Abolhassan Banisadr

Biography

Abolhassan Banisadr was born in 1933 in a village near Hamadan, the son of a Shia cleric. He studied law, theology and sociology at the University of Tehran and, as a member of the National Front, took part in the student opposition to the Shah in the early 1960s, for which he was twice imprisoned and was wounded during the 1963 protests. He then left for France, where he studied finance and economics at the University of Paris, wrote on Islamic economics and led an Islamic students' association linked to the National Front.

In 1972 he met Ruhollah Khomeini at his father's funeral in Iraq and became one of his advisers, returning to Iran with him on 1 February 1979. Under the interim government he was deputy finance minister and a member of the Revolutionary Council, and he was elected to the assembly that drafted the new constitution. In November 1979, after the US embassy was seized, he briefly served as acting foreign minister and then as minister of economy and finance, while openly criticising the hostage-taking.

In January 1980 he won Iran's first presidential election with about three-quarters of the vote. As president he led the country's response to the Iraqi invasion in September 1980 and oversaw the release of the American hostages in January 1981. His long struggle with the clerical Islamic Republican Party came to a head in 1981: Khomeini removed him as commander-in-chief on 10 June, and parliament impeached him, with Khomeini approving his removal on 22 June.

After weeks in hiding, Banisadr fled to Paris in July 1981 with the Mojahedin leader Massoud Rajavi aboard an air force plane. In France he co-founded the National Council of Resistance of Iran but left it by 1984 after a split with Rajavi. He spent the rest of his life in exile writing books and criticising the Islamic Republic, including its handling of the 2009 election, and died in Paris in October 2021.