Iran, 30 Years After The Revolution

VPM | By Steve Inskeep

Published February 2, 2009 at 11:00 AM EST

Updated July 13, 2023

It’s been 30 years since the Islamic revolution in Iran. The Iranian government is spending 10 days celebrating the time when Muslim clerics took power in 1979. The anniversary comes just as the U.S. considers a new approach to Iran. This week, Morning Edition examines how some Iranians see their world, and what the revolution means to them.

At a weekend gathering at the shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolution’s founder, a group of young Iranian women sum up the revolution in two words: independence and freedom.

This is the heart of the matter for many Iranians, who see the revolution as the overthrow of a ruler — the Shah of Iran — who was backed by the United States.

Ali Askar Vafaei, curator of Iran’s Martyrs’ Museum, notes that revolution was about culture.

“We didn’t have the revolution to have a better, easier, more comfortable life. It was the cultural issues,” he says. “Our culture was being conquered by the Western culture, and our Islamic values were fading.”

Others say the revolution always had an economic side — one driven by ideas of social justice and alleviating poverty.

But many of these development and subsidy programs to help the poor haven’t worked, and Iran’s economic situation is worsening, making life difficult for ordinary Iranians.

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Steve Inskeep

Steve Inskeep is a host of NPR's Morning Edition, as well as NPR's morning news podcast Up First.

Known for interviews with presidents and Congressional leaders, Inskeep has a passion for stories of the less famous: Pennsylvania truck drivers, Kentucky coal miners, U.S.-Mexico border detainees, Yemeni refugees, California firefighters, American soldiers.

Since joining Morning Edition in 2004, Inskeep has hosted the program from New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, Cairo, and Beijing; investigated Iraqi police in Baghdad; and received a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for "The Price of African Oil," on conflict in Nigeria. He has taken listeners on a 2,428-mile journey along the U.S.-Mexico border, and 2,700 miles across North Africa. He is a repeat visitor to Iran and has covered wars in Syria and Yemen.

Inskeep says Morning Edition works to "slow down the news," making sense of fast-moving events. A prime example came during the 2008 Presidential campaign, when Inskeep and NPR's Michele Norris conducted "The York Project," groundbreaking conversations about race, which received an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for excellence.

Inskeep was hired by NPR in 1996. His first full-time assignment was the 1996 presidential primary in New Hampshire. He went on to cover the Pentagon, the Senate, and the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he covered the war in Afghanistan, turmoil in Pakistan, and the war in Iraq. In 2003, he received a National Headliner Award for investigating a military raid gone wrong in Afghanistan. He has twice been part of NPR News teams awarded the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for coverage of Iraq.

On days of bad news, Inskeep is inspired by the Langston Hughes book, Laughing to Keep From Crying. Of hosting Morning Edition during the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession, he told Nuvo magazine when "the whole world seemed to be falling apart, it was especially important for me ... to be amused, even if I had to be cynically amused, about the things that were going wrong. Laughter is a sign that you're not defeated."

Inskeep is the author of Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, a 2011 book on one of the world's great megacities. He is also author of Jacksonland, a history of President Andrew Jackson's long-running conflict with John Ross, a Cherokee chief who resisted the removal of Indians from the eastern United States in the 1830s.

He has been a guest on numerous TV programs including ABC's This Week, NBC's Meet the Press, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports, CNN's Inside Politics and the PBS Newshour. He has written for publications including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic.

A native of Carmel, Indiana, Inskeep is a graduate of Morehead State University in Kentucky.

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