Today marks the start of the Ten-Day-Dawn, in fact the 44th anniversary of the Fajr that dawned on Tehran with the arrival from exile of the beloved Father of the Islamic Revolution and spread all over the country in the next ten days as the grassroots movement of the Iranian Muslim people triumphed to end foreign hegemony and domestic dictatorship.

The nation became free of not just the stranglehold of the British-installed and American-backed rootless Pahlavi regime but from the tentacles of its masters who like leeches were sucking the oil and other natural resources of Iran to deprive the people of any independent development.

The Pahlavi puppets and the puppeteers in the West had been steadily destroying the ancient Iranian culture, national aspirations, and the time-tested Islamic values of the Iranian people.

They had turned Iran into a client state whose economy was in the doldrums and which heavily depended on whatever third-rate industry they supplied by withholding access to sophisticated modern technology.

Even the military personal supplied with costly American armaments had no direct access to maintenance of this equipment, which was far below what Washington gave free to the illegal Zionist entity.

A section of the women on the pretext of liberty found themselves deprived of the freedom of Hijab and feminine virtues associated with the time-honoured culture of Iran. Many of these disrobed dames damsels became objects of commercial and carnal desires.

The misery of Iran and the Iranian people had plunged to such an extent that infamous capitulation bill made even the self-styled Shah helpless if the god of a US citizen were to bite him.

In such a state of suffocation, Imam Khomeini (RA) inspired the Iranian people to rise up against the tyranny of both the West and the upstart Pahlavi potentate. 

He reminded the nation of its past glories and the present potential. As the leading religious authority of the days, he instilled in the Islamic values. 

For 15 long years since the 15th of Khordad Movement (5 June 1963) he had suffered brief imprisonment, exile – initially in Turkey and the rest in Iraq – and a temporary stay in Paris on a 3-month visa on being expelled from the Holy Najaf by the repressive Ba’th minority regime of Baghdad. 

All this Imam Khomeini had endured for the salvation of Iran, the progress of the Iranian people, and the revival in society of the dynamic rules of Islam.

He thus returned home on the historic first of February to a resounding welcome by millions of people, and straightaway went to the Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery to pay tributes to the martyrs of the revolution in order to wake up the nation and prepare it for the glorious tasks ahead.

Today, 44 years later it is clear to all that the prudent policies of the Father of the Islamic Revolution, which have continued by his successor, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, have transformed Iran into a paramount power of the region, possessing astounding capabilities in all fields of modern science and technology, and helping other countries to defeat terrorism and hegemony.

Global equations have drastically changed since 1979, but what remains unchanged is the hostility of the US and the West towards Iran and the Iranian people as is evident by their dastardly plots of riots, arson, killings, treason, terrorism, vandalism, and sacrilege through thugs, traitors, seditionists, traitors, blasphemers, and characterless women. 

They will never succeed, since Imam Khomeini (RA) had correctly said. “Our Revolution was burst of Light”.