(Mohammadi 58).
After his family was reinstated, the shah who might have been expected to have learned from his father's experiences the limitations of trying to enforce draconian measures enacted martial law and continued to try to transform his country into a more Westernized nation. These moves toward Westernization more than the shah's heavy-handedness or even charges of corruption against the royal family would lead to the revolution. By the 1970s, the Iranian people would begin to feel that they had in some essential way lost their own culture in a tide of Westernization that had been too swift and too dramatic for the country. Fundamentalist Islam would come to seem the only appropriately indigenous alternative to the American-style modernization programs urged on the country by the shahs.
During the 1960s and 1970s in the decades when the stirrings of revolution were being heard with increasing forcefulness Reza Pahlavi continued the same kinds of modernization that his father had instigated before him, although by the early 1960s under pressure from the United States, the shah also began to loosen restrictions placed on the press and on political activity. These moves had the result of lessening tensions in the country at least somewhat.
The 1960s in Iran also saw a number of wide-ranging political changes called the "White Revolution", a six-point program that included the sale of state-owned factories, the nationalization of forests, and a series of land reforms. However, despite the regime's stated intention of reforming land policy, the shah did not in fact make agriculture development a high priority, with the result that landless peasants, unable to support themselves in the then-current land structure, began migrating to urban centers. They brought with them not only a discontent with the shah's policies but a dedication to a more conservative form of Islam than most urban dwellers adhered t...