The Iranian Revolution took place in 1979 but could be foreseen in some form several years before that. Much of the world misunderstood the nature of the regime of the Shah of Iran before the revolution and not surprisingly has misunderstood the nature of the revolution itself. For the United States, one reason for this myopia may have been the fact that the monarchy had been restored by a CIA aided coup in 1953, after which Reza Shah Pahlavi had used Iran's oil revenues to finance the rapid modernization of his country and the purchase of American arms. Nixon viewed Iran as a U.S. surrogate in the Persian Gulf, and as late as 1977, President Carter praised the Shah for making Iran "an island of stability." It is clear that American intelligence services failed to detect or underestimated the widespread Iranian resentment of modernization and other forces in the country leading to the revolution. Fundamentalist movements and conflicts between Sunnite and Shi'ite Muslims occurred from time to time in the course of Islamic history, but the fundamentalist revival and conflicts in this century have been especially important in light of the Western assumption that less developed countries would naturally secularize their politics and culture as they modernized their society and economy. This is not what happened in Iran, which instead experienced the religious revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
An examination of how different commentators write about the Iranian Revolution shows that outsiders generally have tried to characterize the revolution in terms of their own history and have seen their own concerns reflected in the revolution, though in fact they are often missing the point by doing so. Often, it is a fear of what the outsider believes the revolution to be that colors perceptions so that the revolution is characterized as anti-secular, though the true picture may be more complex. The West tends to see the r...