At the beginning of 1978, the Iranian government of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi appeared to almost all observers, inside and outside Iran, to be firmly in power, and likely to remain so for the indefinite future. That there was fairly widespread disaffection from the regime was evident, but the Shah had survived such disaffection before, and there was little reason to suppose that he would would not survive it again. He had extensive military and internal-security forces at his command, while his potential opposition was divided among groups with widely varying agendas and bases of support, ranging from the Tudeh (Communist) Party to militant Islamic groups. Between the ruthlessness of SAVAK, the Shah's internal-security organ, on the one hand, and the internal divisions of the opposition on the other, it seemed likely that the Shah would continue to suppress opposition and remain in power.
Among the Shah's opponents, outsiders might have imagined one of the more quixotic to be Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an aged Shia cleric then living in exile in France. The world of the 1970s was familiar with leftist revolutionaries and their ideologies; by comparison, it knew little of Shia Islamic militancy, the program of which seemed nearly incomprehensible to non-Iranians, and irrelevant to modern social and political conditions.
Yet little less than a year later, in February of 1979, newspaper headlines proclaimed Shah raft, Imam amad: "The Shah has gone, the Imam has come." Khomeini returned from exile in triumph, and it was the Shah who was now in exile, a wondering exile that would end with his death from cancer a year later. In the months and years that followed, Imam Khomeini and his followers proceeded to construct a new Iran, based upon Shia Islamic principles, the first theocracy of modern times.
By 1981-82, secular groups such as Tudeh, which had participated in the Islamic Revolution alongside the Shia militants...