Imam Khomeini and the new Iran

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."

. . .
der revolutionary tradition, that of the French and Russian revolutions, and a sharp departure from the rural, peasant-based model of revolution which was popularized internationally by the writings and success of Mao Zedong. In the older tradition, cities were the natural source of both revolutionary tensions and revolutionary ideology: urbanization at once uprooted populations from traditional relationships, concentrated them into a critical mass, and provided readier access to the propaganda of revolutionary ideologies. It had been Mao's innovation to shift the focus from the cities to the countryside, and to substitute the peasantry for urban groups as the vanguard of the revolution. This model seemed inherently well-suited to conditions in Third World countries, where most of the population was rural, and the cities, at least in their modern enlarged forms, were a recent and semi-foreign implantation in the society. In the post-Mao era, the rural-based revolution came to the regarded as the "normal" model of revolution, at least in the Third World. Yet, in fact, outside of China and perhaps Vietnam, the rural revolution has achieved little success in the modern world. In Iran and Nicaragua in the late 1970s, as in C
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Mohammad Mossadeq, Islamic Revolution, Shah Iranian, Shi'ism Khomeini, Soviet Chinese, Third World, Mao Zedong, Reza Pahlavi, Iran Nicaragua, Shia Islamic, middle class, third world, islamic revolution, iranian revolution, iranian society, revolution iran, iran nicaragua, islamic revolution iran, revolutions iran, third world countries, world countries, traditional middle class, revolutionary ideologies, revolutions iran nicaragua,
Approximate Word count = 2015
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

More Essays on Imam Khomeini and the new Iran