THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION

Conclusion: Consequences and Prospects

Introduction: Why the Iranian Revolution?

Possibly the single most important development in the last half-century of Middle Eastern history, and from an American perspective the most alarming, has been the rise of Islamism or Islamic fundamentalism. The critical moment in this development was the overthrow of the last Shah of Iran in 1979 and the establishment of the Iranian revolutionary Islamist government. This revolution unleashed forces across the Muslim world which have yet to play out to their conclusion.

The following discussion considers the long-term and short-term causes of the Iranian revolution. In summary, the long-term cause was the Iranian struggle for a political development to match its social and economic modernization. The short-term cause was the conditions that caused the Iranian revolution to take a Shia Muslim form.

Until nearly the end of the 19th century, Iran (still called Persia by Westerners until well into the 20th century) was not so much a country as a world unto itself, a vast and complex mosaic. The Shahs of the Qajar dynasty surrounded themselves with the trappings of abso

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i moved into the vacuum. After initially proposing himself as president of a republic, undoubtedly along lines being followed in these same years by Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, he realized that republicanism had no base of support, and in 1925 he became Shah (Munson, 1988, pp. 46-48). Technological and economic modernization continued, but political modernization had reached an impasse. III. Abortive Revolutions The pattern of the constitutionalist era was in many ways reprised by the developments after World War II that culminated in the ascendancy of Mohammed Massadeq and his overthrow at the hands of the Americans operating through the CIA. Mossadeq based his leadership on a broad-based coalition that ranged from Communists to the ulama. What held them together was Iranian nationalism, specifically British demands for retention of its one-sided oil concessions (Kinzer, 2003). For a few years, it seemed that Iran was on the verge of political modernization and effective democratization. Once again, however, the Westernizing intelligentsia in Iran proved to lack critical mass to sustain itself entirely on its own. It is probably true that without the CIA intervention in 1953, Mossadeq would not have been overthrown, and t

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