An Intriguing But Incomplete Picture

The Iranian revolution of 1979 was one of the most significant events of the 20th century. With demands for democracy, political freedoms, economic justice and national independence, the revolutionaries put an end to the oppressive client state of the Shah, who had been brought back to power more than two and a half decades earlier by a CIA/MI6 coup d’état against the democratically elected government of Dr. Mohammed Mossadeq.

The revolution began with secular liberal and left intellectuals, artists, lawyers, academics, workers and students, and became a mass popular movement once the Islamists, under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, an exiled Shiite fundamentalist cleric, joined the uprising. These Islamists were a heterogeneous group; some were populists stressing the government of the dispossessed, and others were pragmatists favouring a full-fledged open market economy with an Islamified society.

However, both factions were united in seeking the...