The 1979 Iranian revolution was directed from exile in Paris

Evidence

Nikki Keddie sees the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as the culmination of a fifty-year national transformation carried out by Mohammad Reza Shah and his father, Shah Reza Pahlavi, before him. Secular modernization—based on Atatürk’s model—was accompanied by rapid industrialization and infrastructural investment, legal and land reform, urbanization, and an expansion of the armed forces and governmental power. This period culminated in the oil crisis of 1973, in which the shah overplayed his hand in leading OPEC’s demands for a higher price for Iran’s oil, resulting in more money entering the Iranian economy, which led to inflation and shortages. Economic difficulties and the shah’s increasingly autocratic and authoritarian style, together with the rising power of a Shia clerisy aligned with merchants and students, allowed the conditions to emerge for the revolution. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 220 (#complicates, via linked claim)

For better or for worse—and from the start there have been different views on this—what happened in Iran can be seen as a revolution in the classical sense: a mass movement with wide popular participation that resulted in a major shift in economic as well as political power and that inaugurated—or, perhaps more accurately, continued—a process of vast social transformation. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1117 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Iran’s 1979 revolution was a classical mass revolution — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 1117; Iran’s 1979 revolution grew from fifty years of secular modernization and economic mismanagement — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 220

Broader Connections

• Iran’s 1979 revolution was a classical mass revolution #complicates (0.75) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1117
• Iran’s 1979 revolution grew from fifty years of secular modernization and economic mismanagement #complicates (0.75) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 220