From My Sister Guard Your Veil; My Brother Guard Your Eyes:
"These days, there is a tendency, both in the West and in Iran, to view the revolution of 1979 as an Islamic revolution instigated at the behest of the Ayatollah Khomeini. This is a historical fiction that emerged out of two and a half decades of postrevolutionary propoganda. The truth is, there were dozens of voices raised against the shah; Khomeini's was merely the loudest. In fact, a full 10 percent of Iran's population actively took part in the overthrow of the shah, thus making it the largest popular revolution in modern history. Feminists, communists, socialists, Marxists, secular democrats, Westernized intellectuals, traditional bazaari merchants, die-hard nationalists, religious fundamentalists, Muslims, Christians, Jews, men, women and children: nearly every sector of Iranian society was represented in the revolution. Khomeini's genius was his intuition that in a country steeped in teh faith and culture of Shiism, only the symbols and metaphors of Shiite Islam could provide a collective language with which to mobilize a disparate coalition that had little in common save its virulent hatred of the shah." - Reza Aslan
So much for blaming it all on a radical religion - I guess Iran is just as complicated as America. Can you imagine?
