1979: The Great Backlash

These were compelling visions, and they informed thinking about the developing world too. "Development economics," as propagated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, pre-scribed big infrastructure projects like hydroelectric dams overseen by top-heavy bureaucracies. How this differed from competing Soviet aid projects was not al-ways obvious. The extent to which this conventional wisdom had taken hold came out clearly in both Iran and Afghanistan. The shah was staunchly anticommunist, yet the main planks of his effort to drag his society into the 20th-century mainstream looked strikingly similar to what the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan had started implementing there after seizing power in a 1978 coup: land reform, literacy campaigns, secularization, and women's rights. Tellingly, the shah had dubbed his modernization program the "White Revolution."

Small wonder, then, that experts who tried to interpret events in Iran tended to get it so wrong. It all flew in the face of centuries of revolutions trending against the clerics. As religious scholar Karen Armstrong observes in her book The Battle for God, no less than political philosopher Hannah Arendt had mused that "what we call revolution is precisely that transitory phase which brings about the birth of a new, secular realm." Even the United States' "bourgeois revolution" had established the principle of the separation of church and state, while the more radical versions in France and Russia had aspired to do away with religion altogether.

Yet Khomeini, too, was tapping into this intellectual tradition by embracing the radical thinking, if not the antireligiosity, of the Muslim world's revolutionaries. For decades, powerful secular ideas—pan-Arabism, Baathism, revolutionary Marxism—had dominated the Middle East's politics, and their utopian political rhetoric had become second nature to the region's intellectuals. Nascent Islamists learned a great deal from these ideologies even as they excoriated them for their abject failure to overcome the challenge of Israeli and Western "neocolonialism." One of the Islamic Revolution's great progenitors was Ali Shariati, an Iranian intellectual who strove to meld leftist ideas of revolution with the fundamentalist longing for a return to the Prophet's original vision of social equity and justice.

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