1979: The Great Backlash

Certainly, the journalists who converged on the Paris suburb of Neauphle-le-Château to find Khomeini in exile didn't really know what to make of him. Modern revolutionaries were supposed to be egghead Marxists of the Lenin-Mao breed or flamboyant young longhairs on the make, like the radicals who had taken to the streets in Paris, Chicago, and Frankfurt a decade earlier. This taciturn Shiite legal scholar with his hooded gaze and long black robes just didn't fit the picture. Yet he had become the de facto leader of Iran's multifarious opposition movement. Some observers even compared the ayatollah with Mahatma Gandhi. Why not? They were both men of faith who tried to change the world, right?

One of the most remarkable eyewitness accounts of the 1979 Iranian Revolution comes from Desmond Harney, a fluent Farsi speaker and British ex-diplomat who knew more about Iran than just about any other Westerner at the time. Yet, as his diary ruefully records, he was shocked to see Khomeini and the mullahs gain the upper hand; he had assumed that the left-wing National Front would prove to be the decisive force. "Strange to think of the destinies of this country being swayed by a frail, elderly, vengeful priest sitting in a Paris suburban villa, with half the Iranian world paying court to him there!" He had underestimated the traumas that the shah's modernization program had inflicted upon a deeply traditional society.

Khomeini's extraordinary bid to graft an Islamic theocracy onto the body of a modern nation-state amplified trends that had been building for years in the Muslim world; 1979 was the year they burst into inarguable reality. In Saudi Arabia, a group of armed Islamist fanatics took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca and held on for two weeks until they were bloodily suppressed. Around the world, mobs of Muslims, blaming this sacrilege on the Americans, took to the streets. In Tripoli, Libya, they burned the U.S. Embassy to the ground; an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, left two Americans dead. (After this last fiasco, U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance reassured reporters: "It's hard to say at this point whether a pattern is developing.")

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