Reddit reviews Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution

Good question! The Shah did indeed have a large secret police, SAVAK, which did all sorts of very nasty things. So that part is true.

The way I heard it (in a class on Modern Iran), the Shah saw himself as a continuation of the older Classical (pre-Islam) Persian Empires. He made large efforts to stress this relationship - his regime had a lot of pomp and circumstance - the standout example is the 2,500 year celebration of Persian Monarchy, which was conducted on the ruins of Persepolis itself. There's a couple of good videos of it on Youtube.

So the Shah (in delusion or not) saw himself as a good ruler that would modernize and westernize Iran, taking it back to the Classical glory it once had.

However, the Shah was not completely successful in these efforts- the White Revolution being the standout one. Additionally, as he had gained absolute political power (Iran was a constitutional monarchy beforehand) because of the CIA-conducted overthrow of the rather popular Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, the Shah never had the greatest legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian people. All his callbacks to the Classical past (ignoring the thousand or so years of Islamic Persia) were both needlessly wasteful (fancy celebrations don't pay for themselves) and seen as catering to the west. Ultimately, he was generally viewed as a western puppet by many.

So he had many enemies, including both Communist (Iran did border the USSR) and Islamist opposition. Some groups even combined some of these ideologies! Regardless, the Shah faced non-violent opposition in the forms of writers, speakers, clerics, and others - Ayatollah Khomeini was one of these, but there were many others; of especial note is Ali Shariati who was essentially the lay counterpart to Khomeini. The Shah also faced some violent opposition in the form of armed guerrillas, but these groups were generally defeated by SAVAK. As such, most of the enemies of SAVAK were opposition figures, both violent and not. They could perhaps have been seen by the Shah as "mere" enemies of the state (not so sure on that one).

As such, when the Islamic Revolution occurred, and large groups of people rose up against the regime, the Shah found himself having lost the mandate of the people. Plus, gunning down crowds of protestors would not have put him down in history as a great ruler of Iran. Plus it wouldn't have looked good to the western powers that supported him - recently Pres. Carter had pressed him on human rights abuses and other issues.

As such, Shah Pahlavi did not gun down crowds of protestors, and the Pahlavi Dynasty was ultimately replaced by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

A quick note: the revolutionaries were not all Islamists, and certainly not all supported of Ayatollah Khomeini - there were many leftists, communists, moderate Islamists, and others as part of the revolution. However, Khomeini outmaneuvered these groups - including the (successful) referendum vote being for an Islamic Republic or none at all, which was boycotted by the more secular groups (to their detriment) - and in a sequence of events that mirrors Martin Niemoller's "First they came.. quote, Khomeini ended up being the Supreme Leader of Iran.


tl;dr: The Shah wanted to be seen as a great ruler harkening back to Classical Persia, both contemporaneously and in history, and gunning down crowds of protesters is rather contradictory to that.

If you're interested in reading more, I recommend reading the Iranian Revolution Wikipedia page for a start.

However, I have to recommend at least partially reading Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution by Nikki Keddie. It'll give you a great background on why Iran is the way it is today, Ayatollahs and all. It's a good book on the subject (It's the one I used!)

Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution, Updated Edition Updated Edition

by Nikki R. Keddie

http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Iran-Results-Revolution-Updated/dp/0300121059

Robert Fisk: The Great War for Civilization.

Nikki Keddie: Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution

Ira Lapidus: A History of Islamic Societies

And other good ones I know of that were mentioned in here:

A History of the Arab People" by Hourani

"All the Shah's Men" by Stephen Kinzer

The Palestinian People: A History

The Israelis: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land

This is all a good place to start, I think.

If you want to learn about how Iran got to where it is today / events that shaped it's views I think Modern Iran by Nikki Keddie. You don't get that "YOU MUST HATE IRAN THEY ARE EVIL" junk in it. You just get how Iran sort of came to be in the modern era.

The Coup is a great Book to expand on exactly how Iran/U.S. relations got messed up. Long story short the CIA overthrew their democratically elected leader, and ever since then they have been pissed, but this goes into detail about it and does a great job explaining everything.

If you want to watch some documentaries. I HIGHLY recommend you watch "Bitter Lake" that explains Saudi's rise to power/Afghanistan and how things got messed up.

Another interesting documentary is the The Man who Changed the World about Khomeni

Those are pretty good starting points to understand Iran.

So it's clear to me that you don't really know all that much about Iran or the Iranian people, but I can suggest some reading material so that you can further educate yourself if you so choose to. I found these books to be quite informative.

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A couple to get you started...

Nikki Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (updated 2006)

Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet (2nd edition, 2008)