Islam. 173tenor of modern culture familiar, giving it a context of mean-
ing and spirituality that makes it more accessible. Again, they
are tacitly asserting that it is possible to be modern on other
cultural terms than those laid down by the West. The Iranian
Revolution of 1978-79 can be seen in this light. During the
1960s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-89) brought the
people of Iran out onto the streets to protest against the cruel
and unconstitutional policies of Muhammad Reza Shah,
whom he identified with Yazid, the Umayyad caliph who had
been responsible for the death of Husain at Kerbala, the type
of the unjust ruler in Shii Islam. Muslims had a duty to fight
such tyranny, and the mass of the people, who would have
been quite unmoved by a socialist call to revolution, could re-
spond to Khomeini's summons, which resonated with their
deepest traditions. Khomeini provided a Shii alternative to
the secular nationalism of the shah. He came to seem more
and more like one of the imams: like all the imams, he had been
attacked, imprisoned and almost killed by an unjust ruler; like
some of the imams, he was forced into exile and deprived of
what was his own; like Ali and Husain, he had bravely op-
posed injustice and stood up for true Islamic values; like all
the imams, he was known to be a practising mystic; like Hu-
sain, whose son was killed at Kerbala, Khomeini's son Mustafa
was killed by the shah's agents.
When the revolution broke in 1978, after a slanderous at-
tack on Khomeini in the semi-official newspaper Ettelaat, and
the shocking massacre of young madrasah students who came
out onto the streets in protest, Khomeini seemed to be direct-
ing operations from afar (from Najaf, his place of exile),
rather like the Hidden Imam. Secularists and intellectuals
were willing to join forces with the ulama because they knew
that only Khomeini could command the grass-roots support
of the people. The Iranian Revolution was the only revolu-
tion inspired by a twentieth-century ideology (the Russian