In the Footsteps of Martyrs 189Fifteen years later, in 1979, Khomeini returned to Iran, tri-
umphant and determined to usher in a new era in the country’s his-
tory—one that almost no one in the crowd could have predicted.
Indeed, less than a year later, Khomeini would ostracize, then execute
his political and religious opponents—the same men and women who
had brought this revolution to fruition—and replace the transitional
government with his personal ideal of the Islamic state: a state in
which he alone had final authority over all matters civil, legal, and
religious.
But on that February morning, no one was calling Khomeini the
Faqih, “the Jurist”: the title he would eventually give himself as
Supreme Leader of the newly formed Islamic Republic of Iran. At that
time, Khomeini had yet to unveil his plans for absolute clerical rule.
Rather, amid the chants of “God, Quran, Khomeini,” and the placards
that declared the old Ayatollah to be “the Light of Our Life,” there
was another title being bruited through the crowd like a secret that
could not be contained. Khomeini, people were whispering, was the
Mahdi; he had returned to Iran to restore Islam to its original state of
perfection.
The reasons for the success of Khomeinism—the proper term for the
religio-political philosophy that ultimately created the Islamic Repub-
lic of Iran—are numerous and too complicated to present here in
detail. In many ways, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was the in-
evitable conclusion of two previous popular revolutions—the Consti-
tutional Revolution of 1905–11 and the Nationalist Revolution of
1953—both of which were suppressed by foreign governments (the
first by the Russians and, to a lesser extent, the British; the second, as
mentioned, by the United States) who wished to maintain their grip
on Iran’s natural resources. By the late 1970s, most Iranians had
grown so weary of the corrupt and ineffectual rule of Iran’s monarch,
Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, that another revolution was unavoidable.
Faced with an almost total lack of political participation (the Shah
had eliminated the country’s party system and abolished its constitu-
tion), a reckless economic agenda that had fueled record inflation, a
rapid and useless militarization, and a widespread loss of national and
religious identity, the country’s clergy, its intellectuals, the merchant