Political Modernity 73occasion was the religious agitations against land reforms by the Shah. Khomeini
widened the challenge to the arbitrary powers of the Shah and his disregard for
religion and its upholders. It was the culmination of a simmering resentment by
the religious classes and their supporters against the secularising regime of Reza
Shah, followed by his son. Khomeini’s forthright denunciation of the Shah and
his policies agitated religious students and elements of the bazaar in Qum and
Tehran, where his agents had been organising support. This elicited a forceful
and violent repression by the authorities and the ultimate arrest, then exile, of
Khomeini, fi rst to Turkey, then to Iraq.^16 On that occasion, the secular opposi-
tion of the nationalists and the left stood aside, with characteristic distaste for
what they considered reactionary religious forces, dubbed ‘black reaction’ (a
reference to the black garments of the mullahs) by the regime.
The Shah attempted to control all centres of social and political autonomy
and ultimately to subsume any civil association under his Rastakhiz Party, in
imitation of the nationalist one-party states of the ‘Third World’. The social and
economic upheavals inaugurated by the oil revenue boom of the early 1970s
included high levels of rural migration, high infl ation, economic dislocations
and disappointed expectations by wide sectors of the population. The educated
middle classes, benefi ciaries of the Shah’s generous educational measures and
lucrative employment, were frustrated by the continuing repression and exclu-
sion from political and policy participation. All these factors led to a crisis of
legitimacy and mounting discontent, which were to break out in the revolu-
tionary events of 1977–9 (Abrahamian 1982: 496–524; Zubaida 1993: 64–82).
When, for a variety of reasons, not least of which were the pressures from an
uneasy American administration under the comparatively liberal presidency
of Carter, the Shah loosened his grip, a variety of political and cultural forces
stirred. These, for the most part, lacked organisation and resources, and mostly
acquiesced in the Islamic leadership, which offered both. This acquiescence
was facilitated by the anti-imperialist and seemingly liberationist slogans of
Khomeini and his followers, calling for a ‘Republic’, denouncing monarchy
and taghut (godless tyranny), championing the mustazafi n (the oppressed), and,
above all, chanting ‘death to America’. There were also hints about democracy.
Political anti-imperialism of the left also carried with it a Third Worldist and
populist cultural nationalism, and Islam (in its modern phase) was seen as an
expression of a national essence and the creed of ‘the people’. As such it pro-
vided a nativist and populist idiom for a revolution. That is to say, the remnants
of secular modern politics accepted religious leadership, which seemed to adopt
its own ideological motifs in an Islamic idiom. The Islamic politics and ideology
of the Iranian Revolution fell mostly within the paradigm of modern politics
as characterised above, and it worked through ideological mobilisation of ‘the
people’. At the same time, sectors of the urban popular classes were mobilised
for the revolution through reconstructed traditional channels of bazaar, guild