Model Of Civil Resistance: Baha I Documents During And After 1979 Iranian Revolution

In the late 1970's, the world was hit with the events of the Iranian Revolution, a movement in which the Shah was overthrown in replacement with Ayatollah Khomeini. Causes for this movement included the economic, political, and socio-economic conditions in Iran before the Revolution. Economically, the Shah's hopes for the country ended up being their downfalls while politically, the Shah's ruling as a dictator prohibited the freedom of the Iranians. Socio-economically, the Shah didn't place much emphasis on religion, angering the majority of the population. The overthrow of the Shah led to the uprise of a religious leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, a figure supported by many. Unlike advice

As Susy Kassem once said, “Just like freedom, truth is not cheap. Yet both are worth more than all the gold in the world. But what is freedom, if there is no truth? And what is truth, if there is no freedom? Both are worth fighting for – because one without the other would be hell” (Kassem). In the beginning of 1980, the Cultural Revolution began, and with it the people of Iran fought back against the existing regime. The government oppressed the citizens by changing their education into a religious based system and forcing the women to wear veils, stripping them of both their truth and their freedom. Refusing to conform, the revolutionists had to secretly rebel while hiding from the government and their neighbors. In Marjane Satrapi’s

Before the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, the country was on course to becoming a westernized secular country. The Shah of Iran was more interested in developing the country along western model than anything else. People were left on their own to make decisions regarding moral issues. Religion was a private affair and people were free to practice their religion, as they wanted. People enjoyed personal freedoms comparable to those enjoyed in the west. They only thing they lacked was political freedom as all the power rested with the Shah. The elite controlled political power and anyone who wanted to join politics needed the sponsorship of the elites. The elites also controlled the economy largely because Shah appointed members of the

Throughout the history of present day Iran it has been contested whether the Shi’i ulama or the Shah are the logical leaders of the community. It is true that the ulama have gained control of Iran, and that Islam “changed much in Iran, but in some respects continuity from the past was far stronger than the new concepts” (Frye 36) due to the fact that the power of the Shah remained for hundreds of years after the introduction of Islam. The Iranian people have a long history of traditions and culture and even when Islam spread throughout the country it was adapted to include some of the Iranian traditions. The most significant example of this is the Shah’s adaptation and endorsement of Islam. The long history, tradition, and the decline of

By 1979, the shah of Iran, an ally of the United States, was in deep trouble. Many Iranians resented his regime’s widespread corruption and dictatorial tactics. In January 1979, revolution broke out. The Muslim religious leaderAyatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led the rebels in overthrowing the shah and establishing a religious state based on strict obedience to the Qur’an, the sacred book of Islam. Carter had supported the shah until the very end. In October 1979, the president allowed the shah to enter the United States for cancer treatment, though he had already fled Iran in January 1979.

This was one reverse too far, for Iran's young “cherish a packet of grievances, ranging from the acute shortage of jobs to the social restrictions that ban most boy- and-girl outings. Restrictive though it is, the system allows discussion of these complaints, and many niggling rules have been quietly eased since Mr. Khatami took over” (Anonymous Iran's second revolution? 13). It was, however, after the police and their allies, the Islamist bully-boy militia, raided the dormitories in Tehran University, where they killed at least one student and probably more, that the shout for change began to penetrate “out-of-bounds areas. The students started to call for fundamental reforms, questioning the legitimacy of clerical control” (Anonymous Iran's second revolution? 13). They even went so far as to challenge the sacrosanct heart of Iran's Islamist edifice, the ultimate authority of the “supreme leader.”

As Mohammad Rezi Pahlava ruled Iran, his questionable approach to the government garnered opposition. On the verge of civil war, the country faced conflicting views. One being a push towards Westernization and the other being a more traditional, religious stance. Islamic clergy members pointed out that implementing modernization techniques would hinder Iran’s fundamentalist society.(Brinkley) However, the majority of Shah’s opposition originated from the leader’s repressive

The Iranian Revolution was the first of many popular civil insurrections that resulted in the overthrow of an autocratic monarchy which lasted from 1977 to 1979. It consisted of non-violent demonstrations by the revolutionaries until late 1978, due to the shah’s decision to violently silence demonstrators. The shah, during the time period, was Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. He was viewed by many to be a western-puppet who implemented a variety of systems and programs that suggested westernization. Iran was being transformed under his rule, and there were efforts to separate from Islamic culture and religious values. However, because of Pahlavi’s anti-traditional changes, he saw a broad coalition of forces formed against him. These revolutionaries

All revolutions need revolutionaries, because unified revolution can be best organized with the agenda of a single person. Thus, the Iranian Revolution was only possible with the emergence of Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolutionary who would forever change Iran’s future. Khomeini’s critical importance to leading the revolution started when he was just six months old, as his father was murdered in 1903. His hatred for such a regime spawned at a young age, and his grand literary talent and religious connection enabled him to utilize such hatred towards

Because of Shariati’s brilliant mind, his political theories and interpretation of Islam as the revolutionary ideologue for social change, strongly ignited the desire and determination of the Iranians particularly Ayatollah Rohullah Khomeini to overthrow the Shah regime. The Iranian Revolution, was a popularly supported response to a corrupt regime, but unlike many prior revolutions, the main ideology fueling the revolution was religion. Although it was Shariati’s Shiism revolutionary ideologue that fueled the desire of the Iranians for change, much of the ideological justification was routed through Shi‘ism espoused by the ideological mastermind of the revolution, Khomeini who was at the same time influenced by Shariati’s ideas. Shariati died before the revolution, but Khomeinin borrowed mostly his idea from him and applied it. If not only his death, he could have sparked more debates and spread his brilliant political theories that will challenge other

The Iranian revolution in 1979 did not only collapse the ancient tradition of monarchy but it also produced profound change in domestic and foreign policy of Iran. Iran, which was, a prominent ally of the USA and Israel during Shah Dynasty, has become deeply antagonistic following the revolution. When we look at the course of the revolution, it can be considered a massive opposition to Shah dynasty rather than an Islamic revolution since the supporters of the revolution include many different circles ranging from liberals to moderate Islamists or from communists to radical Islamists. After the revolution, Islamic circles seized the power due to the Ayatollah Khomeini's charisma and ability After the revolution, the principles of the

These kinds of people are famous and popular because they did something different that a normal person can do, Khomeini was one of these people. He leads two revolutions a religious and a political revolution combined with each other at the same time in Iran, explain how the revolutions took place and answer the following questions: Who was Ayatollah Khomeini, and how did he become the leader of the Iranian Revolution? How did Khomeini carry out the two revolutions? How did he create a new theory of the relationship between religion and politics, and how did he work to remove the Shah and put this theory into practice? How did he characterize Iran under the rule of the Shah in his 1964 speech ‘Iran in Imperialism's Clutches'? Who does Khomeini

In the autumn of 1962, new elections for local government and provincial councils, who was sworn into office on Qoran prerequisite that those elected to the governing law promulgated deleted. Imam Khomeini to infiltrate both telegraphed the baha 'is, by looking at a plan to allow the public life of Mohammed Reza Shah and the Iranian Constitution of 1907 both Islam and to desist from violating the law, the Prime Minister of warning days, the 'ulama (religious scholars) was involved in a sustained campaign of

II- The Coup and the restoration of the Shah: In 1951, Mohammad Musaddeq became the Prime Minister of Iran. He was the first prime minister who was not appointed by the shah, but officially elected by the public. He was a nationalist and the founder of the political opposition party, the National Front, in Iran in 1949. He was a western educated man who believed in democracy as the best solution in Iran.

However, the ideas had already spread throughout the Iranian people and religious protesting escalated continuously. People’s ideas of recreating a religious based government persisted to an unstoppable level. Khomeini, whom many protesters felt to be a hero, said in a speech in 1979, “Do not try to westernize everything you have! Look at the West, and see who the people are in the West that present themselves as champions of human rights and what their aims are. Is it human rights they really care about, or the rights of the superpowers? What they really want to secure are the rights of the superpowers. Our jurists should not follow or imitate them” (Ayatollah Khomeini: speech on the uprising of Khurdad 15, 2010). Based on this quote, the “voice” of the protesting Iranians was that westernization was not a good thing because the west does not care for human rights and freedoms of the lesser powers in the world and that the way to change for the better is to impose the Islamic values that already existed into society. In January of 1979, the Shah fled the country under the pressure of the people and Khomeini returned to Iran to be greeted as a hero (Bentley & Ziegler, n.d., p. 1117). Fighting erupted between Khomeini’s supporters and remaining military officials and on the eleventh of February the government fell. On the first of April, Khomeini proclaimed the beginning of the new Islamic republic (Islamic