Sublime

Still, Iranians were too elated by their newfound independence, and too blinded by the conspiracy theories floating in the air about another attempt by the CIA and the U.S. embassy in Tehran to reestablish the Shah on his throne (just as they had done in 1953), to recognize the dire implications of the new constitution.

Once his colleagues had been intimidated into silence and Iran’s Shi‘ite majority stirred into action, Khomeini was free to seize control of the transitional government. Before most Iranians knew what they had accepted, he had used his popular mandate to inject his theological beliefs into the political realm, transforming Iran into the Islamic

This was the Valayat-e Faqih (“the rule of the jurist”) that Khomeini had been writing about furtively during his years of exile in Iraq and France. In theory, the Faqih, or Supreme Leader, is the most learned religious authority in the country, whose primary function is to ensure the Islamic quality of the state. Yet through the machinations of

For more than three decades following the end of World War II, Iran was a stable, relatively secular, and pro-Western, pro-American country, in part because many Iranians feared (with good reason) Soviet ambitions. Like most other countries in the region, it was led by an authoritarian figure, Shah Reza Pahlavi, who ruled for nearly forty years.