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Iran dominated international attention in the 1980s with its Islamic revolution that toppled Muhammad Reza Shah's regime, and then with its eight-year war of attrition with Iraq in 1980-88, which claimed the lives of an estimated half a million people. The Shah's oppressive administration and Westernization policies alienated conservatives and revolutionary intelligentsia in the early 1960s when he intensified his modernization programmes by appropriating clerical landholdings (religious foundations possessed 1.235 million acres, 12 per cent of all villages and their associated land in Iran),(1) and supporting increased participation of women in private and public enterprises. As a protagonist of the middle class and petty bourgeoisie, Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini declared his opposition to the reforms and Westernization, stating that
It is a capital sin to dispossess people of their property through forcible seizure or decrees...Women's interference in social matters...will involve women in corruption and it is against the will of God and prohibited by Islam and must be stopped.(2)
The revolutionary left, the liberals and nationalists were disenchanted with the Shah's capitalist-oriented economic and cultural reforms. The struggle for democratic change continued and intensified in the late 1970s. Religion was the only discursive medium which could effectively unite people against the Shah. The revival of the Islamic movement was fundamentally a response to the political domination of Iran by the US and the tyranny of the US-backed political system. The Islamists of petty bourgeois background within the Shah's administration allied with the opposition, which demanded that the Shah leave Iran. With the departure of the Shah, the state apparatus disintegrated when the clerics seized power in February 1979. After seizing power the clerics skilfully exploited popular sentiment and resorted to anti-imperialist rhetoric to strengthen their position and to establish more favourable terms and conditions for Iran within the imperialist framework. To this end the clerics dealt a mortal blow to the liberal wings of Islamists who were calling for a bourgeois democratic rule based on bourgeois expertise, not the Qur'an. Their leaders, Abol Hasan Bani Sadr, then the elected President of the Republic of Iran, was forced to flee to France and Mahdi Bazargan, head of the National Front, had been executed. Mujahiden-e-khalq, who were espousing politics similar to liberation theology in the West and had...