Iranian Islamic Revolution: Contemporary Perceptions, Proclivities and Prospects

The spontaneous, swift, and a truly people's revolution that convulsed Iran towards the end of the 1970s was deliberately and coherently lead by a situational coalescing of forces that included grass-root clerics, religious leaders, small political groups, non-clerical individual political activists and propagandists, that were provoked by a pervasively corrupt, plundering, brazenly Westernising puppet regime of the Shah – who was quite simply seen as ‘America's Man in the Gulf and the Middle. East’ — that had totally alienated the masses by its crass insensitivity and brutal oppression, in which neither the military nor the peasants featured significantly. The US did not perceive it as a genuine urge of the Iranian people, the rest of the West took time to accept it as a fact to be adjusted to, while the Soviet Union and much of the Asiatic world showed a better understanding of the revolution to develop cordial relations with the new regime believing it to be closer to the people. Notwithstanding the alarm and anxiety that it may have caused in neighbourhood and elsewhere initially, there does not now seem to be much possibility of universalisation of the Islamic revolution, not only because the revolutionary process in Iran itself has made way for serious national development through economic liberalisation but also because the rest of the Islamic world, riven still by the eternal Shia-Sunni schism, is determined to resist penetration of Iranian ideas in their respective domains.