I’m an Israeli student of history at university, and although my focus and interest is not primarily Iran I have studied the country and the history because I believe that my people and their people are intimately connected throughout history, sometimes in conflict as is the current state but the relationship is complex and stretches back millenia. My favourite works on the Iranian revolution are Saïd Amir Arjomand‘s The Turban for the Crown, Charles Kurzman’s Unthinkable Revolution and Michael Axworthy’s History of the Islamic Republic.

Anyhow, the reason for the dominance of the Ayatollah during the revolution was, in short because he was popular. There is a revisionist strain in modern discourse that portrays Iran pre-revolution as a thoroughly westernized society where women wore miniskirts and drank champagne, but this is only descriptive of a very small group of the power elite. In reality, Iran was a country with a deeply religious and mostly poor population who were not only resentful of the lavish lifestyles of Shah and the elite, but offended by the behaviour of that elite and the secularising policies of the government which they perceived as an attack on their religion, oppressed by the government security services and filled with indignant nationalism over the fact that they perceived the government to be a puppet for western interests. Khomeinism captured the zeitgeist because it was a political program that combined Islamism with explicitly socialist and democratic rhetoric and promises of reestablishing the national independence and pride of Iran. This essentially brought the base of the socialist, liberal and nationalist opposition into the Islamist fold, because for lack of a better term the leadership of those other camps was out of touch with religiosity and values of the average Iranian, and they lacked the gravitas, oratorical skills and revolutionary credentials that Khomeini had.