Abbas Amanat

Or how to separate the religion and state.

These issues were never addressed.

What happened is that there was this bypass through political Islam and revolutionary Islam as it gradually they learned, you know.

that this is the bypass, bypass to power, basically, to become again a voice in the society and eventually a prominent voice and eventually monolithic voice in the society.

That's the process that led into the revolution of 1979.

Basically, this period, greater attention was paid to religion, even among the secular middle classes who were alienated

For a very long time, because of this extensive modernization of the Pahlavi period, they didn't have a sense of that old mullahs with their turbans.

But they became, they had a kind of aura in this period.

Yes, they are those who remained not corrupted.

They are the people who basically went against the suppression of the Pahlavi regime.

And Khomeini became a leader, a symbol of that.

Nobody ever thought in the earlier stages.

Among these very excited multitudes that came to the streets of the Iranian cities in 1979, or 1978 actually,

thought that this old Mullah in its 70s, that all of a sudden has appeared from the Najaf,

through Paris to Tehran is going to take over and create a autocracy, a religious autocracy.

What should we know about the guy?

Ayatollah Khomeini, who eventually was known as Imam Khomeini, he was kind of promoted to an even more sublime position.

Well, Ayatollah means the sign of God.

Mm-hmm.

In the course of the 19th century or early 20th century, as the religious establishment gradually lost its greater presence in the society and its prominent places in society, they had some kind of an inflation in titles.