Abbas Amanat

So it's a very old phenomenon in Iran, very old.

And it's time and again repeated itself in the course of its history, but never as powerfully

as it happened in 1979, and never in the form of authority from within the religious establishment.

It was always the dissent movements that were kind of antinomian.

They were against the authority of the religious establishment.

That changed in the 20th century.

It certainly did.

Probably not, certainly not as brutal in terms of the victims as you would see in Soviet Union under Stalin, who the bloodshed or the destruction of the population was far greater than what you would find in Iran of the Islamic Republic.

It's incomparable.

Perhaps I would find a greater parallel with Mao Zedong, and particularly because China has a very strong messianic tradition since the ancient times.

So they have something, and Mao appeared as a kind of a messianic figure.

There I can see there is a parallel, but also you can see with any other authoritarian regime with the messianic fear at the head of it, that it destroys all the other forces.

So during the course of the first 10 years of the Islamic Revolution,

It destroyed the liberal nationalist secular.

It destroyed the guerrilla movements, some of them Islamic, some of them Marxist, who turned into political parties or tendencies in the course of the post-revolution 1979.

They were completely destroyed and in a very brutal fashion.

And their opposition, even within the religious establishment, because it wasn't a uniform, there were many different tendencies.

Those that were opposed to the authority of Ayatollah Khomeini, or now Imam Khomeini, meaning almost a sacred religious figure above the level of a religious authority.

He's a saint kind of a figure.

Shizim has this idea of imams.