Dayuhan,
You may be right. Yesterday, I re-read an account of the Iranian revolution (Jihad: the Trail of Political Islam) by Gilles Kepel. The book emphasizes the importance of organizational power in the aftermath of a revolution. I especially like the quote below on page 110.
This text could have been written yesterday about the situation in Egypt.As the shah's isolation grew, the support of his principal ally, the United States, was weakened by the election of Jimmy Carter to the White House in November 1976. The brutal tactics of the Savak became a target of the new American president's human rights policy, and Carter himself applied pressure on the shah to liberalize Iranian civil society. Naturally enough, the secular middle class took this criticism as a signal that the United States had withdrawn its unconditional support of the Pahlavis. The year 1977 saw a spate of meetings and demonstrations by the liberal opposition, which for the first time in many years was not repressed by the regime. The clergy took very little part in this short-lived "Tehran spring." Though the secular middle class was the first group to shake off political apathy, it proved incapable of taking the lead in a general resistance to the shah. It lacked the charisma necessary to rally the bazaaris and the urban poor around its cause, and it did not have an organized party base capable of mobilizing these social groups with slogans they could understand. Meanwhile, the student-led Marxist movements were too weak for mobilization, having been decimated by repression or distanced by exile. The way was open for a clerical splinter group led by Khomeini.
Bookmarks