Chuck, this is really not accurate. The armed struggle against the Shah was carried out not by fundamentalists at all, but by a range of movements, The fundamenalists.... played a very muted role until the eve of the revolution and after when they managed to mobilise the population from the mosques against the secularists.. Tahir Wood
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You're right. I didn't remember well, didn't understand what was happening at the time and never went back to read about it.
But the question in my mind is still why the fundamentalists were so successful, coming out of the background and at the very last minute? They had to mobilize and depend on some already existing conflation of nationalism and Islam in enough people, in order to commandeer that kind of power.
Dennis P's point, what was revolutionary about it, then comes back. And ultimately I can't answer that. Was it used in its anti-western guise, so that the secular groups could be separated from their own nationalism? Somebody else has to put that together, because I don't know.
Chuck Grimes