<http://www.marxisme.dk/arkiv/harman/1994/prophet/ch08.htm>
It was because they depended on balancing between the major social classes to advance their own control over the state and a section of capital that the Khomeini group had to hit first at the left organisation and then at the established bourgeois organisations (Bazargan etc) before being able to consolidate their own power. In 1979 this meant working with Bazargan against the left to subdue the revolutionary wave, and then making certain gestures to the left at the time of the seizure of the US Embassy to isolate the established bourgeoisie. During the 1980s it meant another zigzag, allowing another Islamic figure linked to the established bourgeoisie, Bani Sadr, to take the presidency and then working with him to smash the bastion of the left, the universities. When the IRP suggested sending the Islamic gangs, the Hizbollah, into the universities to purge them of 'anti-Islamic elements', Bani Sadr was happy to comply:
Both the IRP leaders and the liberals agreed to the idea of cultural revolution through direct action by the people who were mobilised to march on university campuses... For the liberals it was a means to get rid of the leftist agitators in the public institutions, the factories and the rural areas, so that economic and political stability could be restored to the country...
The gangs of the Hizbollah invaded the universities, injured and killed members of the political groups who were resisting the cultural revolution, and burned books and papers thought to be 'un- Islamic'. The government closed all universities and colleges for three years, during which university curricula were rewritten. [106]
Yet even at this time the Khomeiniites continued to preserve part of their own 'left' image, using anti-imperialist language to justify what they were doing. They insisted the fight to impose 'Islamic values' was essential in the struggle against 'cultural imperialism', and that, because the left resisted this, it was in reality working for imperialism.
External events helped them to get away with these arguments. These were the months of the abortive US attempt to recapture the embassy by sending in armed helicopters (which crashed into each other in the desert), of Shiite demonstrations against the government of Bahrin, of pro-Khomeini riots in the oil rich Saudi province of Hasa, of the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by armed Sunni Islamists, and of the attempt by Saddam Hussein of Iraq to ingratiate himself with the US and the Arab Gulf sheikdoms by launching an invasion of Iran. The Khomeiniites could proclaim, rightly, that the revolution was under attack from forces allied to imperialism, and, wrongly, that they alone could defend it. No wonder Khomeini himself referred to the attack as a 'godsend'. The need for all out mobilisation against the invading forces in the winter of 1980-1 allowed his supporters to justify increasing their control, at the expense of both the left and the Bani Sadr group, until in June-July 1981 they were able to crush both, establishing a near totalitarian structure.