Many of my Iranian friends are also liberals and leftists who left Iran either during or after the revolution of 1979. One can speculate what might have happened if Iranian leftists made a different choice than what they did, but since a majority of Iranians then -- and probably still now though much less so -- are religious, I doubt we can say for sure that things would have happened very differently if they allied with the Shah or stayed neutral or allied with religious revolutionaries till the overthrow of the Shah and then turned against the religious revolutionaries (this last one seems difficult to pull off). <<<<<>>>>>
A couple of 1970s groups (one, in fact, into the early 1980s) that I was in worked with members of the Iranian Students Association (ISA) who were vehemently anti-Shah. Some traced their politics to SAVAK torture of family and friends back home. Others lived with the fact that SAVAK surveillance of their activities here in the states meant repression of their families and friends in Iran. While the folks I knew were generally secular Leftists (several with RCP connections), the ISA itself was apparently a politically as well as religiously divided organization.
I recall that several people I knew went back to Iran after the revolution which had brought together secular leftists, liberal democrats, and religious activists under an Islamic banner. Both political and religious differences were blurred - as they generally tend to be - in the heady of victory. Below the Islamic umbrella, however, were competing agendas and outlooks. Even the religious activists were split; some wanted to stress Iran's culture, traditions, and values, others wanted clerical rule. Clergy themselves differed in their interpretations of Islam and its political applications/ implications.
For example, Khomeini's pre-revolutionary criticisms and denunications of the Shah were similar to those made by people across the political and relgious spectrum. Better known at the time than Khomeini was Ali Shariati who had forged a left-wing Islamic political ideology and theology of liberation. Influenced by Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara sans their rejecton of religion, Shariati asserted the necessity of reclaiming Iran's religious roots (he died just prior to the revolution of a heart attack in Britain to where he'd been exiled following several years in an prison Iranian prison, his supporters suspected the SAVAK in his death).
According to several of my Iranian friends who went from being anti-Shah to anti-Khomeini, most people in Iran weren't familiar with the latter's views on the relationship between religion and politics, most specifically, his belief in direct clerical rule and elite guardianship. The politico-religious unity of Khomeini's clerical cohorts and their lay supporters overwhelmed the cacophony of other clerical and lay, religious and secular voices, *all* of whom were subject to so-called "Islamic justice". In the process, they consolidated control over the country's cultural and social institutions. Michael Hoover
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