Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The Ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini, returned to a delirious welcome in Tehran. He had long been at the forefront of Islamic opposition to Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. . . . From there he launched a ceaseless bombardment of tracts and sermons against the shah, which were banned in Iran but still widely circulated and increasingly influential." [1001 Days] "This was the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979, the greatest by far of the revolutions of the 1970s, and which will enter history as one of the major social revolutions of the twentieth century. It was the response to the programme of lightning modernization and industrialization . . . undertaken by the Shah on the basis of the solid support of the U.S.A. and the country's oil-wealth, its value multiplied after 1973 by the OPEC price revolution. No doubt, apart from other signs of the megalomania usual among absolute rulers with a formidable and dreaded secret police, he hoped to become the dominant power in western Asia. . . . The spark came from the peculiar specialty of the Iranian scene, the organized and politically active Islamic clergy which occupied a public position that had no real parallel elsewhere in the Muslim world . . ." [Hobsbawm: Extremes, p. 453-54]