Volume 31, Number 1 · February 2, 1984
In the Terror of Tehran
By Richard Dowden
Five years ago, in January 1978, the Shah of Iran did much to seal his fate and help begin the inexorable rise of Ayatollah Khomeini. A semiofficial newspaper published an attack on Khomeini and accused him of being in the pay of the British. During the next two days some seventy of Khomeini's students were killed at the holy city of Qom. The Shah, as an Iranian later put it, had stepped on the dragon's tail. Almost exactly a year later the Shah fled and the secular and religious opposition marched together in triumph through the streets of Tehran. But the secular opposition never regained the initiative and before long the dragon turned on them too. Now the process of making Iran rigidly Islamic is almost complete and the opposition has been laid to waste.
Feature, 3201 words
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