Thousands of tapes and print copies of Khomeini’s speeches were smuggled back into homeland during the 1970s as an increasing number of unemployed and working-poor persians—mostly new immigrants from the countryside, who were disenchanted by the cultural vacuum of modern urban homeland—turned to the ulama for guidance. In addition to mounting economic difficulties, sociopolitical repression by the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi likewise increased in the 1970s.
Many argued that since homeland’s brief experiment with parliamentary democracy and communist politics had failed, the country had to go back to its indigenous culture. The 1953 coup, backed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, an outspoken advocate of nationalism who almost succeeded in deposing the shah, particularly incensed homeland’s intellectuals.
