[custom_adv] Revolution didn't start on February 1, 1979, when the shah left homeland and exiled Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini returned home from Paris. Nor did it begin nine days later, when the shah's regime was formally declared overthrown and the provisional government of Mehdi Bazargan took over. [custom_adv] It actually started at least a year or two earlier with demonstrations and strikes, the distribution throughout the country of tapes of Khomeini's speeches, and countermeasures, sometimes harsh and brutal, by government forces. [custom_adv] As the strikes and the anti-shah slogans became increasingly frequent, millions of people -- men, women, the elderly people, teenagers, children, factory workers, bazaris, unemployed, and finally soldiers and officers -- took to the streets with a single demand: The shah must go! [custom_adv] By 1979, such universal discontent had developed into something none of us could have imagined, even those who considered themselves educated individuals who cared about the fate of their nation. [custom_adv] Intellectuals, students, writers, teachers, and opposition groups were all involved in some sort of activity directed against the shah's regime. The main reason was the lack of freedom and democracy, and the arrests and torture of political opponents. [custom_adv] [custom_adv] But once those whom you didn't expect to protest first became sympathetic to the idea of, and later demanded, regime change, everybody -- bazaris, government employees, and finally even officers of the royal army -- understood that the situation was serious. [custom_adv] It was not just a few hundred, or even a few thousand, people: Millions came out on the streets, every week and every other day. The shah had no alternative but to quit. [custom_adv] And that was everyone's main demand. Not an ideology, not a political system, not religion, but just: The shah must go! With his charisma and relentlessly anti-shah position, and as thousands of mosques and tens of thousands of mullahs signaled their support for him, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini became the symbol of the anti-shah movement, a national leader whose words, once he arrived in Tehran, immediately acquired the force of law.
