ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the manner in which economic forces interacted with other factors to create and amplify a multiclass discontent that proved fatal to the regime. Strikes within government agencies constituted a critical factor in the toppling of the shah's regime, and academia played the most important role in instigating and leading them. Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers have ardently attempted to interpret the fall of the shah as being the result of a purely Islamic revolution. The lower level of oil export was sufficient to meet the foreign-exchange requirements of the country and, at the same time, to avoid the exhaustion of oil reserves at a rapid pace that had been set forth by the shah's regime. The concept of Islamic government is more an outgrowth of the political consequences of the events that occurred after, rather than during, the fall of the shah.
