ABSTRACT
According to Ervand Abrahamian, of the total of 341 guerrillas killed by the Pahlavi regime in the 1970s, 91 percent belonged to the ranks of the intelligentsia, 41 percent of whom were college students. In the mid-1960s, two independent groups of Marxists began building and expanding underground organizations. The organization’s other activities included bombings of government buildings, kidnappings, robbings of banks, and distribution of revolutionary literature. The National Front was the major secular nationalist organization. Bazargan and his associates were also instrumental in creating a number of Islamic organizations, like the Society of Moslem Engineers. A large faction within the organization had concluded that Marxism, not Islam, was the liberating ideology of the masses and that it should be adopted as the group’s official ideology. Moslem members of the Mojahedin insisted that the main ideologues of the Marxist faction were communists who had deliberately infiltrated the organization to denigrate Islam.
