ABSTRACT
"The Islamic Ideology" was the crucial, perhaps even indispensable, mobilizing force behind the massive demonstration of public discontent with the Pahlavi regime. "The Islamic Ideology", as the penultimate construction of the contemporary Muslim revolutionary urges, went through what have been identified as the three simultaneous processes of externalization, objectification, and internalization in the four decades that preceded the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Two prominent motifs of legitimate authority, one Iranian and the other Islamic have historically constituted the dual basis of justified ruler ship in the Iranian political culture. In retrospect, perhaps the most significant ideological antecedent of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in an ideal-typically "religious" context was the doctrinal propagation of velayat-e faqih, or "the authority of the jurist", as formulated by Ayatollah Khomeini. The failure of secular ideologies to attain a measure of legitimacy in Muslim societies is due in part to their attempt to activate a rhetoric that is Islamically mute.
