ABSTRACT
Following the 1970s oil boom, by the end of that decade many Iranians considered that their country was wealthy, but that they themselves were not seeing the fruits of that wealth. There were also many disaffected religious leaders and scholars who saw the social changes implemented by Md Reza Shah as being un-Islamic. These circumstances combined with many others to produce regime change through popular revolution, the only example of such change in the Middle East in the past 40 years. The strong and viable alternative at the time was an Islamic republic.
