ABSTRACT
Ruhollah Khomeini formed a political movement that energized many Iranians who felt oppressed by the institutionalization of Western values in Iran and the exclusion of most people from the country's enormous wealth. Khomeini had an orthodox interpretation of Islam, whose classic tolerance for outsiders was almost completely ignored by him. People flocked to Khomeini because the mosques were the only large institution the shah tolerated besides the government and the army. Khomeini provided a way for the people left behind by or alienated by the shah's modernization efforts to protest and to take the power denied to them into their own hands. In addition, in the context of the Cold War, the West supported the shah, probably for too long, because he represented a centrist, putatively democratic regime along the southern border of the Soviet Union.
