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In retrospect, it is easy to see that the Shah's oil money was buying trouble as well as power. His army could not protect him from the discontent of his own people, and the boomtown nature of Iran's economic growth nourished that discontent. Glittering apartment houses rose in the big cities, but 63,000 of Iran's 66,000 villages still have no piped water. Tehran, a city of around 5 million, boasts traffic jams rivaling those of Tokyo, but it has no sewer system. Inflation soared as high as 50% a year. So many rural residents left the land to seek industrial jobs in the cities that well-cultivated farm land reverted to desert and Iran, long self-sufficient in agricultural production, had to import much of its food.
Though the Shah proclaimed himself a pious Muslim who in his youth had experienced mystic visions of God, his Westernization of the country deeply offended the mullahs; they became a kind of network of resistance. The clergymen were displeased initially by the land reform, which broke up some of their own properties. They resented the Shah's centralization of power, which diminished their traditional role in guiding the society. Modernization brought such appurtenances as gambling casinos and discotheques, abominations to the mullahs and many of their followers, and Western-style apartment buildings that were despised by many of their tenants, whose traditions called for an architectural style emphasizing privacy and seclusion.
Industrialization and education created a huge new middle class, estimated ftCMi by U.S. Iranian Expert James Bill to constitute 25% of the population. The Shah thought that gratitude for material prosperity would make this new class a bulwark of his regime. He was wrong; members of the middle class eventually helped the Islamic clergy lead the demonstrations that toppled him. The middle class was angered by the lack of political rights and by the corruption and inefficiency of a government system in which top jobs were awarded on the basis of loyalty to the Shah rather than ability.
The Shah sent hundreds of thousands of middle-class youths abroad for government-paid study—an enlightened policy, and also a handy way of getting potential dissidents out of the country for a while. But the result was a severe brain drain that aggravated social imbalances. For example, so few medically trained Iranians returned to their country to practice that in 1974 the nation had only one doctor for each 3,300 patients, a worse ratio than in neighboring, and much poorer, Syria. To replace the students who would not come home, the Shah brought in foreign technicians, and their presence and high salaries annoyed many Iranians.