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Islam is not inherently or inevitably antiWestern, despite the often bloody encounters of the past. Muslims have historically occupied a geographically vulnerable position, which may account for their militant touchiness. But the religion has become the vehicle for certain antiWestern, anti-American resentments and antipathies. In some ways, the specifically Islamic religious component is almost incidental: Islam is, as much as anything else, the repository for grievances, envies and hatreds that Third World have-nots harbor for the privileged of the globe. Islam gives cohesion to complaints about the injustices of the world. The Muslim tradition provides the language and symbolism to express a wide social message: it is not necessarily a religious phenomenon. It is not antiChristian. In fact, Muslims really regard modern Westerners as a species of pagan. Ironically, some of the resentment has been aroused by the emergence of oil-rich classes within the Islamic countries themselves. With that wealth came a widening gap between rich and poor, a dangerous ambivalence of rising expectations and an anxiety that old ways might be endangered. The resentment of modernization is not anything so simply and piously self-abnegating as a wish to avoid luxury; it is also a bitterness at being forced to live adjacent to a wealth one cannot possess.
Iran embodies both the essence of the Islamic complaint against the West and unique historical grievances of its own. By race (Aryan), language (Persian), religion (Shi'ite Muslim) and historical tradition (ancient Persia was conquered by Muslims in the 8th century), Iran is different from the rest of Middle Eastern Islam. It was never colonized, in the usual sense of the word, by the West. And yet the penetration of Western ideas was deeper in Iran than in some other parts of the Middle East and came to be seen in a considerably more sinister light.
While leaders in other Muslim states (Saudi Arabia and Libya, for example) have moderated Western influences, the Shah embraced the West with (as it turned out) a heedless enthusiasm. He set up a secular state, destroying the classic and crucial unity in Islam between church and government. Under the Pahlavis, women were liberated from the traditional chador, permitted to vote and divorce their husbands. The Shah made the mistake of ignoring the mullahs (priests). The U.S., in turn, embraced him, and even had the CIA engineer a coup to restore him to power in 1953. Corruption, dislocations of life and profoundly disorienting social change all accompanied his rule; so did political suppression and the tortures of SAVAK, his secret police. The U.S. was inextricably implicated in the career of this potentate—Ozymandias and Faust—and shared the people's judgment of him when it came.