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In a sense, the Iranian revolution was an exercise in internal anticolonialism: a convulsive rejection of foreign influence that had, so a wide variety of Iranians thought, robbed their culture of its Islamic values and its natural wealth. In a psychological way, the revolutionaries were obeying the logic of many anticolonial fighters who, in the formulation of the revolutionary theorist Frantz Fanon, held that the "native" must be transformed into a free man through struggle against his foreign oppressors. In countries like Algeria and Kenya, the struggle was protracted and violent. In Iran, after a point, the army foreshortened the process by choosing not to resist the revolution.
Some outsiders fear the Moslem revivalism in the revolution. But Robert Wesson, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, sees it "not so much as medievalism as a rejection of foreign intrusion. They are not reversing modernization, but giving it a sounder basis in Iranian institutions." Wesson detects a parallel between Islam in Iran and Roman Catholicism in Poland. "There, in a country in a subrevolutionary situation, the Catholic Church is enormously popular because it is the counter to the government — it is the refuge for freedom. It has become the umbrella for all man ner of movements."
In the months of the demonstrations that brought down the Shah and then Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar, Is lam performed that unifying function. Several different revolutions coalesced then; now they are subdividing again. The century's earlier revolutionary his tory may explain the components. The revolutions of the '20s and '30s were ei ther rebellions of redemptionists (some times fascists, as in Germany and Italy) intent on rescuing old native virtues from alien influences, or of Communists, or of nationalists (in Ireland, for example). Elements of all three have been at work in Iran. But now the contradictions of the types must be sorted out. Says Laqueur: "The Iranian revolution does not exist. There exist various groups, each of which says, 'We caused the revolution, we are the legitimate heirs.' " The resolution may take months or years. After a period of chaos, it becomes easy to imagine, a variation of the Brinton model might start working: a strongman with an armed force imposing law where there is none. When Bakhtiar was named Prime Minister, the mind immediately said, "Ah, Kerensky." Now there seems a possibility of multiple Kerenskys: Bazargan, an Khomeini himself. In the Iranian turbulence, an ominous recollection about Russia arises: its two revolutions of 1917 were basically bloodless. Then, from 1918 to 1921, the country was torn apart by civil war.
— Lance Morrow