avered. These events all led to the march against the government of the Shah, in which eight million Iranians protested on December 10, 1978 (Bill 25). One-fifth of the Iranian government was willing to join in a massive and nonviolent manifestation of opposition even though most of them knew that thousands of their countrymen had been shot in previous demonstrations. The banners and slogans made clear the religious and political essence of the revolutionary movement. This massive demonstration was the turning point from symptoms to rising fever. It clearly reflected the weakness of the Shah, and the inevitability of revolution in Iran. After a year of public demonstrations against him, the Shah of Iran left Tehran on January 16, 1979, for an "extended vacation" (Orwin 46). He left the country in the hands of a regency council and Prime Minister Shahpur Bakhtiar, who was a former member of the National Front. The opposition leader, Khomeini, was to become the new ruler, and he returned to Iran on February 1, 1979. Khomeini occupied preeminent positions among Iran's most respected religious scholars, the Mujahedin-e Khalq.. Although Khomeini wanted a stable government that could cope with the problems of reconstruction, he wanted to eradicate the evil roots of the old system, which he describes as satanic. He denounced the materialism of the ...
