Council whose responsibility was to ensure that all

Council (whose responsibility was to ensure that all laws passed by Parliament conformed to the
sacred law)
- Glorified Khomeini not only as the revolution’s leader, republics founder, and the most
respected of the religious jurits, but also as an imam, a title Iranian Shiis had traditionally
reserved for the revered originial twelve imams.
- Promised all citizens pensions, social security, unemployment benefits, disability pay,
medical services, and free secondary as well as primary school education
- promised to eradicate hoarding, usury, monopolies, unemployment, poverty, and social
deprivation
- provide interest free loans, utilize science and technology

- Iranian constitution has more to say about economic matters than most Western
Constitutions.
- Promises to make Iran fully independent, pay off external loans, cancel foreign
concessions, nationalize foreign companies, strive for the total unity of all muslims, and help the
oppressed of the world struggle against their oppressors.
- Safeguarded private property
- Khomeini’s Divine Will and Political Testament
- claims that the true message of islam is being constantly distorted by an international
conspiracy of Zionists, Communists, Eastern and Western Imperialists, marxists, western-
contaminated liberals, opportunistic clerics, and local tyrants
- addressing parliament, Khomeini stresses that the deputies should continue to come
from the middle class and the deprived population and not from the ranks of the capitalists, land-
grabbers and upper class. he states that revolution succeeded because of the active participation
of the deprived classes
- he encourages private investments in agriculture and industry, provides for a balanced
economy in which the private sector is recognized and also respects private property for
providing social justice and turning the wheels of a healthy economy.
- he states that the deprived of the world should no sit around passively waiting for
liberation but should rise up to overthrow the imperialists and their local lackeys.
Khomeini and Populism
- Khomeinism in many ways resembles latin american populism
- Pahlavi Iran had much in common with Latin America: an informal rather than formal
dependence on the West; an upper class that included bourgeoisie; an anti-imperialist middle
class; an urban working class unorganized by the Left; and a recent influx of rural migrants into
urban shantytowns.
- Khomeinism was mainly a middle-class movement that mobilized the masses with radical
sounding rhetoric against the external powers and entrenched power-holding classes.
- Respected private property and avoided concrete proposals that would undermine the petty
bourgeoisie
- Khomeinism claimed to be a return to native roots and a means for eradicating cosmopolitan
ideas and charting a noncapitalist, noncommunist third way toward development
- On one hand it wanted to protect middle class property, but on the other hand it wanted to
strengthen the state by extending its reach throughout society and providing social benefits to
the lower classes.
Keddie, “Can Revolutions be Predicted?”, e-reserve
I. Should the Iranian Revolution Have Been Predicted?

a.