Its strange to see my surname being broadcasted around BBC as the world marks the 30th anniversary of the Iranian or Islamic Revolution and the overthrowing of the Shah’s. I had always known that my surname related to some royalty somewhere in the Islamic world, whether it was the empire being overthrown by the mullahs of Iran or the emperor who built the Taj Mahal for his beloved wife. Shah had always carried with it a great significance in the history of the world.
However, as the world marks the 30th anniversary of the Iranian revolution, I went out to read about it as a way to find out more about the world we live in. I watch Persepolis on the plane on one of my journey somewhere, and for the first time I was aware of the power the name “Shah” had.
The idea of overthrowing of the Shah and creation of an Islamic state, in my opinion, is a good idea - idea in an ideological sense. That a state where religious law governs people’s life, whether in a personal or a political sense: That the corruption of western and secular ideas is to be fought. In a way this makes me realise the challenge of modernity which Muslims face today around the world. The fact that people do not realise we are not fighting people but an ideology: Something which cannot be achieved throught military and political means. We can only achieve through education and judging people on a personal level.
I think terrorism has become a cancer within Islam. No one really likes it or condone it, but its there. The result? It hurts everyone who carries the name Islam in their life. Non-Muslims are worried they’ll get blown up, Muslims are worried that they’ll be misinterpreted by non-Muslims as Terrorists and we forget that we are all just human beings. Another thing is the anti-semetic rhetorics I noticed. The rise of Israel, the defeat in 1948, everything makes Muslims point their fingers to the Jews, but yet they probably don’t know anything about Judaism.
This is a fact: People are like sheeps. We are influenced by so many ideas out there that we no longer understand what it is in life we are living for, what it is we are dying for.
According to Wikipedia these are the factors which contributed to the fall of the Shah:
The unpopularity of the Shah’s regime: the perception that the Shah was beholden to - if not a puppet of - a non-Muslim Western power, (the United States), whose culture was contaminating that of Iran’s; that the Shah’s regime was oppressive, brutal, corrupt, and extravagant.
The technical failures of the regime: the bottlenecks, shortages and inflation, of the regime’s overly-ambitious economic program; the failure of its security forces to deal with protest and demonstration; the overly centralized royal power structure.
The growth of the Islamic revival that opposed Westernization and saw Ayatollah Khomeini as following in the footsteps of the beloved Shi’a Imam Husayn ibn Ali, and the Shah as a modern day version of Husayn’s foe, the hated tyrant Yazid I;
The underestimation of the Islamist movement of Ayatollah Khomeini by the Shah - who thought they were a minor threat - and by the anti-Shah secularists - who thought Khomeninists could be sidelined.
The Golden Age of the Islamic Empire had long been gone, the sun had finally set on the British Empire with the handover of Hong Kong. Perhaps this is the empire of Economy, with the monarchy of money - perhaps this analogy is stretching it, but if you think about the thousand of years of struggle within Europe can put their difference aside to join the EU - learning from the Shah’s, I wonder if we are replacing the evil of today (the investment banks) with something more evil…