The Aquatic Revolution: The Iranian Islamic Revolution

The Iranian Revolution was an Islamic revolution for freedom against the current king of Iran. It began in 1978 and lasted until 1979. The king, or shah, of Iran at the time was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The leader of the revolution was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an Islamic Shia cleric. The revolution was aimed toward the brutal rule of the shah who tortured almost anyone who disagreed with his rule. The Iranian people were also angry with the United States since they had put the Shah in power and gave him support. The revolution became very violent to the point when U.S. embassy workers were taken hostage by Islamic clerics, and the shah had to part from Iran. As a result of the revolution, life became better for nearly every single person in Iran. Its economy, government, and culture has been stable to this day since the revolution. There were many reasons why people disagreed with the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. First of all, he was a very rich man when most of Iran at the time lived in poverty. The gap between the rich and the poor grew dramatically during his regime. Pahlavi also tried to industrialize and model Iran after secular nations in the western world. People hated this idea because it was opposite to the conservative Islamic religion. By industrializing

For example, women were forced by Khomeini’s police to wear veils unlike the rule of the shah. During his rule, women were prohibited to wear the veils in an effort to make Iran’s culture more secular and western. Another beneficial result of the revolution was the increase of life expectancy. Before the Iranian Revolution, an average person’s lifespan was fifty-five years, after the 1970’s, the life expectancy increase to seventy years old. To this day, the people of Iran are content with all the results of the 1979