In the late 1970s, revolution was in the air in Iran. The people were sick of the Shah and the culture of corruption that characterized the elites. The country was wealthy, but many people were poor. The country was secular, but many felt that said secularism went against their religious beliefs. We all know that in 1979 there was a revolution that saw the Shah overthrown and the monarchy replaced with a Shia Islamic theocracy. Since then, things have gotten arguably worse for Iran as the new Islamic government turned out to be even more tyrannical and insane than the previous one, and arguably even more corrupt.
However, not all Iranian revolutionaries were Islamist as during Iran's revolutionary period there were two major revolutionary factions. You had the Islamists that ultimately created the batshit insane regime that Iran has today, and you had the secular nationalists which sadly lost. How do you think things would have turned out if either the Shah remained in power or the secular nationalists won?
In my view, there is simply no practical way that the Shah could have remained in power given his extreme lack of popularity at the time. However, if the secular nationalists won the revolution then I could see things turning out to be much better for Iran. For one thing, they were a secular faction that advocated liberal democratic practices and despite opposing the Western-backed Shah, they still wanted to maintain decent relations with the West and were wary of the Soviet Union. The human rights situation in Iran wouldn't be so horrible, the economy would be much better, terrorist groups like Hezbollah or Hamas either never would have come to exist of would be much weaker, meaning that the Middle East as a whole might be less unstable.
What are your thoughts on how things could have gone differently? What implications would it have for the Middle East and the world as a whole?
