Collapse of The Dynasty
The Shah's government suppressed its opponents with the help of Iran's security and intelligence secret police, SAVAK. Such opponents included members of the Communist Tudeh party.
By the mid-1970s, relying on increased oil revenues, the Shah began a series of even more ambitious and bolder plans for the progress of his country and the march toward the "White Revolution". But his socioeconomic advances increasingly irritated the clergy. Islamic leaders, particularly the exiled cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were able to focus this discontent with an ideology tied to Islamic principles that called for the overthrow of the Shah and the return to Islamic traditions, called the Islamic revolution. The Shah's government collapsed following widespread uprisings in 1978 and 1979. The Islamic Revolution dissolved the SAVAK and replaced it with the SAVAMA. It was run after the revolution, according to U.S. sources and Iranian exile sources in the US and in Paris, by Gen. Hossein Fardoust, who was deputy chief of SAVAK under the former Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and a friend from boyhood of the deposed monarch.
The Shah fled the country, seeking medical treatment to Egypt, Mexico,the United States, and Panama and finally resettled with his family in Egypt as a guest of Anwar Sadat. Upon his death his son Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi succeeded him in absentia as heir apparent to the Pahlavi dynasty. Pahlavi and his wife live in the United States in Potomac, Maryland with three daughters.
Read more about this topic: Pahlavi Dynasty
Famous quotes containing the words collapse of the, collapse of and/or collapse:
“The world was a huge ball then, the universe a might harmony of ellipses, everything moved mysteriously, incalculable distances through the ether.
We used to feel the awe of the distant stars upon us. All that led to was the eighty-eight naval guns, ersatz, and the night air-raids over cities. A magnificent spectacle.
After the collapse of the socialist dream, I came to America.”
—John Dos Passos (18961970)
“The world was a huge ball then, the universe a might harmony of ellipses, everything moved mysteriously, incalculable distances through the ether.
We used to feel the awe of the distant stars upon us. All that led to was the eighty-eight naval guns, ersatz, and the night air-raids over cities. A magnificent spectacle.
After the collapse of the socialist dream, I came to America.”
—John Dos Passos (18961970)
“At the crash of economic collapse of which the rumblings can already be heard, the sleeping soldiers of the proletariat will awake as at the fanfare of the Last Judgment and the corpses of the victims of the struggle will arise and demand an accounting from those who are loaded down with curses.”
—Karl Liebknecht (18711919)