Word: shahs
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...after day they marched, tens of thousands strong, defiant chanting demonstrators surging through the streets of Tehran, a capital unaccustomed to the shouts and echoes of dissent. The subject of their protest was the policies of Iran's supreme ruler, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Some carried signs demanding his ouster. Others called for a return of long denied civil and political liberties and the enforcement of Islamic laws. A few even demanded the legalization of the Tudeh, Iran's outlawed Communist party. The crowd, at times numbering more than 100,000, was a colorful, sometimes incongruous cross section of Iranian...
...challenge to his leadership stunned the Shah and outraged his generals, who argued that the demonstrations were surely eroding his authority?and in turn the army's?and must be stopped. Declared an army officer: "We told the Shah, as Lincoln once said, a house divided cannot stand by itself." Said a general to the Shah: "It is against our military honor to stand the present situation." A lengthy late-night Cabinet meeting followed, and on the morning after, Premier Jaafar Sharif-Emami proclaimed a curfew and martial law for six months. Not in a quarter-century had Tehran been...
...proud Shah, as for his distressed people, it was a sorry week, yet one that had been a long time coming. For months the Shah's opposition had been growing more demonstrative, especially the Shi'ite mullahs and their followers. Three weeks ago, the militance took on a mad and sinister cast: terrorists set fire to a movie house in Abadan, killing 377 people. In an attempt to placate the religious conservatives, the Shah two weeks, earlier had installed Sharif-Emami as Premier, largely because he was respected by Iran's moderate Muslim clergy. Sharif-Emami closed gambling casinos...
...Shah's problems are magnified by the fact that the opposition does not arise from a single political sector, like the communists, or a single cultural group, like the religious conservatives, who remain his most vocal and articulate foes. The dissent cuts across class, religious and political divisions, ranging from Marxist students on the extreme left to Western-educated intellectuals, professionals and businessmen in the center to religious zealots on the far right. The mullahs, for all their abhorrence of the decadent excesses of modernism, have traditionally been political progressives and nationalists in their outlook...
...pictures of the rise and fall of the Shah of Iran...