In 1979, an air of melancholy, struggle, and revolution cascaded upon the city of Tehran to signal the arrival of a new class of ruler, and a new form of republic. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a leading Shia cleric and Iran’s first Supreme Leader carrying the baton of revolt, proclaimed “if we want to export this revolution, we must do something so that the people themselves take government in their own hands, so that the people from the so-called third stratum come to power.” The establishment and propagation of Iran’s Islamic Revolution sent shockwaves across the world, altering the course of regional dynamics, and shaping Middle Eastern politics for decades to come. Egypt would play a pivotal role in the opposition of the Iranian Revolution, as tensions between Cairo and Tehran continued to rise to unprecedented proportions. Upheaval in Tehran Fred Halliday, a prominent scholar of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), cites this historical event as “the first revolutionary movement in modern times to be dominated by religion in this way, and to succeed in seizing power.” Spurred on by the cataclysmic collision of…
