Like the world around it, Iran has been — and still is — going through a transformation.
Early passions have been replaced by a hard-earned pragmatism, produced in part by revolutionary excesses that backfired against the clerics and exhausted the population.
Arrogance has given way to realism. The "government of God" is ceding to secular statecraft.
The passions once evoked by Ayatollah Khomeini may have waned, even withered, as the tough realities of running a large country with a complex economy have taken precedence. But the idea behind the revolution led by the Imam still had historic importance two decades later — perhaps in some ways even more than when it started.
Its significance also extended far beyond Iran, the Middle East, the broader Islamic world and even the twentieth century, for one simple reason: It is the last great revolution of the
Modern Era.
The singular political theme of the Modern Era — and particularly the twentieth century
— has been empowerment, or the spread of political, economic and social rights to the earth's farthest corners, to all its diverse ethnic groups, races, religions and, perhaps last of all, to both genders. Dozens of countries can claim revolutions in the name of empowerment since the English Revolution of the 1640s created a modern precedent. But fewer than a handful represented seminal turning points. They set the pace, defined goals, provided justification and, most important, introduced a viable new idiom of opposition later adapted or imitated elsewhere.
Two revolutions particularly shook political conventions by introducing new ideologies:
In toppling the Bourbons of France, the Jacobins of the eighteenth century introduced equality and civil liberty as the basis of modern democracy. In the early twentieth century, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian Romanovs in favor of classless egalitarianism.
The ideas that emerged from both revolutions in turn helped to topple monarchies and petty tyrannies worldwide and then defined the political spectrum that replaced them. The pace accelerated as demand for political participation spread after World War II.
However misguided in application, the empowerment embodied in democracy and socialism inspired popular uprisings from China to Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s, independence movements from Algeria to Zambia in the 1960s and 1970s and, finally,

the penetration of democracy from the Soviet Union to South Africa in the 1980s and
1990s.
But that pattern of global change has had one large gap: the Islamic bloc.
The Muslim world is a vast and vital area that accounts for more than 50 of the world's
191 countries. It stretches from Indonesia on the Pacific Ocean to Morocco on the
Atlantic, from Kazakhstan in chilly Central Asia to Saudi Arabia on the warm Persian
Gulf, from Somalia in drought-plagued east Africa to Nigeria on Africa's fertile west coast and from Yemen on the Red Sea to Lebanon on the Mediterranean.
The Islamic bloc also accounts for one of every five people on earth — or more than one billion who have been excluded from the political process for most of the Modern Era. As home to the final functioning monarchies and the largest number of authoritarian regimes, it is today the last bloc to hold out against the tide of democratic reform that has swept the rest of the world.
In this context, Iran's upheaval is arguably the Modern Era's last great revolution. It effectively completes the process launched in the West by other ideologies that were adopted by or adapted to all other parts of the world.
Like its earlier counterparts, Iran's Islamic revolution introduced a new ideology to the world's modern political spectrum. In a region where members of the opposition have often been imprisoned or exiled, it established the precedent of using Islam — a familiar, legitimate and widely available vehicle — to push for empowerment. It provided a format, if not a precise formula, for the last group of undemocratic regimes to make the transition. And despite Western portrayals of it as a force spinning Iran back thirteen centuries in time, the sixteen-month upheaval in Tehran demonstrated that Islam could be a distinctly modern idiom of political opposition in both tactics and goals.
The product has been unique: Although thoroughly Islamic with several unique twists,
Iran has become a modern republic based on a unique blend of Islamic and European law, most notably borrowing ideas from France and Belgium. It calls for national, provincial and local elections in which all males and females vote as of age fifteen. It stipulates term limits for the presidency and allocates parliamentary seats for Christians, Jews and
Zoroastrians — at least token acknowledgment of individual or minority rights.
The impact of Iran's revolution on its brethren has also been obvious: It ignited the budding Islamic movement that emerged out of the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars and spurred on opposition movements throughout the Muslim world. In the 1980s, the trend was most visibly linked to radicalism, from plots to overthrow the emir on the tiny
Persian Gulf island of Bahrain to the Islamic takeover in Sudan, Africa's largest country, from the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in Egypt to the campaign against
American diplomats and Marines in Lebanon.

Less visible and more important, however, were the quiet efforts to produce Islamic alternatives to failed state institutions, from schools and clinics to farm co-ops and welfare agencies. Islamic groups struggled to create a new civil society — the network of associations, unions and clubs for workers, teachers, engineers, women, doctors, youth and other sectors that became a means of addressing problems their governments ignored.
In the 1990s, tactics among key political groups increasingly shifted from the bullet to the ballot, with the rise of political parties trying to work within the system rather than from outside it in countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Yemen and Kuwait.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the trend is far from climaxing. For years, empowerment in the Islamic world will be a major theme of political change — be it peaceful as in Jordan, bloody as in Algeria, or tumultuous as in Indonesia. Iran's revolution may therefore not be the last revolution; other societies may well have national revolts that topple outdated ideological systems.
And in the end, no Islamic country is likely to duplicate the Iranian experience. Its excesses diminished interest in emulating Tehran, except among a tiny corps of extremists. The costs were too high, the results too controversial. The Shi'ite character of the revolution also makes it unlikely to be repeated among Sunni governments, which most other Muslim governments are. Finally, strong indications that the specific Iranian model may yet fail — albeit for economic rather than ideological reasons — will make other societies wary of imitating the Islamic Republic.
Yet whatever happens, Iran's revolution will still rank as the Modern Era's last great revolution, because Tehran paved the way for using Islam to push for empowerment — not only politically. Just as the Reformation was critical to the Age of Enlightenment and the birth of modern democracy in the West, so too have Iranian philosophers advanced a reformation within Islam that is critical to lasting political change.
In some ways, Iran might seem an unusual place for the last great revolution. The Islamic world is as diverse as it is vast.
But Iran is particularly unique. It is the only overwhelmingly Shi'ite country in a bloc that is some 85 percent Sunni Muslim. It is an aberration from both the Middle East and south
Asia, the two regions it bridges. It is the only Muslim state of Aryan people, the Indo-
European race whence Iran gets its modern name.
Ethnically it also stands alone, with Arabs to the west, the Central Asian mix to the north,
Indo-Afghan-Pakistanis to the southeast and assorted Asian Muslims to the far east. Even
Tajikistan, a northern neighbor and the only other Farsi-speaking country in the world, is
Sunni Muslim.
Iran stands apart geographically, too, because of two great mountain ranges, the Alborz and the Zagros, and three great bodies of water, the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf and the
Indian Ocean.

Yet those attributes are also reasons why Iran was a logical place for such sweeping political innovation.
First, Shi'ite Islam demands that the faithful fight against injustice and tyranny, even if it means certain death. Islam's so-called second sect was born out of a sense of persecution by a seventh-century dynasty that usurped leadership of the new Islamic world — and spawned a sense of outrage that lives on today. Shi'ite clerics also have a mandate to mobilize and direct their flocks into action, not just to advise them. That power explains why Ayatollah Khomeini emerged as a natural leader to unite both secular and religious opposition against a twentieth-century dynasty.
Islam, which makes no distinction between the powers of Caesar and God, had also long been a nationalist force in Iran. Shi'ism had been a source of national identity — even among those less than devout — since it was introduced in 1501 by the new Safavid
Dynasty to create a sense of common identity separate from the Ottoman Empire, which was ruled by Sunni Muslims. And even into the twentieth century, Iran was a country of feudal fiefdoms, tribes and ethnic groups whose rivalries ran deep — hence the historic need for strong leadership or a binding social force, or both.
Second, Iran was politically more experienced than virtually any other Muslim state.
Most countries were created or gained independence from European colonial powers only in the twentieth century. But Iran had a long, if somewhat varied, history of sovereignty.
Third, with more than 2,500 years of civilization, Iranians have a sense of historic importance and of a role in shaping the world. Iran has produced centuries' worth of great writers and philosophers. It also had the intellectual environment that stimulated questioning, new ideas and, eventually, a revolutionary spirit.
Fourth, as a crossroads between East and West and a target of invading armies from ancient Greece to contemporary Britain, Persia had long exposure to ideas from the outside world. Iranians absorbed and adapted many of the traditions, ideas and skills from other cultures to their own ways, from the early medicine of the Jews and the religion of the Arabs to English as a second language. Along the way, they were also influenced by the Greco-Roman legacy and the Judeo-Christian values that, together, formed the basis for Western revolutions since the Age of Enlightenment.
Fifth, the quest for empowerment in Iran did not simply explode unpredictably in 1979.
The trend of the entire century, particularly two earlier upheavals, centered on ending dynastic rule.
The Constitutional Revolution of 1905-11 was sparked by the weak Qajar Dynasty's decision to dole out political and economic concessions to Britain and Russia. Britain won the exclusive right to tap Iran's oil.
To curtail powers that allowed the king to give away the country and to rid Persia of foreigners who challenged religious and social traditions, a powerful alliance of the

clergy, the intelligentsia and the bazaar merchants launched a protest. Prolonged instability forced the Qajar monarch, in 1906, to accept demands for Persia's first constitution and its first parliament — both of which limited the king's powers.
In 1953, the last Pahlavi shah, also weak and also heavily influenced by foreign powers, faced a similar challenge from the National Front. The front, led by Prime Minister
Mohammad Mossadeq, was a four-party coalition that advocated constitutional democracy and limited powers for the monarchy. But the shah's attempt to have
Mossadeq dismissed backfired, forcing the monarch to flee to Rome. The last dynasty looked as if it had fizzled — until the CIA and British intelligence orchestrated riots that forced Mossadeq to resign and allowed the young king to return to the Peacock Throne for another quarter century.
The revolution was thus an extension of earlier challenges. With attempts at evolutionary change repeatedly blocked, revolution became the alternative route to empowerment.
But the political endgame in 1979 marked the Modern Era's last great revolution not only because of its success in scrapping one of the world's oldest kingdoms. What happened after the revolution may be even more important, particularly the way Iranians, often in defiance of the government, adapted the Islamic system in creative and progressive ways.
During the Islamic republic's first two decades, new approaches to everyday issues produced everything from an internationally acclaimed cinema to an alternative press, from novel family-planning programs to women's activism. These nonpolitical innovations are virtually certain to produce the revolution's real legacy — and to have a far more enduring impact in the wider Islamic world than Iran's political system will have.