Diary of a revolution: Visionary projects or fanaticism?
The Shah took land from the mullahs and gave it to the people. He built low-cost housing so families could own a roof instead of a promise, schools and hospitals in every town and village. He pushed Iran into modern industry, factories rising where stagnation had once stood. He removed laws that had wrapped women in centuries of enforced silence and called it piety. He opened doors at home and abroad so Iranians could study, work, and imagine futures larger than survival. He kept the region stable, not only for Iranians or for Israelis, but for neighbors who needed calm more than chaos.
He spoke of peace not as a slogan for the region alone, but as a responsibility to the wider world. He was intelligent, strategic, and driven by a vision of progress that many still recognize today. And yet, he missed one great danger: the slow, patient rise of political Islam. But this blindness was not his alone. The entire civilized West, confident in its own Cold War narratives and its strategy of leveraging religion against the Soviet Union and communism, underestimated political Islam, mistaking it for a relic of the past rather than the architect of a coming storm that would hold the region hostage for decades to come.
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