" Young Iranians educated at the Sorbonne returned to Iran as committed Marxists willing to subjugate themselves to Khomeini’s leadership of the anti-Shah opposition.’[Marx] exposes the imperialists and their rape of all the countries of the Third World, including Iran’ parroted one student, a leftist who donned a chador not because she understood or believed in Islam but because she wanted to make a political statement against the Shah’s regime. Though Marx had condemned religion as the ‘opiate of the masses … in developing countries it is different. At times, religious feelings and social movements go hand in hand. That is the way it is now in Iran. We are all of us united against the Shah. We are in an Islamic country, and all social movements inevitably have a religious coloring. We do not believe there will ever be Communism here as there is Communism in Russia or China. We will have our own brand of socialism.’ Remarks like hers pointed to a curious phenomenon last seen in Imperial Russia sixty years before: Iran’s best-educated minds helping their future executioners erect scaffolds in their name. "
― Andrew Scott Cooper , The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran
![Andrew Scott Cooper quote : Young Iranians educated at the Sorbonne returned to Iran as committed Marxists willing to subjugate themselves to Khomeini’s leadership of the anti-Shah opposition.’[Marx] exposes the imperialists and their rape of all the countries of the Third World, including Iran’ parroted one student, a leftist who donned a chador not because she understood or believed in Islam but because she wanted to make a political statement against the Shah’s regime. Though Marx had condemned religion as the ‘opiate of the masses … in developing countries it is different. At times, religious feelings and social movements go hand in hand. That is the way it is now in Iran. We are all of us united against the Shah. We are in an Islamic country, and all social movements inevitably have a religious coloring. We do not believe there will ever be Communism here as there is Communism in Russia or China. We will have our own brand of socialism.’ Remarks like hers pointed to a curious phenomenon last seen in Imperial Russia sixty years before: Iran’s best-educated minds helping their future executioners erect scaffolds in their name.](/image/1386808.jpg)