Richard A. Horsley

"Intensive measures of repression taken by the Shah to enforce his westernizing development program nearly eliminated effective political parties and forms of civil society other than activities in the mosques."

"The separation of religion from politics, and the historical emergence of Judaism and its spin-off, Christianity, however, did not develop until late antiquity; these institutions are a long-range result of the Romans’ use of political and military power to ensure that indigenous peoples’ commitment to their traditional way of life not interfere with their submission to the imperial order."

"A key factor in [the revival of Shiite Islam in Iran] was the Iranians’ refusal to accept the western reduction of religion to individual faith, which would have enabled an easier imposition of a global capitalist political economy."

"Khomeini ... was a paradigm of asceticism, which in Islam was not a withdrawal from worldly affairs but a refusal to be seduced by materialism. He was incorruptible."

"Against the U.S.-sponsored program to deny subject peoples their own cultural heritage as well as participation in shaping their own social and economic life, Iranian opposition took the form of a revival of the only sphere of life that remained available, Shiite cultural tradition and the ritual space and symbols of the mosques."

"Cultural elites in countries that dominate peoples have adapted subject people’s religion for their own purposes."