The very notion that Khomeini was at times connected to the Mahdi is representative of how influential and powerful he quickly became following his persuasive speech on Ashura in 1963. Indeed, he used this symbolic day as an opportunity to appeal to the emotions of Iranians through Karbala references: “If the Bani Umayyad and the regime of Yazid ibn Mu’awiya were at war with Husayn, then why did they commit such savage and inhuman crimes against defenseless women and innocent children on the day of Ashura? What were the women and infants guilt of?” By reminding Iranians of their own struggles under the Shah through deeply symbolic language, especially during the month of Muharram, Khomeini strategically connected with the people on a personal level. He was not a distant ruler like the Shah or foreign governments; he was …show more content…
Prime Minister Mossadegh, for example, had also been able to connect with the masses, which was part of why the Americans and the British saw him as such a threat. However, as Hamid Algar points out in his lecture series Roots of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, “One of the great differences between 1953 and 1979 in Iran is that in 1953 there was a [Mossadegh] and in 1979 there was a Khomeini.” What Algar implies in this statement is that as a secular leader, Mossadegh would never have been able to lead a movement as powerful as Khomeini, because he would not have been able to connect with the people in the way that Islamic revolutionaries like Shari’ati and Khomeini did. To add to that, given that the 1953 coup “destroyed the secular parties,” that is, the Tudeh Party and the National Front, Khomeini’s religious opposition force filled a “vacuum” that the Shah, the United States, and Britain had created. Facing little competition, Khomeini was able to attract a larger following—and with Islam, he could mobilize a revolutionary