So over the past three weeks I bought and read Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, which is an auto-biographical graphic novel of her growing up in Iran from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. I figured that I should try to understand better how Iran transitioned into the Islamic Republic that it is today. But after finishing it last night, my mind is still fucked from the massive disparity that the graphic novel seems to portray between the Iranian people and its government.

So I get that the Shah during the end of his reign was a really brutal dictator and overall bad guy like all the other dictators the US propped up in the region. And I get that out of the power vacuum, one of the stronger factions would be the Islamic fundamentalists to take up control. But I don't understand is how the Iranian people went along with the Islamic fundamentalists in the first place. YOu can google pictures right now of Iran before the revolution and you can see that both men and women were fairly westernized in their clothing at least and to a fair degree their social institutions. But the very first thing that the Islamic fundamentalists did after gaining control (from what I gathered from the novel) was literally enforce clothing rules, moral rules, etc. I thought it was a sneaky thing like with the surveillance state that Western countries have become, slow and steady. But no, the way it was portrayed was a like a stark night and day change where suddenly everyone woman in class had to cover themselves and were beaten for being with men who were not their husbands. And throughout the entire novel, the most that the Iranians (at least the Iranians she interacted with) do is to simply resist through fashion styles that toe the line or to do everything in the safety of their house, constantly on the look out for the party police. But why did it get to the point where there was no political resistance remaining by the time the book ends (early 1990s)? They just overthrew a government that was brutal and tyrannical but when the Imams tell them that they have to dress like this, looks like this, behave like this everyone just suddenly becomes more chill with it?

I guess the main thing I got from the graphic novel is that to a very large extent, the Iranian people are just like us. Except they live under this terrible regime that everyone (with a bit of education) acknowledges but they all act as if they can just wait it out or something.

The only thing that I can think of is that Iranians may have supported the new regime due to the Iran-Iraq war which happened like months after the revolution was successful. A large part of the book is about life during Iran while the war happened, and the propaganda that was pushed out. But even here, I don't understand because from what I know about the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam attacked first. But why did he attack a new regime that obviously would be looking for some sort of symbol to get the public to rally behind them during a period of revolutionaries? Did he honestly think he was going to be able to conquer all of Iran? Because otherwise the only thing that war was ever going to do was simply make the fundamentalists more legitimate in the eyes of the Iranian people.

There is so much that I just cannot wrap my head around right now. I guess the main question I have is how did such a fundamentalist government come to power and sustain it when to me it seems that the average Iranian citizen is just like your average American citizen (just swap Christianity with Islam), they are religious but it doesn't really define them completely as an individual or as their culture.