Like the Wahhabis of Sunnism, Khomeini claimed that Muslims had fallen away from “true” Islam as understood from a literal reading of the Qur’an and the traditions of the prophet and (because these were Shi’is) the imams who succeeded him. Khomeini attacked the Shah not for his despotism but for his modernism—for promoting the western dress code, favoring women’s rights, allowing nightclubs to be built in Iran, and so on.
