The first implementation of radical Islamist principles as a doctrine of state power occurred in 1979, in a capital where it was least expected—in a country unlike the majority of Middle Eastern states, with a long and distinguished national history and a long-established reverence for its pre-Islamic past. So when Iran, an accepted state in the Westphalian system, turned itself into an advocate for radical Islam after the Ayatollah Khomeini revolution, the Middle East regional order was turned upside down.
