Shi'a clergy (Ulema) have had a significant influence on some Iranians, who have tended to be religious, traditional, and alienated from any process of Westernization. The clergy first showed themselves to be a powerful political force in opposition to Iran's monarch with the 1891 Tobacco Protest boycott that effectively destroyed an unpopular concession granted by the Shah giving a British company a monopoly over buying and selling Tobacco in Iran.
Decades later monarchy and clerics clashed again, this time monarchy holding the upper hand. Shah Pahlavi's father, army general Reza Pahlavi, replaced Islamic laws with western ones, and forbade traditional Islamic clothing, separation of the sexes and veiling of women (hijab). Police forcibly removed and tore chadors of women who resisted his ban on public hijab. In 1935 dozens were killed and hundreds injured when a rebellion by pious Shi'a at the most holy Shi'a shrine in Iran [34] was crushed on his orders.
In 1941 Reza Shah was deposed and his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, installed by an invasion of allied British and Soviet troops. In 1953 foreign powers (American and British) again came to the Shah's aid. After the Shah fled the country an American CIA operative and aided by the British MI6 organized a military coup d'état to oust his nationalist and democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.
Shah Pahlavi maintained a close relationship with the United States government, both regimes sharing a fear of/opposition to the expansion of Soviet/Russian state, Iran's powerful northern neighbor. Like his father's regime, Shah Pahlavi's was known for its autocracy, its focus on modernization and Westernization and for its disregard for religious and democratic measures in Iran's constitution. Leftist, nationalist and Islamist groups attacked his government (often from outside Iran as they were suppressed within) for violating the Iranian constitution, political corruption, and the political oppression by the SAVAK (secret police).
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