AN AUGURY OF REVOLUTION: THE IRANIAN STUDENT ...

CHAPTER III – THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION AND IRANIAN STUDENTS, 1964-
1968
Dramatic changes occurred in both U.S. – Iranian relations and the Iranian student
movement abroad from 1964 through 1968. Dissident Iranian students continued to become
more vocal and radical as their numbers grew throughout the decade. While Qotbzadeh left the
U.S. for France in 1964, Fatemi remained in the United States. Qotbzadeh, and ardent Islamist,
eventually developed a relationship with Ayatollah Khomeini while in France. Fatemi and
Qotbzadeh represented both the secular leftist and moderate Islamist tendencies in the Iranian
student movement in the United States, and the movement was similar in Europe. While Ali
Shariati, a very influential moderate Islamist, was involved in the European CIS, leftists such as
Hasan Masali were equally, if not more influential in the mid-1960s. The ideologies of these
men evolved and went in various directions throughout the next fifteen years as many more
students joined the movement. After the brutal response to demonstrators in Iran during the
summer of 1963, students abroad were among the only groups of Iranians able to express their
political beliefs. Iranian student organizations such as the CISNU “were a large pool from which
various communist, Maoist, Islamic, and nationalist groups recruited members.” 184 This new
generation of students developed a much more radical discourse on both Marxism-Leninism and
Islamism.
Iranian student protest became more frequent by the late 1960s. Their demonstrations
displayed disaffection with the shah’s regime throughout the United States and Western Europe.
The ISAUS believed that its methods were “the enlightened, democratic way of trying to rid Iran
184 Mohsen M. Milani, The Making of Iran’s Islamic Revolution: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic (Boulder,
Colorado: Westview Press, 1988), 114.