Yeah, the nationalization of oil in Iran wasn't really a socialist ideological thing as much as it was a nebulous nationalist Iran should own its resources not more of these gorram foreigners type of deal. And the last Shah's and the "opposition" were more in agreement with modernization/secularization/Europeanization/etc. and deliberately trying to play all the powers off one another. Mosaddegh was basically trying to pull off his own little internal coup and the Brits used it to trick the CIA into intervening.
The Islamic Revolution rode to power on something similar (a kind of "independent Iran" platform) before going "hey remember when we said all that Islamic State/Rule by God's law stuff, we really did mean it brehs, shoulda read the fine print"
EDIT: A good example of Reza Shah's vision being similar to Ataturk was his demand that everyone stop calling it fucking Persia, it's Iran and has been for millenia dammit!
Not quite nebulous. To catch up with the West, many predominantly Muslim countries engaged in defensive developmentalism. (Modernizing to defend themselves from further imperialist incursions.) A problem with defensive developmentalism though was that it often relied on shortsighted crash financing of modernization with cash cropping, which not only further integrated these places into the global periphery, but made them incredibly vulnerable to market fluctuations as they were imprudent with government finances in these crash modernizations / expected cash cropping to be sustainable longer than it was. (The most infamous example, imo, being Egypt under the Pasha khedives. Think the Southern United States will never produce cotton again while building opera houses brehs.
)
So, while realizing that modernization still needed to be done to restore sovereignty, and to inject this post with a touch of the Marxiness, in Iran the Pahlavis and their successors arrived at the intellectual antithesis to the failed thesis--import substitution industrialization. (I guess this should be contextualized against the larger anti-globalization movement that manifested as a kind of pseudo-autarky happening elsewhere. (cf. Nazism, Italian fascism) This was not a good time for internationalism generally speaking.) However, it was put it into practice with synthesis--crash financing the import substitution industrialization with the 20th century's version of cash cropping: oil exportation. (Reza Shah also expropriated a lot of land from ulama and landlords, which was probably not the smartest move in retrospect.)
While the Iranian Revolution did ride in on an anti-imperialist wave, it wasn't quite the same sort of one. It was of a cultural and intellectual sense, not so much a bureaucratic or economic one. While there was a broad coalition of groups that overthrew the Pahlavis, the faction that eventually won was able to win because it could muster the broadest base of support by appealing to cultural authenticity (the anti-imperialism I spoke of previously) and to urban bazaaris who had risen in prominence as the populace was extensively urbanized by import substitution modernization (ulama tended to be drawn from this socio-economic group). I don't think this broad coalition had any illusions about the kind of people they were putting in power, ulama had been part of their everyday lives for quite some time, whether it be as their religious or commercial leaders. (Ulama would oversee contracts, that sort of thing.)
The people who got duped were the other factions of the revolution, but that's the dangerous game you play when you play at revolution.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
Analyzing history with dialectics.
If only I'd been enlightened in university, essays would have been much more fun.
