i'm joined in the newsroom by anna riney in -- by an iranian author and intellectual.thank you for being with us. 35 years ago you were there at the time. the extraordinary enthusiasm, one imagines, in the days just after the shah had left but before the atomic revolution was proclaimed. there, basically, i was during the years of the revolution and three or four years after the revolution. the victory of khomeini and the clergy. and during the terror period, what we call the terror period, with mass executions that followed immediately after taking power by khomeini. >> it was initially a popular uprising against the shah that might have gone another way. >> absolutely. there were good reasons for the uprising. you had economic growth, you have the growth of the middle class, and the middle-class have access to education opportunities, economic opportunities, but what lacked seriously back then was social reforms in terms of their political anger. , which the middle-class had grown up economically and demographically with no say in political matters, and the social cl