An Example of Noble Character

gained, the result is typically just the replacement of one ruling class with another. The Islamic revolution is unique in that it succeeded in creating a society and social structure that genuinely reflected its founding ideology. The primary reason for this difference lies in the timeline of realization. Other revolutions took multiple generations to mature, whereas the Islamic revolution reached its fulfillment in its very first generation. The first generation of any ideological movement sees the ideology as a personal discovery. They embrace it with deep conviction and wholehearted sincerity. By the second or third generation, however, the ideology often becomes just a formal belief, losing its motivational force in everyday life. For example, the idea of democracy was introduced by European thinkers in the seventeenth century, but it was not practically implemented until the late eighteenth century—in America in 1776 and in France in 1789. Democracy remained a theoretical ideal during its first generation and only took institutional form in its third generation, long after its original advocates had passed away. Consequently, democratic revolutions have not fully embodied the ideology’s founding principles. A similar pattern is seen with communism. Though its concepts emerged in the nineteenth century, communism was only implemented in practice during the twentieth century, by the second and third generations of communists. The first generation never saw it realized. As a result,