It might be too simplistic to call it a reaction to Western modernity. There were a collection of groups behind the 1979 revolution and the Islamists were really only allowed to gain control by the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War. And in fact, their political power isn't so absolute that they've been able to get everything they wanted. On some fronts, they were forced to grant concessions, such as on women's rights. Everything is overtly conservative (at least in tone if not at all in substance in some instances), but there are still surprisingly liberal elements to be found in Iranian society.
Heck, even the Khoemini himself was not always party to the conservatives' interests. Witness the creation of the Expediency Council and his declaration before that that the state can contradict sharia if it's in the interest of the public. Such measures were meant to combat the obstructionist tendencies of the Council of Guardians at that time, which naturally had an Islamist agenda.
It's not a question of conservatism: Islamism can and does take radical and leftist forms (the most prominent Islamist leftist being [wiki]Ali Shariati[/wiki], who would probably been the leader of the Iranian Revolution if SAVAK hadn't assassinated him in '77). The point is an intellectual rebellion against the political implications of modern science, against what many regarded as the intellectual sterility of the West since it had begun to become secular. When you take liberal democracy to its logical extreme (goes the Islamist--and, not incidentally, Nietzschean--argument), you end with tolerance for the sake of tolerance, not because you think that there's a chance that any one particular theory is true, but because you believe that all overriding value systems are unknowable; the Left and Right are equally good because they are equally meaningless. Islamism is a conscious effort to posit a modern value system to shield the Muslim world against the ailment of the West: Sayyid Qutb called it corruption, Kierkegaard called it levelling, and Nietzsche called it nihilism, but whatever you call it, Islamism is an attempt to avoid it.
I don't think you can call "overthrow" and "abolishment"* the same thing.
Also, the American Revolution had a great deal of influence internationally if only through the global war it spawned.
I'll say these things:
1. The true American Revolution for Americans was in fact the Civil War; it was the point at which Southerners were forced, at gunpoint, to see themselves as American rather than Virginian or Georgian or Mississippian or Texan (OK, we may not have succeeded completely on that one). However, the American Revolution was important intellectually and politically. Politically, it's simple: the American Revolution was the primer for the giant explosion that was the French Revolution. Had the Colonies come to a peaceful conciliation with Britain or had the British decided not to fight and thus draw France into a war, I doubt that the French Revolution would have happened when it did, how it did were it not for the American Revolution. It would most likely delay it for a while. It may never even have occurred. As much as Marxists assert that liberalism was an idea whose time had come by 1789, the actual situation is rather more complex. At the end of the day, the American Revolution, combining as it did a liberal spirit and a big war between Britain and France, was the
sine qua non of the Greatest Revolution of Them All.
2. The American Revolution produced vast quantities of dissertations on the application of liberal theory in its mature form to actual government. The states engaged in a great deal of constitutional experimentation (for instance, take a look at the first constitution of post-independence Pennsylvania), and The
Federalist Papers are probably the most useful practical guide to liberal democratic governance in existence (despite its focus on the American Constitution as it originally stood, it's an excellent work even for non-Americans to look at). Also, Alexis de Tocqueville, fifty years later.
