Although the claim that Iran's revolution of 1979 changed the politics of the Arab World is now a truism, we know relatively little about how that transformation occurred. This paper investigates the broader intellectual fallout of the Iranian Revolution in Arab political thought. It argues that the revolution's historical repercussions outside Iran must move beyond the study of transnational religious networks , or the rousing of politically dormant Shi'ite communities. Specifically, it investigates how Arab historians, journalists, politicians, and intellectuals debated the causes of the revolution in Iran. Using popular histories of the revolution written in Arabic, and the intellectual output of economic and political journals of the early 1980s from the Gulf States an Egypt, the paper demonstrates how Arab authors explained the rise of the Islamic Republic in doctrinal, racial, and psychological terms, in order to dismiss it as a revolutionary event. The paper concludes that the core conceptual vocabulary and political practices of right wing populism - containment, stability, and moderation - that emerged during the mid 1980s, have their roots in interpreting and containing revolutionary threats from outside the Arab world and have since re-emerged to perform similar functions within it.