From 1941, Iran was ruled by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a king close to the United States. During his reign, he introduced a series of reforms aimed at Westernising the country, such as women's emancipation and land redistribution. However, the latter proved a fiasco, as the land allocated to peasants was insufficient to improve their standard of living, pushing many to seek their fortune in vain in the cities. Furthermore, the land reform affected many members of the Islamic clergy, who were mostly landowners; this, combined with attempts at women's emancipation (such as granting women the right to vote), created friction between the clerics and the Shah. Furthermore, the national economy lacked a competitive bourgeoisie and continued to rely almost exclusively on oil, while social inequalities deepened, and the government remained despotic and corrupt. All this led to the emergence of an opposition led by Ruhollah Khomeini, an ayatollah (a high-ranking Islamic cleric) who saw the Shah's reforms as a new form of colonialism. The ruler exiled him in the 1960s, but popular resentment grew in the following decade due to an oil crisis that severely damaged the economy, the Shah's increasingly tyrannical attitude, and increasingly rampant corruption. These factors led to increasingly large-scale protests that did not stop even under martial law; the king, in late 1978, attempted to save himself at the last minute by appointing one of his opponents, Shapur Bakhtiar, as Prime Minister. But this did not stop the protests, which forced the Shah to flee in January 1979. Khomeini, who had led the protests during his exile, returned to his homeland in February of that year. After pushing Bakhtiar to resign, he devoted himself to building a new government, which led to the creation of today's Islamic Republic, of which he became the first Supreme Leader. The Shah, after being granted political asylum in various countries, died of cancer in Egypt in 1980; with his death, the Iranian monarchy reached its end.