Iranian Islamic Revolution is reversed in a coup d'état

The question is coup'd by whom?

Secularists? Moderate Islamists? Tudeh? SAVAK and/or military?

IMO- secularists would be the preferred faction but weakest and most divided IOTL.

Moderate Islamists that wanted more social justice, less military expenditures and a more consultative role for the ayatollahs than actual leadership would've been the folks with moral authority and popular support to stay in power.

Tudeh takeover, however unlikely, would've started a bloodbath that made Afghanistan look tame in scale and ferocity and probably triggered if not WWIII a rather tense Soviet-NATO confrontation..

SAVAK and the military were exhausted and paralyzed by events 1977-1979.

Now, if a general were to broom Shah Pahlavi out of the country, invite SCIRI and Majlis deputies into a government, draft a new constitution and pull something of an Ataturk, then it's possible but very unlikely that it would stick together for very long. I'm not familiar enough with the VIPs to give you a good read of who COULD have pulled that off, if anyone.

Too many factions were too far apart on everything but getting rid of the Shah.
What carried Khomeni's faction through the rugby scrum after the Shah fell was a good ground game- many people knew and trusted Khomeni's agenda thanks to the taped lectures where he explained the failures of secularism and basis of the Islamic state.
The Islamists had built an extensive parallel structure of schools, clinics, food banks, and so forth that gave Iranians a peek at how Islamists would rule.
The Islamists had courted a wide base of the folks bypassed by the Shah's march to modernity.
 
And when the Ayatollah took over, the Islamists disposed of them like tissues. Perhaps they should've killed the Ayatollah when the French offered to do so.
 
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