by Kim Ghattas
But Arab countries had rejected the Partition Plan, declaring they would continue to fight for an undivided Palestine. On May 15, they went to war, sending thousands of troops and tanks across the border. The new nation of Israel was already mobilized. With logistical help and arms shipments from a number of European countries, the Israelis built an army that soon surpassed Arab firepower. Within a year, Israel controlled 78 percent of former British Mandate Palestine, including West Jerusalem, while Jordan now administered the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and its walled old city, and Egypt had control of the Gaza Strip. The Arabs had lost Palestine, it was a catastrophe, a nakba, as it became known. Several hundred thousand Palestinians had to flee, within the country or into neighboring countries. Palestinians felt they were being made to atone for Europe’s sin of the Holocaust by sacrificing their own land. They took the keys to their houses with them and never gave up on the idea of returning home one day. But in 1967, during six days of war, the Arabs lost more land: Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, including the walled old city that is home to Al-Aqsa mosque, as well as Egypt’s Sinai and Syria’s Golan Heights. Jerusalem was under Jewish rule again for the first time in two millennia. Across the Arab and Muslim world, there was disbelief, shock, and tears. Arabs had put their faith in nationalism and in Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Just a few years prior, in 1956, Nasser had emerged victorious from a war for control over Egypt’s Suez Canal, staring down not only the French and the British but also Israel. The charismatic nationalist had become a hero for millions across the Arab world. How could he have lost this time? Perhaps, some people thought, God had forsaken Muslims; perhaps a return to religion was the answer.
Palestine continued to live in the collective consciousness of millions of Arabs, and Palestinian refugees now lived among them, in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, mostly in tented settlements and shantytowns. The Palestinians had had enough of these large Arab armies that kept losing precious land. The time had come to intensify guerrilla warfare. The man who had risen to lead them was Yasser Arafat, a Palestinian from Gaza, who had become chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1969. Armed Palestinian factions that had battled the Israelis alone and alongside the Arabs began to consolidate their grip on the refugee population in Jordan and Lebanon, filling their ranks with more fighters and launching attacks into Israel. The king of Jordan would have none of it—his army crushed the PLO ruthlessly in 1970. More Palestinian fighters, and more refugees, headed to Lebanon.
Israeli retaliation against Palestinian guerrilla attacks became a constant of life in southern Lebanon. In this small country of minorities, outside patrons were essential: the Christians looked to France, the old colonial power, as their protector; the Sunnis had the choice and, depending on their political leanings, some looked to Egypt or Syria; others to Saudi Arabia. The Shias felt they had no one: the shah of Iran was an ally of Israel and was mostly concerned with keeping tabs on the Iranian opposition in Lebanon.
Husseini wanted to raise awareness about this state of affairs. He wanted a voice to speak out, someone powerful enough to pressure the shah to change his stance on Israel. In 1974, the young parliamentarian traveled to Najaf to meet Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Even in exile, his voice mattered. Husseini explained to the seventy-two-year-old ayatollah that as a Lebanese Shia he felt a double burden: his community was defenseless in the face of Israeli shelling, and yet the shah, Guardian of the Shia Faith, ruler of a majority-Shia country, was an ally of Israel. Husseini pointed out to Khomeini that he was not in jail, like colleagues back in Iran, and though his name was banned from newspapers in Iran, he was relatively free, even under Iraq’s dictatorship. He urged the ayatollah to speak out and talked to him about how he and others in Lebanon, like Chamran, could support a revolution in Iran. Khomeini must have been pleased by the visit; he missed being at the center of political action. There would soon be others whispering in his ears about the Palestinian cause, which he cared about more than the plight of Lebanon’s Shias—it had better potential to serve his desire to be heard outside Najaf.
After a decade in Najaf, the capital of Shia Islam, a Vatican of sorts, Khomeini was still an outsider. When he had arrived in the Iraqi city, the high-ranking clerics had rejected his entreaties to launch a Shia uprising in both Iran and Iraq, where the secular nationalist Baath Party was in power. This was not the clergy’s role, they had told him. In a tense meeting, the most senior cleric told the Iranian ayatollah, “there is no point in sending people to their deaths.” The tension would never subside, leaving Khomeini to wonder “what sin I have committed to be confined to Najaf in the few remaining years of my life.”
Khomeini was sought after by others who were attracted to his uncompromising stance. Najaf was the oldest and most prestigious hawza (Shia seminary), and Shias came from all over the world, not only to visit the shrine of Imam Ali, but to study. Over time, Khomeini trained hundreds of clerics and preached to thousands of students who then returned to Iran, Bahrain, or Pakistan. During those lectures, Khomeini laid out his vision for an Islamic state ruled by Islamic law, the shari’a, which he delivered in Persian to avoid censure by the Iraqi authorities. Traditionally in Shiism, the perfect Islamic state can come into existence only with the return of the Mahdi, or Hidden Imam, a messiah-like redeemer and the twelfth imam after Ali, who had gone into hiding, or occultation, in the ninth century. Until the return of this infallible man, governance would be in the hands of the secular state. But Khomeini asserted that the Quran had in fact provided all the laws and ordinances necessary for man to establish an Islamic state and that the prophet and Imam Ali had intended for learned men to implement them: with these tools, a wise man, or faqih, could be the guardian and rule over such a state, or wilayat, with absolute power and bring about a perfect and just Islamic society. The Guardianship of the Jurist, or wilayat al-faqih, had been a theoretical subsection of Shia jurisprudence, and clerics believed that in current times such guardianship could apply only to widows and orphans. Khomeini had transformed it into an immediate, political goal.
When Imam Sadr read Khomeini’s booklet, he was taken aback. The two men were distant relatives through marriage, but they had little in common: one was pragmatic, the other uncompromising; one was worldly and inclusive, the other insular and exclusionary. As early as 1973, Sadr had sent a warning about Khomeini’s idea to the shah through a friend: “This is the juice of a sick mind.” But otherwise he kept his misgivings about the ayatollah mostly to himself. Sadr seemed to want to pressure the shah just enough to make him soften his grip and engage with the opposition, but not see him toppled. For now, Khomeini was a useful thorn; his crazy Islamic government could never come about anyway. At least that’s what Sadr thought. During his visit to Najaf in 1974, Husseini did not bring up the wilayat al-faqih with Khomeini, nor argue its insanity.
In Lebanon, Chamran and his colleagues from the Liberation Movement of Iran were getting ahead of Sadr and Husseini. Among them was Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, a tall, broad-shouldered, somewhat flamboyant womanizer and former student activist who had studied at Georgetown University but never graduated. Ebrahim Yazdi traveled often to Lebanon from the United States, where he lived in exile. With his black-rimmed eyeglasses, curly hair, beard, and tweed jacket, he looked like a French intellectual, but he actually held a PhD in biochemistry. Chamran, Ghotbzadeh, and Yazdi formed the backbone of the LMI, whose members were middle-class or wealthy Iranians who had lived a comfortable life. They came from traditional merchant families, those at the top of the hierarchy of the all-powerful community of the Bazaar, the market, with its artisans, guilds, and apprentices. The Bazaar had always served as a political force in Iran, agitating against Western competition on its turf, and they often made common cause with the clerics who resented Western influence on Iranian society. That alliance had produced upheaval before, during the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. The monarchy had been shaken and transformed, but it survived a
s a ruling system. The current generation of young revolutionaries wanted to tear the whole structure down.
Working alongside the LMI was Abolhassan Banisadr, a leftist nationalist and professor of economics living in exile in Paris. Banisadr, Chamran, Ghotbzadeh, and Yazdi were all the same generation, born in the early or mid-1930s. They had come of age during the tumultuous period of the early 1950s in Iran, when a CIA-fomented coup had brought down Mohammad Mossadegh, a popular, nationalist Iranian prime minister who had been asserting his independence from the shah. The 1953 coup had given them all a taste for activism. Soft-spoken, with a black mustache, thick hair, and a small figure, Banisadr was the son of an ayatollah who had chosen politics instead of religion. He had met Khomeini as a child and had played with the cleric’s children. But he had been unimpressed by the ayatollah when he had seen him again in Najaf in 1972, finding him unfriendly and isolated. Banisadr had also read Khomeini’s book about an Islamic state with disbelief. Most of his colleagues on the left found the writings so outlandish that they assumed it was a forgery by the Iranian regime seeking to discredit Khomeini as a religious fanatic.
But the Iranian opposition needed such a firebrand to ignite the revolution and access the masses in the mosques. The nationalists and leftists were good organizers, but they didn’t have a popular following, they did not have a charismatic Che Guevara. Banisadr warned Khomeini not to speak about his wilayat al-faqih because it showed him to be unrealistic: How could clerics who could barely manage the daily affairs of Najaf, the holiest city of Shiism, run a whole country? Khomeini said his writings were just a starting point to provoke conversation about the best form of government. Banisadr was satisfied. The groundwork for a revolution could begin.
* * *
The fire was sparked in 1977. It began with the death in June of Ali Shariati, the dangerous visionary ideologue of the revolution. Tall and dapper, in his early thirties, with fuzzy hair on top of his balding head, Shariati was a nationalist who had studied sociology in Paris. He was of the same generation as Chamran and the other LMI members, and he too had grown up in the era of Mossadegh. As a young man, he was caught scrawling pro-Mossadegh graffiti and was made to lick the wall clean. Shariati was full of contradictions: the son a religious leader in the holy city of Mashhad, he disliked the influence of the clerics; he was devout but admitted once that if he were not a Muslim he would be a Marxist. Leftist and Islamist, he dressed the Western way, in a suit and tie, always clean-shaven. Nonetheless, he despised the sterile modernity of Europe and railed against Iranians who rejected their own history and embraced everything Western. At the same time, he derided the commoner wedded to tradition and stuck in the past: “A futureless past is a state of inertia and stagnation, while a pastless future is alien and vacuous.” And yet in his search for a future that was anchored in his country’s past and Iran’s distinct identity as well as in Islam, he looked to foreign authors. He was inspired by Frantz Fanon, the anticolonialist thinker from Martinique, and by the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, who was close to many Iranian revolutionaries. From all these contradictions, Shariati produced a new brand of Shiism, even more militant and mobilized than what Imam Sadr had been preaching in Lebanon. There was nothing quietist or ritualistic in Shariati’s deeply political and insurgent version of Shiism. He coined the term Red Shiism, one tinged with Marxism ready for sacrifice to attain social justice. It stood in opposition to Black Shiism, the quietist, ritualistic one who submitted to rulers and monarchs. By rediscovering an authentic Islam, he asserted, Iran could be a utopian society with a perfect leader, a philosopher king, as in Plato’s Republic. The similarity to Khomeini’s faqih was striking, except that Shariati did not believe clerics had any role to play in politics. Khomeini despised secular thinkers, but he let the militant fervor that Shariati had awakened serve his purposes.
In 1971, Shariati openly called for the masses to rise against the shah. Lecturing at the university of Mashhad, he smoked while he talked, sometimes holding forth for as long as six hours, his audience enthralled, their minds captivated. By 1973, he was in jail. After four years he was released and left for London. He died a month later from a heart attack—though many felt the circumstances were mysterious and attributed his death to the shah’s secret service, the SAVAK. Imam Sadr praised Shariati’s efforts to produce a discourse for emancipation and change that was indigenous to Muslim societies.
The next to die was Mostafa Khomeini, the ayatollah’s own son, at the age of forty-seven. The eldest of his children and his most trusted aide, Mostafa suffered from health problems due to his weight, but his father allowed conspiracy theories to circulate about a mysterious death to be blamed on the SAVAK. There had been years of unrest in Iran, but the moment when the dam truly broke was in November 1977, when the shah allowed Khomeini’s relatives in Iran to mark the fortieth day of mourning for Mostafa. Khomeini’s father-in-law published a notice in the mass-circulation Kayhan newspaper referring to Mostafa as the “offspring of the Exalted Leader of All Shiites of the World.” In the Jameh mosque in Tehran, prayers were said for “our one and only leader, the defender of the faith and the great combatant of Islam, Grand Ayatollah Khomeini.” For fourteen years, Khomeini’s name had been taboo in Iran. Now it was in print, it was in sermons, brandished and aggrandized, a foreboding signal of how Khomeini saw himself and how some perceived him.
That same month, Arab honor died too, or so it felt for millions across the region, who watched, incredulously, as Nasser’s successor, president Anwar Sadat, crossed enemy lines and traveled to Jerusalem to address the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Tears streamed down the faces of children as rage burned inside the hearts of men. How could Egypt break rank and betray the Arab and Palestinian cause? Peace talks would soon begin between Israel and Egypt—so who would wipe the shame from the forehead of Arab men now? Arafat was furious; he felt personally betrayed by Sadat. He looked for support elsewhere. He used the death of Khomeini’s son as an opportunity to contact the ayatollah, offering condolences through a friend, the Lebanese Shia cleric Sayyed Hani Fahs. The connection between Iranian and Palestinian revolutionaries, including in training camps, had mostly been a leftist affair so far. Now that there was formal contact between the PLO and the fundamentalist Islamist wing of the revolution, embodied in the ayatollah, training and support for the Iran revolution would intensify. Khomeini would exploit the connection endlessly, and his appropriation of the cause would alter the political landscape of Lebanon and the Middle East.
In the fall of 1977, with the civil war in Lebanon well into its third year, Husseini bought a state-of-the-art AKAI stereo system with a double cassette tape deck and vinyl player. His four children, all in their early teens, were delighted with this addition to the living room in their home by the sea: cutting-edge technology at their fingertips. Every afternoon after school, they played their favorite records: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Beatles. This was a revolutionary home, mobilized for change. Pictures of Shariati and Khomeini hung on their walls. They were in awe of Chamran, who often spent the night. In the evening, if there was no shooting or shelling, they could hear the waves as they fell asleep.
After the children went to bed, the stereo system had another purpose. The message of the revolution had to be spread far and wide. Before the Internet, before Twitter, there were the cassette tape and the fax machine. Husseini and Imam Sadr got to work. The politician would operate the recorder and the cleric would speak. They made tape after tape of revolutionary messages addressed to the Iranian people, encouraging them to rise up and demand change. Sadr never promoted Khomeini and never explicitly called for the downfall of the shah, but he fervently believed that unrest could force Iran’s king to make real, far-reaching reforms. Copies of the tapes were given to Iranian dissidents who were still able to travel in and out of Iran. Once the tapes were smuggled into the country, more copies were made, and the messages spread like wildfire. Khomeini made tapes, too, virulent diatri
bes against the Pahlavis. Some were smuggled back into Iran by pilgrims who had gone to Najaf. Recordings of his speeches were also played down an international telephone line to Tehran, recorded on a deck there, and disseminated. While the shah was focused on controlling the message on television, radio, and in the newspapers, the underground business of revolutionary tapes was mobilizing the masses and chipping away at the facade of a king in control.
The Husseini and Fahs families inhabited different worlds; they were at odds politically, but their children all sang for the revolution—separately, and each with a different vision of what it meant for Iran. They knew by heart the Persian lyrics to the first revolutionary song that echoed across Iran:
