by Kim Ghattas
Husseini had joked with Bazergan that Chamran was only on temporary loan to Iran, that Lebanon wanted him back. Bazergan joked back: “Persians don’t return loans, we’re keeping him.” Chamran was delighted to be home. The guerrilla fighter was appointed minister of defense. He would never go back to Lebanon. He may have wanted to return to visit his friends, or look out to the sea, or walk the streets of Tyre. But Khomeini’s folly was going to get him killed soon.
* * *
Events in Iran were hurtling forward at breathtaking speed. Mohsen was at the heart of it, still thrilled and exhilarated by this opportunity to build the new Iran. Victory had come much quicker than he had expected. He had been right: the fervor of the people was enough to sweep away the last vestiges of the shah’s power, after just a few key battles. The long drawn-out insurgency that he had envisioned, with a people’s army fighting for years like the Vietcong in Vietnam or the National Liberation Front in Algeria, had not materialized. But with the shah still alive and not far away, and the CIA’s intentions always the eternal unknown, everyone was fearful of a possible coup. Amid the chaos of revolution, the breakdown in law and order, and the paralysis of the armed forces, there were militias springing up everywhere and guns galore. Within weeks, Mohsen helped to set up an organization that would guard the revolution from these excesses and from any possible counterrevolution. The Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enghelab-e Islami, the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, was born: armed vigilantes operating across the country to beat down any dissent, any counterrevolutionary groups, any non-Islamic militias. The communists and Marxists were still armed, so they were targeted, too. Mohsen and some of his comrades set out to write the founding charter of the Guardians, a document to spell out duties and limits and bring all the disparate groups under one umbrella. Mohsen, one of the provisional commanders, went to the headquarters of the SAVAK. The physics student, a revolutionary at heart but a technocrat in practice, got a bit queasy about what intelligence work would entail. He talked to others around him and with colleagues like Yousef Kolahdouz, a former officer in the shah’s army. They rewrote the charter and named new commanders at the top. The far-reaching consequences of what Mohsen was helping to found were not clear to him—or, if they were in that moment, he would never admit it. The informal resistance movement became an organ of the state, a feared, all-powerful paramilitary organization that struck at anyone who opposed the revolution. Its emblem was a raised fist holding a Kalashnikov rifle. Over time they became known as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), their power extending well beyond the borders of Iran.
Mohsen moved to the radio and television authority and later to the industrial development authority. As he tried to preserve his belief in the core ideals of the revolution and in Khomeini, he would go from disappointment to disappointment. The utopia he had once envisioned never materialized. Instead, there was now an Islamic republic.
The Islamic Republic of Iran was now the official name of the country, after a referendum at the end of March 1979, when Iranians went to the polls to vote on a simple question: Should the monarchy be replaced by an Islamic republic? There were no voting booths, so everyone could see what people were choosing on their ballot papers. “Yes” was colored in green. The turnout was massive, and 98 percent picked green, even though there was no definition of what an Islamic republic entailed. Bazergan and his allies had been working on drafting a constitution since their days in France, inspired by the text drawn up after the revolution of 1906, which had been implemented for only a few years then. The new text, published on June 14, envisaged an executive presidency whose power was vested in the people, not in a monarch. A committee of religious leaders would have limited veto power over laws. Men and women would be equal under the law. In Bazergan’s document, there was no reference to the wilayat al-faqih.
Tensions began to surface between Khomeini and the more progressive and highly regarded ayatollahs like Taleghani and Shariatmadari. Taleghani’s children were briefly arrested in April by militiamen from revolutionary committees, komitehs, that had sprung up everywhere. Taleghani, the country’s second-highest-ranking cleric, retreated home in protest, closed his offices in Qom, and warned that the nation could “once more fall back into the hands of dictatorship and despotism.” After meeting Taleghani in Qom, Khomeini chided him rather than the komitehs, making clear who was staying. He pointedly avoided addressing Taleghani as Ayatollah, instead calling him Mr. Taleghani. Protests erupted. “Disrespect to Taleghani is disrespect to the nation,” the demonstrators chanted. A few months later, in September, Ayatollah Taleghani died in his sleep at the age of sixty-eight. He was a healthy man and the timing of this death was convenient, leading some to believe there had been foul play.
Meanwhile, Shariatmadari, who himself wanted a return to the 1906 constitution, had launched his own political party. Within days, more than a million people signed up. He was one of Khomeini’s most prominent challengers, and all year he campaigned against Khomeini’s brand of Islam. But the radical clerics were better organized, well ahead, and far more ruthless. Even before Khomeini’s return they had formed a kind of shadow government under the banner of the Islamic Republican Party (IRP), which Beheshti, Khomeini’s closest ally, was leading. Tightly organized, authoritarian, it gathered all those who accepted Khomeini’s leadership unconditionally. Beheshti was using the party to consolidate control over the revolution and marshaled support from the komitehs, as well as the clerics, Islamic militias, and the Revolutionary Guards. The IRP had worked hard to make sure that the April referendum would result in an Islamic republic. It had its own thugs: Hezbollah, or the Party of God, and attacked demonstrators who opposed Khomeini, terrorized students on university campuses, shut down critical newspapers, and rode in the streets in convoys of motorbikes, waving black flags and banners.
If the IRP was slowly seizing the levers of power, the secular leftists still dominated the streets and could bring out hundreds of thousands of Marxists, socialists, and communists. They had been working underground for decades, they were the oldest opposition groups in the country, and they had in effect laid much of the groundwork for the revolution inside the country, alongside nationalist secular forces. Their formerly underground guerrillas were now out in the open, having picked up weapons from abandoned army bases. Within days, they were distributing pamphlets and newspapers on the street. They could mobilize huge demonstrations: between five hundred thousand and a million people took to the streets on Labor Day. Leftist student organizations still wielded huge power across the country on university campuses. They held debates with Hezbollahis and won, because theirs was still the ideology of the day, and anti-imperialism the most popular rallying cry.
Khomeini had not expressed openly anti-American sentiments while in exile and had barely done so since his return. He bemoaned the United States’ backing of the shah and ranted against Israel, but he did not seem to be gearing up for a confrontation with America. Khomeini, the provisional government, and even Beheshti had maintained ties with the United States. They had negotiated the release of US diplomats when a Marxist-Leninist group had briefly seized the American embassy earlier in the year. But leftist groups were now brandishing the anti-imperialist banner higher and higher, demanding that Khomeini break ties with the American government and cancel contracts with American companies. Toward the end of October, the shah arrived in the United States for medical treatment. Few outside the shah’s close circle knew of his illness and, in Iran, many imagined this visit was the prelude to another CIA coup. The left jumped on the occasion, mobilizing on university campuses that had just reopened for the start of the academic year, and launched the slogan “Death to America,” Marg bar Amreeka.
Khomeini’s most radical followers did not want to be left out—it was time to show who were the true revolutionaries. On November 4, some four hundred students climbed the walls of the American embassy compound in central Tehran. Led by a group calling its
elf Students Following the Imam’s Line, they took sixty-six American hostages. Khomeini did not order the seizure but quickly recognized its benefits. He could outbid the secular left, undermine the nationalists, and appropriate the popular anti-imperial slogan. He would have a whole new arsenal at his disposal to solidify his grip on the country. Khomeini began to pitch in with more anti-American rhetoric, and he gave his blessing to the seizure of what the students called “the nest of spies.” Two days later, Prime Minister Bazergan resigned in protest. As did Yazdi. There had been months of tussles with the ayatollah over governing style and vision for the country but the hostage crisis was the final fissure. The radicals now had free rein. Within a month, a new constitution was put to a referendum. This latest version was unrecognizable from the version Bazergan had drafted in France and finalized in Iran in June—it was almost wholly the work of Beheshti and his allies, who had spent the summer reworking the text. The wilayat al-faqih had been enshrined and tailored to fit Khomeini. The faqih had very broad powers: it enabled him to name top military leaders and judges, dismiss the president, and disqualify political candidates, with or without cause. He could declare war and peace. A national referendum was called to vote on the constitution. Turnout was slightly lower than in April, but on December 3, the result was an overwhelming yes.
Khomeini was now the Supreme Leader, the delegate of the Mahdi on earth.
In Qom, the gentle Ayatollah Shariatmadari did not vote in the referendum, and he made his views known. He vehemently opposed the constitution and the role of the faqih. He warned of civil war. His supporters began an insurrection in his home province, and he became a rallying point for all dissenters. It wouldn’t last because, unlike Khomeini, Shariatmadari did not want to spill blood. He dismantled his party. Soon after, he was put under house arrest and stripped of his religious rank.
Several articles in the constitution were of particular interest to supporters of the revolution outside Iran. The Muslim Brotherhood had been waiting for Khomeini’s answer to its proposal that he be the ultimate leader of an Islamic awakening. But article 12 of the new constitution declared that Iran’s state religion was still Shia Islam. The Brothers who had visited Khomeini in Iran were deeply disappointed. Khomeini wanted to be a leader on his own terms; he wanted to be separate from the rest. He didn’t want to dissolve himself into a Muslim world that was 80 percent Sunni; he wanted to lead the opposition forever. When it suited him, he would reach out to those Sunni groups that could serve his agenda. Article 154 of the constitution was designed exactly for that, implicitly expanding the jurisdiction of the faqih beyond the borders of Iran. Indeed, the constitution declared that the Islamic Republic of Iran supported “the just struggles of the oppressed against the oppressors in every corner of the globe.” Khomeini’s revolution was just beginning.
* * *
In America, millions were tuning in for a nightly update from ABC on the hostage crisis at the embassy in Tehran. Every evening, Ted Koppel delivered the latest in a special program: The Iran Crisis—America Held Hostage: Day 5. Then there was day 10, and day 12. On days 14 and 15, a total of thirteen Americans were released. Except for one hostage released in 1980 for health reasons, the other fifty-two remained hostages until January 1981, a total of 444 days, throughout which Khomeini continued to eliminate the left and solidify his grip on the country with his radical posse. At exactly the same time in Saudi Arabia, a similar crisis was unfolding. The Mahdi had seemingly returned from occultation and appeared in Mecca. And he, too, had taken hostages.
3
BLEEDING HEART
SAUDI ARABIA
1979
Yet I wondered fancifully if he had seen more clearly than they did,
had sensed the threat, which my presence implied—
the approaching disintegration of his society
and the destruction of his beliefs.
Here especially it seemed that the evil that comes
with sudden change would far outweigh the good.
—Wilfried Thesiger, Arabian Sands
Sami Angawi overslept on November 20, 1979, and missed the dawn prayers. He prayed five times a day, every day, as dictated by Islam. He found peace in every word, every movement, as he bowed and knelt in rhythmic, meditative motion, trying to reach a mystical state of communion with the Almighty. He loved dawn prayers in the silence of a world still asleep; he could almost feel the vibrations of the thousands, even millions of those who were praying across the country at the exact same time, uttering the same words, facing in the same direction: the Ka’aba in the Holy Mosque in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam. He would have to make up for this missed prayer when he reached Mecca. He and his Quran teacher had chosen to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Mosque on what they thought was an auspicious day: the beginning of a new century in the Islamic calendar, the first of the month of Muharram of the year 1400. While many conservative Muslims memorize the Quran’s 6,236 verses, Sami had not learned them by heart as a child. Then, as a teenager, he had gone to school in the UK and then off to university in Texas. Back in Saudi Arabia, he was learning to reconnect with his faith. The architecture graduate was only thirty years old, but he was an old soul. He was a towering figure, physically, and already considered a thought leader in Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy sitting on the world’s second-largest oil reserve, at a time when the only trend—the only thought that seemed to dominate and drive the country—was money.
The discovery of oil in 1938 launched the transformation of a mostly desert kingdom into a modern country. The country was barely six years old and its founder, King Abdelaziz ibn Saud, was already courted by world powers. In 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt struck a deal with the Saudi monarch, sitting aboard the USS Quincy on the Great Bitter Lake. The two men agreed that Saudi Arabia would provide America with unimpeded access to exploit the oil, in exchange for military protection and support. The price of a barrel was low for years, the revenues limited, but it was more than enough to build a country from scratch, and by the late 1960s a wave of construction was under way across the kingdom. There was no local expertise, but plenty of money to hire help. Then, in the fall of 1973, the price of oil quadrupled almost overnight from $3 to $12—roughly the equivalent of $50 in 2019. That October, Egypt and Syria had gone to war against Israel, hoping to regain land lost in the Six-Day War of 1967. Oil-producing Arab countries declared an embargo on exports to the United States and other countries that supported Israel in the conflict. Saudi Arabia was reluctant to undermine its alliance with the US but ultimately led the charge and reaped the benefits: Arab hearts filled with pride, briefly grateful to the kingdom for standing up to the West and Israel—a small consolation for past humiliations. Most important, the young country was now awash with cash as billions of dollars flooded the kingdom. Between 1970 and 1974, Saudi Arabia’s oil revenues ballooned from $1.2 billion to $22.5 billion.
Construction became frenetic, and cranes appeared everywhere. Neighborhoods were being transformed or built almost overnight. Every major American hotel chain was setting up in town: Intercontinental, Sheraton, Holiday Inn, Hyatt, Hilton, Marriott. Thirty thousand Americans had moved to the kingdom to offer their expertise, from oil engineers to hotel managers to accountants, building everything from roads and airports to hospitals and schools. The Americans used the model they knew best. Small urban settlements in the middle of the desert, like Riyadh, began to grow into cities that looked like Arabia’s answer to Houston: urban grids of wide streets with massive shopping centers and no public transportation. Big American cars, Cadillacs and Chryslers, cruised the streets, adding to the American illusion, broken only by the minarets of mosques. Everyone was dazzled by the unimaginable wealth that had descended on them. Two hundred foreign companies opened offices in the kingdom in the span of just a few years. World-renowned architects were flown in. The American architect Minoru Yamasaki, who was designing the World Trade Center in New York City, was also working on the Dhahran ai
rport in the east of Saudi Arabia, and the Riyadh headquarters of the newly established Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority. Even the country’s currency was brand-new.
The royal family handed out generous subsidies to most of its subjects. On the fringes in the desert, in distant areas of what was barely a country, many were left out of the frenzy, still in poverty, in thatch-roofed huts with no running water. Princes sank fortunes into every imaginable luxury: yachts, jewelry, opulent new palaces, and high-stakes gambling in Monte Carlo. The state budget was the royal family’s private coffers, just as the country was, in essence, their private property. People had more money than they knew what to spend it on, and many were losing all sense of bearing or balance. Sami remained unperturbed. He was different, indifferent—not that he was completely uninterested in the material things of this world, but he hailed from a well-established Meccan family, descendants of the prophet. His father had served as both the chief of police in Jeddah and a mutawwif, the guide who leads pilgrims through the rigidly codified rituals of the hajj in Mecca, the yearly pilgrimage and one of the five pillars of Islam. He was a servant of the state, but mostly he was a servant to the pilgrims, whether peasants or ministers. It was a privileged position, held by only a few thousand families, handed down through generations, a position that preceded the creation of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia by centuries. With the honored status also came wealth and, above all, a deep connection to Mecca, the birthplace of the prophet and of Islam.
