While in exile, Khomeini kept up a stream of messages and speeches critical of the regime, which were smuggled into Iran and distributed, often using cassette tapes. Having developed his theory of opposition into a fullblown theory for Islamic government, he set this out in a book, based on lectures he gave in Najaf in 1970, with the title Hokumat-e Eslami: Velayat-e Faqih (Islamic Government: Regency of the Jurist).51 In this text the Usuli thinking of the previous two centuries—a line of thought that had helped the ulema develop a hierarchy and had allowed them in effect to stand in for the Hidden Emam—was developed to its logical extreme: permission for the ulema to rule directly. This was the meaning of the term velayat-e faqih, which needs explaining. A vali was a regent or deputy, someone representing the person with real authority—it was the title taken by Karim Khan Zand in the eighteenth century, when he forbore to make himself shah. Velayat meant regency, guardianship, or deputyship—or rather, by extension, the authority of the deputy or regent. The term faqih signifies a jurist, an expert in Islamic law—fiqh. The logic of the concept was that the shari‘a, derived from the word of God and the example of the Prophet, was there to regulate human conduct, and was the only legitimate law. In the absence of the Hidden Emam, the mojtaheds were the right people to interpret and apply the shari’a. So obviously, they were the right people to rule, too. Who else? From this point onward, Khomeini demanded the removal of the shah and the establishment of Islamic government. He delivered clear and consistent demands that the whole country could understand (at least they thought they could—what exactly Islamic government might mean in practice remained less clear), and that increasingly made him the focal point for opposition to the shah.
The principle of velayat-e faqih was not accepted by the ulema as a whole—indeed not accepted by very many. But since the First World War the ulema had been jostled and edged out of many of their traditional roles of authority in society by the secularizing Pahlavi monarchy. Under Mohammad Reza Shah the regime even attempted, in the late 1960s and 1970s (as part of the White Revolution program), to replace the traditional ulema with a new religious structure of mosques and mullahs answerable to the state. There was little popular enthusiasm for the state religion (din-e dawlat), but it succeeded in alienating the ulema as a whole even further from the shah. Ayatollahs Montazeri and Taleqani were arrested and sentenced to internal exile after disturbances at Tehran University and in Qom in 1970–1972.52 But where Tudeh, the National Front, and the violent radicals were battered and disrupted by years of conflict with SAVAK, the informal nationwide network of mullahs and religious leaders—reaching into every social class, every bazaar guild, and every village—was still there in the late 1970s, as it had been in 1906. Its continuing presence reflected the enduring power of this alternative source of authority in Shi‘a Iranian society. In the theory of velayat-e faqih and Khomeini, the ulema had the defining political principle and the leader that they had lacked in 1906.
By the end of 1977 the shah had alienated the ulema, alienated the bazaaris, and had created a large, poor, deracinated working class in Tehran. He had also alienated many of the educated middle classes—his natural supporters—through his repression and abuses of human rights. Some of these had in addition been radicalized by their experience of leftist politics in Europe in the late 1960s and 1970s. But there was another important influence on the thinking of this generation—Ali Shariati.
Shariati was born in 1933, near Sabzavar in Khorasan. He grew up to be a lively, highly intelligent, extroverted youth with a strong sense of humor, someone who enjoyed ridiculing his teachers. He was influenced by his father, who had been an advocate of progressive Islam in his own right, but also by writers like Hedayat and Western thinkers like Schopenhauer and Kafka. Later Shariati went to Mashhad University, and then to Paris, where he studied under Marxist professors, read Guevara and Sartre, communicated with the Martinique-born theorist and revolutionary activist Frantz Fanon, and took a doctorate in sociology (in 1964). His political activism also attracted the attention of SAVAK. Returning to Iran in 1965, he taught students in Mashhad and later in Tehran, attracting large numbers to his lectures, and wrote a series of important books and speeches. The general message was that Shi‘ism provided its own ideology of social justice and resistance to oppression. This had been masked by a false Shi‘ism of superstition and deference to monarchy (Black Shi‘ism, Safavid Shi‘ism), but the essential truths of the religion were timeless, centering on the martyrdom of Hosein and his companions. Shariati was not a Marxist, but he could be said to have recast Shi‘a Islam in a revolutionary mold, comparable to the Marxist model: “Everywhere is Karbala and every day is Ashura.”53 For the shah’s regime, he was too hot to handle. He was imprisoned in 1972, released in 1975, kept under house arrest, and allowed to go to England in 1977. He died there that June, apparently of a heart attack, though many Iranians believe he was murdered by SAVAK. Khomeini would never endorse Shariati’s thinking directly, but was careful never to condemn it either. Shariati’s radical Islamism, both fully Iranian and fully modern, was a strong influence on the generation of students that grew to adulthood in the 1970s.54
Through the inflation and the economic slump and deflation that followed, many Iranians—including well-off ones—had come to doubt their assumptions about steady growth and economic security. There had also been a number of incidents in which the shah had made himself look foolish or out of touch—the latest came on his visit to Washington at the end of 1977, when TV cameras caught him clinking champagne glasses with President Carter and weeping from tear gas on the White House lawn when the wind blew the wrong way from a nearby demonstration against his visit. An autocrat can get away with many things, but looking foolish undercuts him in the most damaging way.
REVOLUTION
In January 1978 an article appeared in the paper Ettela‘at, attacking the clergy and Khomeini as “black reactionaries.” The article had been written by someone trusted by the regime and approved by the court, but had been refused by the more independently edited paper Kayhan. It twisted facts and invented fictions, suggesting that Khomeini was a foreigner (from his grandfather’s birth in India and name, Hindi), a former British spy, and a poet (the last was true, and was intended to detract from his clerical seriousness because most ulema, with some backing from the Qor’an, disapproved of poetry).55 The article immediately prompted a protest demonstration in Qom, in which thousands of religious students heaped abuse on the “Yazid government” and demanded an apology, a constitution, and the return of Khomeini. There were clashes with the police and a number of students were shot dead. The following day Khomeini, by now in Paris, praised the courage of the students and called for more demonstrations. Ayatollah Shari‘atmadari, one of the most senior marjas at the time, condemned the shootings.
After a traditional mourning period of forty days, the bazaars and universities closed, and there were peaceful demonstrations in twelve cities, including in Tabriz, where again the police fired on the crowd, causing more deaths. The forty-day rhythm continued, like a great revolutionary lung, with the almost unanimous support of the ulema (though many of the clerics called for mourners to attend the mosques rather than to demonstrate). The demonstrations grew larger and more violent, with slogans like “death to the shah.” After the end of May there was a lull (among other reasons, Ayatollah Shari‘atmadari had urged people against further street demonstrations to avoid more deaths), but there was a violent incident in Mashhad in July where police fired on a crowd. On August 19 the Rex Cinema burned down in Abadan, an incident that is still controversial. About 370 people died in the fire. Government and opposition both accused each other, but events, trials, and investigations in later years indicate that a radical Islamic group with connections to ulema figures was responsible.56 At the time, the mood was such that most blamed SAVAK.
By that time the demonstrations, which up to then had largely been an affair for middle-class students and members of the traditiona
l bazaari middle class, were being augmented by strikes and other actions by factory workers—prompted by the government’s deflationary policies.57 In August there were many large demonstrations in the month of Ramadan, and more in early September. The shah’s government banned the demonstrations and imposed martial law, but on September 8 there were huge protests in Tehran and other cities. Barricades were set up in the working-class areas of south Tehran. The government sent in tanks and helicopter gunships; the people on the barricades responded with Molotov cocktails. In Jaleh Square an unarmed crowd refused to disperse and were gunned down where they stood.
September 8 was thereafter called Black Friday, and the deaths increased the bitterness of the people toward the shah to such a pitch that compromise became impossible. All that was left was the implacable demand that the shah should go—the demand upon which Khomeini had insisted since 1970. By the autumn most other opposition groups had allied themselves to Khomeini and his program. Karim Sanjabi and Mehdi Bazargan flew to Paris, met with Khomeini, and declared their support for him in the name of the National Front and the Freedom Movement. Demonstrations and riots continued. The shah, by now increasingly ill with cancer, though this remained unknown to the public, veered between more repression and concessions, including the release of political prisoners and the dissolution of the Rastakhiz party. He appeared on television to say that he understood the message of the people, would hold free elections, and would atone for past mistakes.58
But it was all too late. As autumn went into winter, more and more workers spent more and more time on strike. The violence intensified again at the beginning of Moharram in December. In Qazvin, 135 demonstrators died when tanks drove over them. On the day of Ashura itself, December 11, more than one million people demonstrated in the streets of Tehran. After Ashura, street gangs roamed the capital at will. There were more and more signs that the army, which had experienced mass desertions, was no longer reliable. By this time, President Carter’s support for the shah was clearly on the wane, and many Americans were leaving Iran after attacks on U.S.-owned offices and even the U.S. Embassy. The shah had lost control. On January 16, 1979, he left the country. On February 1, Khomeini flew back to Tehran.
8
IRAN SINCE THE REVOLUTION
Islamic Revival, War, and Confrontation
When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, death. For all order is for the sake of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed to the common good.
—Dietrich of Nieheim, Bishop of Verden, 1411 (quoted by Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon)
In the Air France passenger jet that Ayatollah Khomeini took from Paris to Tehran—before it was even clear that the aircraft would be allowed to land—a Western journalist asked him what his feelings were about returning to Iran. He replied Hichi—“nothing.”1 This grumpy response to unimaginative journalism did not demonstrate a deep indifference to Iran or the well-being of the Iranian people, as has sometimes been claimed. Khomeini’s reply has a gnomic quality that challenges interpretation.
Whether one approves of Khomeini or not, it is indisputable that when he arrived in Tehran on February 1, 1979, he was the focal point of the hopes of a whole nation. In some sense they reflected him and he them—at that moment, at least. It may be that the euphoric crowds welcoming him numbered as many as three million. This was in accordance with Khomeini’s sense of himself—his idea of spiritual development was that of Ibn Arabi’s Perfect Man.2 Through contemplation, religious observance, and discipline, his aim was to approach the point at which his inner world reflected the world beyond himself—and, in turn, reflected and became a channel for the mind of God. As he left the aircraft, his car made its difficult way through the crowds from the airport to the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery for Khomeini to honor the martyrs killed in the demonstrations of the last few months. As he passed, the people chanted not just “Allahu Akbar” (God is Great) but also “Khomeini, O Emam.” In Shi‘a mysticism (erfan), the Emam and the Perfect Man were one and the same. No human being since the disappearance of the Twelfth Emam had been acclaimed with the title Emam (many senior ulema never accepted the title for Khomeini).3 The followers and the crowds were not saying directly that Khomeini was the Hidden Emam returned to earth, but it was very close to it. Centuries before, the Arab poet Farazdaq saw the fourth Emam at Mecca, and afterward wrote:
He lowers his gaze out of modesty. Others lower their gaze for awe of him. He is not spoken to except when he smiles.4
This is why Khomeini answered the pushy journalist on the aircraft as he did. The mojtahed on the path to becoming the Perfect Man had no place for feelings or the manifestation of feelings. He was at one with the crowds, and they with him, and both with God. Or so they believed.
The revolution of 1979 was not solely—and perhaps not even primarily—a religious revolution. Economic slump and middle-class disillusionment with the corruption and oppression of a regime many had previously supported were important factors, as was a nationalistic dislike of the unequal relationship with the United States. But the revolution drew great strength from its Shi‘a form, which lent cohesion and a sense of common purpose to disparate elements—even those that were not overtly religious—and from the clarity and charisma of Khomeini, which albeit temporarily gave an otherwise disunited collection of groups and motivations a center and a unity. Unlike other revolutions in history—notably the Bolshevik revolution of 1917—the Iranian revolution was genuinely a people’s revolution. The actions of a large mass of people were crucial to the outcome, and the immediate outcome, if not the longer-term result, was a genuine expression of the people’s will.
In his last weeks the shah had appointed the National Front leader Shapur Bakhtiar as prime minister, and Bakhtiar had announced a program of measures in an attempt to restore constitutional government and some stability, including free elections (Bakhtiar had been imprisoned by the shah for several years at different times since 1953). But the National Front had disowned Bakhtiar, and Khomeini had pronounced his government illegal. Maintaining this line, upon his arrival Khomeini on February 5 appointed his own prime minister from the Freedom Movement, Mehdi Bazargan. Revolutionary Committees (Komitehs) were set up and began cooperating with deserters from the military, Tudeh, the Fedai, and the MKO to take arms and attack buildings associated with the regime, including police stations and the SAVAK’s notorious Evin prison. After a last stand by some members of the Imperial guard, on February 11 the military gave in and announced that they would remain neutral.5 Bakhtiar resigned and went into hiding; he left the country two months later. From that point on, the revolutionaries were in control. The Komitehs rounded up senior figures of the Pahlavi regime, and a revolutionary tribunal operating out of a school classroom had them executed, including, on February 15, the former head of SAVAK, General Nassiri. Khomeini himself headed a Revolutionary Council that maintained contact with the Komitehs through the connections between mullahs. In that way he began inexorably to remove all rivals to his vision for the future of the country.
Komitehs were set up all over Iran, but not all of them were so susceptible to Khomeini’s central control. In the northwest in particular, with its own regional and leftist tradition, revolutionary enthusiasm turned toward a drive for greater regional autonomy. Kurdistan plunged into outright rebellion and separatism. In the 1970s the shah had supported the Kurds in Iraq in armed resistance against the Iraqi government, but his support was intended only as leverage to pressure the Iraqis into concessions elsewhere. He dropped the Kurds as soon as it was convenient for him, and the Kurds in Iraq suffered terribly as their revolt was crushed. The episode again stimulated Kurdish nationalism, which had motivated previous separatist movements within Iran in the 1920s—under the charismatic leader Simko/Simitqu—and again in the 1940s. Of the many ethnic and relig
ious minorities of Iran, the Kurds are the group with the most developed sense of a separate national identity, with strong links to the Kurds of Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. The Kurdish insurrection in Iran that followed the revolution was eventually crushed, but not without more bitter suffering—prefiguring the even worse treatment that was visited on the Kurds of Iraq later in the 1980s.
Even before he returned to Iran, Khomeini had been making speeches critical of the shah’s leftist opponents. At the end of March 1979 he set the seal on the removal of the shah and the establishment of a state based on Islamic principles with a referendum that returned ninety-seven percent support for the establishment of an Islamic republic. In May Khomeini established the Revolutionary Guard Corps (Sepah-e Pasdaran) as a reliable military force to balance the army and to supplement the gangs of street fighters that became known as Hezbollah—the party of God. The extensive property of the shah’s Pahlavi Foundation was transferred to a new Bonyad-e Mostazefin (Foundation for the Oppressed), which became a vehicle both for the projection of the regime’s social policies and for political patronage.
The executions of old regime members shocked moderates and liberals (including Bazargan), as well as many of those around the world who had initially welcomed the fall of the shah. The killings stopped for a time in mid-March, but continued again in April, when Hoveyda was shot. Khomeini had initially called for moderation, but acquiesced to the pressure from young radicals urging revenge for the deaths of the previous year. The young Islamic radicals were his weapon against the rival groups that had participated in the revolution.6 In April and May Khomeini was given a sharp reminder of the seriousness of the struggle and the consequences of failure, when several of his close supporters, including notably Morteza Motahhari, were assassinated.
A History of Iran Page 30
