Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (17 page)

It is one of the great ironies of the Iranian Revolution that the precise course it took depended crucially on the political acumen and personal instincts of this one
man. Khomeini’s supporters might argue that God had provided well; he had chosen the ayatollah as the medium through which he was determined to act. If we do not accept this belief, however, it is hard to escape a sense of profound contingency. Without the presence of Khomeini, the revolution in Iran would have assumed a fundamentally different form. “In fact, Khomeini is to the Islamic Revolution what Lenin was to the Bolshevik, Mao to the Chinese, and Castro to the Cuban revolutions,” writes historian Ervand Abrahamian, who goes on to note that the ayatollah had such a powerful impact on the course of events precisely because of his aura of purity and principle. Most Iranian politicians were calculating intriguers looking for an angle. Khomeini, by contrast, had spent long years in the loneliness of exile for the sake of his principles. As Abrahamian notes, he lived a life of ostentatious simplicity, more akin to a medieval mystic than a 1970s activist. He rejected compromise and refused to maneuver for the advantage of his family; indeed, he famously stated that he would have his own children executed if they acted against the laws of God. Most notably of all, perhaps, he was ostentatiously incorruptible. Even once he had assumed the position of supreme leader, he insisted on living a life of minimal material comfort.
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Westerners did not know what to make of Khomeini. The leaders of contemporary revolutions were supposed to be flamboyant, strident, perhaps even promiscuous or a bit messy—like Mao or Che or the student activists in Paris or Frankfurt in the 1960s. Perhaps the closest comparison was to be found in earlier paragons of revolutionary idealism like Robespierre or Lenin, ascetic fanatics whose lives were entirely devoted to the cause. But the zeal of these men derived from a quasi-scientific view of history that prescribed the inevitability of social transformation. They were aggressively secular materialists—exactly the sort of personality that had shaped the idea of modern revolution, and was, correspondingly, regarded as almost inseparable from it.

Nothing remotely like that applied, of course, to this white-bearded religious scholar, shrouded in the black robes and turban of his calling, who so deftly dodged the journalists’ questions about the nature of the future Iranian state. That same dark gaze that so disconcerted Khomeini’s non-Iranian interviewers resonated with his compatriots, who knew him to be a lifelong student of
erfan
, the Shiite mystical tradition that emphasized the immediacy of the divine and the dismissal of this-worldly passions. The imam, as some were beginning to call him, spoke an idiom of sacrifice and justice that galvanized the people back at home. They parsed the voice issuing from black-market cassettes or illicit shortwave broadcasts for clues about what was to come.

Had an objective biography of the ayatollah been available at the time, it would have revealed a great deal. It was his peculiar personal circumstances and his inclinations that made Khomeini into a revolutionary; he certainly did not come into the world as one. He was born in 1902 in Khomein, a small provincial town that seemed to owe more to the sixteenth century than the twentieth. Modern technology had little impact on life there; the same big landowning families who had dominated the social and political life of the community for generations remained firmly in control. The central government was remote; the state was weak. The only other figures capable of exercising competing influence were the members of the religious establishment.

Khomeini’s father, Mostafa, came from a long line of illustrious clergymen, and he enjoyed a reputation as a lover of justice. In March 1903, his father announced that he was going to the local governor’s office to raise a formal complaint about the behavior of several local khans (nobles) who were known for their harassment and exploitation of the locals. But the men killed Mostafa before he could get there. His son Ruhollah was four months and twenty-two days old.
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We can only speculate, of course, about the extent to which his father’s murder shaped the mature Khomeini’s attitudes toward the society in which he lived. But it is certainly striking how many revolutionaries and political extremists have experienced violence directly in their own lives.
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From an early age, it was clear that Ruhollah would stay with the family vocation. He began his studies of the Quran as soon as he learned to read and soon showed that he had a prodigious memory and remarkable analytical skills. His temperament was mild—he showed little inclination to rebellion. He followed the prescribed path toward his calling as a religious scholar with patience and obedience. But he did experience a major shock when his mother died in his early teens, during a cholera epidemic that struck Iran during the First World War. He was now an orphan.

Khomeini may have originally intended to complete his studies at the great Shiite seminary in the Iraqi city of Najaf—the same place to which he would later be exiled for his resistance to the shah. But the end of World War I brought with it the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and Najaf was caught up in the unrest that accompanied the turbulent birth of the new state of Iraq. So Khomeini opted to stay in Iran, enrolling at a seminary in the city of Arak. In 1922 he was invited to attend the newly opened Faiziyeh Seminary in Qom, which would soon become the most prestigious center of religious learning in Iran.
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He proved himself an exemplary student in Qom. Yet it was here that he began to diverge somewhat from the path of convention. While pressing ahead with his
prescribed studies in logic and jurisprudence (including a solid grounding in tax law), he also began to explore the esoteric teachings of
erfan
, the rich but demanding tradition of Shiite mysticism. The word
erfan
literally means “gnosis” (occult knowledge), and it promises, to those capable of mastering its mysteries, a direct experience of communion with God. Most budding religious scholars steered clear of such heterodox territory, but once the young Khomeini discovered a willing instructor, he immersed himself in the subject.

Because the religious authorities regarded
erfan
with a certain degree of suspicion, Khomeini’s teacher, Ayatollah Mohammed Ali Shahabadi, conducted his classes in the subject at home and always confined his students to a small but select group. There they discussed the canonical works of the Shiite mystics. Borrowing from the Neoplatonists, some of these Shiite thinkers ascribed to the essential unity of all creation and dismissed the complexities of visible reality as illusory. But it was possible, through discipline and study, to achieve an immediate and personal experience of this underlying divinity. As was so often the case in other mystical traditions,
erfan
taught that an individual seeker could achieve union with the godhead directly, without the help of priests or other intermediaries. A regime of spiritual discipline enabled the practitioner to bypass the deceptive information of the senses and the attachments of the individual soul. The adept who mastered these techniques could achieve “divine wisdom and the status of sainthood.”
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In one version of this teaching that had a particularly profound effect on Khomeini, someone who has developed the mystical training to appreciate the oneness of God behind all things can be considered a “perfect man”—a status that enables him to become an imam, the leader of a just and virtuous community.

The secrets of
erfan
—not unlike the Sunni mystical tradition of Sufism with which they can be compared—thus have potentially far-reaching political implications. The traditions in which Khomeini was immersed had their intellectual roots in the Greek philosophers, particularly Plato and his descendants, who dreamed of a perfect community in which enlightened scholar-rulers would transcend the messiness of this-worldly politics. The Greeks imagined this polity to be based on philosophy, not religion. But the Muslim theorists of government who emulated them later easily translated this vision into Islamic terms. The Prophet Mohammed was the earthly leader of the first perfect community. The tricky part was how to continue it once he was gone. This was an issue of considerable complexity, and the twentieth century was now challenging Muslims to figure out new answers to it.

In practical terms, a Shiite cleric of Khomeini’s generation faced two fundamental choices about politics. One was to follow the example of the quietist clerics, who essentially believed that the clergy should leave politics to the politicians. The other position was represented by two of Khomeini’s personal heroes. The first was Sheikh Fazlollah Nuri, a Shiite clergyman who had initially backed the Constitutional Revolution and had then rejected it when the revolutionaries had moved toward the creation of secular political institutions that undermined clerical power. Nuri was ultimately hanged by his enemies—an episode viewed by Khomeini as an instructive example of the sorts of betrayals of which secular revolutionaries were capable.

Khomeini only knew about Nuri through stories. But his second hero was someone whose public example he had followed for much of his youth. This was a Shiite notable named Seyyed Hassan Modarres, who persistently and publicly criticized the powers that be—above all Reza Shah, that fierce secularizer and founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. Modarres opposed Reza Shah’s assumption of dictatorial powers and ended up spending much of his life in jail as a result. The shah finally had him killed in prison in 1937. But during Modarres’s life, he offered the young Khomeini a compelling model for how a principled religious scholar could exercise moral force in the political arena. During the 1920s Khomeini often cut classes at the seminary in order to hear Modarres speak at the Iranian parliament. There, among other things, Modarres conducted master classes in parliamentary theatrics, dishing out one fearless tongue-lashing after another as he lectured the most powerful man in the nation on the imperatives of Islamic law and the constraints of the constitution.
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Khomeini still managed to find time to graduate. In 1936 he received his permission to act as a
mujtahid
, an expert on Islamic jurisprudence. He was unusually young to receive such a distinction.

The 1940s were a difficult time for Iran’s religious elite—just as they were for the country as a whole. The new leader in Qom, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Tabatabai Borujerdi, was, like his predecessor, a quietist, and he was reluctant to challenge the new shah directly. The Allied invasion of Iran and the period of political volatility that followed confronted the clerics with difficult choices, and they wanted to tread carefully.

Khomeini, however, was gradually losing his reservations. He watched the arrogant maneuverings of the infidel foreigners, the British and the Russians, with mounting fury. The young shah, as he saw it, was only too happy to serve as their pawn. In 1943 he published a book entitled
Kashf-i Asrar
(The Revealing of Secrets)
that contained a withering assault on the secularizing tendencies of the shah, who wanted to continue the Westernization program inaugurated by his father. The word
kashf
, literally “unveiling,” came straight from the Sufi lexicon: it alluded to the process of stripping away deceptive appearances from the true face of the divine. For the first time Khomeini issued a plea for a virtuous “Islamic government” to be run along divine guidelines: “Government,” he wrote, “can only be legitimate when it accepts the rule of God and the rule of God means the implementation of the Shari’a.” And he specified that a truly Islamic government should ban any writing “against the law and religion . . . and hang those responsible for such nonsense.”
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Yet for all the invective he unleashed at the shah, he still stopped short of calling for the complete abolition of the monarchy.
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And Khomeini saved some of his harshest insults for his fellow clerics, whom he accused of cowardice when it came to standing up for the rights of their estate. His book did not win him a mass following, but some of his younger colleagues, who shared Khomeini’s concern about the direction the country was taking, took note.

During the 1950s the attitudes of the religious scholars remained divided. Some of them, like Modarres, supported Mossadeq’s plans to nationalize the oil industry and effectively curtail the shah’s powers. Others, like Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Mostafavi Kashani, ended up siding with the coup plotters who put an end to Mossadeq’s ascendancy and revitalized the rule of the shah. This divided religious establishment—some of them wooed by the shah with money and favors—was in no position to act as an alternate power center.

In 1961, Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi died. This gave his pupil Khomeini the freedom to act as he saw fit. He now had no reason to hold back from public attacks against the shah. The shah had not helped matters by acclaiming an ayatollah in Iraq as the preeminent spiritual leader of Iran’s Shiites—a transparent attempt to undermine the authority of politically minded clerics back in Iran like Khomeini and his older (and somewhat more cautious) colleague Ayatollah Mohamed Kazem Shariatmadari. Khomeini was ready.

In October 1962 the cabinet passed a law that allowed Iranians to vote for representatives to local councils. The new law gave the vote to women and no longer required Islam as a condition for holding office. Khomeini immediately made an announcement denouncing the bill as the “first step toward the abolition of Islam.” It was all part of a Zionist plot, he said, to destroy the family and spread prostitution.
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It wasn’t just the local councils law, though. The shah had already announced the first stage of a national land reform—the early stages of the White
Revolution—and the clerics were worried that the measure could threaten the financial independence of the religious endowments that owned large amounts of land around the country. The shah’s plans to introduce a Soviet-style “Literacy Corps” also instilled anxiety in the clerics, who wondered whether this was a covert secularization measure designed to undercut the traditionally dominant role of religious scholars as village teachers.
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