Titans of History

KHOMEINI

1902–89

I shall kick their teeth in. I am appointing the government. I am appointing the government by the support of this nation!

The Grand Ayatollah Khomeini led the 1979 revolution that overthrew the last shah of Iran and became the supreme leader of a theocracy, the Islamic Republic of Iran, that has become an often disruptive power across the Near East. This aged, white-bearded Shiite cleric proved to be a dynamic, shrewd and unforgiving revolutionary leader who created a totally new system with his own power protected in a constitution that has proved surprisingly enduring, thanks to the brutal suppression of any opposition. Today’s resurgent, bold Iran, pursuing a nuclear arsenal and regional hegemony, threatening war against the “Great Satan” America and annihilation of the “Little Satan” Israel, backing the Hamas and Hezbollah militias in Gaza and Lebanon, murdering and terrorizing its own people, is the Iran of Khomeini.

Khomeini, whose family had spent much time in India under the British Raj and who used the nom de plume Hindi for some of his own poetry, studied the Koran and in particular Iran’s Twelver Shiism at madrassas in Arak and the holy city of Qom. The Iranian clergy were challenged and almost broken by the rule of Reza Shah, who made himself king of Iran during the 1920s, in a campaign to modernize and secularize the country like his hero Ataturk had done in Turkey.

Reza Shah was forced to abdicate the throne to his young son Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, who at first proved adept at managing the powerful Shiite ayatollahs. Khomeini, not yet a cleric of the top rank, still accepted the idea of a limited constitutional monarchy but gradually he became repulsed by the secular and modernizing instincts of the new shah.

Khomeini was already in his sixties when the deaths of the leading ayatollahs enabled him to emerge as a clerical leader. In 1963, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi announced his White Revolution, a revolution of land ownership, liberation and education of women, and modernization imposed from above by the monarch himself. It was anathema to Khomeini who, calling a meeting of the top ulema (clergy), denounced the shah, whom he called a “wretched miserable man,” a decadent tyrant like Muawiya’s son, Caliph Yazid of history.

The shah responded by attacking the clergy in Qom itself. As the tension rose, Khomeini was arrested. When the Shah’s prime minister demanded Khomeini apologize, supposedly slapping the cleric’s face, Khomeini refused. He was already in contact with an expanding network of Islamic schools and charities with political and violent programs: days later the shah’s prime minister was assassinated. Vast crowds protested against the shah and backed the ayatollahs.

In the face of this rising tension the shah gave his new prime minister powers to use the military to repress the rebellion. Four hundred protesters were shot by the army and the shah regained the initiative. Khomeini was forced into exile, for a period in Turkey but mainly in Najab in Iraq, the only other country with a huge Shiite population.

The shah had now emerged as a regional military potentate, a trusted ally of America and recipient of billions of dollars as the oil prices rose. But his White Revolution was gradually destroying itself: thousands of Iranians embraced the new possibilities of education, joining the middle class just as millions of poor Iranians, excited by new industry, new education, new housing, new wealth, had left their villages for Teheran only to discover a new listless poverty and disappointment in slums. Here they were left adrift under the corrupt and distant magnificence of the increasingly autocratic shah and his court of technocrats and cronies, a rule enforced by increasingly bombastic splendor and the regime’s brutal SAVAK secret police. President Saddam Hussein of Iraq frequently suggested to the shah that he liquidate Khomeini but the shah always demurred.

Meanwhile in Najab and later in French exile near Paris, Khomeini recorded cassettes of his preaching that were smuggled into Iran where they found a growing audience. He had embraced his new concept of divine sovereignty—veleyet e faqih—the guardianship of the religious expert over the people. Traditionally the Shia believed that the leadership of the Prophet descended through his direct descendants—the Twelve Imams—until the last, the twelfth, who had vanished but would one day return to lead them. Khomeini was now increasingly revered as “the Imam,” more than just an ayatollah, but a mystical national-religious leader in his own right.

In 1978, the shah’s regime was paralyzed by a series of strikes and growing protests just as the inept President Jimmy Carter weakened his regime by criticizing its human rights abuses. The shah proved curiously incapable of reacting, turning to the US and British ambassadors but refusing to empower a military strongman to repress the growing tide of protest. Few knew that the shah, having concentrated all power in his own hands, was secretly suffering from cancer.

Meanwhile Khomeini proved himself an adept manipulator of Iranian and Western opinion, concealing his theocratic views while posing as a democratic populist, surrounding himself with democrats and Westernized liberals who convinced foreigners that he would oversee a new, free Iran. In fact his cassettes were open in their fanatical and violent language against the shah, America and Jews. When the shah left Iran “on vacation,” millions celebrated. On February 1, 1979, Khomeini returned and overthrew the provisional government—“I shall kick their teeth in; I appoint the government,” he declared—and appointed his own new government under a moderate democrat, Mehdi Barzagan: “he shall be obeyed because I appointed God’s government.” In the absence of the Twelfth Imam, Khomeini immediately assumed near absolute powers, overseeing a terror that executed or murdered thousands of the shah’s supporters and soon any of his own supporters who questioned his style of rule. His new constitution for an Islamic government was approved by a vast majority and while he created a semi-democratic façade—with an elected president and parliament—the real power lay with himself, now the supreme leader, chosen by a committee of expert clergymen, who controlled the entire state. Swiftly the state became a far more ruthless, and repressive dictatorship than it had ever been under the hapless shah.

When America gave the dying shah medical treatment, Iranian students seized US diplomats as hostages; American military intervention failed disastrously; and Khomeini reveled in the humiliation of the Great Satan. Meanwhile in 1980, the Iraqi Saddam Hussein invaded Iran but Khomeini, using the war to consolidate his power, counter-attacked and regained the initial losses. When Iraq offered a truce, Khomeini refused, sending thousands of conscripts in human waves at the Iraqi lines. The war lasted six years and was a disaster for Iran and Iraq—500,000 to one million died. In 1989, Khomeini reacted to the publication of the book the Satanic Verses by the British author Salman Rushdie by issuing a fatwa (religious decree) sentencing him to death.

When Khomeini died in 1989, his nominated successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was duly chosen as supreme leader, though he lacked Khomeini’s unique authority. The new leader backed the rise of populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, who pushed their shared agenda of a nuclear-armed Iran as regional great power across the Middle East. Ahmadinejad energetically attacked America and Israel, denying the existence of the Holocaust and threatening to destroy the Jewish state altogether. He also challenged the power of his own patron Khamenei and the clergy with his mystical millenarian radicalism. In 2009, Ahmadinejad almost certainly lost the presidential election to a liberal candidate but the supreme leader ensured his official re-election. Vast crowds protested and called the supreme leader a dictator but Iran brutally repressed the revolt and, defying international protests, continued to pursue the creation of a nuclear arsenal.