by Kim Ghattas
On March 6, 1979, Khomeini declared that women working in government offices must wear the veil; “naked women” could not work in Islamic ministries. Two days later, for International Women’s Day, tens of thousands of women spontaneously came out and marched on the streets of Tehran chanting “In the dawn of freedom, there is an absence of freedom.” Some women were bareheaded, others veiled, including some in full chador, the all-enveloping black cloak that was worn only by the most pious and conservative. There were men, too, including some who formed a protective cordon around the women as they came under attack. Feminists from around the world flocked to the protests, including the American activist Kate Millett, the author of Sexual Politics. Soon as many as a hundred thousand women were on the streets. For six days, they protested the assault on their personal freedom. Rarely—if ever—had women organized so quickly and spontaneously after a revolution. But Iranian women in Iran had gained many rights under the shah, including the right to vote, to run for office (in 1963), and to wear whatever they wanted. In an effort at modernization, the shah’s father (the first Pahlavi to rule) had briefly tried to ban the veil altogether in 1935, but that forced conservative families to keep their daughters at home for modesty. The move was quickly reversed. What Iranian women wanted was the choice: to veil or not to veil.
The flamboyant revolutionary Ghotbzadeh had been put in charge of the Islamic Revolution National and Radio authority, and he oversaw state media. The Westernized womanizer, who had fought so long for this revolution, could not abide the idea that there was any opposition to its victory. And anyway, he thought, the hijab (veil) would never become mandatory. The key was to portray unity and undermine the protests: in the media they were depicted as the work of monarchists. Some women were so angry about this misrepresentation that they attacked Ghotbzadeh in his car one evening as he was on his way to work. Meanwhile, the wider movement was racked with doubt as to whether they were indeed being used as a vehicle by supporters of the shah to undermine the revolution. They simply wanted this moment to live up to its promise of freedom and justice. Instead, they were finding themselves handed a black shroud. With their intentions misunderstood and put into question, and faced with increasing violence on the streets, the protests petered out. The women retreated home.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault was still writing in praise of the revolution, while others, like Simone de Beauvoir, recoiled—aghast—and sent messages of support to Iranian women. Though Foucault recognized Islam as a “powder keg” that could transform the region and the global equilibrium, he still found in the revolution the spirituality that he missed in the West. For him, the veil was just a detail, an inconvenience. The allure of anti-imperialism can be blinding to those who don’t have to make any of the tough choices required of life under a repressive rule. Foucault would never recant his support for Khomeini, nor acknowledge the damage done to personal and intellectual freedom.
In the summer of 1980, all universities in the country were shut down. Iran’s Cultural Revolution was now in full swing, complete with an eponymous institute that had just been charged with overhauling the curriculum in line with Islam and the new state ideology. For three years, there were no classes, while the student and professor corps were also purged. University campuses had been hotbeds of activism against the shah, but the ideologies then came in all colors and every possible combination: secular leftists, modernist Islamists, nationalists, leftist Islamists. Now there was only one stance, one narrative allowed. Seven hundred qualified scholars lost their jobs, while the country cut off the funds of a hundred thousand students who were on state scholarships overseas. Sciences were left alone, but the humanities were overhauled, producing textbooks titled Islamic Psychology and Islamic Sociology. Foreign influence had to be ripped out of books and minds.
The purge was everywhere, a reign of terror that would last ten years. The first victims were the royalists, former officials, military and intelligence officers; then came the communists, the leftists … Everything became a crime, yielding an entrenched paranoia and darkness that rolled over the country. The brutality of the former SAVAK paled in comparison to what was meted out in the new Islamic Republic dreamed up by Khomeini. Evin Prison in Tehran, built by the shah to house three hundred prisoners, was home to fifteen thousand by 1983. “More than 7,900 Iranian political prisoners would be executed between 1981 and 1985, at least seventy-nine times the number killed between 1971 and 1979” under the shah. In 1988, in a paroxysm of state depravity, at least three thousand political prisoners would be executed over the course of five months. Some reports put the number much higher, up to thirty thousand. The mass executions required forklifts to transport the prisoners and cranes to hang them at half-hour intervals.
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In a poor village near the Caspian Sea, they were not marching against the veil. There was no foreign influence to purge. There wasn’t even a high school. The women already covered their heads. But theirs were colored scarves, tied with a knot under their chin, Grace Kelly fashion, with strands of hair showing. They wore long tunics over their baggy trousers. They toiled in poverty and believed the revolution would bring better, more prosperous days. In the Alinejad family, the men joined the Basij, the new volunteer paramilitary force enforcing security and morality in the village: they destroyed music records and bottles of alcohol. Masih, the youngest of the family, would grow up with a veil tightly wrapped around her head, not a strand of hair showing. She even slept in it. Again and again in school, she was told she would go to hell if she took it off. One day, she would choose hell—but for now, in her village, she rebelled in smaller ways, asking why her brother could swim in the river and she couldn’t, why he could ride a bike and she couldn’t. It was all for a higher purpose, one that her parents believed in: the revolution.
But the revolution was devouring its own children. Taleghani had already died under mysterious circumstances after denouncing the inclusion of the wilayat concept in the constitution. Shariatmadari would die under house arrest in 1986. Ghotbzadeh was accused of plotting the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and executed by firing squad in September 1982. President for a year and a half, Banisadr was never able to rule or match the ruthlessness of the clerics. He fell out of favor fast with the man he had once considered a father figure. Khomeini pushed for his impeachment, and Banisadr went underground to escape jail in June 1981, before slipping out of the country. Bazergan, the founder of the LMI who had resigned during the hostage crisis, and Yazdi, the PhD graduate who had become close to Khomeini in Najaf, became harsh critics, but both survived, staying in Iran. Baraheni, the poet who had written searing verses against the shah, had flown back to Iran the minute Khomeini returned. In the first few months of the revolution, he was on the streets fighting against those who were resisting the birth of a new Iran—not with a pen, but with a gun. He, too, would end up in jail, tortured, and then forced into exile. Mohsen, the believer who had helped found the Revolutionary Guards, would also fall afoul of the clerics and end up in jail, tortured brutally. He would one day return to the United States and reflect, aghast, at what he had helped bring about.
But it was Musa Sadr who had first paid the price for what had been unleashed by men with hopes of freedom. His disappearance was not a mystery for those closest to Khomeini, perhaps even for Khomeini himself (though there is no record of that). After his stop in Tripoli in that fateful month of August 1978, Imam Sadr had been due to travel onward to West Germany for the secret meeting with an envoy of the shah. There were reportedly plans to bring Sadr back to Tehran to lead a moderate religious bloc against Khomeini, perhaps even serve as prime minister in a government under the shah and help save the monarchy. The shah was deeply distressed when news emerged that the imam had disappeared. We don’t know if news of the planned secret meeting had reached Khomeini’s entourage. Either way, it was clear that Sadr was a threat to the ayatollah’s plans. Sadr was the only cleric with the stature and charism
a to rival the exiled ayatollah. He was beloved and well known in Qom, with close ties to other key clerics who feared Khomeini, including Taleghani and Shariatmadari. Most of all, Sadr had political experience: he had lived and functioned in the real world, outside the rarefied environment of religious seminaries. The hardline ayatollah Beheshti, Khomeini’s close ally, who was supposed to meet Sadr in Tripoli, had instead called Gaddafi and asked him to detain Sadr—victory against the shah felt within grasp and there was no way that Khomeini’s acolytes were going to allow anybody to disrupt their path to Tehran. Sadr and his two companions were reportedly detained for a few months in Libya, and by the time Khomeini and Beheshti were busy writing Iran’s new Islamic constitution, in the summer of 1979, they did not want him to ever reappear. Years would go by before this information surfaced, from Palestinian sources and US intelligence files; reports implicated Beheshti, but also Arafat, who was said to have had a hand in the disappearance, keen to help eliminate the man who had dared put Lebanon’s Shias ahead of the Palestinians.
Who knows how the Iranian Revolution would have unfolded if Imam Sadr had returned to Iran and joined forces with other moderate clerics? Would the shah have stayed? If Sadr had returned to Iran after the departure of the shah, would he have survived Khomeini’s ruthless campaign? There was nothing preordained about Khomeini’s becoming Supreme Leader in the wilayat al-faqih he had created. That journey required vigilant cunning, constant maneuvering, and the weakness or naive loyalty of others. The Islamic Republic of Iran was born in a bath of blood, cruelty, and darkness.
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Within their borders, Saudi Arabia and Iran seemed to echo each other with the kind of cultural and social changes they were introducing into their societies—though the comparison may seem unfair or unbalanced. Iran had centuries of civilization and culture, including pre-Islamic, that would continue to resist the Khomeinization of the country. Iran was ancient Persia; its kings Cyrus and Darius had ruled over the world’s first superpower, centuries before Jesus and Muhammad. The power and size of the Persian empire naturally changed over time, but much endured. Though ethnically diverse, a common Persian identity dominated. In contemporary Iran, art, literature, and cinema produced their own distinct movements, influencing others as much as it was influenced.
The Saudi kingdom prided itself on being the birthplace of Islam but obscured the rich pre-Islamic past of the Arabian Peninsula dating back to the Nabataeans. Ancient cities lay forgotten, hidden from the world to avoid veneration of buildings, especially ones belonging to the age of ignorance, al-jahiliyya, that preceded Islam. The ancient, intricate art of frescoes and the tradition of men wearing crowns of flowers survived in the distant villages of southern Asir province, away from the religious police. Even in the era of the Al-Sauds, before 1979, a daring, avant-garde mayor of Jeddah had transformed the seaside corniche into the largest open-air sculpture gallery in the world, commissioning works from the greats of the era like Joan Miró and Henry Moore. (There were no human representations.) But poetry, literature, and art did not flourish beyond limited circles in a country shaped by the desert and religion. There were no wild disco nights in Jeddah, as there had been in Tehran.
In Iran, there was more to stifle and shut down. The onslaught had to be, and was, systematic, rapid, and widespread; it was a highly organized state-led effort. The country changed in front of people’s eyes, as life retreated indoors. And so there were two revolutions in 1979, one that made headlines and one that unfurled quietly, a black wave with far-reaching consequences for millions. These revolutions were amplified by the bitter rivalry that emerged that same year between two countries that had once been allies, a rivalry born out of Khomeini’s desire to upstage the Saudis as leaders of the Muslim world.
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The shah had once courteously referred to King Faisal as Amir al-Mu’meneen, the Commander of the Faithful. The portrait of another Saudi king hung in a hotel in Isfahan. When the shah had visited Saudi Arabia on several occasions, he had been greeted by excited crowds along the roads. In Jeddah, little girls and boys draped in the Saudi and Iranian flags had recited poetry about the love between the two Muslim nations. The two countries were both part of the Safari Club, an alliance of intelligence services started in 1976 along with Morocco, Egypt, and France, which fomented anti-Soviet operations and coups from Angola to Afghanistan. The two dynasties—the Pahlavis and the Al-Sauds—had come to power around the same time, and both had to contend with the disruptive effect of the rapid modernization driven by the riches of oil. Until 1979, the secular ambitions of the shah as a regional power and the aspiration of Saudi kings to lead the Muslim world did not clash on the same terrain. And though Sunni Wahhabism was inherently anathema to Shia Islam, the antagonism was contained within the kingdom’s border; it did not get in the way of relations between the two states.
When Khomeini returned to Iran, officialdom in Saudi Arabia stayed mum for a few days. They were still worried about Iran turning communist and appalled by how quickly Washington seemed to have abandoned its stalwart ally in Tehran. On February 14, a few days after Khomeini declared victory, Crown Prince Fahd sent Prime Minister Bazergan a congratulatory message, wishing him success and looking forward to cooperation between “our brotherly nations.” On February 19, the day of Arafat’s visit to Tehran, a big headline on the front page of the Kuwait newspaper Al Ra’i al Am declared SAUDI ARABIA PRAISES THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION. The Saudis, reported the paper, were also “warning against anyone undermining the revolution’s support for the Arab struggle against the Zionist enemy.” The shah’s support for Israel had been a sore point in the Saudi relationship with Iran, but now Khomeini was promising to uphold the Palestinian cause. A few months later, Prince Abdallah, the future king of Saudi Arabia, would declare he was very relieved that the new Iran was “making Islam, not heavy armament, the organizer of cooperation” between the two countries. “The Holy Koran is the constitution of both countries,” he added. The Saudis saw no reason to worry about Khomeini, a man who was just as puritanical as they were, and promising an Islamic state, albeit a Shia one. The Saudis were likely not aware of Khomeini’s lesser-known book published in 1945, Kashf al-Asrar (The Unveiling of Secrets), in which he had shown nothing but contempt for “the camel grazers of Riyadh and the barbarians of [the Saudi desert of] Najd, the most infamous and the wildest members of the human family.” Khomeini felt so strongly about the Saudis that his diatribe against them and Wahhabism was the first section of the book. Soon he would challenge the House of Saud’s custodianship of Mecca and Medina.
Throughout 1979, the Saudis were slow to grasp the extent of Khomeini’s enmity. The overtures of all the Gulf countries were rebuffed by the Iranians, who lectured them about the rights of Shia minorities in their countries or even the availability of alcohol in places like Bahrain. Khomeini responded by repeatedly labeling the Gulf countries as purveyors of the “American Islam.” The Shia uprising in the Eastern Province had been a shock for the Saudis. Some Shias did begin to look to Iran for support. By the end of 1979, the new Saudi policy was to “demote the Iranian Revolution from the status of an all-Muslim one to a purely Shiite one, then to downgrade it to a purely Iranian Shiite one and finally to a revolution of only one party of the Iranian Shias,” the ones who followed Khomeini. They were hoping to reduce the revolution to the smallest group possible, but Khomeini now spoke in the name of the whole country.
The Saudis became determined to position themselves as the sole defenders of the Muslim faith, at all cost, and on every front, from education to politics, from culture to the battlefields. In the 1960s and 1970s, King Faisal had deployed his oil dollars to promote religion as a counter to communism and pan-Arab nationalism. Several organizations had been founded, like the World Muslim League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. They were all based in Jeddah, and while they were not state organizations, they were mostly Saudi-funded, and
they became channels for Saudi influence. A reflection of the king’s largesse, the money’s impact was limited, neither disruptive nor transformative. Now the same tools were going to be deployed in a much more systematic and focused campaign. In 1962, Saudi funding for WAMY was $250,000 a year. By 1980, the spigot had opened: funding jumped to $13 million. By 1999, WAMY would have spent $22 billion on “services to Islam and Muslims” worldwide, including education and culture. With that money came the expectation of how Islam should be understood or taught, a homogenizing current reverberating from the kingdom to the rest of the Muslim world. The Saudi official discourse became more religious than ever. The more the Saudis lurched to the right, reviving Wahhabism at home and expanding it abroad, the more they provoked the Iranians. Saudi Arabia and Iran would develop their revised identities, their state narratives, in opposition to each other. There would be many front lines.
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On Christmas Eve 1979, columns of Soviet tanks crossed the border from the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, across the Amu Darya River, and rolled into Afghanistan. At five o’clock on the morning of December 25, the Soviets began a massive airlift of combat troops into Kabul. More than two hundred flights were reported to have landed and departed by two o’clock that afternoon, multiplying the number of Soviet troops in the country from fifteen hundred to six thousand almost overnight.