by Amir Taheri
Of course, there is no universal model for a Muslim nation. In Iran’s case, the pre-Islamic past remains present, partly through certain aspects of the Twelver faith. Iran also has a history of more than four centuries of contact—often conflict-ridden but at times friendly and fruitful—with Western nations, from which it has borrowed heavily. Its first constitution, promulgated in 1906, was modeled on that of Belgium, with alterations to take the principles of Islam into account. Until the Khomeinist takeover, Iran had a parliament that, though manipulated by the executive, had a secure position in the national conscience as an important institution. Since 1911, there had been regular general elections, first every two years, then every four. Liberals, democrats, social-democrats, nationalists, and nihilists had all made their contribution to the collective consciousness at different times. In the 1950s, the Iranian Communist Party, called the Tudeh (Masses), became one of the largest Communist organizations outside the Soviet bloc. Iran had a privately owned press with a history of over 150 years, as well as Western-style academies, some linked with leading American universities.
Even so, whether Iran was a Muslim country was never the issue. none of the shah’s opponents, not even Khomeini, ever claimed that Iran had abandoned Islam; they couched their criticism of the regime in nationalist, tiersmondiste, and populist terms. In 1978-79, the shah faced three parallel currents of opposition. One consisted of various leftist groups, some of them armed, who set aside their internecine feuds, dreaming of a “proletarian revolution.” Another current emerged out of the Westernized middle class, which had secured material prosperity and now sought political power against an authoritarian regime. The third current belonged to what can only be described as the forces of fascism in Iranian society, which used an “Islamic” terminology.
The leftist camp knew that it could never mobilize enough muscle in the streets to neutralize the shah’s army and police. The middle-class opposition also lacked muscle power and, more importantly, feared “the street.” In the final analysis, the street could be mobilized only in the name of religion. This was how Iran’s communists, socialists, social-democrats, democrats, liberals, etc., all rallied to the banner of Khomeini while claiming—and some of them believing—that they were fighting for greater individual and public liberties. To challenge an authoritarian regime, they brought to power dark forces led by a small group of mullahs and their nonclerical associates. It was a sight to see: at once comical and tragic. Socialists, liberals, and secularist democrats began growing beards, buying carnelian rosaries, and even conjuring a patch of piety on their foreheads. They started peppering their discourse with Koranic quotations, often with amusing effects because there are Arabic letters that Persian speakers cannot pronounce, and made a point of showing up at the mosque at least on Fridays. High-society women who used to fly to Paris to renew their wardrobes adopted the newfangled revolutionary headgear, invented by Imam Musa Sadr in the 1970s and inspired by the headgear of Christian nuns in Lebanon, and launched the fashion of organizing “holy table” parties where guests communicated with the Hidden Imam with the help of a mullah. The entire country became a vast theater stage on which tens of thousands of men and women were amateur actors playing “Islamic” roles. All this, however, could not hide the truth that the Khomeinist revolution and the regime it created were basically secular inventions and that the label “Islamic” was a lie.
For three decades, official Islam in Iran has been whatever the ruling mullahs and their praetorian guards want it to be at any given time. Khomeini had forbidden music in accordance with his understanding of Islam, but in 1980 he decided that Islam should allow music, as long as it supported the revolution and, not so incidentally, also contributed to his own personality cult. Even the ban on singing was lifted in the case of men, provided that they sang revolutionary songs in praise of the Supreme Guide. Khomeini had ruled that anyone who caught the caviar-bearing fish or ate the eggs would go straight to hell; but when he learned that Caspian fisheries generated $200 million for his treasury each year, he lifted the ban. Catching the fish and taking out the eggs were declared licit, though marketing them required special dispensation. This was an excellent device to make some mullahs rich by providing the required “religious cap” (kolah e shar’ee) for the business.
The ayatollah had promised to shut down all banks as “places of usury,” in accordance with Islamic rules. By the end of 1979, however, the state had taken over all Iranian banks, providing endless sources of wealth for mullahs and their associates. Insurance companies had a similar experience: Islam regards insurance as sinful because it is an effort to pre-empt the will of God. If Allah intends to burn your house or wreck your car in an accident, who are you to try to obstruct his will through insurance? Worse still, how could a true believer try to provide for his family after his death? Was he not arrogating to himself the power of Allah as Sole Provider? In 1979, insurance was unknown in most Muslim countries, but it was big business in Iran. The mullahs seized all the insurance companies, and they were not prepared to kill the goose that laid so many golden eggs. Once again, Khomeini accommodated Islam with the interests of his associates by decreeing insurance to be licit only in his own Islamic Republic, thus closing the Iranian market to foreign insurance firms.
The traditional Islamic penal code does not provide for imprisonment. Those charged with any crime are to be tried before the first sunset after their arrest, and resulting penalties are either corporal punishment (including capital punishment), or fines in cash or kind, or in many cases only a cautionary sermon. Recidivist thieves may have one finger or a whole arm chopped off in public, but in most cases they go free after a caning and a fine. Even in murder cases, the guilty could walk free if the family of the victim offers pardon and receives the “blood tithe” (diy’ah), fixed by Islamic jurisprudence. Khomeini’s Islamic Republic takes a different approach. The regime has executed over 100,000 people, mostly on charges that would never stand in a traditional Islamic court. It has hanged gay men from cranes in public, although the Koran only demands that homosexuals be cautioned and “allowed to go.” Scores of women accused of adultery have been stoned to death in city squares, again in direct contravention of explicit Koranic rules. Under the shah, the maximum number of political prisoners in Iran was 3,000; in the early 1980s, the number climbed to over 150,000. Since then, more than five million Iranians have been sent to prison for lengths of time varying from a few hours to decades, often on spurious charges.
Khomeini boasted that he alone had authority to decide what is Islam at any given time, and even to suspend the basic principles of Islam. His successor Ali Khamenehi, being a junior mullah, has not had the effrontery to make such claims; but his propagandists compensate by asserting that whatever he decides has “divine sanction” as the authorized version of Islam. The Khomeinist revolution and the system it produced, although based on a peculiar reading of Islam, could hardly be called Islamic as understood by the overwhelming majority of Muslims and scholars of Islam. Thus the first word in the Khomeinist regime’s name, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is a manifest lie.
5
Democracy as Enemy
The second identifier of the Khomeinist regime, the term “Republic,” also amounts to a lie. An English dictionary defines the word as: a state or a nation in which supreme power rests with the citizens entitled to vote, and is exercised by representatives elected directly or indirectly by them and responsible to them.1
To understand a civilization, it is important to understand its vocabulary; if it was not on their tongues, it was not likely to have been on their minds either. none of the principal Muslim languages—Persian, Arabic, and Turkish—had a term for “republic” until the end of the nineteenth century. The word chosen as an equivalent is jumhur, which the leading Persian dictionary defines first as “grape juice distilled until half its volume evaporates, leaving half that is mildly intoxicating” and thus allowed under the rule of Islam forbidding t
he consumption of alcoholic drinks.2 Thus jumhur and its variations jumhuri and cumhuriyet are used as equivalents of “republic,” a word of Latin origin, only incidentally. Even in the political sense, most Arabic, Persian, and Turkish dictionaries offer a narrower definition than their counterparts for Western languages. Here is the leading Persian dictionary’s definition: “A form of government in which the head (the president) is elected by the people of the country for a limited period.”3 For most Islamic leaders, the concept of a republic is little more than a rhetorical prop, as illustrated by the Libyan dictator Muammar Kaddhafi’s invention of the word jamahiria to describe his particular form of despotism. Etymologically, the word designates an occasion on which a great deal of jumhur (mildly intoxicating grape juice) is imbibed, a kind of Islamic bacchanalia with reduced risks of hangover.
As for Khomeini, there is no evidence that he even knew the words “republic” or jumhur until he seized power in 1979. The term is never mentioned in any of his books written and published between the 1940s and the 1970s or any of his sermons before 1979. The term he always used was hokumat Islami, which means “Islamic rule”—specific enough to appeal to those who dreamed of religious government but vague enough not to alert the monarch’s secret service, SAVAK (State Intelligence and Security Organization). During the revolutionary season of 1978-79, the term “Islamic rule” formed part of the triptych chanted by crowds in the streets of Tehran.4 Khomeini’s most directly political book, Hokumat Islami (“Islamic Government”), describes a system as far from republican as can be: all power belongs to Allah and is exercised by the Infallible Imams, and in their absence by a theologian acting in walayat e faqih, an obscure term open to multiple interpretations. Prior to Khomeini, the most widely accepted meaning was “custodianship by the theologian,” referring to the tutelage of orphans, widows, and mentally handicapped individuals by mullahs. Khomeini’s position, an “innovation” in the eyes of most Shiite theologians, abolished the customary distinction between the concepts of walayat (religious custodianship of the faithful) and ze’amat (leadership of society in secular matters).
Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Tabatabai, possibly the most original of Shiite theoreticians of the twentieth century, had tried to develop common ground between Shiism and the Iranian people’s thirst for democratic rule, demonstrated by over a century of struggle against absolutism culminating in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and the first elected parliament in a Muslim country. Arguing that Islam was in harmony with natural law, Tabatabai claimed that natural law required every society to have a “superintendent” (sarparast). In Shiism, he argued, that function was represented by the walayat. The question was who should exercise the function of walayat—the people as a whole, the clergy as a whole, a committee of mullahs, or a single theologian?
Tabatabai provided no answer, leaving the theoretical possibility of a system in which the people as a whole would be regarded as the vicar of Allah on earth. no doubt, Tabatabai had an eye on the 1906 Constitution, under which monarchy was “a gift bestowed by God” on the people of Iran. In other words, the nation as a whole was its own monarch; it was only the exercise of the power of monarchy that was bestowed on an individual. On this basis, a constituent assembly formed in 1912 dethroned the reigning Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar, who had taken up arms against the new democratic system. In 1925, another constituent assembly took the monarchy away from the Qajar dynasty and handed it over in trust to the Pahlavis. In both cases the message was clear: power belonged to the people, who could delegate or withdraw it as they wished.
Khomeini, by insisting that walayat be performed by a single mullah or in some ill-defined circumstances by a committee of mullahs, violated the principle of national sovereignty. It is not clear why Khomeini agreed to abandon the term “Islamic Rule” for “Islamic Republic.” One plausible explanation, offered by some of the ayatollah’s associates in the early days of the revolution, is that he was persuaded to adopt the term “republic” to reassure Communist and liberal allies.
Because most Iranians had never heard of Khomeini, let alone his weird ideas, until 1978, it was not clear how much support he actually enjoyed within the revolutionary movement. Much of the violence that pushed the shah’s back to the wall was organized by leftist or Islamist-Marxist groups, some of whose leaders had trained in Cuba, China, north Korea, Communist South Yemen, and in Palestine Liberation Organization camps in Lebanon. They killed police officers and gendarmes, robbed banks, set public buildings and means of transport on fire, and terrorized the citizenry by setting up roadblocks on major roads. As for strikes, especially in strategic industries like energy and transport, the organizing was done by the well-trained cadres of the Tudeh (Masses) Party, a Communist outfit created by the Soviet Union during its occupation of northern Iran in 1941-46. Many of those who joined the revolutionary revolt, perhaps even a majority, believed they were fighting for an end to personal rule by the shah and certainly did not imagine they would end up under an even harsher personal rule by a mullah.
To allay their suspicions, Khomeini made full use of the Shiite arsenal of deception. He practiced kitman (concealment) by keeping his true intentions hidden. He practiced taqiyyah (dissimulation) by pretending to be a fighter for democracy. By the spring of 1979, weeks after the fall of the shah’s regime, the broad coalition that had swept Khomeini to power was beginning to fragment. The leftist and Islamist-Marxist parties, still armed and capable of threatening the mullahs, began to campaign for a “people’s republic” or a “people’s democratic republic.” The word “republic,” designating a system in opposition to monarchy, was the only term on which everyone within the revolutionary coalition agreed. Khomeini had no choice but to adopt it, albeit with the inevitable adjective “Islamic.”
Most of the men invited by Khomeini to write the constitution of the Islamic Republic believed they were required to build a more or less democratic system. The text that provided the basis of their work was a translation of the Constitution of the French Fifth Republic.5 They also referred to Iran’s Constitution of 1906, itself a translation of the Belgian Constitution. According to Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri, who chaired the earliest meetings of the so-called Assembly of Experts set up to write the new constitution, the participants believed that they were expected to establish a “people-based” government. “Khomeini made many promises that we also repeated on his authority,” Montazeri says. “The masses came forward in response to those promises and made many sacrifices. In reality, however, those promises were never realized.”6
In the final days of the assembly’s work, Khomeini instructed it to write the new constitution around the concept of walayat e faqih, ending all democratic illusions among the members. The new constitution gave the wali e faqih unlimited powers, including the authority to suspend the rules of Islam if necessary. The wali e faqih had to be an Iranian born of Iranian parents and a Twelver Shiite, but was declared to be the leader of the Muslim ummah throughout the world. At the same time, however, the text provided for the election of a president of the republic and a unicameral Islamic Consultative Assembly based on direct universal adult suffrage. nevertheless, the wali e faqih was given the power to dismiss both the elected president and the parliament.7 That Khomeini’s system could not be a republic was made clear by Ayatollah Muhammad Beheshti, regarded by some as the regime’s strongman until his assassination in 1981. Having created his political faction and named it the Islamic Republican Party (IRP), Beheshti told the central council of his movement that the term “republic in its Islamic interpretation” meant only “a rejection of hereditary monarchy” and not a Western-style system in which power belongs to the people.8
In fact, the term Islamic Republic is an oxymoron, because no republican system could be based on Islam. In a republic, power belongs to the people, even if in practice that might mean some of the people only, and the power may be exercised through elected representatives. The rule of the people, the demo
s, is democracy—a concept that is alien to Islam. There was no word for democracy in any of the Muslim languages until the 1890s, when the Greek term entered Muslim languages with little change: democrasi in Persian, dimokraytiyah in Arabic, demokratio in Turkish. There is not even a term for “politics” in the Muslim languages. The word siassah, now used as a synonym for “politics,” initially meant whipping stray camels into line. The idea is to goad people onto the right path as the ruler sees it; the closest translation may be “regimentation.” In a broader context, the verb form of siassah means meting out punishment or even assassination. Rather than the concept of polis, evoking citizenship with rights and duties, there is the ummah, the community of believers. It is no accident that early Muslims translated numerous ancient Greek texts but never those related to political matters. While the great Avicenna (Ibn Sina) wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, there was no translation of Aristotle’s Politics in Persian until 1963.