by Amir Taheri
The Khomeinist version of fascism has turned death into its proper territory. Khomeinists love the dead better than the living. They regard themselves as a superior race not only because they are prepared to kill in cold blood, but also, and especially, because they are ready to die. They have nothing but contempt for those who wish to live. In his pseudo-nietzschean moments, Khomeini saw the desire to live as a fundamental weakness of human character. His ideal man was prepared to die for the cause because he was prepared to do everything else for it, including lie, cheat and kill. Khomeinism is above morality, a discourse that has no audience in death’s territory. It was in this spirit that Khomeini in 1981 issued his notorious fatwa ordering children to spy on their parents and report their anti-Islamic activities, while parents were told that their religious duty required them to denounce their offspring if they engaged in anti-regime schemes. A Tehrani witticism put it thus: “The shah had tried to teach Iranians how to live, and failed. Khomeini taught them how to die, and succeeded.” According to Khamenehi, it is “by dying for his faith that a Muslim becomes truly alive.”7
The ninth characteristic of generic fascism is its fear and hatred of freedom. It speaks of “the people,” but this is a chimera to prevent citizens from taking initiative. There is no system of delegating power, and thus no accountability. nor can the “just” government be replaced through free elections. Khomeini admitted that his chief motive in fighting the shah’s regime was that it might have evolved into a Western-style democracy, which he called “a form of prostitution.” Khamenehi is equally straightforward: “In the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet, there is no talk of liberty or freedom of speech and belief.”8 Freedom, he often insists, is acceptable only if its aim is to strengthen the Islamic system.
This view is based on the works of an earlier advocate of Islamist fascism, Hussein Tabatabai, who wrote:
Some exegetes have tried hard to prove that there is freedom of conscience in Islam. They have referred to the verse: “There is no constraint in faith.” What I can say here is that monotheism is the foundation stone of all Islamic principles. Thus, how could Islam decree any freedom of conscience? In all its legislation, Islam has relied on nothing but monotheism, prophecy, and resurrection. If there is freedom, it is within that circle. If we accept freedom outside that circle we have undermined the foundations of our faith.9
The mullah Morteza Motahari claims that freedom is only a pretext for sexual license. “In Western societies,” he writes, “freedom is summed up in the freedom of lusts and desires. Western freedoms, in the name of equality for women, promote sexual license and corrupt the souls of maidens and young ladies.”10 If Allah granted man any freedoms, according to Khomeinism, it was not on an individual basis. The human individual has no meaning outside the ummah, which is a theatrical device—like “the people” or “Das Volk.” This is perhaps why Khomeini and his successors have spoken of “the umma that is always present on the stage to play the role required of it.”
The generic fascist hates parliaments, political parties, and institutional politics in general. He feels at home in mass rallies, street marches, and flag-waving shows. In Iran, people appear at such rallies in theatrical costumes: volunteers for martyrdom wear shrouds and crimson headbands, while women are hidden under a mass of black drapery. It is reminiscent of the nazis’ passion for choreographed mass gatherings. Key government decisions are announced not at the parliament but at gatherings of militants on Fridays at the campus of Tehran University. The principal yardstick for choosing government officials is not expertise but loyalty. Khomeini used to say: “Don’t talk to me about economists. Economics is for donkeys.” Khamenehi likewise has attacked those who dare suggest that the nation might need specialists to rebuild its shattered economy. “We need devoted people,” he said. “We need people who believe in our system. A specialist who doubts is worse than any enemy.”11
The tenth characteristic of fascism is its love of uniforms, and Khomeinism uses uniforms in a variety of ways. Mullahs wear special gear marking them out from the common folk. The most prominent item of a mullah’s clothing is the turban. The larger the turban, the higher is the wearer’s claim to status within the clerical hierarchy; the most imposing turbans, requiring up to six meters of cloth, are reserved for grand ayatollahs. A black turban identifies the wearer as a sayyed, a descendant of the Prophet and thus doubly deserving of deference. White turbans are for clerics who do not claim Arab blood; they are known as a’am (common). Another feature of the mullahs’ attire is the long, Arab-style robe. Unlike the Greeks in ancient times and the Arabs up to the present day, Iranian men never wore robes or skirts. Iranians invented trousers for men more than 2,500 years ago and have always associated the wearing of skirts with femininity.
Mullahs are not alone in marking themselves out by their clothing. The regime employs several corps of professional supporters, the largest of which is the Ansar Hezballah (Friends of the Party of Allah). These are street fighters who dress in battle fatigues and wear the Palestinian checkered kufiyah around their necks, in the same way that leftist students do in the West. Acting as an Iranian version of Mao Zedong’s Red Guards, these violent thugs are used by the regime to terrorize opponents on university campuses, in factories, and on city streets.
The regime’s most widely used tools of uniformization are the hijab for women and the beard for men—both props in a campaign of visual terrorism, designed to frighten opponents and enforce conformity. In 1982 the regime passed a law imposing the hijab and what was called “modest dressing” on women. In April 2006, the Islamic Majlis (parliament) passed a broader law mandating “Islamic dress” for both men and women. We shall discuss the hijab later when we examine the regime’s obsession with controlling women. As far as beards are concerned, wearing or not wearing them has become one of the perennial issues of Iranian politics.
One of the first measures of the Khomeinists in 1978 was an effort to force Iranian men to grow beards. The slogan “Death to Those Who Shave” appeared on the walls; and several youths were disfigured by acid thrown at their clean-shaven faces. Those who wished to assume a revolutionary identity stopped shaving. Later, growing beards became sometimes a necessity and sometimes a device for self-ingratiation with the authorities. At government offices, clean-shaven men are either ignored or humiliated, while those sporting the revolutionary beard are received attentively.
In most cultures, facial hair has been associated with historic or religious missions. The classical image of Zeus in Hellenic culture or God in Semitic culture is a man with a long white beard. Old Testament prophets are represented with beards, as are most Christian saints. More recently, beards have made an appearance in secular creeds, on Marx and Engels and their Russian disciples from Plekhanov and Martov to Lenin and Trotsky—although the last two wore only goatees (also known as Vandykes). Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine T-shirt revolutionary, also had beards. Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung did not grow beards, apparently because they were genetically incapable of doing so.
Although Ayatollah Fazl-Allah Mahallati once claimed that no man could become a true Muslim without growing a proper beard, there is no evidence that early Muslims, those of the so-called Golden Age, detected any sacred qualities in facial hair. According to his biographers, including Ibn Kathir, Muhammad himself sported a goatee. The Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar lampooned the mullahs for growing big beards. In one verse, Attar depicted the fate of “an idiot with a huge beard” who is choked and killed by it when his boat capsizes. Another poem relates the story of a pious man who, despite his prayers, never feels well. He asks Moses to ask God why this is so. God answers:
He has forgotten all about us,
So preoccupied with his beard he is.
Tell him to first forget about his beard,
So that he may reap some rewards.
The poet Sanai also mocked those who grew beards:
How could any follower o
f Mostafab
Grow the beard and moustache of the ignorant?
The Sufi poet Rumi poked fun at the mullahs who wore beards to back their claim of discernment:
You cannot rule your own beard
Which grows, and goes white—
regardless of your wishes.
How then could you claim
To rule over Good and Evil?
More recently, Iraj Mirza, the great Persian satirist of the early twentieth century, wrote poems mocking beards. Iraj Mirza himself wore a moustache and expressed understanding of clerics growing Vandykes in imitation of Muhammad. Anything beyond that, however, he considered a prop for charlatanry and tartuffery. In one poem, he complains about the fact that he has to shave every day even while he is losing the hair on top of his head, and he wonders: couldn’t Allah reverse the process?
The Persian word for beard is rish, which also means “wound” or “injury”; another meaning is “corruption” or “going to waste.” The popular expression “its beard has grown” refers to something that has gone bad or been exposed as untrue. According to the medieval satirist Suzani Samarkandi, rish-jonbani (literally: “shaking a beard”) is a worse breach of etiquette than belching or letting off wind in public.
By contrast, the Arabs use the euphemism mahasin (benedictions) to describe beards. It is in imitation of Muhammad that Saudi officials and theologians grow Vandykes plus a moustache. The more radical Sunnis, known as Salafis (meaning predecessors or ancestors), distinguish themselves from Saudi Wahhabis by growing a more fulsome beard but no moustache. The Khomeinists also go for longer and denser beards.
Over the years, deciding who is who by style of beard has become a popular sport with Iranians. Called “beard spotting” (rish shenasi), the technique enables the observer to place a man by the beard he grows. The mullahs with the greatest pretensions to learning and piety grow the longest beards. Many dye their beards jet black or various shades of red with the help of henna. Those who wish to give an impression of detachment from the transient do not dye their beards. Most others opt for a salt-and-pepper look to make them appear old enough to impress the populace but young enough to avail themselves of teenage “temporary wives,” or sigheh. nonclerics who wish to emphasize their piety without being mistaken for mullahs grow bushy round beards that are carefully trimmed and dyed, and often perfumed with rosewater. Mullahs who wish to portray themselves as “moderate” or open to a “dialogue of civilizations” choose beards that do not dominate their faces. A goatee is kept in deference to the Prophet, but it is extended by long sideburns to distinguish the wearer from the Saudis. A trim moustache is also added to show that one does not sympathize with Salafis like bin Laden. Those who wish to hedge their bets—that is to say, advertise their Islamism while appearing “modern”—have opted for what is known in the West as designer stubble, achieved with an electric shaver that does not cut the facial hair from the root. This “modern” type of beard was authorized by Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleqani, one of the “useful idiots” that Marxists and fellow travelers promoted as a religious facade in the early days of the revolution. He ruled that Islam banned the use of razors that cut facial hair completely, but an electric shaver was acceptable because it allowed some of the hair to remain. The Stalinists who collaborated with the fascist mullahs in the first phases of the revolution distinguished themselves by maintaining two-day stubble dominated by a thick bushy moustache in memory of the Soviet despot. The Mujahedin Khalq (People’s Holy Warriors), Marxist-Islamists who helped Khomeini come to power but later broke with him, mark themselves out by shaving off their beards and growing signature moustaches in imitation of their Supreme Guide, Massoud Rajavi.
Khomeini, ignorant of history and most other things, did not realize that—except for clerics who sported Vandykes—the growing of beards had not been a Shiite tradition until the seventeenth century, when it was imposed by the Safavid Shah Tahmasp with a royal edict. Tahmasp had a dream in which the Hidden Imam apparently demanded that “men of True Faith” not discard what Allah had made to grow on their faces as a sign of his blessing. After Tahmasp’s reign, however, most men reverted to the custom of shaving their beards but growing ferocious moustaches.
Because the regime attaches such importance to facial hair, its opponents use shaving as a sign of protest. Television news footage and photos of public gatherings published by newspapers are censored to make sure they do not show too many clean-shaven men. To further emphasize their individuality, young men grow their hair long or spiked, and wear T-shirts with Western inscriptions. A Western visitor would be surprised how many young Iranians wear T-shirts and caps that advertise various American baseball teams.
The eleventh characteristic of generic fascism is the cult of war, both foreign and civil. It conceives of existence as a Manichean struggle between Good and Evil. While other messianic movements may also instigate wars, Islamist fascism uses war as a highly desirable tool in creating the new man and the ideal society. Khomeini described war as a divine blessing. Where open warfare is not feasible—perhaps because one is not sure of winning—it is necessary to maintain the “war spirit” by provoking conflicts. It is also essential to pick adversaries who will show one up as a hero. Thus, the Iran-Iraq war was not presented as a conflict with Saddam Hussein, described by Khomeini as a “nincompoop who had better commit suicide.” no, Iraq and Saddam Hussein were too small for a great heroic revolution! The Khomeinists said they were at war against the United States, and better, against “World Arrogance”; they were fighting to defeat the Americans, liberate Palestine, and wipe Israel off the map! Conveniently ignored was the fact that the United States and Israel, at a crucial stage, helped Iran get the weapons it needed to continue the war and avoid defeat by Iraq.
Over the past thirty years, the Khomeinist regime has led Iran into an eight-year war with Iraq, a two-year border war with Afghanistan (1998-2000), and a proxy war against Israel, waged through the Lebanese branch of Hezballah, since 1983. It has also been engaged in low-intensity warfare against the United States. The various wars provoked by the Khomeinist regime at home and abroad have claimed the lives of over a million people—the vast majority of them Iranians. This is a regime with war written in its political DNA.
More importantly, perhaps, the Khomeinist regime has been at war against the Iranian people almost continuously for the past three decades. It has crushed revolts by ethnic minorities with savage brutality. In 1979, a unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regime’s praetorian guard, organized a massacre in the Kurdish village of naqada, in the province of West Azerbaijan, killing more than nine hundred people, mostly women and children. Almost thirty years later, Turkmen were massacred in the province of Golestan, on the Caspian Sea, by another unit of the IRGC. The regime’s repressive forces have been engaged in low-intensity wars against Baluch and Kurdish rebels, in southeastern and western provinces respectively, for the past two decades.
Linked to the fascist cult of war is a readiness to use terrorism, both before and after attaining power. Franquist death squads remained in operation three decades after the victory of the Phalange. SS death squads were always on hand to eliminate real or imagined opponents long after Hitler had sat down at the window that opened on the Unter Den Linden. Khomeini issued his first death fatwa in 1946, against a leading intellectual (Ahmad Kasravi). The Khomeinist regime today has several death squads known as Thar Allah (Blood of Allah) and Avengers of the Imam. numerous prominent politicians and mullahs who had initially cooperated with the new regime have been assassinated in the past thirty years. In the late 1990s under the presidency of Khatami, hundreds of intellectuals, along with spiritual leaders of Sunni Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Baha’is, were murdered by official death squads, their corpses thrown by the roadside. Mrs. Shirin Ebadi, Iran’s nobel Peace laureate, puts the number of those murdered at “over four hundred” and claims to have full documentation about at least half the cases. The man who orches
trated the murders was the mullah Qorban-Ali Dorri najafabadi, who worked as Khatami’s minister for intelligence and security. (Under Ahmadinejad, he works as chairman of the High Administrative Tribunal.) A series of books and articles by the dissident journalist Akbar Ganji has revealed the extent of high-level official involvement in the killings. (The books cost Ganji five years in prison and eventually exile.) Abroad, death squads from Tehran have killed 127 dissidents, most of them intellectuals, in sixteen countries including the United States and several European nations.
That the Islamic Republic practices terrorism as official policy was established at a trial in Berlin on April 10, 1997. The Berlin Criminal Court was dealing with a case concerning the murder of two Iranian Kurdish dissident leaders and their two interpreters in a restaurant in the German capital in 1992. After years of investigation and cross-examination, the court reached a unanimous verdict: the murders were ordered and planned at the highest level of the Islamic Republic’s leadership. Four officials were named as participants in the crime: the Supreme Guide, Ali Khamenehi; the president of the Islamic Republic, Hashemi Rafsanjani; the minister for intelligence and security, Ali Fallahian; and the minister for foreign affairs, Ali-Akbar Velayati. Of the four “murdering Alis,” as the quartet is known in Iran, all but the last were mullahs. In 2007, a court in Buenos Aires found the government of the Islamic Republic responsible for a terrorist operation in July 1994. A unit of Hezballah, acting on orders from Tehran, blew up the headquarters of the Israel-Argentine Mutual Jewish Association in Buenos Aires, killing 86 people and injuring 250. The Argentine court demanded that “red alert” international arrest warrants be issued against a number of Khomeinist officials, including the four “murdering Alis.”