The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution

by Amir Taheri

  18

  West Stricken, Arab Stricken

  The Khomeinist upheaval of 1978-79 was the first of the great revolutions to lack a corpus of ideological works on which to rely. Most of Khomeini’s own writings do not deal with political issues, focusing instead on matters of personal behavior, especially with regard to religious duties, sex, and commercial transactions. Even then, the ayatollah’s confused prose, limited vocabulary and muddled thinking make his writings hard to read and even harder to understand.

  Might not one consider the Koran itself as the first manifesto of the movement? The answer is no. The Koran, too, does not discuss politics, but instead addresses matters of ritual and the maintenance of a thin veneer of religious loyalty. In any case, every part of the Koran has always been so open to interpretation that it could be, and has been, used by all sorts of scoundrels—from the apologists of despotic monarchy to “reformed” Stalinists, and, of course, fascists. Ehsan Tabari, the principal ideologue of the Tudeh (Masses) Party, has published several books claiming that the Koran could be read as the first draft of The Communist Manifesto. By contrast, Muhammad-Ali Ramin, a key advisor to Ahmadinejad, has established “thematic accords” between the Koran and Hitler’s Mein Kampf, especially with regard to the “ever conspiring Jews.”

  Sometime in the early nineteenth century, the mullahs, who had once provided the backbone of the nation’s intellectual elite, stopped producing anything worthwhile even in their own domain. Unable to risk theological speculation, let alone innovation, as their predecessors had done, they resigned themselves to parrot-like repetitions of shopworn clichés. When pressed to offer views on new issues of contemporary life, they shied away from taking a position by invoking the Shiite principle of ehtiat (caution), which means dancing around the issue, or they hid behind the formula “Allah Knows Best.” In the nineteenth century, Aqa najafi, a key ayatollah of his time, was asked by some wits what believers should do in the north Pole to honor the five daily prayers and the dawn-to-dusk fasting of Ramadan? His answer was: no good Muslim should go there if such a place exists!

  In 1978-79, Khomeinism had a great deal of muscle in the streets—muscles that burned, looted, threw acid at hijab-free women, and cut the throats of kidnapped policemen. When it came to brains, however, they had only two “philosophers.” One was Abol-Hassan Banisadr, a fifty-year-old “mature student” in Paris who had self-published a pamphlet under the title “Monotheistic Economics.” The other was the mullah Morteza Motahari, who had once worked as “philosophical advisor” to Empress Farah and had written a column for Zan Ruz (“Today’s Woman”), a weekly women’s magazine. When exposed to the wider public, both these “big brains of Islam” proved embarrassing. Banisadr became the first president of the Islamic Republic for some eighteen months but then fled back to Paris, thus losing his place as a theoretician of Khomeinism. Motahari was soon assassinated by a group called Forqan (Discernment) created by rival mullahs, while his gospel of “blood and martyrdom,” although fashionable for a time, proved eventually to have limited appeal.

  The leaders of the revolution knew they had to do better. It was then that they discovered and tried to promote two other ideological “prophets.” One was Jalal al-Ahmad, a Communist turncoat who had discovered “the healing touch of Islam” towards the end of his life, shortened by decades of addiction to vodka. In the 1960s he had published a pamphlet under the title Gharb-Zadeg (“Being Stricken by the West,” translated into English as “Westoxication”). He claimed that the root cause of Iran’s poverty, backwardness, and despotic political system was the “Westoxication” of its elites and urban middle classes in general. Iranians, he argued, should “return to themselves,” rediscover their traditional values (which he would not spell out), and above all, be on guard against contamination by Western ideas. Interestingly, al-Ahmad opened his pamphlet with a quotation from Ernst Jünger, a major in Hitler’s army and a part-time philosopher. Having advised Iranians to steer clear of the West, al-Ahmad filled his pamphlet with quotations from Western writers, revealing his own acute Westoxication.1

  The other writer the Khomeinists discovered was Ali Shariati, who had studied sociology in Paris and died after a long illness in Southampton, England. Shariati, too, had been a talented pamphleteer and a firm believer in the toxic nature of Western civilization. In the 1970s, the shah’s secret police (the State Intelligence and Security Organization, or SAVAK) had used his writings, especially his pamphlet titled “Marxism and Islam,” in an ideological campaign against Marxists. now it was the turn of the Khomeinist regime to enlist him in support of its campaign against “the corrupt, capitalist West.” For the mullahs, however, using Shariati was not as easy as using al-Ahmad, since Shariati had been an outspoken critic of mullahs as self-serving collaborators of despotic regimes for over four hundred years. The mullahs, he argued, represented the Safavid version of Shiism, named after the Safavid dynasty, and not the Shiism of Ali, the first imam. Safavid Shiism was formal, hypocritical, and ultimately empty. Ali’s Shiism, on the other hand, was lively, passionate and liberating. Shariati had tried to Islamicize some of the key concepts of Marxism, which he had studied under his French teacher Gurovich. He identified the term “proletariat” with the Shiite concept of mustazaf (the underdog), while the “bourgeoisie” was the equivalent of mustakbar. Shariati’s confused message also included the claim that Imam Hussein’s ill-fated attempt at becoming caliph was a prototype of “revolution” as understood in Europe’s secular radicalism.

  At any rate, the mullahs were able to extract the message they wanted: a hatred of the West as the cause of Islam’s decline, and by extension, Iran’s historic defeat. The infidel West was the enemy that the revolution needed, and the United States, as the leader of the infidel West, deserved special vilification. By adopting anti-Americanism as the backbone of its ideology, Khomeinism was giving a sharper focus to anti-Western sentiments that had built up over the previous two to three decades, while claiming ownership of them.

  In 1979, having shut all universities for two years, Khomeini appointed a council to reorganize higher education based on his anti-Western ideology. While proceeding with the purge of academia, the council transformed itself into a philosophical club in which mullahs and their nonclerical associates soon divided into two camps. One camp was labeled “the Heideggerites,” after Martin Heidegger, the pro-nazi German philosopher who is also claimed by existentialists as a spiritual ancestor. Ahmad Fardid, a teacher of philosophy at Tehran University, who described himself as “a companion of Heidegger,” was their champion. Fardid’s young sidekick Reza Davari Ardakani carried the Heideggerites’ banner in media appearances. The other camp was named “the Popperites,” after the British philosopher Karl Popper, who devoted his life to fighting totalitarianism. Initially, the Popperites had rallied around Motahari. When he was assassinated, the Popperites promoted a nonclerical amateur philosopher named Abdul-Karim Sorush as chief spokesman. A British-educated chemist, Sorush had been appointed secretary general of the council at the start of the academic purges of 1979. needless to say, neither the Heideggerites nor the Popperites merited their labels. Both accepted Khomeini’s claim of the right to rule in the name of the Hidden Imam, something that neither Heidegger nor Popper would have understood. The Heideggerites were chiefly interested in presenting any form of democracy as anti-Islamic and against philosophy. Davari, for example, claimed that Socrates had been sentenced to death because of his opposition to democracy and that his disciple Plato had been an advocate of the “rule by the select,” which in Iran’s case meant a government of the mullahs.

  The Popperites insisted that the mullahs’ rule should be subjected to public endorsement in elections, but were not prepared to go as far as allowing just any citizen to stand for election. All candidates had to be loyal to the regime. nor were they prepared to admit that the government of the mullahs was bound to lead to totalitarianism in the name of religion. In a distortion of Pop
per’s thought, his Iranian followers tried to develop the concept of “religious democracy.” The trick they used was to argue that democracy was not incompatible with Islam or any other religion. This is certainly true. What they did not say, however, was that Islam is incompatible with democracy. Islam can have its place in a democratic state, but democracy has no place in an Islamic state. The idea that a state could be both Islamic and democratic at the same time is a myth that many disillusioned Khomeinists had tried to cling to since the 1990s.

  Until 1989, the Heideggerites were the dominant philosophical force within the Khomeinist establishment. The then Prime Minister Mir-Hussain Mussawi and the then Chief Justice Abdul-Karim Ardebili, a businessman-cum-mullah, were confirmed Heideggerites. The Popperites started their ascendancy in the 1990s and managed to emerge as the dominant group within the regime in 1997 when one of their supporters, Khatami, won the presidency against Ayatollah Ali-Akbar nateq-nuri, the candidate of the Heideggerites. In the summer of 2005, however, the Popperites suffered their worst defeat when Ahmadinejad, the candidate of the Heideggerites, won the presidency. That victory put the limelight on Ayatollah Muhammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, one of Fardid’s most talented pupils and the best-known mullah among the Heideggerites. Mesbah-Yazdi is Ahmadinejad’s “thought-master.”

  It might come as a surprise to outsiders, but for the past twenty-eight years the philosophical debate in the Islamic Republic has been over a misunderstanding of a pro-nazi German philosopher on the one hand and an even bigger misunderstanding of a liberal British philosopher on the other.

  Almost three decades of supposedly Islamic rule has not produced a single Islamic philosopher. Even Mesbah-Yazdi, acclaimed by his supporters as “the most significant Islamic philosopher of the past two centuries,” has little to offer besides a rehash of Fardid’s misunderstanding of Heidegger. Fardid, who knew no European languages, had gleaned some knowledge of his idol, Heidegger, through partial Persian translations as well as verbal accounts by friends who spoke French or German.2

  The Heideggerites claim that each society must identify the elite that could provide it with the best government. In the case of Islam, that elite consists of religious scholars. Once the “just rule” is established, society should admit no dissent and should, instead, mobilize all its energies against internal and external foes. The Heideggerites have also inherited a dose of anti-Semitism, both from the German philosopher himself and from his Iranian admirers. Since Ahmadinejad’s election the Heideggerites have attacked the Popperites as “naïve souls deceived by a Jewish troublemaker,” a reference to the fact that Popper had been of Jewish birth. The Popperites allow for a diversity of views and even “multiple readings of the sacred texts.” But they, too, reject any possibility of changing the structures of the Islamic state, let alone subjecting the faith to critical scrutiny. In 2002, Jürgen Habermas, the most fashionable German philosopher alive, visited Iran as a guest of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and was surprised by the domination of Iranian thought by “misunderstood Western philosophies.”

  Khomeinist propaganda uses both “schools” in support of its anti-Western, more specifically anti-American message. It also uses them against those who oppose the regime from the standpoint of Iranian patriotism. Iranian patriots see the Khomeinist regime as “Arab-stricken” (Arab-zadeh) and claim that it is trying to de-Iranize Iran, thus realizing the dream of the first Arab invaders. In books that have become bestsellers in Iran, albeit in samizdat form, the writer Ali-Mirfetros argues that the Khomeinist regime is trying to destroy Iran’s “national identity” and transform it into part of a nondescript Islamic ummah. That Khomeini had no feelings for Iran as a nation-state is revealed in this statement: “We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for sherk [associating others with Allah]. I say let this land burn; I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”3

  Khomeinists label their enemies “Americans.” To them, America is the codeword for democracy, modernity, reform, love of country—sentiments that threaten the regime. To opponents of the regime, on the other hand, Khomeinism is an attempt to impose a twisted Arab identity on Iran, deny its people basic freedoms and human rights, and turn it into an enemy of the modern world in the name of anti-Americanism. The late writer and diplomat Fereydoun Hoveyda argued a strong case in support of his thesis that anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, should be seen as the principal ideological ingredient of Khomeinism. Hatred of the United States performs several functions for the regime. It gives its supporters a unifying theme: they can direct their negative energies towards an outsider rather than against each other. It provides the regime with potential allies who are neither Muslim nor even religious. Anti-Americanism is a popular ideology in many parts of the world, including the United States itself. What could make Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez “brothers,” if not their shared anti-Americanism? Only anti-Americanism could persuade the mullahs to impose noam Chomsky’s books as compulsory reading at Iranian universities along with Khomeini’s pamphlets. And why would Bill Clinton and Sean Penn feel “a certain kinship” with Khomeinists, unless it is because of their shared belief that the United States is guilty of “crimes against weaker nations”?

  Hoveyda also believed that were the mullahs ever to abandon their anti-American ideology, they would be sealing the fate of their regime. Khomeinists of all tendencies agree on three things only: compulsory hijab, compulsory beards, and hatred of America. To abandon anti-Americanism would leave the regime with nothing but beards and hijab. no Khomeinist leader could take such a risk. This is specially so because the United States remains popular among the Iranian masses.

  Over the past two decades, dozens of opinion polls have shown that while anti-Americanism is rife even in U.S. allies such as Great Britain, Iran remains one of the few remaining bastions of pro-American sentiment. Despite government-imposed bans and occasional campaigns of brutal repression, American books, films, music, and other cultural products remain as popular in Iran as ever. On several occasions, Khamenehi has condemned all this as “an unhealthy madness for America” and has tried to “cure” it with police repression. What he does not realize is that part of the reason for the average Iranian’s fascination with the United States is precisely that it is vilified by an unpopular regime. Frequent visitors to the Soviet Union would be familiar with the phenomenon. There, too, the state’s official enmity for the United States was translated into popular goodwill towards America and a fascination with things American. This is more so in Iran’s case if only because, unlike Soviet citizens, millions of Iranians have had direct experience of the United States while millions more are in almost daily contact with aspects of it thanks to the global communications revolution. The Iranian community in the United States, believed to be 1.8 million strong, has emerged as an alternative face of Iran, offering a home for writers, poets, musicians, filmmakers, and other producers of culture to continue their creative work free from state censorship and repression. Dozens of satellite television and radio channels are beamed to Iran from southern California and Washington D.C., maintaining bonds that the regime is desperately trying to break. Almost three decades after the Khomeinist seizure of power, Iranian society is more Westoxicated than ever, in the sense that such Western ideas as democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and secularism have found an audience they did not have before.

  At the other end of the spectrum, the regime’s efforts to Islamicize—or as Iranian patriots claim, Arabize—Iran have produced few results. Before the revolution, most Iranians ignored the Arabs if only because they had no direct contact with them. Apart from those who went to Mecca on pilgrimage, almost no Iranians traveled to any Arab country. Teaching Arabic was part of the secondary school curriculum, but few attached any importance to it. Between 1958 and 1979, few Arabic-language films were screened in Iran and fewer Arab writers translated into Persian.4 During the same period, virtually
all major European and American writers were translated into Persian and found a growing audience. American movies almost always topped the box-office lists, often ahead of Iranian films.

  Almost three decades of Khomeinist attempts at de-Iranization has awakened anti-Arab sentiments that had been dormant for centuries. Most Iranians continue to look towards the West—“the natural direction of their gaze,” in the words of Mostafavi—as they have always done in their history. The anti-Western discourse of the Khomeinist regime in a nation that is overwhelmingly pro-Western is another sign of the schizophrenia that Iran has manifested since the mullahs seized power.

  19

  State or Revolution

  The seemingly erratic manner in which Iran at times takes and applies its decisions, especially in certain areas of foreign policy, has baffled more than one observer in the past three decades. In the 1980s, one might have argued that Iran’s behavior, which at times included harming its own interests, was partly due to the relative inexperience of the new decision-making elite that issued from the 1979 revolution. There was also the fact that the system evolved since the revolution was neither a monolithic regime nor a typical Third World dictatorship in which decisions are made by either one man or an easily identifiable group.