The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution

by Amir Taheri

  Ultimately, however, the role that the Supreme Guide plays depends on the personality of the man who occupies the position. The first man in that position, Khomeini, had little knowledge of Iran and even less interest in things Iranian. Although he had composed some poetry, mostly doggerel, Khomeini knew next to nothing about Persian literature and cared even less for it. His poems were so embarrassingly bad that a volume published after the revolution was quickly banned when advisors convinced him that it would harm his image. Khomeini was a limited man, living a narrow life centered on his deep misunderstanding of Islam, his visceral hatred of the shah, and his pathological fear of modernization and democratization. At age seventy-seven, he was an old man when he won power, and thus very much in a hurry. He had no time to waste trying to persuade counterrevolutionaries that they were wrong; better to kill them by the thousands, and move on. Having lived a confined life—first in Qom, a backwater at the best of times, and then in exile in Turkey and Iraq—Khomeini had never developed a physical feel for Iran and its seductive natural beauty.

  Khamenehi is somewhat different. To start with, when he became Supreme Guide, he was twenty-six years younger than Khomeini, and thus had a different idea of the role that time plays in politics. Khomeini had spent at least a quarter of a century dreaming of becoming ruler of Iran and the leader of Islam in global conquest. Khamenehi had never harbored such illusions. Circumstances, including several bouts in prison on political charges and years of banishment to remote regions of Iran where Shiites were in a minority, had prevented him from completing his theological studies. In 1978, he was better known as an anti-shah militant than a theologian of any rank. He had made his name as a revolutionary street fighter by organizing gangs of youths who attacked cinemas, restaurants, and other “places of sin,” and terrorized the urban middle classes into joining the revolutionary movement. Indicating his ambition to build a political rather than a theological career, Khamenehi had played a key role in the creation of new revolutionary organs, most notably the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In 1980, he had managed to get himself appointed deputy secretary of defense.

  Unlike Khomeini, who never felt at home in Iran, Khamenehi regarded Iran as home and, quite possibly, even loved it as a land as well as a civilization in its own right. Khamenehi had traveled to many parts of Iran and, again unlike Khomeini, had directly experienced and shared the average life of Iranians. Having never spent time in exile, Khamenehi did not share Khomeini’s feeling of being an outsider in Iran. Khomeini was unable to speak in Persian for five minutes without making at least a dozen grammatical errors—errors that gave his performance an air of standup comedy.1 Many Iranians regarded Khomeini’s “peasant accent” and inability to speak an idiomatic Persian as a sign that he had never received a proper education in that language. The fact that Khomeini never quoted any Persian poets, writers, or philosophers, and appeared to have no knowledge of the incredibly rich treasury of Persian proverbs, reinforced that belief.

  In contrast, Khamenehi is a fluent Persian speaker with a standard accent understood by all Iranians. Also, he is well read in Persian poetry, philosophy, and history. Khamenehi’s family hail from a village of that name in East Azerbaijan, one of the four provinces in northwest Iran where people of Iranian stock speak a form of Turkic known as Azari. However, Khamenehi spent much of his life in Khorassan, northeast Iran, the birthplace and cradle of modern Persian.

  A magnetic orator, Khamenehi shines where Khomeini embarrassed himself with his whining voice, limited vocabulary and narrow vision of existence. Although he spent fifteen years in an Arabic-speaking country, Khomeini never mastered the Arab language. Khamenehi, who has never lived among the Arabs, however, is a fluent speaker of Arabic and, according to some reports, also composes occasional verse in that language. Unlike Khomeini, who hated music, Khamenehi loves “the celestial sounds” and is himself a passable player of the sitar, a traditional Persian stringed instrument. On private occasions in the company of handpicked friends, Khamenehi is known to demonstrate his talents in singing classical Persian songs—again, something that Khomeini would have regarded with horror. There are also reports, impossible to confirm, that Khamenehi is an occasional smoker of opium, a typically Iranian middle-class affliction since the nineteenth century—something else that would have scandalized the puritanical Khomeini.

  Like Khomeini before him, Khamenehi is the object of a massive cult of personality. Official flatterers describe him as a “Divine Gift to Mankind” or the “Shining Sun of Imamate.” In official discourse, he is quoted more often than Prophet Muhammad or the Koran itself. Objects he has touched during provincial visits are collected and sold as icons supposed to cure disease, ensure personal success, and ward off the “evil eye.” In 2008, some officials started to refer to Khamenehi as “Aqa” (Sir), an affectionate term, or as “Sayydena” (Our Master), a title usually reserved for Prophet Muhammad.

  The Islamic Republic protocol requires that all senior foreign visitors, including heads of state, call on Khamenehi to pay their respect. An audience with him is presented as a “special gift.” The Islamic Republic’s clients throughout the world know that paying tribute to Khamenehi is part of their duties towards their benefactors in Tehran. Here is how Hassan nasrallah, leader of the Lebanese branch of Hezballah, paid tribute to Khamenehi: “Many think that by saying we are members of the party of the Supreme Guide, they are insulting us. Today, I declare once again something that is not new: I am a member of the party of the Supreme Guide, who is just, learned, sagacious, brave, honest and sincere. Let everyone know that we are the party of the Supreme Guide.”2

  nevertheless, it is possible that Khamenehi is not as affected by this cult of personality as Khomeini had been. Khomeini genuinely believed that he was somehow “chosen” (nazar-kardeh) by the imams to save Islam. Khamenehi, on the other hand, knows that he is where he is by accident. Between 1979 and 1981, counterrevolutionaries assassinated half a dozen senior mullahs who, headed by Khomeini, provided the revolution with its leadership. Had they not died, any of them could have succeeded Khomeini as Supreme Guide. More importantly, Khomeini’s designated heir as Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri, decided to break with the regime in 1986 because of his opposition to mass executions and the regime’s repressive policies. Thus, when Khomeini died in 1989, he lacked a clearly identifiable successor.

  In a deft political maneuver, Hashemi Rafsanjani, then speaker of the Islamic Majlis, leading the faction that had forced Montazeri out, succeeded in naming Khamenehi as Supreme Guide based on what later turned out to be a forged note from the late ayatollah. The scenario, written by Rafsanjani, was that Khamenehi would leave the presidency to become Supreme Guide, thus making sure that their faction controlled the key organ of the regime. In exchange, Khamenehi, once sworn in as Supreme Guide, would support Rafsanjani’s bid to become president. The secret deal, which also involved Khomeini’s son Ahmad, was based on a twenty-year friendship between Rafsanjani and Khamenehi. In the tandem, Rafsanjani was recognized as the “strongman,” while Khamenehi, who looked more like a mullah than Rafsanjani ever could, was supposed to provide the necessary clerical cover. Khamenehi realized that he had moved to the highest position in the regime largely because he had happened to be in the right place, at the right time, and on the right side. He had been among some one hundred mullahs who had been objects of assassination attempts by counterrevolutionaries. Most had died; he had survived. In 1989, when Rafsanjani had the constitution amended to abolish the post of prime minister and increase the powers of the presidency, Khamenehi knew that his friend and ally regarded him as little more than a second fiddle. It was to take Khamenehi sixteen years to build his own power base within the regime, thus restoring the position of Supreme Guide as the true center of power in the Islamic Republic.

  The fact that Rafsanjani devoted a good part of his considerable talents and energy to amassing a personal fortune, now regarded as the largest in Iran, h
elped Khamenehi. As he became richer, Rafsanjani, nicknamed Kusseh (the Shark) by Iranians, became politically more vulnerable. Iranians love to become rich themselves but hate the rich, especially if they made their money through questionable public contracts. That Khamenehi was not interested in amassing a personal fortune endeared him to the hardcore revolutionaries and won him grudging admiration within the population at large. As Supreme Guide, Khamenehi cultivated his image as a simple if not austere man, devoting his time to defending Islam and the revolution. People saw him sit on the floor rather than use expensive furniture, eat with his hands as poor Persians did until recently, and wear inexpensive clerical garb. Unlike most mullahs, who seemed addicted to taking young “temporary wives” on an almost annual basis, Khamenehi remained strictly monogamous. He seemed to be uninterested in the three things that fascinate the average Muslim in “developing countries”: money, sex, and travel. As soon as he became Supreme Guide, Khamenehi decided he would not travel outside Iran, further enhancing his image as a modest man. At the same time, people would see leaders from all over the world coming to Tehran to “pay their respects to the Supreme Guide” as the official media claimed.

  The media also showed Rafsanjani and Khatami, who succeeded him as president in 1997, embarking on costly foreign trips with the kind of pomp and ceremony they could not reconcile with revolutionary pretensions. In some anecdotes from his memoirs, published in April 2008, Khamenehi recalled his encounters with several revolutionary leaders, including Mozambique’s President Samora Machel in the 1980s. Khamenehi says he was “shocked and horrified” to see Machel living in a grand Portuguese colonial palace complete with black servants dressed in scarlet velvet uniforms. The banquet that Machel had thrown in Khamenehi’s honor proved so sumptuous that the visiting mullah lost his appetite. During another visit, this time to Harare in Zimbabwe, Khamenehi decided to skip Robert Mugabe’s banquet of honor because the African despot was behaving like a monarch. Khamenehi preferred to stay in his hotel room, dine on a simple plate of cheese and grapes, and pray. (The Zimbabweans announced that Khamenehi had refused to attend the banquet because Mugabe had invited women, including his Ghanaian wife, who refused to wear the hijab.)

  Khamenehi’s insistence on advertising his simple lifestyle and his shunning of luxuries that many other mullahs crave is a theme of many jokes that circulate about him in Tehran and have earned him the sobriquet of “Ali Gedda” (Ali the Beggar). Having tried to make up for the lacunae in his theological studies by increasing the size of his turban and the length of his beard, the accidental Supreme Guide poses as a paragon of virtue in a sea of vice.

  Some Iranians believe that Khamenehi’s claimed virtues could ultimately prove deadlier than Rafsanjani’s alleged vices. The real test is whether Khamenehi would be prepared to sacrifice the interests of the revolution to safeguard Iran’s interests as a nation-state. Will he be able to see beyond the schizophrenia that has afflicted Iran under the bizarre system created by Khomeini? In his Jekyll-and-Hyde situation, whose side will he take? There are no ready answers to these questions. Khamenehi has made all the usual noises against Iran’s pre-Islamic civilization, although far less viciously than Khomeini. Also, he never misses an opportunity to warn against the supposed dangers of Iranian patriotism. nevertheless, patriotic themes occasionally sneak into his speeches, hinting at the possibility that he might baulk at the prospect of sacrificing Iran at the altar of Khomeini’s lunatic ideology.

  In 1980, days after Saddam Hussein’s armies had invaded Iran, Khamenehi drove to the battlefront in the company of a ramshackle band of lightly armed men. On his way, he exhorted the population in villages and towns to take up arms, including “knives and batons,” and move to the front to stop the invader. His theme was one of defending a homeland (vatan), not an ideology. On the front, he saw firsthand that Iranians from all backgrounds, faiths, and ethnic origins were ready to fight and die for their homeland, while Khomeini’s sick ideology divided them against one another. Khamenehi’s patriotic oratory in those days was in contrast with a notorious speech by Khomeini, a day after the invasion, in which he said he did not bother about “a handful of earth and a bit of water.” As deputy secretary of defense in those crucial days, Khamenehi also played a role in forcing the release of army officers and air force pilots imprisoned by Khomeini because they had served under the shah. There is no doubt that Khamenehi’s action played a part in helping organize Iranian resistance against the Saddamite invaders in the first phase of the war.

  For the past five years, Khamenehi’s health has been a subject of speculation, with his death announced by the rumor mill on more than one occasion. In the absence of official information regarding his health, however, it is difficult to be certain. Today, Khamenehi is still twenty years younger than Khomeini was at the time of his death, and based on the mullahs’ average life expectancy, which is fifteen years higher than that of the average Iranian, he may well continue for two or more decades. His demise, however, could plunge the system into a crisis the outcome of which is unpredictable. There is no consensus candidate for succession, and rival factions appear poised for a power struggle that could tear the regime apart.

  20

  Six Centers of Power

  Designed to reserve ultimate, in fact absolute, power for the Supreme Guide, the Khomeinist system has tried to prevent its concentration around any of the traditional organs of the state. To that end, it has created a number of revolutionary organs operating in parallel with the state. This has led to a system of checks and balances in which the Supreme Guide is acknowledged as the ultimate arbiter of debate and final decision-maker. Western officials, including President George W. Bush in the United States, have often castigated the various revolutionary organs of the regime by describing them as “unelected.” In fact, all organs of the Islamic Republic, including the position of Supreme Guide, are elected directly or indirectly. The point is that elections in the Islamic Republic are carefully limited to the supporters of the regime.

  Theoretically, the most important of the revolutionary organs after the Supreme Guide is the Assembly of Experts (Majlis Khobregan), a ninety-two-man body of theologians elected through universal adult suffrage for a period of eight years. Legally, the assembly has the power to elect and to remove the Supreme Guide if he falls short of his constitutional duties or is afflicted by an incurable illness or is otherwise incapacitated. In practice, however, it is hard to imagine circumstances under which the assembly might make such a move. The assembly was led by Ayatollah Ali-Akbar Meshkini, the Friday prayer leader of the “holy” city of Qom and one of Khomeini’s most radical associates, until his death in 2007. Since then it has been chaired by Rafsanjani, who has tried to flex muscles by reminding everyone of the assembly’s right to choose, and dismiss, the Supreme Guide. In its current composition, however, the assembly will almost certainly produce a comfortable majority for Khamenehi if and when the matter comes to a vote.

  The second important revolutionary organ is the Council of the Guardians of the Constitution (Shuray e negahban qanun assassi Jumhuri Eslami Iran). A twelve-man organ, the council is tasked with examining laws passed by the elected parliament to make sure it conforms to the Islamic principles of the constitution. More importantly, perhaps, the council decides who is allowed to stand for any elected position within the system. It also has the authority to declare the election of any individual, or even an entire election, null and void. Of the twelve members, six are appointed by the Supreme Guide, while the parliament names the other six with his assent. Again, the council, although enjoying a constitutional position, and thus considered a state structure, is better classified as a revolutionary organ because of ideological considerations. Over the past three decades, the council has acted as a bastion of revolutionary puritanism rather than a bona fide constitutional court. Virtually all its members have been picked from among individuals claiming a revolutionary record rather than constitutional, or theological, qual
ifications. The council’s principal spokesman and secretary is Ayatollah Ahmad Janati, who is regarded as one of the leading spokesmen of the radical faction supporting President Ahmadinejad.

  Another pseudo-constitutional but in fact revolutionary organ is the Council for the Discernment of the Interests of the Established Order (Shuray e Tashkhis e Maslehat e nezam). This was at first created by Khomeini as an ad hoc extra-constitutional body in 1988 to iron out disputes among the prime minister, the president, and the parliament. (The post of prime minister was abolished in 1989.) The council was given constitutional standing in 1991. It now has thirty-two members, appointed by the Supreme Guide. The president of the republic, the speaker of the parliament, and the president of the Supreme Judicial Council are ex officio members. Rafsanjani, who heads the council, has tried to turn it into a power base for himself. He has co-opted most of his former collaborators fired by Khatami or Ahmadinejad. Pro-Rafsanjani newspapers present the council as something of a super organ that could overrule not only the president and the parliament but also the Supreme Guide. In 2005, the council announced that it had assumed charge of establishing a twenty-year development plan for the country, implying that it now stood above all organs of government. After an initial strong showing, partly thanks to a skillful propaganda campaign, the council has nevertheless faded into the background since Ahmadinejad’s election as president. Its chief usefulness at present is that it provides a channel for direct communication among the top figures of the state and the revolution on a monthly basis. However, at a time of crisis triggered by the power struggle within the ruling clique, the council could help tip the balance in favor of one or another faction.