by Amir Taheri
There is no denying that the mechanics of regime change are a delicate and often highly chancy matter, and that the historical record offers examples of failure as well as success. But there is also no denying that the game is worth the candle. The people of Iran have been fighting this evil regime for almost three decades. Hundreds of thousands of people have died and millions more have suffered in the struggle against Khomeinist tyranny in Iran. Today, the world should hear the cry of help that is coming out of Iran. Accelerating the collapse and replacement of this aberrant tyranny, an enemy of the Iranian people and a curse to the world, will also strike a blow against anti-Western and antidemocratic forces all over the globe and safeguard the strategic interests of the democratic world in the Middle East. The Persian night can come to an end; Iran can become free; and the world can be saved from terror and wars triggered by an obscurantist fascist movement with messianic pretentions. Since the fall of the Soviet Empire and the apartheid regime in South Africa, the main theme of contemporary international life has been freedom. So why not Iran, and why not now?
Afterword to the Paperback Edition
Khomeinism: The Beginning of the End?
No one knows how the Iranian insurrection, triggered by the disputed presidential election of June 2009, will end. However, one thing is already clear: The doctrine of walayat faqih (“government of the theologian”), the cornerstone of the Khomeinist system, is dead.
Khomeini invented the doctrine to justify the claim that he drew his legitimacy from Allah and was accountable solely to him. In practice, walayat faqih was supposed to work the same way that Lenin’s “democratic centralism” did in the early days of Bolshevism. Issues could be debated, even disputed, within the regime—but once the Supreme Guide pronounced “the final word,” everyone had to fall in line.
The Supreme Guide, also called rahbar (the Persian equivalent of “Führer”), would announce the ultimate decision in a special sermon. Such sermons were described as fasl el-khitab, an archaic theological term meaning “the end of discussion.” Anyone who opposed the end of discussion would be regarded as “a miscreant, waging war on Allah.” For almost thirty years, this system worked in Iran, at least as far as the Khomeinist elite was concerned. On most issues, there was enough debate to hoodwink the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Barack Obama into believing that Khomeinism contained “a measure of democracy” (as the New York Times put it).
Ayatollah Ali Khamenehi, the current Supreme Guide, attained that position in 1989, but until recently he had used the fasl el-khitab card in public only once—in 1991, to crush a student revolt in Tehran. Over two decades he presented himself as a pious recluse who cultivated taciturnity as an art. The idea was that while others fought for personal or partisan motives, the rahbar, living an ascetic life devoted to prayer and introspection, intervened only to close debate and unite the ummah, the community of the faithful.
nonetheless, the doctrine of walayat faqih remained at the center of Iranian political debate; indeed, it has been debated ever since the mullahs seized power in 1979. The Khomeinist elite has defended it by claiming that the Supreme Guide’s function is to stand above factions, prevent extremism, and arbitrate divisive issues in the broader interest of the ummah. Supporters of pluralism and democracy, on the other hand, have seen the doctrine as a façade for religious despotism.
As often happens, events rather than rhetorical pirouettes appear to have ended the debate. In the past months, it has become clear that walayat faqih no longer works. Since the presidential election, Khamenehi has had more fasl el-khitab events than Frank Sinatra had farewell concerts. His message is always the same: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s landslide re-election should be hailed as an “Islamic miracle” rather than a crude fraud worthy of a banana republic.
In emerging from his reclusion and taking sides in a fight within the establishment, Khamenehi has demonstrated his own irrelevance. Rather than calming spirits and fostering consensus, his intervention has deepened divisions and fanned the fires of opposition to the regime. The Supreme Guide has become just another character in a political soap opera, and each appearance chips off more of his mystique. Simultaneously, the number of those who doubt the “Islamic miracle” seems to be growing by the day. “The Leader may no longer be an asset to the regime,” says Yussefi Eshkaveri, a mullah who fought for Khomeinism before becoming a dissident and being defrocked on Khamenehi’s orders. “He has jumped into the mud pit alongside many others and is unlikely to re-emerge with dignity.”
The question many ask in Tehran is: Why did Khamenehi abandon his role as supreme arbiter to become a hatchet man for Ahmadinejad?
There is no satisfactory answer. One theory is that when he endorsed Ahmadinejad’s re-election, he had an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) gun pointed at his temple. Another is that he was terrified by the prospect of a “velvet revolution” that could send him to the gallows or into exile.
In 2005, Khamenehi tacitly supported Muhammad-Baqer Qalibaf, a former police chief, rather than Ahmadinejad as presidential candidate. When Ahmadinejad won, Khamenehi congratulated him in brief, even cold, terms. At the time, many suspected that the IRGC had propelled Ahmadinejad into the presidency against the wishes of Khamenehi’s entourage. (Khamenehi’s ambitious son Mujtaba had been chief campaign manager for Qalibaf and an outspoken critic of Ahmadinejad.)
This time, however, Khamenehi rooted for Ahmadinejad and made no secret of it. A year before the election, he told Ahmadinejad to “work as if you have five more years, not just one,” clearly indicating his hope that the incumbent would secure a second term. In June, Khamenehi did not even wait for the publication of official election results to congratulate Ahmadinejad on his “miraculous victory.” When the opposition disputed the results, Khamenehi cast himself in the role of chief spokesman for the Ahmadinejad camp. For almost a week, the re-elected president was nowhere to be seen while the Supreme Guide was everywhere, fighting in his behalf.
It is now clear that Khamenehi has squandered three decades’ worth of political capital. Although he remains a powerful player in the Iranian political game thanks to the vast financial and security assets at his disposal, he is no longer above the melee. The regime he heads has become a typical Third World dictatorship relying on violence and bribery to remain in power. With the mystique gone, the reality of a brutal regime that kills unarmed protestors in the streets is increasingly noticed, even by people like Brzezinski and Obama.
Two former presidents of the Islamic Republic, Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Muhammad Khatami—both mullahs with impressive Khomeinist credentials—have made it clear that they no longer believe in walayat faqih. Both have refused to obey Khamenehi by recognizing Ahmadinejad’s re-election. They have also boycotted official ceremonies organized by Khamenehi. Mir-Hussein Mussavi, Mehdi Karrubi, and Mohsen Rezai Mir-Qa’ed, the three candidates supposedly defeated by Ahmadinejad, have also made it clear that they no longer believe in walayat faqih by refusing to join Khamenehi in his claim that the June election was “a boon from Allah.” Scores of other mullahs (perhaps even a majority of Shiite clerics in Iran) and numerous senior officials who believe that Ahmadinejad “stole” the election have followed this example.
More important, daily demonstrations in Tehran and at least a dozen other major cities continue to challenge Khamenehi’s fasl el-khitab. The regime still controls these cities—but thanks only to the IRGC and the Baseej militia, not to the prestige and authority of the rahbar.
Until the current crisis exposed the fundamental contradictions of the Khomeinist system, the function of the Supreme Guide appeared to have at least one justification: It prevented civil war within the ruling elite. With Khamenehi now adopting a brazenly partisan position, that justification is gone. The Khomeinist elite is in a state of civil war and risks dragging the whole nation into a long period of strife.
For thirty years, walayat faqih was a barrier to creating a broad coalition for genuine refo
rm and change. But now, Khamenehi’s behavior has fostered a growing consensus that it is time for Iran to move beyond Khomeinism as both an ideology and a governing arrangement. Only a shrinking segment of the Khomeinist constituency still clings to the bizarre and unworkable walayat faqih concept. And that is perhaps the true miracle that happened last year.
March 2010
Notes
Chapter 1: The World’s Number-One Power
1 General David Petraeus in an interview with BBC Radio 4, March 24, 2008. Cf. Testimony by General Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad, at the U.S. Senate hearing on April 8, 2008.
2 The congress elected a nine-man “Coordination Council” for the proposed jihad. Among its members were Turabi; Osama bin Laden, later to emerge as the leader of al-Qaeda; Ayman al-Zawahiri, of the Egyptian Jama’ah al-Islamiyah (Islamic Society) and later bin Laden’s second-in-command; the Algerian Abdallah Jaballah of an-nahda (Awakening) party; and Ayatollah Mehdi Karrubi, at the time speaker of the Islamic Consultative Assembly (Majlis), Iran’s ersatz parliament.
3 Cet animal est trop mechant, / Quant on l’attacque, il se defend!
4 After the murder of 241 Marines in their sleep in 1982, President Ronald Reagan withdrew the U.S. task force from Lebanon despite the fact that they had been sent under a United nations Security Council mandate and at the invitation of the Lebanese government to protect the Palestinians. In 1999, President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, apologized to the Islamic Republic in Iran for unspecified aspects of past U.S. policy. Clinton also dispatched a string of emissaries, including his Un ambassador, Bill Richardson, to Kandahar, capital of the Taliban in Afghanistan, to court Mullah Muhammad Omar, but without success. On one occasion, Richardson was kept waiting for two days to see the mullah to deliver Clinton’s message, before being told that he had to return home without a meeting. The mullah could not sully himself by meeting an “infidel” emissary!
5 See Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America (new York: Random House, 2004).
Chapter 2: The Haven of Jihad
1 Cf. Carl Schmidt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab, Erna Hilfstein (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996).
2 Here is how “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenehi described the “deeper meaning” of the slogan in a sermon to Islamic Revolutionary Guards in Tehran on March 14, 2005: “Death to America is something every Muslim must say before every sura of the Koran. It is like saying anathema to Satan. It is because we have to be constantly aware that Satan is there to attack you.” Broadcast live by Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB).
3 Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a member of the Council of the Custodians of the Constitution, a key organ of the Khomeinist regime, put it this way: “After [the death] of the Prophet, the Koran was discarded and Koranic laws were pushed aside. Our revolution revived it, and is making [the laws of the Koran] triumph in every corner of the earth.” Friday sermon on the campus of Tehran University, February 29, 2008, broadcast live by Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB).
Chapter 3: The Focus of the Universe
1 Iran has land and sea frontiers with the following states: Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and nakhichivan (autonomous enclave).
2 The neighbors are Russia and Pakistan. The other three are China, India, and Israel. One could also include the United States, which may be considered a neighboring power thanks to its massive and semi-permanent presence in the Persian Gulf.
3 Persian belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, which includes such ancient languages as Sanskrit and Greek, and modern ones like German and English.
4 These include Kurdish, Baluchi, Pushtun, Sart, Ossetian, Tati, and Taleshi.
5 Yammut and Kokalan, also spoken in neighboring Turkmenistan, parts of Uzbekistan, and northwestern Afghanistan.
6 Other non-Iranic languages spoken by smaller communities in various parts of Iran include Armenian, Assyrian, Chaldean, and Tatar.
7 Sheikh Abdul-Aziz bin Baz, in conversation with the author in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in november 1996.
8 Each of these faith communities is, in turn, divided into several rival sects. Some, like the Yazidis, are closer to Zoroastrianism than Islam, while others, like Ali-Allahis—who believe that Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali was an avatar of Allah—clearly fall outside the broadest perimeter of Islamic belief.
9 The phrase is from the historian Muhammad Mohit-Tabatabai (died in Tehran in 1988), who echoed Hegel’s assertion that history began with the creation of the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great.
Chapter 4: The Triple Oxymoron
1 The second caliph, Omar bin Khattab, was murdered by an Iranian war prisoner, Firuz, known as Abu-Laulau (Father of Pearls). The third, Osman Ibn Affan, was hacked to death by a group allegedly linked to Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law. Ali, who became the fourth and last of the “Well-Guided Caliphs,” died when one of his former aides, Abdul-Rahman Ibn Muljem, cracked his skull with a sword.
2 The late Ayatollah Ali-Akbar Meshkini, longtime speaker of the Assembly of Experts, a high organ of the Islamic Republic in Iran, claimed in a sermon in Qom, in 2003, that only Iran had a “truly Islamic system of government.” Others, including the “self-styled Islamic Republics” and the Saudi Arabian kingdom, were making “sordid claims” when they called their systems Islamic. Khomeini himself referred to the Saudi system as “American Islam.”
3 Described as such because they believe in twelve imams, the last of whom went into “prolonged occultation” in 941 A.D. The Zaydis believe in a chain of only four imams and the Ismailis recognize seven.
4 Of the six grand ayatollahs of the time, three—Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Kazem Shariatmadari, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Khonsari, and Grand Ayatollah Hassan Tabatabai-Qomi—openly rejected the Khomeinist system as “un-Islamic.” Two others, Grand Ayatollah Shahabeddin Mar’ashi-najafi and Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Golpayegani, practiced taqiyyah, the Shiite tradition of dissimulation, to avoid taking a clear position on the issue. The sixth, Khomeini himself, was alone in regarding his system as “Islamic.”
5 Cf. Colin Turner, Islam Without Allah? The Rise of Religious Externalism in Safavid Iran (Surrey, UK: Curzon Press, 2000).
6 In Arabic: La ilah il-Allah! Muhammad an rasul Allah! The formula is known as shehadatayn or “the two testimonies.” Anyone who pronounces it with sincere belief is immediately recognized as a Muslim.
7 Jaafar Ibn Muhammad Ibn Alil Ibn Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet, was the sixth imam of Twelver Shiites and the chief theoretician of their creed. This is why Twelver Shiites are also known as Jaafaris. His followers gave him the title Al-Sadiq (“the Truthful One”).
8 Yaqub Kolini Razi, Usul Kafi [Sufficient Fundamentals], pp. 104-12. The book is one of the basic texts of Twelver Shiism.
9 Khomeini, Kashf al-Asrar [Revelation of Secrets], p. 100.
10 The original text is made of the following verses, repeated a number of times:
Allah is the Greatest,
There is no God but Allah,
Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah.
Come to reconciliation,
Come to success.
The Shiite text contains two more hemistitches: “Ali is the Vicar of Allah” and “Come to doing good deeds.”
11 They were Maulavi Abdul Quddus, Maulavi Yussef Sohrabi, and Mulavi Muhammad Omar Sarbazi.
12 Interview with Hussein Haj-Faraj-Allah Dabbagh, better known under his nom de guerre Abdul-Karim Sorush, in 2004. Sorush first made his name as secretary general of the Council for Islamic Cultural Revolution set up by Khomeini in 1979 to purge the Iranian universities. The council closed all universities for two years and purged over 6,000 professors and lecturers. Hundreds more were sent to prison.
It also excluded over 15,000 students accused of being liberals, monarchists, nationalists, or Marxists. A few years later, Sorush joined the loyal opposition to the regime and eventually decided to go into exile in Britain.
13 The survey was commissioned by the deputy prime minister, nassir Assar, but was never published. Assar’s successor in the post, Alinaqi Kani, showed the author a copy of the report in 1978.
14 Tehrani, who was married to Khamenehi’s sister, spent almost ten years in exile in Iraq. He returned to Iran in 1995 and spent two years in prison, during which he attempted suicide on at least two occasions. He died in 2002.
15 See Amir Taheri, The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1985).
16 Some of Ayatollah Kazemeini Boroujerdi’s sermons before his imprisonment in 2008 can be found on YouTube.
17 Ayatolla Mahmoud Tabatabai-Qomi in an interview with the author in London, January 2002.
18 Halabi was born in Yazd, central Iran, in 1897, and died in Tehran in 1999.