by Robin Wright
Born in 1939, Ayatollah Khamenei is a tall, lean man with full white whiskers and square, oversized glasses. He wears the black turban of a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. A student of the Imam’s, he was jailed six times by the Shah. His most unusual physical trait is a limp right hand and thin, atrophied fingers that dangle at his side. He suffered serious chest and arm injuries in 1981, when a tape-recorder bomb went off as he was delivering a speech. The regime dubbed him a “living martyr.”
I met Khamenei in 1987. He was the first Iranian leader to speak at the United Nations since the revolution. He was president at the time. His debut at the world body, in full clerical garb and turban, reflected the revolution’s early hubris. Speaking in the cavernous General Assembly hall, Khamenei blithely dismissed the world body as “a paper factory that issued worthless orders.”
He then portrayed Iran’s revolution as a contribution to global order because it had toppled a monarchy that had been in “the service of imperial powers, particularly the United States.” Washington, he angrily proclaimed, with no sense of the normal diplomatic politesse used at the United Nations, was the “arch Satan.”
With a handful of journalists, I was invited to a small breakfast for him the next day at the Waldorf-Astoria. Given his speech, it was a slightly bizarre scene. A collection of clean-shaven U.S. Secret Service agents—who provide security for all visiting heads of state, even for countries with which the United States has no diplomatic relations—were working with a detail of bearded Iranian Revolutionary Guards to protect the Iranian leader. They coordinated and kibitzed like fellow professionals.
At breakfast, Khamenei came across as a dour and distant man, unable to go beyond tired rhetoric and devoid of the kind of mysterious charisma that originally attracted millions of Iranians to the Imam. A Revolutionary Guard stood next to the disabled president’s chair and cut up his breakfast foods. It seemed symbolic. Widely considered a weak politician, he was dependent on others to achieve political office.
Yet Khamenei has emerged as the revolution’s most enduring constant during its first three decades. The two big turning points in his career symbolize the two pivotal debates that have dominated politics since 1979.
The first big debate was about who should lead the revolution. The answer took two and one half years to sort out. It was the revolution’s bloodiest phase.
The Imam—and many of the people who took to the streets to topple the shah—initially did not intend to create a theocracy or to see clerics rule. “Our intention is not that religious leaders should themselves administer the state,” Imam Khomeini told Le Monde shortly before returning to Iran from exile in Paris.3 After a wild welcome in Tehran, he moved back to his modest home on a muddy side street in Qom. The first revolutionary government was led by secular technocrats. The Imam was consulted mainly to settle disputes.
But when Iran got down to the business of writing a new constitution—the instrument to define the new state—the process began to look like Tehran’s traffic.
In some frenzied politicking, sixty-two drafts were introduced, more than 4,000 constitutional proposals put forward. Many called for technocrats to continue; they opposed clerical rule. Others favored a strong parliament to prevent a president from becoming another autocrat. Some wanted an elected judiciary rather than appointees. Ethnic minorities wanted autonomy from Tehran.4 The many versions were boiled down, with difficulty after heated disagreements, to two formal drafts. Both constitutions called for a strong president. Both outlined a secular structure for the new state. Both borrowed heavily from Europe’s Napoleonic law. Neither allocated special roles for the clergy. And neither proposed a position of supreme leader.
The Imam accepted the second draft, but several parties balked at both. Controversy raged. Rivalries deepened. To end the political gridlock, Iran’s Revolutionary Council called for election of an Assembly of Experts to write a final draft. The vote, however, only deepened the divide. When twenty political groups boycotted the poll, the unlikely coalition that had ousted the shah—including communists and clerics, radical students and conservative businessmen, nationalists and ethnic movements—formally collapsed.
The election, held six months after the Imam’s return, marked the day the revolution was hijacked by the clergy.
With most secular parties staying away, clerics won two thirds of the Assembly of Experts seats. They then crafted a constitution steeped in Islam. Article Four stipulates, “All laws and regulations, including civil, criminal, financial, economic, administrative, cultural, military, political or otherwise, shall be based on Islamic principles.”
The new constitution created a unique political system—with two parallel governments. The first layer is secular, based on Western models. It includes separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, with elections by universal suffrage from the age of sixteen.
The parallel layer is religious. Every branch of government is mirrored by an Islamic institution led by clerics, most of whom are appointed. One body is elected, but the candidates emerge from a clergy whose members basically promote each other to religious positions behind closed doors, with lifetime standing and virtually no accountability.
The religious bodies were designed to be watchdogs. But in every case they have ended up more powerful.
At the top, the Islamic Republic’s president is elected every four years and is limited to two terms. His powers are checked by parliament and the judiciary.
But the president is mirrored by the supreme leader, or velayat-e faqih. The concept emerged from the Imam’s fascination with Plato’s Republic and the idea of a philosopher-king, adapted to the Islamic world.
The supreme leader is charged with the oversight of all branches of government. He is infallible in all affairs of faith and state, with ultimate veto power over every issue in a country with the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves and the region’s second-most-powerful military. He also appoints the chiefs of the judiciary and military. And he controls the internal security and intelligence services. There is no appeal from any of his decisions.
The supreme leader runs the most powerful political papacy in the world.
The role is a radical departure in Shiite doctrine. For fourteen centuries, Shiites had been suspicious of political power. The state was viewed as imperfect, corruptible, and a source of persecution and injustice. Shiites had never before accepted temporal rule. It was anathema. So the Imam’s decision to put clerics in charge of a modern government was a revolution within Shiism as well as in Iranian politics. It also went against the will of the majority of Shiite clergy, both in and outside Iran.
Other branches of government also have mirror images.
Iran’s unicameral parliament has 290 members elected every four years. It is mirrored by the twelve-member Council of Guardians appointed on an open-ended basis. The guardians can reject both candidates and legislation for not being Islamic enough. And they often do.
In the judiciary, Iran’s civil and criminal courts are headed by secular judges usually with legal training. Most proceedings are open. They are mirrored by Islamic courts headed by clerics. The clerics can charge people, vaguely or vindictively, with un-Islamic activity. And they often do. Many proceedings are held in secret.
Iran’s military has the conventional branches of army, navy, and air force, with a total of more than 400,000 troops. They are mirrored by the elite Revolutionary Guards of some 125,000 troops, plus the young paramilitary volunteers called the Basij, or Mobilization of the Oppressed. They were formed in the revolution’s early days to protect the clerics, specifically to prevent the conventional military from trying to launch a coup. During Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq, however, the Revolutionary Guards and Basij emerged as far more powerful. They were also put in charge of Iran’s secret military procurement programs, including missiles and weapons of mass destruction.
Yet Iran’s new constitution did not create a theocracy. Even a
fter it passed, Iran’s government was still distinctly split. Secular technocrats ran the traditional arms of government, while clerics dominated the religious institutions. The Imam even decreed that clerics could not run in the first presidential election, which took place a year after the revolution, in January 1980.
The winner was Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, a French-educated economist who had been twice imprisoned by the Shah. A tall man with black, wavy hair, he had a mustache that turned up at the ends, but he was otherwise notably clean-shaven—at a time when beards and stubble were in vogue, even de rigueur, politically. He was close to the Imam during exile in France. Before the revolution, he wrote extensively on how Islamic economics could replace either capitalism or communism.
But Iran’s political transformation was still not complete. Neither a new constitution nor a new government ended the discord. Internal spats escalated as revolutionary factions turned on each other. Amid crackdowns, arrests, and executions, the government’s secular technocrats and the clerics began to fall out too. Bani-Sadr took to writing a newspaper column called the President’s Diary to air his troubles. He criticized the clergy for creating a climate of fear. He equated their tactics with Stalinism. He called publicly for “resistance to tyranny,” while privately writing the Imam to caution that the regime was moving toward dictatorship. Once he dared to warn that the revolution was “committing suicide.”
Clashes soon erupted between supporters and opponents of the president. Two dozen died in the bloodiest one-day showdown.
The tensions finally played out on the floor of Iran’s parliament. In June 1981, seventeen months after taking office, parliament impeached Bani-Sadr. The next day, the Imam used his absolute power to remove Bani-Sadr from office and order his arrest. Dressed as a woman, the revolution’s fist president went into hiding. He eventually fled to France.
The next sixteen months were even bloodier, as Iran’s factions fought it out. Two massive bombs in June and August 1981 eliminated a second president, the prime minister, ten cabinet officials, and twenty-seven members of parliament. In a four-month period in 1981, more than 1,000 government officials—including clerics, judges, politicians, and aides to Khomeini—were killed.5
The assassinations forced Iran to hold three presidential elections in a twenty-one-month period in 1980 and 1981, the last two within ten weeks.
In the disarray, the Imam lifted his ban on clerics running for government office. He no longer trusted many secular politicians. In the third presidential election in October 1981, clerics were the only serious candidates.
The winner was Khamenei.
His election marked the moment that the theocrats took over both halves of the state. Iran officially had its “government of God.”
Khamenei served as president until he became supreme leader after the Imam’s death in 1989. Despite his powers on paper in both jobs, however, Khamenei has never achieved the same aura as the Imam. In his weakness, he has been more thin-skinned about challenges and more vindictive in response.
In 1995, I was in Tehran during the sixteenth anniversary of the American embassy seizure, an event commemorated each year with lots of speeches and a parade to the old embassy compound. The supreme leader devoted more time berating Soroush, Iran’s leading philosopher and reformer at the time, than condemning the United States or Israel.
“It makes me very sad when I see people who seem to be one of us…understanding truths in such a distorted way and publishing them,” Khamenei railed in his comments on the anniversary.
“Interpreting religion isn’t something that can be carried out by just anyone. Jurisprudence is the main science of the clergy,” he warned. “If someone confronts the clergy, he gladdens the Zionists and the Americans more than anything else…because they’ve set their heart on the destruction of the clergy.
“Well, the Islamic system will slap these people hard in the face!”
The regime’s thugs often did just that. Soroush kept a collection of ripped and bloodied shirts from attacks on him in classrooms as well as on the streets.
As a cleric, Khamenei has issued thousands of fatwas, or edicts, ensuring strict Islamic interpretations on everything from Islamic law to betting on basketball, student loans to children in day care with non-Muslims, women on motorcycles to staying in hotels used by Buddhists.6 Unlike papal bulls, which are initiated by the Vatican, fatwas are issued as answers to questions from members of the flock. They were used by the regime to control everyday life.
Music, Khamenei ruled, can cause deviant behavior and moral corruption among the young that is not compatible with the goals of an Islamic order.
Foreign news, Khamenei ruled, is outlawed if it in any way “lessens trust in Islamic government.”
When riding bicycles or motorcycles, he ruled, women must avoid actions that lead to the wrong kind of attention.
Clapping, he advised, is not forbidden on “joyful occasions” but must be avoided if religion is involved.
Nose piercing, he ruled, is not forbidden, although as an adornment it must be covered.
On clothing, he wrote, pictures or symbols from Western countries are a problem because they “promote the cultural aggression against Muslims.” Wearing ties is forbidden as it “imitates and propagates the cultural assault” on Muslims.
But new restrictions are not what many Iranians expected out of the revolution. And three decades later, Khamenei faced the same irrepressible irreverence that makes Tehran’s streets so crazy. A lot of Iranians do exactly what they want, fatwa or not.
In 2004, I was in Tehran again during the twenty-fifth anniversary of the U.S. Embassy takeover. During the commemoration in front of the graffiti-covered wall around the American compound, supporters of the regime handed out little cards listing companies to boycott, such as Calvin Klein, because they do business with Israel. Yet throughout the capital, billboards once reserved for revolutionary slogans and Iranians killed in their Iraq war instead now advertised Calvin Klein—as well as Cartier watches, Nokia mobile phones, and Hummer, a cologne for men named after the American military vehicle.
Victoria’s Secret had also arrived in Tehran. So had the Gap, Diesel, Benetton, and Black & Decker. They were not legal franchises. Economic sanctions forbid American companies from doing business with Iran. So Iranian entrepreneurs bought brand-name goods abroad and resold them in their own shops, often with the brand replacing the shop name on storefront signs. Victoria’s Secret was a bit more discreet. It was marked only by a trademark pink-and-white-striped Victoria’s Secret bag in the window.
Iran’s young, who comprise seventy percent of the population, are particularly defiant, sometimes desperately so. When Iran beat Bahrain to qualify for the 2005 World Cup, tens of thousands of young males and females poured onto Tehran’s streets to celebrate. More than 100 young females even defied police—and fatwas against women attending male sporting events—to get into the stadium to see the game.
The eruption of life is visible every Thursday evening, the eve of the Muslim Sabbath, on Africa Boulevard. Teenagers and twenty-somethings cruise up and down a street lined with boutiques and fast-food joints in their colorful Japanese and Korean compacts. Boys in one car, girls in another, they drive slowly back and forth for hours, their cars blaring Justin Timberlake, Ricky Martin, punk, rock, rap, heavy metal, pop, jazz, electronic, or disco. Everyone seems to be talking, either shouting to passengers in other cars or on cell phones after beaming numbers to each other. Some will hook up later in alleys near the pizza parlors that have proliferated throughout Tehran.
Police try to break up the car cavorting, but they, too, get stuck in the bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Dress codes are openly ignored by the imaginative young. One of my favorite images was a young woman whose version of Islamic dress was a black skirt and a baggy black sweatshirt emblazoned PLANET HOLLYWOOD LAS VEGAS. Pale pink has increasingly replaced black as the female fashion favorite, even among the devout. Many o
f the young dare to wear tight jeans under bust-stretching shirts or jackets. Colorful headscarves are perched precariously at the crown of the head to expose as much of a beautifully coifed hairdo as possible without falling off. Open-toed shoes expose toenails lacquered in red, purple, pink, or black. Faces are heavily made up. Among the young, plastic surgery—especially nose jobs—is common.
Many of Khamenei’s other fatwas are also ignored. Satellite dishes beam in CNN and BBC, which are viewed even in government offices. Women ride on the back of motorcycles, their chadors flapping dangerously in the wind. And the double bill at a local movie house the same weekend as the commemoration of the American embassy takeover in 2004 featured Kill Bill and Fahrenheit 9/11. They played to sold-out audiences. Despite its theme of religious irreverence, Bruce Almighty drew big audiences a few months later.
Khamenei’s powers are at the heart of the second big debate in Iran. It pits the clergy against itself—even within Khamenei’s own family. And it has still not been resolved three decades after the revolution.
Since 1989, the symbol of dissent among Iran’s clergy has been Ayatollah Ali Montazeri. The Imam, who once called him “the fruit of my life,” appointed Montazeri as his successor. They had been lifelong colleagues.
But ten years into the revolution, the two men had a final and politically fatal falling-out when Montazeri dared to criticize the Islamic republic and its rulers. The theocracy, he said publicly, had failed to fulfill much of its early promise. He called on the government to “correct past mistakes.”
“One does not fight a doctrine by killing, because no problem can be settled this way. One fights back with a fair doctrine,” he wrote the warden of Tehran’s Evin Prison after word circulated about several secret executions of dissidents.7