Khomeini, often thought in the West to be a rabble-rouser, was not advocating violence. The crowds who protested on the streets were unarmed, and their deaths laid bare the ruthless ferocity of the shah’s secular regime. The assassination of Martin Luther King, who had insisted that a nonviolent response to injury was “an absolute necessity for our survival … the key to the solution of the problems of our world,”85 also revealed the latent violence of American society. King would have agreed with Khomeini’s demand for global justice. He had lamented Kennedy’s disastrous colonial misadventure in the Bay of Pigs (1961), and even though Johnson had given African Americans more than any previous president, he refused to support his war in Vietnam. But in the late 1970s, when the Iranian revolution broke out, the mood in the West had changed. In 1978 the conservative bishop of Cracow Karol Wojtyla, a fierce opponent of Liberation Theology, was elected to the papacy, taking the name of John Paul II. The fundamentalist Moral Majority had surged to the forefront of American religious life, and the Democratic president Jimmy Carter, a “born-again” Christian who campaigned vigorously for human rights, was a loyal supporter of the shah’s dictatorship.
Viewed from the West, Iran seemed to be booming during the 1970s, but the state had become rich at the expense of the nation; a million people were unemployed, local merchants had been ruined by the influx of foreign goods, and there was widespread resentment of the flourishing American expatriates.86 After Khomeini’s departure, the shah had become even more autocratic and started to secularize more aggressively, confiscating the awqaf and bringing the madrassas under strict bureaucratic control.87 When Ayatollah Riza Saidi denounced the regime, he was tortured to death, and thousands of demonstrators poured onto the streets of Qum.88 The charismatic lay philosopher Ali Shariati (1933–77), who had studied at the Sorbonne, kept the revolutionary flame alive among the young Westernized Iranians.89 He told them that if they tried to conform too closely to the Western ideal and abandoned the Shiah, they would lose themselves; the example of Ali and Husain compelled Muslims to stand up and say no to injustice, coercion, and tyranny. Shariati too was tortured, imprisoned, and died in exile, almost certainly the victim of SAVAK agents. In Najaf in 1971, Khomeini published Islamic Government, arguing that the ulema should rule the state. His doctrine of velayat-e faqih (“the government of a [Muslim] jurist”) seemed to fly in the face of Western modernity and was shocking to most Shiis, since for centuries the clergy had refused official posts—in the absence of the Hidden Imam, they regarded any government as corrupt. But Khomeini’s thought was clearly in line with those Third World intellectuals who defied global structural violence. Islam, he would always claim, was “the religion of militant individuals who are committed to faith and justice. It is the religion of those who desire freedom and independence. It is the school of those who struggle against imperialism.”90
Even though nobody at this date, Khomeini included, believed that it was possible to topple the shah, events were moving faster than he had anticipated. In November 1977, his son Mustafa was assassinated in Iraq, again almost certainly by SAVAK agents,91 and the shah forbade mourning ceremonies to be held. This only identified Khomeini even more closely with the Shii Imams, since like Husain, his son had been murdered by an unjust ruler, casting the shah yet again as Yazid. And at this critical juncture, U.S. president Jimmy Carter cast himself as the “Great Satan.” In November 1977, while Iran was mourning Mustafa Khomeini, the shah visited Washington, and Carter spoke with great emotion of the United States’ “special relationship” with Iran, “an island of stability in a turbulent corner of the world.”92 He thus entered the unfolding Karbala drama as the shaytan, the “tempter,” who lured the shah to follow the United States to the detriment of his own people.
The revolution began on January 8, 1978, when the semiofficial newspaper Ettelaat published a preposterous attack on Khomeini.93 The next day four thousand unarmed students in Qum demanded a revival of the 1906 constitution, freedom of speech, the release of political prisoners, and the return of Khomeini. Throughout, Iranians showed that they had fully absorbed the modern ethos, demanding the independence, liberty, and constitutional rule that they had been consistently denied by the shah’s secular government and the international community. Seventy of these students were killed. With this massacre, the regime crossed a line. A pattern now emerged. Forty days after the Qum massacre, crowds gathered for the traditional mourning ceremonies for the dead, and more people were shot down. Forty days later there were more ritualized rallies in honor of the new martyrs. Marxists, secularists, and liberals who opposed the shah but knew that they had no grassroots appeal joined forces with the religiously minded revolutionaries. This was not a violent uprising, however. Cinemas, banks, and liquor stores—symbols of the “great shaytan”—were attacked, but not people.94 By now the jails were full of political prisoners, and the mounting death toll showed the world that the shah’s secular regime, lauded in the West as progressive and peaceful, was slaughtering its own people.
The revolution was experienced as a religious as well as a political event. Demonstrators carried placards reading “Everywhere is Karbala, and every day is Ashura,” convinced that they were following Husain in their struggle against oppression.95 They spoke of the revolution as a transforming and purifying experience, as if they were purging themselves of a debilitating poison and regaining authenticity.96 Many felt as though Husain himself were leading them and that Khomeini, like the Hidden Imam, was directing them from afar.97 On the last night of Ramadan, September 4, vast crowds prostrated themselves in prayer in the streets, but—an important turning point—this time the army did not open fire. Even more significant, the middle classes began to join in the protests, marching with placards reading: “Independence, Freedom and Islamic Government!”98 At six a.m. on September 8, martial law was declared, but the twenty thousand demonstrators who were already gathering in Jaleh Square did not know it; when they refused to disperse, the soldiers opened fire. As many as nine hundred people may have died that day.99
That evening Carter called the shah from Camp David to assure him of his support, and the White House, while regretting the loss of life, reaffirmed its special relationship with Iran. The liberty and independence for which the American revolutionaries had fought were clearly not for everybody. On the first three nights of Muharram, men donned the white shroud of the martyr and ran through the streets defying the curfew, while others shouted anti-shah slogans from the rooftops. The BBC estimated that seven hundred people had been killed by the Iranian army and police in these few days alone.100 Yet still there was no mob violence. On December 9, for six hours a vast procession—at different times numbering between 300,000 and 1.5 million people—wound through the streets of Tehran, walking quietly four abreast. Two million more marched on the day of Ashura itself, carrying green, red, and black flags, representing Islam, martyrdom, and the Shiah.101
A month later it was all over. The shah and the royal family flew to Egypt, and on February 1, 1979, Khomeini returned to Tehran. His arrival was one of those events, like the storming of the Bastille, that seemed to change the world forever. For committed liberal secularists, it was a dark moment, the triumph of the forces of unreason over rationality. But for many Muslims, Sunni as well as Shii, it seemed a luminous reversal. As he drove through the streets of Tehran, the crowds greeted him as if he were the returned Hidden Imam, confident that a new age had dawned. Taha Hejazi published a poem of celebration, a tremulous hope for the justice that the shah and the international community had denied them:
When the Imam returns,
Iran—this broken, wounded mother—
Will be forever liberated
From the shackles of tyranny and ignorance
And the chains of plunder, torture and prison.102
Khomeini liked to quote the hadith in which the Prophet announced after a battle that he was returning from the lesser to the “greater jihad,” the implementation of t
ruly Islamic values in society, a struggle far more exacting than the “lesser” military one. As he looked at the ecstatic crowds that day, he must surely have felt apprehension at the more onerous jihad about to begin.
It was indeed a struggle: almost at once, perhaps predictably, the fragile coalition of Marxists, liberals, and the devout seemed to unravel. There was opposition to the new constitution, in 1980 four separate plots against the regime were uncovered, and there were constant street battles between secularist guerrillas and Khomeini’s Revolutionary Guards. A reign of terror ensued, not unlike those that followed the French and Russian Revolutions, when so-called revolutionary councils, which the government could not control, executed hundreds of people for “un-Islamic behavior.” As a crowning blow, on September 20, 1980, the southwest of the country was invaded by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces. During this turbulent period, the American hostage crisis proved a godsend to Khomeini. On November 4, 1979, three thousand Iranian students had stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and taken ninety prisoners. It is not clear whether Khomeini knew of their plan beforehand, and everyone expected him to release the hostages immediately. But although the women hostages and the embassy’s Marine guards were allowed to return to America, the remaining fifty-two diplomats were held for 444 days. In the West, this disreputable affair seemed to epitomize Islamic radicalism.
Yet Khomeini’s decision to retain the hostages was inspired not by an Islamic imperative but simply by politics. He could see that this focus on the Great Satan would unite Iranians behind him at his difficult juncture. As he explained to his prime minister Bani Sadr:
This action has many benefits. The Americans do not want to see the Islamic Republic taking root. We keep the hostages, finish our internal work, and then release them. This has united our people. Our opponents do not dare act against us. We can put the constitution to the people’s vote without difficulty, and carry out presidential and parliamentary elections. When we have finished all these jobs, we can let the hostages go.103
As soon as they were no longer useful, the hostages were released on January 20, 1981, the inauguration day of the new U.S. president Ronald Reagan and the departure of his “satanic” predecessor Jimmy Carter. Inevitably the hostage crisis tainted the image and idealism of the Islamic Revolution. Many Iranians were unhappy about it, even while appreciating its symbolism. A nation’s embassy is regarded as its sovereign territory on foreign soil, and some thought it apt that American citizens should be held there, just as for decades Iranians had felt imprisoned in their own country with the connivance of the United States. But this was simply revenge politics, and the cruel treatment meted out to the hostages violated cardinal principles of all faith traditions, not least those of Islam. Whatever the regime gained by stopping the clock while it achieved a degree of stability, it would pay for over many years in the ledger of the privileged free world.
The great genius of the Shiah was its tragic perception that it is impossible fully to implement the ideals of religion in the inescapably violent realm of politics. Ashoka had discovered this even earlier than the Shii Imams when he promoted his compassionate dharma but could not disband his army. At best, people of faith can either bear witness to these values, as Khomeini did when he castigated the injustice of the Pahlavi regime in the 1960s, or provide an alternative that either challenges or seeks to mitigate state violence. But as we have seen throughout this story, even the most humanitarian traditions are unable to implement their ideals if they identify with a state ideology that inevitably depends upon force. Khomeini believed that the revolution had been a rebellion against the rational pragmatism of the modern world. The goal of his theory of velayat-e faqih was to institutionalize Shii values: the supreme jurist (faqih) and the ulema on the Council of Guardians would have the power to veto any legislation that violated the principles of Islamic justice.104 But in practice, Khomeini would often have to reprove the guardians for playing selfish power games, just as he himself had felt compelled to pursue a cynical realpolitik during the hostage crisis.
We have seen that revolutions can take a long time, and like the French Revolution, the Iranian Revolution has passed through many stages and is still in progress. As in France, Iranians feared that powerful external enemies would destroy the Islamic regime. In the summer of 1983 the Iraqis attacked Iranian troops with mustard gas and then with nerve gas the following year.105 Khomeini was convinced that America would organize a coup similar to the one that had deposed Musaddiq in 1953. Because Iran had antagonized the West, she had forfeited essential equipment, spare parts, and technical advice; inflation was high, and by 1982 unemployment had risen to 30 percent of the general population and 50 percent in the cities.106 The poor, whose plight Khomeini had championed, were not doing much better under the revolution. Yet Western observers had to acknowledge that, despite the growing opposition of Westernized Iranians, Khomeini never lost the love of the masses, especially the bazaaris, the madrassa students, the less-eminent ulema, and the poor.107 These people, whom the shah’s modernization program had overlooked, still thought and spoke in a traditionally religious, premodern way that many Westerners could not even comprehend.
After the Iranian Revolution, one exasperated U.S. official was heard to exclaim: “Whoever took religion seriously?”108 Since the Enlightenment, revolutions were understood to occur at a time when the saeculum had reached maturity and was strong enough to declare its independence of faith.109 The idea of a popular uprising ushering in a religiously oriented state was almost embarrassing in its upending of accepted wisdom; many Westerners deplored it as atavistic and perverse. But they seemed unable to see that by pursuing their own political and economic agendas that did violence to the Iranian people, Western governments had bred a new species of religion. They had been blind to the particular problems of the postcolonial state and the pitfalls of a modernization imposed from without rather than effected organically from within.110 And in deploring the new theocracy, they failed to appreciate a central irony. The Western ideals of liberty had fired the Iranian imagination and inspired Iranians to demand basic freedoms, but the Western secular ideal had been irredeemably tainted for Iranians by the self-interest and cruelty with which it had been pursued. The United States declared that it had a God-given mission to spread liberty throughout the world, but this had evidently not included the people of Iran. “We did not expect Carter to defend the shah, for he is a religious man who has raised the slogan of defending human rights,” an ayatollah explained to an interviewer after the revolution. “How can Carter, the devout Christian, defend the shah?”111 Such perplexity reveals how strange a premodern sensibility must find the idea of religion as a private matter.
The Iranian Revolution had dramatically changed the status quo in the Persian Gulf. The shah had been one of the key pillars of U.S. policy in the region, permitting the West to access its vast oil reserves at a viable price. In December 1979, the Soviet Union sought to capitalize on America’s loss of influence in the region by invading Iran’s neighbor Afghanistan. This Cold War struggle between the superpowers helped to inspire a global jihad that would eventually target the United States and its allies. But it would be some time before the West recognized this danger, because during the 1980s and 1990s, it was more concerned with terrorist atrocities and violence in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent that seemed wholly inspired by “religion.”
12
Holy Terror
On November 18, 1978, nine hundred and thirteen American citizens died of self-administered cyanide poisoning in the agricultural colony of Jonestown, Guyana.1 It was to date the largest loss of civilian life in a single incident in U.S. history. The deceased men, women, and children were members of the People’s Temple founded during the 1950s in Indianapolis, Indiana, by the charismatic preacher James Warren Jones (1938–78). Its commitment to racial and social equality had attracted chiefly poor, working-class white Americans and African Americans. Members lived a strictly
communal life based on what Jones called the “apostolic socialism” of the Acts of the Apostles. In 1965, after having a vision of a nuclear bomb destroying Chicago, Jones had persuaded his followers to move with him and his family to safety in California. The Temple opened facilities in San Francisco and Los Angeles and gained a reputation for being politically progressive, offering legal services, child care, housing, and drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Membership increased to about one thousand, and in 1976, to escape the systemic violence and injustice that it believed to be inherent in the United States, the Temple moved to Guyana.
Jonestown is often cited by those who claim that religion has been responsible for more death and suffering than any other human activity. Yet even though Jones was an ordained Methodist pastor who often quoted the gospels and used religion in recruitment, he was a self-confessed atheist and communist who often ridiculed conventional Christianity. Stories about the Temple’s violence had begun to circulate in 1972: defectors spoke of beatings, verbal abuse, and emotional cruelty. Members were viciously castigated for making racist or sexist remarks, complaining about the communal living arrangements, or wasting food. Culprits were subjected to brutal physical punishment and other humiliations in public, and the community was kept in a state of constant terror. Jones filled their minds with graphic descriptions of CIA torture methods, Nazi concentration camps, and Ku Klux Klan lynchings. In 1972, while still in California, he announced that the U.S. government was
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