by Reza Aslan
Shah Ismail was unmoved by arguments against the legitimacy of a Shi‘ite state in the absence of the “Hidden Imam.” Instead, he simply declared himself to be the long-awaited Mahdi, boldly crying out at his ascension, “I am very God, very God, very God!”
Soon after Ismail’s Safavid Dynasty came to an end in the eighteenth century, Twelver Shi‘ism, though remaining the “state religion” in Iran, reverted to its former political quietism, prompting the ayatollahs to cultivate once more the ideology of taqiyyah and to refrain from directly interfering in the administrations of the Qajar Dynasty, which succeeded the Safavids in the nineteenth century, and the Pahlavi Dynasty, which succeeded the Qajars in the twentieth.
All of that changed with the Ayatollah Khomeini.
ON A CHILLY February morning in 1979, hundreds of thousands of Iranians flooded the streets of Tehran to celebrate the end of the long, oppressive reign of Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. Among the crowd on that day were democrats, academics, and Western-educated intelligentsia, liberal and conservative religious clerics, bazaari merchants, feminists, communists, socialists, and Marxists, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, men, women, and children—all bound by their disdain for the despotic American-backed régime that had made life in Iran unbearable for so many people for so many years.
The crowd pumped their fists in the air, shouting “Death to the Shah!” and “Death to Tyranny!” Angry young men gathered throughout the city to burn American flags and chant anti-imperialist slogans against the superpower that had, a little more than two decades earlier, extinguished Iran’s first attempt at democratic revolution. That revolution took place in 1953, when the same improbable coalition of intelligentsia, clerics, and bazaari merchants managed to topple Iran’s monarchy, only to have it forcibly restored by the CIA a few months later.
“Death to America!” they shouted, their chants a warning to the American embassy in Tehran that this revolution would not be hindered, no matter the cost.
There was also on that day another, more singular contingent of demonstrators consisting mostly of bearded men and black-veiled women who marched through the streets shouting the names of the martyrs, Hasan and Husayn, and calling for the advent of the Last Days: the coming of the Mahdi. Almost to a person this raucous group displayed portraits and posters of the stern, brooding cleric who had over the last few years become the dominant voice of anti-imperialism in Iran: the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Born in 1902 to a respected family of Shi‘ite clerics, Khomeini studied law and theology in the esteemed seminaries of Najaf and Qom. He quickly ascended to the heights of Shi‘ism’s enormously complex clerical hierarchy, becoming a mujtahid worthy of emulation at the extraordinarily young age of thirty-two, and an ayatollah soon after. Like most Iranians, Khomeini blamed Iran’s weak-willed monarchy for allowing the country to be “the slaves of Britain one day, and America the next.” However, unlike most of his fellow ayatollahs, who insisted on maintaining their traditional political quietism, Khomeini unabashedly injected his moral authority into the sociopolitical machinations of the state. His ruthless condemnations of the Shah and his repeated calls for the abolishment of the throne finally led to his arrest and exile in 1964.
Fifteen years later, in 1979, Khomeini returned to Iran, triumphant and determined to usher in a new era in the country’s history—one that almost no one in the crowd could have predicted. Indeed, less than a year after his return from exile, Khomeini would ostracize, then execute his political and religious opponents—the same men and women who had brought this revolution to fruition—and replace the transitional government with his personal ideal of the Islamic state: a state in which he alone had final authority over all matters civil, legal, and religious.
But on that February morning, no one was calling Khomeini the Faqih, “the Jurist”: the title he would eventually give himself as Supreme Leader of the newly formed Islamic Republic of Iran. At that time, Khomeini had yet to unveil his plans for absolute clerical rule. Rather, amid the chants of “God, Quran, Khomeini,” and the placards that declared the old ayatollah to be “the Light of Our Life,” there was another title being bruited through the crowd like a secret that could not be contained. Khomeini, people were whispering, was the Mahdi; he had returned to Iran to restore Islam to its original state of perfection.
The reasons for the success of Khomeinism—the proper term for the religio-political philosophy that ultimately created the Islamic Republic of Iran—are numerous and too complicated to present here in detail. In many ways, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was the inevitable conclusion of two previous popular revolutions—the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11 and the Nationalist Revolution of 1953—both of which were suppressed by foreign governments (the first by the Russians and, to a lesser extent, the British; the second, as mentioned, by the United States) that wished to maintain their grip on Iran’s natural resources. By the late 1970s, most Iranians had grown so weary of the corrupt and ineffectual rule of Iran’s monarch, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, that another revolution was unavoidable.
Faced with an almost total lack of political participation (the Shah had eliminated the country’s party system and abolished its constitution), a reckless economic agenda that had fueled record inflation, a rapid and useless militarization, and a widespread loss of national and religious identity, the country’s clergy, its intellectuals, the merchant class, and nearly every sociopolitical organization in Iran—from the communists to the feminists—put aside their ideological differences and joined together in an anti-imperialist, nationalist revolt against a corrupt monarchy. Despite the post-revolution propaganda, this was by no means a monolithic revolutionary movement initiated at the behest of the Ayatollah Khomeini with the aim of establishing an Islamic theocracy. On the contrary, there were dozens of diverse and sometimes conflicting voices raised against the Shah. Khomeini’s, for better or worse, was merely the loudest.
Khomeini’s genius, both as a politician and as a religious leader, was his recognition that in a country steeped in the faith and culture of Shi‘ism, only the symbols and metaphors of Shi‘ite Islam could provide a common language with which to mobilize the masses. Thus, in transforming Iran into his personal vision of theocratic rule, Khomeini turned to the best example history had made available to him: Ismail, the Safavid ruler who five hundred years earlier had created the first Shi‘ite state by proclaiming himself the Mahdi.
Of course, Khomeini never likened himself to the Divine, nor did he ever explicitly claim the title of Mahdi—to have done so would have been political suicide. Rather, Khomeini consciously embraced the messianic charisma of the Mahdi, and allowed his followers to draw their own conclusions. Like all the Mahdis before him, Khomeini claimed descent from Imam Musa, and eagerly accepted the messianic title “Imam.” He deliberately cast Iran’s horrific eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (1980–1988) as revenge for the massacre of Husayn and his family at Karbala, even though such vengeance was the exclusive right of the Mahdi. In fact, the thousands of Iranian children who were thrown onto the front lines of the war as human minesweepers wore “keys to paradise” around their necks and headbands emblazoned with the word Karbala to remind them that they were not fighting a war for territory, but walking in the footsteps of the martyrs.
By far the most overt connection Khomeini established between himself and the Mahdi was his doctrine of the Valayat-e Faqih: “the rule of the jurist.” The particulars of this doctrine, in which popular and divine sovereignty are united in a single government, will be detailed in chapter 10. For now, it is sufficient to understand the basic outline of the doctrine and its place in Khomeini’s political and religious ideology.
Khomeini argued that in the absence of the Mahdi, divine guidance could come only from the Hidden Imam’s representatives on earth: that is, the ayatollahs. Khomeini was not the first Shi‘ite theologian to have made this claim; the same idea was formulated at the turn of the twentieth centu
ry by politically minded clerics like Sheikh Fazlollah Nuri (one of Khomeini’s ideological heroes) and the Ayatollah Kashani. But the Valayat-e Faqih proposed two startling modifications to traditional Shi‘ite doctrine. First, it insisted that absolute authority be concentrated in the hands of a single cleric, instead of all qualified clerics. Second, it argued that, as the deputy of the Mahdi, the supreme cleric’s authority was identical to that of the “Hidden Imam.” In other words, Khomeini’s guidance was, like the guidance of the Prophet and the twelve Imams, infallible and divinely inspired.
“When a mujtahid [a qualified jurist] who is just and learned stands up for the establishment and organization of the government,” Khomeini wrote in his historic political treatise, Islamic Government, “he will enjoy all the rights in the affairs of the society that were enjoyed by the Prophet.”
This was an astounding assertion and a radical religious innovation in Shi‘ism. Countering long-held beliefs that the Shi‘ah could be led only by the Mahdi when he returns from his occultation in the spiritual realm, Khomeini argued instead that it was the responsibility of the clerics to usher in the messianic era by establishing and governing the Mahdi’s state for him. The Valayat-e Faqih proposed that in the absence of the “Hidden Imam,” the Faqih—the Supreme Jurist and the country’s “most learned cleric”—should have “the responsibility of transacting all the business and carrying out all the affairs with which the Imams were entrusted.” And because he was the representative of the Mahdi on earth, the Faqih held “the same power as the Most Noble Messenger” and would also be entitled to absolute obedience from the people.
It is a sign of the great diversity of religious and political thought that exists in Shi‘ism that most other ayatollahs in Iran—including his superiors, the Ayatollahs Boroujerdi and Shariatmadari—rejected Khomeini’s doctrine of the Valayat-e Faqih, arguing that the responsibility of Muslim clerics in the modern world was to preserve the spiritual character of the Islamic state, not to run it directly. But what made Khomeini so alluring was his ability to couch his theology in the populist rhetoric of the time. He thus reached out to Iran’s influential communist and Marxist factions by reformulating traditional Shi‘ite ideology into a call for an uprising of the oppressed masses. He wooed the secular nationalists by lacing his speeches with allusions to Iran’s mythic past, while purposely obscuring the details of his political philosophy. “We do not say that government must be in the hands of the Faqih,” he claimed. “Rather we say that government must be run in accordance with God’s laws for the welfare of the country.” What he often failed to mention publicly was that such a state would not be feasible except, as he wrote, “with the supervision of the religious leaders.”
Khomeini balked when his fellow ayatollahs objected that the Valayat-e Faqih merely replaced one form of tyranny with another. After all, Khomeini argued, the Faqih is no mere secular leader; he is the heir to the “Hidden Imam.” As such, he does not administer divine justice, he is divine justice. Indeed, according to Khomeini, the Faqih is “not ‘just’ in the limited sense of social justice, but in the more rigorous and comprehensive sense that his quality of being just would be annulled if he were to utter a single lie.”
Once his colleagues had been intimidated into silence and Iran’s Shi‘ite majority stirred into action, Khomeini was free to seize control of the transitional government. Before most Iranians knew what they had accepted, he had used his popular mandate to inject his theological beliefs into the political realm, transforming Iran into the Islamic Republic, and proclaiming himself the country’s first Faqih: the supreme temporal and religious authority in Iran.
Three decades later, Khomeini’s theory of “the rule of the jurist,” or Valayat-e Faqih, is once again being challenged, not just by some of Iran’s most senior religious figures, such as the Grand Ayatollahs Mir Mohammad Ruhani, Sayed Hassan Tabatabai-Qomi, Yusuf Sanei, and Hussein Ali Montazeri, the last of whom, before his death in 2010, famously declared that “even the Prophet did not have absolute Valayat-e Faqih.” It is also being questioned by a new crop of young seminary students studying in the country’s religious capitol, Qom. These future religious leaders have never been exposed to traditional (that is, pre-Khomeinist) Shi‘ism. But they are keenly aware of the failure of the Valayat-e Faqih to usher in the “perfect state” promised by Ayatollah Khomeini. What’s more, they are cognizant of the way in which Iran’s politicized form of Shi‘ism has perhaps irreparably damaged the perception that most Iranians—70 percent of whom are under the age of thirty and thus have no memory of prerevolutionary Iran—have of religion in general and Islam in particular.
However, by far the most significant challenge to Khomeinism has come from outside of Iran, in neighboring Iraq. The 2002 U.S.–led war to depose Saddam Hussein had the somewhat unexpected effect of liberating the other major Shi‘ite school of law, in the holy Iraqi city of Najaf. Led by the Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a man many consider to be the most senior ayatollah in the world, the Najaf school promulgates a more traditional, apolitical interpretation of Shi‘ah Islam. Now that it has been freed from Saddam Hussein’s brutal oppression, Najaf has begun spreading its influence across the border to Iran. Sistani’s disciples have been flooding the seminaries of Qom, while Najaf itself has been admitting a steady stream of Iranian students eager to study a version of Shi‘ah theology untainted by the political philosophy of Khomeini.
It may take a couple of generations before Shi‘ism reverts to its pre-Khomeinist interpretation and the Shi‘ite Ulama return to their roles as the moral, rather than the political, authorities of the Shi‘ah community. Yet the reversal seems inevitable. After all, Shi‘ism is a religion founded upon open debate and rational discourse. In its nearly fourteen-hundred-year history, no Shi‘ite cleric has ever enjoyed unconditional authority over another Shi‘ite cleric of equal learning. Nor has any cleric ever held sole interpretive powers over the meaning of the faith. The Shi‘ah have always been free to follow the cleric of their choice, which is in part why Shi‘ism has blossomed into such a wonderfully eclectic faith. It is also why so many Shi‘ah both inside and outside Iran no longer view the Islamic Republic of Iran as the paradigm of the Islamic state, but rather as its corruption (though that argument must be reserved for another chapter).
The Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989. Although he was a frail and sickly eighty-seven-year-old man, his death took much of the country by surprise. During the funeral his corpse was mobbed in the streets; the shroud in which he had been wrapped was torn to pieces and the fragments taken by mourners as relics. There even were those in Iran who refused to believe “the Imam” could have died. Some claimed he was not dead, but had only gone into hiding; he would return again.
Long before his messianic rise to power in Iran, however, Khomeini was a devoted disciple of the great mystics of Islam: the Sufis. In fact, as an idealistic university student, the young Ruhollah secretly filled his notebooks with astonishingly passionate verses describing his yearning to be united with God as a lover is united with his beloved.
“Oh, I desire a cup of wine from the Beloved’s own hands,” Khomeini wrote. “In whom can I confide this secret? Where am I to take my grief? I have yearned a lifetime to see the Beloved’s face. I am a frenzied moth circling the flame, a wild rue seed pod roasting in the fire. See my stained cloak and this prayer rug of hypocrisy. Can I, one day, tear them to shreds at the tavern door?”
These may seem startling words for a future ayatollah. But to those familiar with the principles of Sufism, Islam’s other major religious branch, they are not at all unfamiliar. For Sufis, Islam is neither law nor theology, neither creed nor ritual. Islam, according to Sufism, is merely the means through which the believer can destroy his ego so as to become one with the creator of the heavens and the earth.
8. Stain Your Prayer Rug with Wine
THE SUFI WAY
THIS IS THE legend of Layla and Majnun.
O
nce, a boy of exceeding beauty was born into the family of a noble Shaykh. He was named Kais, and as he matured it became obvious to all that he would one day become a source of great pride to his family and tribe. Even from a young age, his knowledge, his diligence, his learning, and his speech outshone that of all his peers. When he spoke, his tongue scattered pearls, and when he smiled, his cheeks were violet tulips awakening to the sun.
One day, Kais met a girl so lovely that he was instantly struck with a yearning he could not understand. Her name was Layla, meaning “night,” and like the night, she was both dark and luminous. Her eyes were those of a gazelle, her lips two moist rose petals.
Layla too felt an emotion for Kais she could not comprehend. The two children were drowning in love, though in their youth they knew not what love was. It was as though love were a wine-bearer, fill ing the cups of their hearts to the brim; they drank whatever was poured for them and grew drunk without understanding why.
Kais and Layla kept their feelings secret as they roamed the alleyways and passages of the city’s markets, close enough to steal a furtive glance and share a giggle, far enough not to arouse gossip. But a secret such as this cannot be contained, and a whisper is all it takes to topple a kingdom. “Kais and Layla are in love!” someone said on the street.
Layla’s tribe was furious. Her father removed her from school and banned her from leaving her tent; her brothers vowed to ensnare Kais if he ever came near. But one cannot keep the baying hound away from the new moon.
Separated from his beloved, Kais wandered from stall to stall, from tent to tent, as if in a trance. Everywhere he went he sang of Layla’s beauty, extolling her virtues to whoever crossed his path. The longer he went without seeing Layla, the more his love gave way to madness, so that soon people began pointing him out on the streets, saying, “Here comes the madman! Here comes the majnun!”