The Shi‘a ulema had probably never been as powerful as it was at the moment Khomeini returned from exile. But Khomeini was something of a parvenu among the senior ulema, and the Islamic regime he created reflected his highly individual personality at least as much as it did the nature of traditional Shi‘ism. At the time of the revolution there were other senior figures who commanded great respect, but who were pushed aside by the enormous popularity of Khomeini immediately after his return from exile. The most prominent of these was Ayatollah Seyyed Kazem Shari‘atmadari, who argued for a more moderate line in 1979 and was quickly silenced. Some of his supporters were executed. Khomeini later rescinded Shari‘atmadari’s status as marja-e taqlid—a wholly unprecedented step. The principle of velayat-e faqih was still a dubious novelty for many senior Shi‘a figures, several of whom spoke out against it in 1980–1981. But they too were intimidated into silence. Khomeini and his supporters successfully consolidated their control, based on the principle of velayat-e faqih, but it never commanded universal support among the Iranian ulema.7 A reassertion of Islamic values followed—including a reappearance of ulema as judges, and a reapplication of shari‘a law. Although this has been moderated in some respects by laws passed centrally, some extreme practices like stoning for adultery (though infrequent) have continued and have attracted international criticism.
By the autumn of 1979 the liberals and moderates were looking increasingly marginalized. Over the summer, Khomeini had formed the Islamic Republic Party (IRP), and the first draft of the constitution, put together by Bazargan—similar to the constitution of 1906, minus the monarch—had been radically rewritten by the Assembly of Experts, which was dominated by ulema loyal to Khomeini. The Assembly of Experts had come together after an election marred by liberal and leftist boycotts and allegations of rigging. In its final form the constitution set up the system that still runs Iran today, and which still reflects Khomeini’s idea of velayat-e faqih: that day-today government should be secular, but with ultimate power in the hands of a religious leader committed to Islamic government. The constitution set up an elected presidency, an elected Majles, and elected municipal councils, but it also established a Council of Guardians (twelve clerics and jurists) to vet and approve candidates before they could run for election, and to approve or veto legislation passed by the Majles. Above all, it confirmed Khomeini himself, and his successors, in the supreme position in the constitution. He had the right to appoint half the members of the Guardian Council, to approve the appointment of the president, and to appoint the head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the other heads of the armed forces. While Khomeini used the constitution to consolidate his gains, he was prepared throughout to use violent, extra-legal means to secure his ends, to take and keep the political initiative, and leave his opponents to debate over the rights and wrongs of what had happened. This last was a principle he claimed to have taken from the clerical politician of the 1920s, Modarres: “You hit first and let others complain. Don’t be the victim and don’t complain.”8
Press freedom was also curtailed over the summer, in a concerted campaign. Hezbollah attacked newspaper offices, as well as the offices of political parties, forty newspapers closed down, and two of the biggest—Ettela‘at and Kayhan—were taken over by the Bonyad-e Mostazefin. At the same time SAVAK, after the removal of its chiefs and officers by one means or another, was slowly being turned into an agency of the Islamic state (along with Evin prison). In 1984 it was renamed the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).
In November 1979, prompted by the news that the shah had been allowed into the United States for treatment of his cancer (which finally killed him in July 1980), students broke into the U.S. Embassy and took the diplomats there hostage. Initially people thought this was just another student demonstration (something similar had happened in February), but when Khomeini backed the students and a continuation of the hostage crisis, Bazargan and his fellow Freedom Movement politicians resigned. Early in 1980 a new president, Abol-Hasan Bani Sadr, was elected under the new constitutional arrangements. He had general support, including from middle-class liberals. For the next year and a half he strove to resolve the hostage crisis, and to uphold principles of conventional legality and secular government. But like Bazargan before him, he ultimately failed and in 1981 was impeached by Khomeini.
Khomeini meanwhile exploited the hostage crisis to preserve a revolutionary fluidity and sense of crisis that enabled him to wrong-foot his opponents. He ordered purges to remove civil servants who were suspected of secularist or antirevolutionary attitudes, closed the universities to eject leftists and impose Islamic principles (they reopened, initially on a much reduced basis, in 1982), and used the Komitehs and Hezbollah to force women to wear the veil. The sense of continuing crisis was only enhanced by President Carter’s attempt to send helicopters to rescue the hostages in April 1980. The humiliation of the hostage crisis, the failed rescue, and the subsequent failure of Carter’s reelection campaign all combined to entrench in ordinary Americans a hostile attitude to Iran that still hampers attempts at rapprochement between the two countries. (The hostages were eventually released just after Carter left office in January 1981.) Most Iranians, including radicals who supported the action at the time and some who participated in it, today agree that taking the hostages was a bad mistake.
In the early years of the revolution Khomeini and the IRP had to fight off some formidable enemies, both internal and external. But in each case, true to his guiding principles, it tended to be Khomeini who took the initiative, hitting his opponents with preemptive strikes—at least his internal adversaries. It has been argued that terror and repression were forced on the Iranian revolutionaries—who otherwise would have been humane and tolerant—by the turn of events, the pressure of war, and the viciousness of their enemies. But this argument does not stand up to scrutiny. Although he was reacting to events in a supple way, from the beginning Khomeini was fully aware that if he allowed his enemies to take the initiative, he might not get a second chance. He ruthlessly eliminated his opponents.
The two most serious challenges were from the MKO and Saddam Hossein. Having initially supported the revolution, the MKO were attacked by Khomeini in November 1980 (he labelled them monafeqin, the hypocrites—a term that recalled those who had apostatized after declaring loyalty to the Prophet Mohammad). He had their leader imprisoned for ten years on a charge of spying for the Soviet Union,9 and Hezbollahis attacked the group’s headquarters. The MKO fought back with demonstrations and street violence, and then with bombs, managing to kill many of Khomeini’s supporters before their leadership was driven into exile. Two bombs at the headquarters of the IRP in June 1981 killed some seventy of Khomeini’s closest companions and advisers, including his right-hand man, Ayatollah Beheshti. Large numbers of MKO supporters were killed (as many as several thousand, some of them executed publicly) or imprisoned.10 From exile, at first in Paris and later in Iraq, the MKO kept up its opposition and its violent attacks. But in time it dwindled to take on the character of a paramilitary cult, largely subordinated to the interests of the Baathist regime in Iraq.
Khomeini and his supporters had also been fighting moves for autonomy in Azerbaijan, and the armed rebellion by the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) in Iranian Kurdistan, a rebellion not finally crushed until 1984. The last major political group not aligned to Khomeini and his followers were Tudeh, with whom most of the Fedai had allied themselves after a split. They had supported Khomeini on the wooden-headed Marxist basis that the revolution of 1979 was a petty-bourgeois revolution that would be a prelude to a socialist one. In 1983 Khomeini turned on Tudeh, accusing them of spying for the Soviets and plotting to overthrow the Islamic regime. Seventy leading members were arrested; there were some executions and televised confessions. Tudeh and the Fedai were banned, leaving the IRP and the small Freedom Party as the only ones still permitted to operate. The Freedom Party continues to this day in very restricted circumstances under i
ts leader Ebrahim Yazdi.
WAR
In September 1980 Saddam Hossein’s forces invaded Iran, beginning an eight-year war and intensifying pressure on the Iranian regime. Opinion differs over the origins of the Iran/Iraq war—whether Saddam opportunistically attacked Iran at a moment of perceived Iranian weakness, in the hope of snatching some quick gains in the Shatt-al Arab and elsewhere (attempting to put right a border dispute that had been resolved unfavorably for Iraq in the previous decade) or whether Iranian religious/revolutionary propaganda in 1979/1980, apparently directed at starting a revolution among Iraqi Shi‘as and destroying his regime, left him little choice. But Saddam was the aggressor, invading and occupying Iranian territory. By the end of that immensely destructive war, Iranian talk of exporting religious revolution (one of the few concrete results of which was the Iranian contribution to the establishment of Hezbollah in Lebanon in the early 1980s) had faded. As many as one million Iranians were killed or injured, and a whole generation was stamped anew with the symbolism of Shi‘a martyrdom. In addition to the regular army and the Pasdaran, large numbers of Basij volunteers were recruited, including boys as young as twelve. The regime constantly harped on Ashura, Hosein, and Karbala to maintain support for the war and to motivate the troops. The huge casualties on the Iranian side resulted partly from the human wave tactics they employed against the Iraqis, who were normally better equipped. The technological imbalance was the result of the policy of Western nations who, despite their declared neutrality, sent a variety of up-to-date weapons to the Iraqis while keeping the Iranians starved of spare parts for the weapons the shah had bought in the previous decade. The arsenal supplied to Iraq included chemical weapon technology that was used against Iranian soldiers as well as Kurdish civilians in the north of Iraq, whom Saddam treated as rebels. The war also had the effect of physically dividing Iranian Shi‘as from the shrine cities of Najaf, Karbala, and Samarra.
Iraqi gains at the outset of the war, which caused huge damage in Khuzestan and the flight of hundreds of thousands of refugees, were wiped out by an Iranian counteroffensive in the spring of 1982, which recaptured Khorramshahr and forced Saddam to withdraw to the border. But the Iranians then amplified their war aims, demanding the removal of Saddam and huge war reparations. Thereafter it was the turn of the Iraqis to go on the defensive, but the Iranians were able to make only minor territorial gains, the most notable being the capture of the Fao peninsula in February 1986. The hope of a Shi‘a uprising to support the Iranian attacks in southern Iraq proved an illusion—like Saddam’s hope of an Arab uprising in Khuzestan in 1980—and the land war became a stalemate.
Beginning in 1984 Saddam attacked Iranian shipping in the Persian Gulf, trying to damage Iran’s oil exports. The Iranians responded in kind, resulting in what became known as the Tanker War. The United States and other noncombatant nations moved ships into the Persian Gulf to protect shipping in international waters, but in July 1988 a U.S. warship, USS Vincennes, under a disastrously gung-ho commander, sailed into Iranian territorial waters in pursuit of some Iranian gunboats and after a series of bungles shot down an Iranian civilian airliner with a pair of surface-to-air missiles, killing 290. The Reagan administration gave explanations that contained more misleading inaccuracies and self-justifications than contrition, and later awarded the commander of Vincennes a campaign medal. Many Iranians still believe that the destruction of the airliner was not an accident but a deliberate act. Another less-than-glorious episode in the U.S./Iran relationship took place earlier, in 1986, when U.S. officials brought a pallet of spare parts for Iran’s Hawk ground-to-air missiles from Israel to Tehran (plus a chocolate birthday cake from a kosher bakery in Tel Aviv and other presents) in what later became known as the Iran/Contra affair. The exposure and failure of the venture stood as another warning of the perils of making contact between the two countries, and of the divide of misunderstanding between them.11
As stalemate prevailed in the land war, the Iranians and Iraqis bombarded each other’s capitals and other towns indiscriminately with long-range missiles, and with bombs dropped from aircraft, killing many civilians (the War of the Cities). Toward the end, Iraq had the upper hand in these exchanges, and in the land war was able to retake Iraqi territory at Fao and elsewhere, bringing the front line back almost exactly to where it had been in September 1980. Finally, with the terrible cost of the war mounting and no sign of the dream of a March to Karbala being realized, Khomeini was persuaded by Majles Speaker Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani to accept what Khomeini called the chalice of poison. Rafsanjani, perhaps right for the wrong reason, had used the Vincennes incident to insist that the United States would never allow Iran to succeed in the war. Khomeini allowed President Khamenei (elected in 1981 and reelected in 1985) to announce in July 1988 that Iran would accept UN resolution 598, which called for a cease-fire.
DEATH AND RECONSTRUCTION
Khomeini died on June 3, 1989, and his funeral at the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery drew crowds and scenes of mass emotion comparable only with those that had greeted his return from exile ten years before. At one point the coffin had to be rescued by helicopter from distraught mourners seeking pieces of his shroud as relics. Khomeini’s last months had been overshadowed by the hard decision to end the war with Iraq, and this may have affected his health, but he was also suffering from cancer and heart disease. One significant event in these last months was what is conventionally called the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in February 1989 (some have suggested it would be more accurately described as a hokm—a religious judgment). It seems that Khomeini had been made aware of Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses some months earlier, but had dismissed it as unimportant (he had not even banned it from being imported). Reconsidering the question later—after demonstrations by Muslims in Britain and riots in Kashmir and Pakistan—he then delivered the fatwa as a deliberate act, to reassert his and Iran’s claim to the leadership of Islam.12 It was another classic Khomeini move, one that trumpeted Iran’s Islamic and revolutionary uniqueness. But it also made more difficulties for those who might have wanted to bring Iran out of isolation into some kind of normality.
Another event occurred in these last months that illustrates again the degree to which Khomeini had been (and remained) an enigma even among the ulema. Early in January 1989 Khomeini sent a letter to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, observing accurately that communism now belonged in the museum of history. Before he fell into the snare of materialistic capitalism, Khomeini said, Gorbachev should study Islam as a way of life. At first impression this seems an odd suggestion, but perhaps Khomeini sensed an affinity with Gorbachev—as an unconventional thinker hemmed in by unsympathetic and less imaginative minds. The form of Islam that Khomeini recommended upset many of his ulema colleagues—he commended to Gorbachev not the Qor’an nor any of the conventional works but instead the writings of Ibn Arabi, Avicenna, and Sohravardi. With the letter he sent three of his closest companions and pupils, versed in Islamic mysticism. Whatever his private thoughts, Gorbachev thanked them and expressed his pride at having received a personal letter from the Emam. But the letter attracted criticism from clergy in Qom, some of whom upbraided Khomeini in an open letter for having recommended mystics and philosophers. Khomeini responded with a “letter to the clergy” that vented the frustrations of a long life spent enduring the criticism of more tradition-minded mullahs:
This old father of yours has suffered more from stupid reactionary mullahs than anyone else. When theology meant no interference in politics, stupidity became a virtue. If a clergyman was able, and aware of what was going on [in the world around him], they searched for a plot behind it. You were considered more pious if you walked in a clumsy way. Learning foreign languages was blasphemy, philosophy and mysticism were considered to be sin and infidelity. . . . Had this trend continued, I have no doubt the clergy and seminaries would have trodden the same path as the Christian Church did in the Middle Ages.13
Before the revolution, ascen
t through the ranks of the mojtaheds had been an informal process, but through the 1980s it became much more structured—policed and controlled by Khomeini and his followers.14 As the hierarchy of Iranian Shi‘ism came under control, so did doctrine: Khomeini was attempting to create out of the previous plurality a conformism to a single idea of Shi‘ism. In the 1990s this development went further. Examinations were set up for aspiring mojtaheds, and political loyalty—and adherence to the velayat-e faqih—became more important than piety, depth of religious understanding, intellectual strength, or the approval of a loose group of senior clerics, as had previously been the case. A new group of political ayatollahs, selected in this new way, proliferated.15 Others, more deserving in traditional terms, remained mere mojtaheds.
This meant that the revolution had instituted a religion controlled by the state and subordinated to state interests. The situation was oddly similar, from that perspective, to the din-e dawlat the shah had earlier attempted as part of the White Revolution—with the difference that this state was headed by a mojtahed rather than a monarch. By the mid to late 1990s some independent voices warned of the dangers of the new order. Notable among them was the thinker and theologian Abdolkarim Soroush, who called for a secular government and predicted that, otherwise, the compromises and hypocrisies of politics and government would discredit religion in Iran and alienate the young.16 This is precisely what has happened. The corollary has been an underground resurgence among intellectuals of the nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s pattern, idealizing pre-Islamic Iran and blaming failures of development on the Arab conquest—appearing, ironically, to celebrate the Cyrus-nostalgia most had rejected from the lips of the last shah.17
A History of Iran Page 31