Children of Paradise (7 page)

In Shariati’s Shiism of Ali, Alireza thought he had found an answer to the authoritarianism and intolerance he’d encountered both among leftists and in the seminary. But in the long run his membership in this group of Shariati’s followers, though brief, was a bad bet for Alireza. It made him an outsider when the mainstream of revolutionary Islamism emerged victorious in 1979 and consolidated power in Khomeini’s hands through a series of bloody upheavals in the decade that followed. And although Alireza escaped the fate of the group’s leadership and most of its followers, who were imprisoned or executed throughout the turbulent 1980s, his involvement would forever strike a black mark against him, rendering him effectively alone even when he worked inside the government. It was a government, a system, a country organized around informal networks of membership and ideological affinity. There was nothing more precarious than failing to belong.

In the heady days of the revolution, however, Alireza was in his element. For the first time in his sober youth, the hottest social commodity was intellect, and particularly knowledge of the two competing discourses of the day, Marxism and Islamism. The handsomest man Alireza knew was his friend Bahram. Before the revolution, when Alireza walked down the street with Bahram, young women found excuses to approach his dashing friend. But Bahram was not an intellectual or a militant of any stripe, and after the revolution the girls gravitated instead toward activists and theorists, revolutionaries and scholars. Bahram implored Alireza to help him win back the young ladies who had deserted him. They staged conversations for the ears of pretty Marxist girls. Bahram would opine about Marxism, and Alireza, whose intellectualism and political commitment were known, would pretend to be impressed. Bahram found two or three girlfriends this way. But what Alireza would remember in the years to come was that, in the narrow circle of his life in those days, Bahram was the revolution’s earliest critic. Ideology, Bahram complained, had made people
hostile. It distorted the most basic human relationships. Handsome Bahram couldn’t find a girlfriend, and everywhere people hated each other for ideology, which meant they hated each other without knowing why.

• • •

T
HE REVOLUTION THAT HAD BEEN
so long in coming unfolded blindingly fast. Martial law availed the shah nothing. A general strike paralyzed the country. Riots broke out. The shah bobbed and weaved. He appointed a conciliatory prime minister; replaced him with a general; and replaced the general with a prime minister meant to bridge the country’s now inevitable transition. The shah left Iran on January 16. The rapturous, eighty-four-point-type newspaper headline entered history:
“Shah Raft.”
The shah has left. Iranians danced in the streets. On February 1, Ayatollah Khomeini, at that moment the undisputed leader and symbol of the revolution, touched down at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport.
“Imam Amad,”
the newspapers reported: The imam has come.

With him, to the euphoric and riotous country that welcomed him as its savior, Khomeini brought the virtue and the menace of his clarity. Iran may have been an ambivalent country, wracked by impulses at war with themselves and one another. But Khomeini was nothing if not consistent. “
The government I intend to appoint is a government based on divine ordinance, and to oppose it is to deny God as well as the will of the people,” he informed the nation on February 2, 1979. He disowned all revolutionary forces but his own. “
Those who imagine that some force other than Islam could shatter the great barrier of tyranny are mistaken,” he intoned in June. “
You who have chosen a course other than Islam—you do nothing for humanity.”

In France, Khomeini had already appointed a small and secretive revolutionary council to run the affairs of state until a government could be established. The council included a circle of hardheaded and ambitious clerics loyal to Khomeini and committed to the notion of
velayat-e faqih
. These figures included Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti and the mid-ranking clerics Ali Khamenei and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Within a week of the
revolution, together with other members of the council, they formed a political party called the Islamic Republican Party. It was a juggernaut.

The Islamic Republican Party controlled the mosques, the state broadcasting agency, and other media organs. It could depend on not only Khomeini’s personal charisma, which was incalculable in 1979, but an impressive array of coercive instruments. Suspicious of the loyalties of the shah’s army, Khomeini had ordered the creation of a paramilitary force that would protect him and the Revolutionary Council. It was called the Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Islamic Republican Party also possessed its own network of club-wielding thugs, known as Hezbollah, to harass its opponents. Ayatollah Beheshti helmed the country’s powerful new Islamic judiciary, and clerics close to him headed revolutionary tribunals all over the country, ordering the summary executions of “counterrevolutionaries”: officials from the old regime, Kurdish separatists, political opponents, and other undesirables. In the first twenty-eight months of the Islamic Republic, without recourse to evidence or legal argument, these tribunals would execute 757 people for “
sowing corruption on earth.” This was
more than seven times the number of political prisoners executed in the last eight years of the shah’s regime—and it was only the beginning.

Khomeini and the radical clerics behaved as though the revolution belonged to them alone, but surely they knew that their position was not as secure as they pretended. Among the Iranians who had brought the shah’s regime to its knees with demonstrations and general strikes were secular leftists, nationalists, liberals, and Islamic leftists who did not believe the clerics should rule. The nationalist Islamic liberals who had surrounded Khomeini in Paris were perhaps the weakest of these groups, the least likely to seriously challenge the clerics in a power struggle. But they were also the most useful in assuaging the anxieties of former Western allies. And so Khomeini felt secure in naming Mehdi Bazargan, a moderate nationalist intellectual, prime minister of a provisional government in early 1979. Many of the radical clerics were uncomfortable with this choice. They feared that Bazargan would be the Trojan horse through which American power and influence would reenter revolutionary Iran.

Bazargan was a visitation from another era, a mild septuagenarian whose time had either already elapsed or not yet come. He wore thick-rimmed, square-lensed glasses and a visible tension in the set of his jaw. He was an engineer, a contemporary of Shariati’s father and a former official of the Mossadegh government, which had appointed him to head the briefly nationalized oil industry. Back then he had criticized Mossadegh’s nationalists for their irreligiosity. To effectively oppose the shah, he argued, required the participation of the clergy and the traditional classes, and so he started the Freedom Movement, an opposition party that wedded nationalism and liberalism to Islam.

He was a democrat. From the seven years he spent in Paris, Bazargan had drawn the conclusion that religion thrived in secularly administered, scientifically advanced societies, and he believed that popular sovereignty, not coercion, would in time lead to a state in conformity with Islamic values. But he sustained a pragmatic alliance with the clerics. When Khomeini and other clerics opposed women’s suffrage in the early 1960s, Bazargan is thought to have privately disagreed, but he chose to take a politic, rather than moral, stand: in a country where no one’s vote counted for much, his Freedom Movement declared, suffrage was meaningless, for those who had it as well as those who did not.

Still, unlike many of the radicals of his day, religious and otherwise, he defended freedom of speech, the rights of minorities, and private property; he did not much care for the language of Third World revolutionary movements, with their emphasis on colonialism and exploitation,
terms he found divisive and too easily wedded to Soviet ambitions. He was a technocrat. At the University of Tehran he told a crowd, “
Don’t expect me to act in the manner of [Khomeini] who . . . moves like a bulldozer, crushing rocks, roots, and stones in his path. I am a delicate passenger car and must ride on paved and smooth roads, and you must smooth them for me.”

There were no smooth roads in revolutionary Iran. Nor was Bazargan any match for the popular utopian ferment or the machinations of the Revolutionary Council. It would be more than three decades, well after his death, before the Islamic Republic’s first prime minister found a constituency.
During his premiership, he confronted a country where many citizens were armed, but the security forces had ceased to function. The Revolutionary Council took control of these impromptu militias, called them
komiteh
s, and marshaled them to its agenda of Islamization—an agenda Bazargan did not share, and on which he was never consulted. The
komiteh
s policed the populace for improper Islamic dress, Western music, pictures of uncovered women, and forbidden interactions between the sexes, among other moral infractions.
Khomeini defended their work, arguing that an Islamic state had a duty to intrude on private life for the betterment of its subjects.

Iran had two governments: the legal one Bazargan headed, and an extralegal network of grassroots revolutionary committees, militias, and clerical tribunals backed by firing squads, all of which were loyal to Khomeini and the Islamic Republican Party.
Bazargan’s government tried and failed to secure command of the Revolutionary Guards, tried and failed to bring the revolutionary tribunals under the supervision of the ministry of justice. As Bazargan told the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, “
In theory, the government is in charge, but in reality, it is Khomeini who is in charge. He with his revolutionary council, his revolutionary committees, and his relationship with the masses.”

In Plato’s utopian Republic, the philosopher would be king not only because he was wise, but because he was unwilling. The luminosity of his intellect was a condition to which he was born; it, and not ambition, would impel him to serve his countrymen, even against his natural inclination to withdraw into scholarly seclusion. In Khomeini’s Islamic Republic, however, the radical clerics ruled “darkly as in a dream, fighting for shadows and wrangling for office.” The most important and politically difficult task they faced was to lay an enduring foundation for their own rule, and so the battle over the revolutionary state’s constitution reached a pitch for which Bazargan was hardly prepared.

Not two months after the overthrow of the shah, on March 22, 1979, Iranians had been presented with a public referendum: Would the future state be an Islamic Republic, or not? No definition was provided; no alternative presented. “
Yes” carried the day by 98 percent. But what was an
Islamic Republic? Who would decide? In June, Bazargan and his allies set forward a draft constitution that was liberal and largely secular, based on the constitution of France’s Fifth Republic. The draft was to be reviewed and ratified by an assembly of experts on Islamic law. Elections to this assembly were
rife with irregularities, including violent attacks on opponents of
velayat-e faqih
. With Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri as its chair and Beheshti as his deputy,
the assembly was packed with members of the Islamic Republican Party or sister parties. They wrested the constitution from the prime minister’s hands and rewrote it, adding elements derived from Khomeini’s theory of the state. The result was an innovative and profoundly contradictory document whose internal tensions would define the country’s future.

Most governments derive their legitimacy from a single source. Iran’s would rest on two: popular sovereignty on the one hand, and the sovereignty of God on the other. Like most compromises, this one frustrated both sides. Iran would become, to a degree Khomeini had never envisioned, a republic. It would have an elected president and a parliament that could pass legislation. Far more than under the shah, it would require its people’s participation and assent. But at the same time, a cleric would supervise the country as its Supreme Leader and the vice-regent of God on earth. The Leader would command the armed forces. He would control the instruments of internal security and foreign policy. He would appoint the chief of the judiciary as well as a Guardian Council, made up mainly of clerics. The laws passed by the parliament, and the candidates for the parliament, would be subject to the approval of this Guardian Council, which would function as an arm of the Leader.

Bazargan appealed to Khomeini in protest. The proposed constitution, he objected, would subject the country to a ruling class of clerics and poison future generations against Islam. But Khomeini did not respond.

“
Now the Constitution makes some provision for the principle of the governance of the
faqih
,” Khomeini would tell an interviewer three months later. “In my opinion, it is deficient in this regard. The religious scholars have more prerogatives in Islam than are specified in the Constitution,
and the [clerics] . . . stopped short of the ideal in their desire not to antagonize the intellectuals!”

• • •

O
N THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD
, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had become a desperate fugitive. He passed through Egypt, Morocco, the Bahamas, and Mexico, everywhere fearful of assassins from the new regime and stalked by an even more proximate concern for his safety: a lymphatic cancer the shah had discovered five years earlier and kept secret not only from the Iranian people but from his own family. His aides reached out to American intermediaries in September 1979, when his condition took a critical turn.

The United States admitted the shah for medical treatment on October 23, 1979. It did so over the objections of the top man at its Tehran embassy, who warned that admitting the shah would be “
seriously prejudicial to our interests and to the security of Americans in Iran,” unless the shah first renounced any claim to the Persian throne. But others close to the White House insisted that Washington owed a debt to the deposed king; the man was gravely ill, and hardly a country in the world would take him.