Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (27 page)

Where he remained uncompromising was in his attitude toward the shah, who by now had been forced to acknowledge that his power was slipping away. It was clear that there was no longer any way to contain the protests or the strikes. Parts of the economy were grinding to a halt. The Americans, who had no clear policy on how to respond to the crisis, had been sending contradictory signals, sometimes urging the shah to pursue a harder line, sometimes pushing him to make concessions. But as the new year dawned, they made it clear that he no longer enjoyed their support. The shah had nowhere else to turn.

His departure now appeared increasingly like a foregone conclusion. On January 3 came the news that the shah had appointed Shapour Bakhtiar, one of the leading figures of the National Front, as the new prime minister. The shah empowered Bakhtiar to prepare the way for a transitional government. Though his own party disowned him for accepting the appointment, Bakhtiar, a moderate, believed that it was the last hope for deflecting a full-fledged revolution and easing Iran into a democratic system. He amnestied political prisoners, abolished SAVAK, and eliminated censorship—all measures that, at this late stage, probably sped up the course of the revolution. He dispatched an emissary to Paris to consult with Khomeini, asking for a grace period in which to hold elections for a constituent assembly. Khomeini—cleaving to his role as revolutionary maximalist—denounced Bakhtiar as a collaborator and refused to have anything to do with him.

On January 16, parliament in Tehran gave a vote of confidence to the new Bakhtiar government. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had been waiting for the news.
His options were exhausted. He and his family drove to the airport, boarded a plane, and flew out of Tehran. Officially, he and his family were leaving Iran only for a “vacation.” But the truth quickly dawned on the populace.

The streets of Tehran suddenly fell quiet. For four months, Sattareh Farmaian noted, the city had been awash with the sounds of raucous demonstrations, gun battles, and car horns—so the abrupt onset of silence was disconcerting. Around one o’clock in the afternoon, the mood changed again. Farmaian heard shouting. The young soldiers standing watch in the streets began to jump up and down, hugging each other in joy. Some burst into tears. The manager of the restaurant where Farmaian was sitting turned up his radio so that everyone could hear the news. It had finally happened. The shah had left the country.
¹⁰

Jubilant demonstrators toppled statues of the shah or cut his picture out of banknotes. Images of Khomeini replaced them. Demonstrators stuffed carnations in the barrels of soldiers’ guns. In Neauphle-le-Château, the ayatollah maintained his usual unruffled demeanor. “God is great,” he said when told the news. Then he walked across the street to give reporters his reaction. “The departure is not the final victory,” he said. “It is the preface to our victory. I am congratulating the brave people of Iran for this victory. We must consider that this victory will not only mean the abdication of this dynasty but also the end of foreign domination, and this is more important even than the eradication of the Pahlavi dynasty.”
¹¹

The activists around Khomeini now faced a tricky decision. The shah was gone. The power vacuum inside Iran was deepening by the day. If the ayatollah was to return to Iran, this was the time. But how to proceed? After several fits and starts, it was finally decided that Khomeini would fly back to Iran on February i. But at the last minute, Bakhtiar’s government announced that the plane would not be allowed to land.

So the ayatollah’s aides opted for an insurance policy. They chartered an Air France Boeing 747 and packed it with Western journalists: the army would surely think twice about shooting down a French airliner filled with representatives of the world’s media. As the Boeing neared the Iranian border, one of Khomeini’s men unnerved the reporters with an announcement: “We have received news that the plane will be shot down as soon we enter Iranian airspace.” It was a false alarm.
¹²

One minor incident on the plane threw an intriguing light on Khomeini’s attitude toward the revolution. An American reporter on the plane conducted a brief interview with the ayatollah. “How do you feel about returning to your homeland?” he asked. “Nothing,” Khomeini replied. “I don’t feel anything.” Nationalist Iranians
opposed to the revolution would later cite this exchange as evidence of Khomeini’s lack of patriotism. But for his supporters, it was merely further evidence of his intense spirituality. This was a man whose primary duty in life was service to God.

No one shot at the plane. The 747 landed without problems and taxied to a stop. Khomeini’s companions argued about who would help him down the stairs to the tarmac: everyone was aware of the political benefits accruing to the person who appeared in what was sure to be an iconic image. In the spirit of compromise, the honor was finally delegated to an Air France steward. Frenzied crowds swarmed around the airport as the ayatollah’s feet touched Iranian soil once again. Khomeini and his entourage could barely make it through the terminal building because of the hysterical mob; at one point his turban was knocked off. From the airport Khomeini headed straight to Behesht Zahra cemetery, where he aimed to commemorate the martyrs of the revolution. The crowds that lined the road numbered in the millions. The revolution had a new slogan:
Shah raft, Imam amad
—“The Shah has gone, the Imam has come.”
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T
o some extent, every revolution is an exercise in political improvisation, and this was also true of the first Islamic revolution. Secular theorists like Marx and Montesquieu had at least given their followers a set of eminently practical notions about the workings of government. But someone striving to establish the rule of Islam in a 1970s nation-state had many blanks to fill in. Khomeini’s medium-term plan was simple enough. He would avail himself of the services of the nonreligious groups that favored the revolution as long as they were useful—and then he would eliminate them. He knew he wanted theocracy—but how, precisely, to get there? Khomeini had presented his own theory of clerical rule, known as “guardianship of the jurisprudent,” back in Najaf in 1970. Now he had to translate it into practice.

His idea was the fruit of a long evolution. In his first book on religion and its relationship to society,
The Revealing of Secrets
(1944), Khomeini had pilloried the corruption and excesses of the shah’s regime. Yet he had stopped short of calling for the abolition of the monarchy, admonishing the shah to follow clerical guidance and heed the demands of Islamic justice. A ruler who did not govern in line with the precepts of sharia ran the risk of losing all legitimacy—but Islamic government could, theoretically, be provided by a king who governed in a genuinely Islamic spirit. Some scholars say that this was merely a tactical concession by Khomeini, who was not yet ready to alienate his clerical colleagues by openly calling for revolution. The argument is not entirely convincing. Khomeini’s early book hardly comes
across as an exercise in political tact, since he was anything but subtle when it came to heaping vituperation on the monarch. It seems much more likely that he was still developing his ideas about the precise nature of Islamic rule.
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Whatever the reason, by the late 1960s Khomeini’s ideas on the proper form of Islamic government had crystallized. In Najaf in 1970, he held a series of lectures that gave coherent shape to his political ideas. His followers soon collected his talks into a book that came to be known most widely under the title
Hokumat-i Islami
(Islamic Government), though it is sometimes referred to by the Persian phrase for the doctrine that Khomeini placed at the core of his theory:
velayat-e faqih
, meaning “guardianship of the jurist.” In it Khomeini develops an elaborate argument about who should govern in a future Islamic state. In so doing, he builds upon a discourse that evolved in the nineteenth century to address the fundamental dilemma of Shiite governance.

Twelver Shiites, who make up the overwhelming majority of Iranians, believe that the legitimacy bestowed upon the Prophet by his divine revelation was transferred, upon his death, to his cousin and son-in-law Ali bin Ali Talib, the first of the twelve imams to hold rightful leadership over the community of Muslims. The last of the twelve, Muhammad al-Mahdi, went into “occultation,” withdrawing himself from the view of mortals, in AD 874, and according to prophesy he will not return until the moment when temporal history comes to an end. This, of course, poses the question of how Muslims are to be governed in the meantime. The traditional answer has been, essentially, that existing political rulers are not legitimate but tolerated and that they must be held to account for their actions by the ulama and the people.

In his 1970 lectures, Khomeini—in what one commentator calls “a bold innovation in the history of Shiism”
¹⁵
—elaborates a radically different argument. Contrary to what its title might suggest,
Islamic Government
is not really a book about governance. It is, rather, very much about legitimacy. Khomeini sets out to address the question, “Who is qualified to rule?” The answer is clear: the clerics, people with proper training in matters of Islamic jurisprudence and its application. Yes, Khomeini says, it is true that the last imam is absent. But we can scarcely conclude from this fact that God wanted the rule of the community of believers to be left to chance. To the contrary, the Quran makes it eminently clear that religion and politics are not separate; they are part of a single, unified realm. Governing must be left to those who have an impeccable sense of justice and are the most thoroughly schooled in the tenets of Islamic law. This can only be the jurisprudents, the religious scholars, the
fuqaha
.

Monarchy, Khomeini explains, is actually inimical to Islam. The Prophet had only contempt for kings, and it is the primal Muslim community led by Muhammad that provides a model for the sort of state organization in which Islam can find full and proper development. What worked for the seventh century remained valid for the twentieth. The laws of Islam retain their validity until the end of history. Islam, Khomeini says, has provided everything that is needed for the modern state as well.

If you are a proper Muslim, in fact, you have no choice. If you are confronted by an evil government, revolution is not only advisable but obligatory. “We have no choice,” Khomeini wrote, “but to shun wicked governments, or governments that give rise to wickedness, and to overthrow governments who are traitorous, wicked, cruel and tyrannical.”
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If oppressive rulers refuse to acknowledge the just demands of the Islamic opposition, this means that they have engaged in “armed aggression against the Muslims and acquired the status of a rebellious group.” Muslims then have the duty of conducting holy war against the rulers until they succeed in achieving a society that conforms to Islamic principles.
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The fact that Khomeini felt compelled to lay out this argument in such detail implies that there are those within the clerical establishment who needed to be convinced. Khomeini’s reading was not one that enjoyed universal approbation even within the community of Shia legal scholars. These lectures were aimed at bringing listeners around to a new vision that implied a revision of many long-held views about the extent to which the reigning authorities had a right to rule.

While
Islamic Government
has much to say about the justification for a future Islamic state, it offers little detail about the precise nature of that state. The phrase
Islamic Republic
does not occur anywhere in the text. In fact, there is virtually no discussion of specific institutions at all. The book is silent on topics like constitutions, elections, or political parties—all concepts that would figure prominently in the course of the revolution. Contrary to what a Western reader might expect from its title, Khomeini’s book is not a tract about statecraft. Somewhat like a utopian socialist, Khomeini apparently believed that the state would wither away of its own accord once the proper kind of rule was established. In a casual aside to an interviewer, Khomeini once observed that he could run Iran with the help of two clerks if need be; God had already provided the necessary guidance. He was also known to have expressed the view that Islamic tribunals, unhindered by the niceties of Western law and bureaucracy, could settle the vast backlog of cases in the shah’s court system in a matter of a few days.
¹⁸
At one point Khomeini even dismissed the need
for a parliament, since the Quran and the scriptural traditions had already provided for all the laws that were needed. It was merely a matter of carrying them out.
¹⁹

M
any people—from liberal intellectuals to Communist Party agitators—had worked to undermine the shah’s throne. But when the collapse of the monarchy finally came, few of them had clear ideas of what to do next. Khomeini was different. Like Lenin in Petrograd sixty-one years earlier, he knew the ultimate goal that he wanted to achieve, though he allowed himself considerable tactical flexibility along the way. He went straight to work.

The Revolutionary Council officially started work on January 12, though its precise composition was revealed only much later. Immediately upon his return to Tehran, Khomeini set up his headquarters in an Islamic girls school that the council had been using as its base. Suddenly, the modest building, long overshadowed by the nearby parliament and the huge central mosque, became the center of political gravity in a country of 35 million people. It rapidly turned into an object of pilgrimage for Khomeini’s followers—who arrived bearing food, medicine, and countless petitions—and a source of terror for his foes.