Titans of History

A chinless, bespectacled ex-chicken-farmer who suffered from nervous ailments, he built a second family with his mistress, the ex-secretary whom he called Bunny—but the attic of their house contained furniture and books made from the bones and skins of his Jewish victims. He was a meticulous administrator who organized the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews (two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe), 3 million Russians, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, 750,000 Slavs, 500,000 Gypsies, 100,000 of the mentally ill, 100,000 Freemasons, 15,000 homosexuals and 5000 Jehovah’s Witnesses—murder on a scale never before imagined.

KHOMEINI

1902–89

I shall kick their teeth in. I am appointing the government. I am appointing the government by the support of this nation!

The Grand Ayatollah Khomeini led the 1979 revolution that overthrew the last shah of Iran and became the supreme leader of a theocracy, the Islamic Republic of Iran, that has become an often disruptive power across the Near East. This aged, white-bearded Shiite cleric proved to be a dynamic, shrewd and unforgiving revolutionary leader who created a totally new system with his own power protected in a constitution that has proved surprisingly enduring, thanks to the brutal suppression of any opposition. Today’s resurgent, bold Iran, pursuing a nuclear arsenal and regional hegemony, threatening war against the “Great Satan” America and annihilation of the “Little Satan” Israel, backing the Hamas and Hezbollah militias in Gaza and Lebanon, murdering and terrorizing its own people, is the Iran of Khomeini.

Khomeini, whose family had spent much time in India under the British Raj and who used the nom de plume Hindi for some of his own poetry, studied the Koran and in particular Iran’s Twelver Shiism at madrassas in Arak and the holy city of Qom. The Iranian clergy were challenged and almost broken by the rule of Reza Shah, who made himself king of Iran during the 1920s, in a campaign to modernize and secularize the country like his hero Ataturk had done in Turkey.

Reza Shah was forced to abdicate the throne to his young son Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, who at first proved adept at managing the powerful Shiite ayatollahs. Khomeini, not yet a cleric of the top rank, still accepted the idea of a limited constitutional monarchy but gradually he became repulsed by the secular and modernizing instincts of the new shah.

Khomeini was already in his sixties when the deaths of the leading ayatollahs enabled him to emerge as a clerical leader. In 1963, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi announced his White Revolution, a revolution of land ownership, liberation and education of women, and modernization imposed from above by the monarch himself. It was anathema to Khomeini who, calling a meeting of the top ulema (clergy), denounced the shah, whom he called a “wretched miserable man,” a decadent tyrant like Muawiya’s son, Caliph Yazid of history.

The shah responded by attacking the clergy in Qom itself. As the tension rose, Khomeini was arrested. When the Shah’s prime minister demanded Khomeini apologize, supposedly slapping the cleric’s face, Khomeini refused. He was already in contact with an expanding network of Islamic schools and charities with political and violent programs: days later the shah’s prime minister was assassinated. Vast crowds protested against the shah and backed the ayatollahs.

In the face of this rising tension the shah gave his new prime minister powers to use the military to repress the rebellion. Four hundred protesters were shot by the army and the shah regained the initiative. Khomeini was forced into exile, for a period in Turkey but mainly in Najab in Iraq, the only other country with a huge Shiite population.

The shah had now emerged as a regional military potentate, a trusted ally of America and recipient of billions of dollars as the oil prices rose. But his White Revolution was gradually destroying itself: thousands of Iranians embraced the new possibilities of education, joining the middle class just as millions of poor Iranians, excited by new industry, new education, new housing, new wealth, had left their villages for Teheran only to discover a new listless poverty and disappointment in slums. Here they were left adrift under the corrupt and distant magnificence of the increasingly autocratic shah and his court of technocrats and cronies, a rule enforced by increasingly bombastic splendor and the regime’s brutal SAVAK secret police. President Saddam Hussein of Iraq frequently suggested to the shah that he liquidate Khomeini but the shah always demurred.