Titans of History

Meanwhile in Najab and later in French exile near Paris, Khomeini recorded cassettes of his preaching that were smuggled into Iran where they found a growing audience. He had embraced his new concept of divine sovereignty—veleyet e faqih—the guardianship of the religious expert over the people. Traditionally the Shia believed that the leadership of the Prophet descended through his direct descendants—the Twelve Imams—until the last, the twelfth, who had vanished but would one day return to lead them. Khomeini was now increasingly revered as “the Imam,” more than just an ayatollah, but a mystical national-religious leader in his own right.

In 1978, the shah’s regime was paralyzed by a series of strikes and growing protests just as the inept President Jimmy Carter weakened his regime by criticizing its human rights abuses. The shah proved curiously incapable of reacting, turning to the US and British ambassadors but refusing to empower a military strongman to repress the growing tide of protest. Few knew that the shah, having concentrated all power in his own hands, was secretly suffering from cancer.

Meanwhile Khomeini proved himself an adept manipulator of Iranian and Western opinion, concealing his theocratic views while posing as a democratic populist, surrounding himself with democrats and Westernized liberals who convinced foreigners that he would oversee a new, free Iran. In fact his cassettes were open in their fanatical and violent language against the shah, America and Jews. When the shah left Iran “on vacation,” millions celebrated. On February 1, 1979, Khomeini returned and overthrew the provisional government—“I shall kick their teeth in; I appoint the government,” he declared—and appointed his own new government under a moderate democrat, Mehdi Barzagan: “he shall be obeyed because I appointed God’s government.” In the absence of the Twelfth Imam, Khomeini immediately assumed near absolute powers, overseeing a terror that executed or murdered thousands of the shah’s supporters and soon any of his own supporters who questioned his style of rule. His new constitution for an Islamic government was approved by a vast majority and while he created a semi-democratic façade—with an elected president and parliament—the real power lay with himself, now the supreme leader, chosen by a committee of expert clergymen, who controlled the entire state. Swiftly the state became a far more ruthless, and repressive dictatorship than it had ever been under the hapless shah.

When America gave the dying shah medical treatment, Iranian students seized US diplomats as hostages; American military intervention failed disastrously; and Khomeini reveled in the humiliation of the Great Satan. Meanwhile in 1980, the Iraqi Saddam Hussein invaded Iran but Khomeini, using the war to consolidate his power, counter-attacked and regained the initial losses. When Iraq offered a truce, Khomeini refused, sending thousands of conscripts in human waves at the Iraqi lines. The war lasted six years and was a disaster for Iran and Iraq—500,000 to one million died. In 1989, Khomeini reacted to the publication of the book the Satanic Verses by the British author Salman Rushdie by issuing a fatwa (religious decree) sentencing him to death.

When Khomeini died in 1989, his nominated successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was duly chosen as supreme leader, though he lacked Khomeini’s unique authority. The new leader backed the rise of populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, who pushed their shared agenda of a nuclear-armed Iran as regional great power across the Middle East. Ahmadinejad energetically attacked America and Israel, denying the existence of the Holocaust and threatening to destroy the Jewish state altogether. He also challenged the power of his own patron Khamenei and the clergy with his mystical millenarian radicalism. In 2009, Ahmadinejad almost certainly lost the presidential election to a liberal candidate but the supreme leader ensured his official re-election. Vast crowds protested and called the supreme leader a dictator but Iran brutally repressed the revolt and, defying international protests, continued to pursue the creation of a nuclear arsenal.

ORWELL

1903–1950

In Burma and Paris and London and on the road to Wigan pier, and in Spain, being shot at, and eventually wounded, by fascists—he had invested blood, pain and hard labor to earn his anger.

The novelist Thomas Pynchon