As Khomeini settled into his exile in France in the fall of 1978, the unrest was spreading back at home. Unprecedented mass demonstrations filled the streets of Iranian cities. Voices from across the political spectrum openly demanded change, both gradual and revolutionary. Leftist guerrillas engaged in battles with government security forces. The shah’s regime had never faced a challenge of such proportions before.
All this kindled utopian expectations among the revolutionaries who had gathered in Neauphle-le-Château. Yet the ayatollah remained imperturbable. He continued his daily prayers without interruption, making his obeisance to God in a tent especially erected on the grounds. He received an endless file of visitors, advisers, and petitioners. His supporters marveled at his supernatural equanimity, his simplicity, his unchanging steadiness. Everyone could see that he lived a life of uncompromising modesty; he owned almost nothing in the way of material possessions, and he ate no more than the plainest of meals. His granite sense of remove alienated many of his Western observers. A British correspondent noted that the ayatollah did not deign to shake his hand and that Khomeini’s gaze remained fixed on some faraway point during their conversation.1 Iranians tended to see this otherworldliness as a virtue, evidence of a genuine spirituality that refused to lose itself in the messy trivialities of daily existence.
It is one of the great ironies of the Iranian Revolution that the precise course it took depended crucially on the political acumen and personal instincts of this one man. Khomeini’s supporters might argue that God had provided well; he had chosen the ayatollah as the medium through which he was determined to act. If we do not accept this belief, however, it is hard to escape a sense of profound contingency. Without the presence of Khomeini, the revolution in Iran would have assumed a fundamentally different form. “In fact, Khomeini is to the Islamic Revolution what Lenin was to the Bolshevik, Mao to the Chinese, and Castro to the Cuban revolutions,” writes historian Ervand Abrahamian, who goes on to note that the ayatollah had such a powerful impact on the course of events precisely because of his aura of purity and principle. Most Iranian politicians were calculating intriguers looking for an angle. Khomeini, by contrast, had spent long years in the loneliness of exile for the sake of his principles. As Abrahamian notes, he lived a life of ostentatious simplicity, more akin to a medieval mystic than a 1970s activist. He rejected compromise and refused to maneuver for the advantage of his family; indeed, he famously stated that he would have his own children executed if they acted against the laws of God. Most notably of all, perhaps, he was ostentatiously incorruptible. Even once he had assumed the position of supreme leader, he insisted on living a life of minimal material comfort.2
Westerners did not know what to make of Khomeini. The leaders of contemporary revolutions were supposed to be flamboyant, strident, perhaps even promiscuous or a bit messy—like Mao or Che or the student activists in Paris or Frankfurt in the 1960s. Perhaps the closest comparison was to be found in earlier paragons of revolutionary idealism like Robespierre or Lenin, ascetic fanatics whose lives were entirely devoted to the cause. But the zeal of these men derived from a quasi-scientific view of history that prescribed the inevitability of social transformation. They were aggressively secular materialists—exactly the sort of personality that had shaped the idea of modern revolution, and was, correspondingly, regarded as almost inseparable from it.
Nothing remotely like that applied, of course, to this white-bearded religious scholar, shrouded in the black robes and turban of his calling, who so deftly dodged the journalists’ questions about the nature of the future Iranian state. That same dark gaze that so disconcerted Khomeini’s non-Iranian interviewers resonated with his compatriots, who knew him to be a lifelong student of erfan, the Shiite mystical tradition that emphasized the immediacy of the divine and the dismissal of this-worldly passions. The imam, as some were beginning to call him, spoke an idiom of sacrifice and justice that galvanized the people back at home. They parsed the voice issuing from black-market cassettes or illicit shortwave broadcasts for clues about what was to come.
Had an objective biography of the ayatollah been available at the time, it would have revealed a great deal. It was his peculiar personal circumstances and his inclinations that made Khomeini into a revolutionary; he certainly did not come into the world as one. He was born in 1902 in Khomein, a small provincial town that seemed to owe more to the sixteenth century than the twentieth. Modern technology had little impact on life there; the same big landowning families who had dominated the social and political life of the community for generations remained firmly in control. The central government was remote; the state was weak. The only other figures capable of exercising competing influence were the members of the religious establishment.
Khomeini’s father, Mostafa, came from a long line of illustrious clergymen, and he enjoyed a reputation as a lover of justice. In March 1903, his father announced that he was going to the local governor’s office to raise a formal complaint about the behavior of several local khans (nobles) who were known for their harassment and exploitation of the locals. But the men killed Mostafa before he could get there. His son Ruhollah was four months and twenty-two days old.3 We can only speculate, of course, about the extent to which his father’s murder shaped the mature Khomeini’s attitudes toward the society in which he lived. But it is certainly striking how many revolutionaries and political extremists have experienced violence directly in their own lives.4
From an early age, it was clear that Ruhollah would stay with the family vocation. He began his studies of the Quran as soon as he learned to read and soon showed that he had a prodigious memory and remarkable analytical skills. His temperament was mild—he showed little inclination to rebellion. He followed the prescribed path toward his calling as a religious scholar with patience and obedience. But he did experience a major shock when his mother died in his early teens, during a cholera epidemic that struck Iran during the First World War. He was now an orphan.
Khomeini may have originally intended to complete his studies at the great Shiite seminary in the Iraqi city of Najaf—the same place to which he would later be exiled for his resistance to the shah. But the end of World War I brought with it the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and Najaf was caught up in the unrest that accompanied the turbulent birth of the new state of Iraq. So Khomeini opted to stay in Iran, enrolling at a seminary in the city of Arak. In 1922 he was invited to attend the newly opened Faiziyeh Seminary in Qom, which would soon become the most prestigious center of religious learning in Iran.5
He proved himself an exemplary student in Qom. Yet it was here that he began to diverge somewhat from the path of convention. While pressing ahead with his prescribed studies in logic and jurisprudence (including a solid grounding in tax law), he also began to explore the esoteric teachings of erfan, the rich but demanding tradition of Shiite mysticism. The word erfan literally means “gnosis” (occult knowledge), and it promises, to those capable of mastering its mysteries, a direct experience of communion with God. Most budding religious scholars steered clear of such heterodox territory, but once the young Khomeini discovered a willing instructor, he immersed himself in the subject.
Because the religious authorities regarded erfan with a certain degree of suspicion, Khomeini’s teacher, Ayatollah Mohammed Ali Shahabadi, conducted his classes in the subject at home and always confined his students to a small but select group. There they discussed the canonical works of the Shiite mystics. Borrowing from the Neoplatonists, some of these Shiite thinkers ascribed to the essential unity of all creation and dismissed the complexities of visible reality as illusory. But it was possible, through discipline and study, to achieve an immediate and personal experience of this underlying divinity. As was so often the case in other mystical traditions, erfan taught that an individual seeker could achieve union with the godhead directly, without the help of priests or other intermediaries. A regime of spiritual discipline enabled the practitioner to bypass the deceptive information of the senses and the attachments of the individual soul. The adept who mastered these techniques could achieve “divine wisdom and the status of sainthood.”6 In one version of this teaching that had a particularly profound effect on Khomeini, someone who has developed the mystical training to appreciate the oneness of God behind all things can be considered a “perfect man”—a status that enables him to become an imam, the leader of a just and virtuous community.
The secrets of erfan—not unlike the Sunni mystical tradition of Sufism with which they can be compared—thus have potentially far-reaching political implications. The traditions in which Khomeini was immersed had their intellectual roots in the Greek philosophers, particularly Plato and his descendants, who dreamed of a perfect community in which enlightened scholar-rulers would transcend the messiness of this-worldly politics. The Greeks imagined this polity to be based on philosophy, not religion. But the Muslim theorists of government who emulated them later easily translated this vision into Islamic terms. The Prophet Mohammed was the earthly leader of the first perfect community. The tricky part was how to continue it once he was gone. This was an issue of considerable complexity, and the twentieth century was now challenging Muslims to figure out new answers to it.
In practical terms, a Shiite cleric of Khomeini’s generation faced two fundamental choices about politics. One was to follow the example of the quietist clerics, who essentially believed that the clergy should leave politics to the politicians. The other position was represented by two of Khomeini’s personal heroes. The first was Sheikh Fazlollah Nuri, a Shiite clergyman who had initially backed the Constitutional Revolution and had then rejected it when the revolutionaries had moved toward the creation of secular political institutions that undermined clerical power. Nuri was ultimately hanged by his enemies—an episode viewed by Khomeini as an instructive example of the sorts of betrayals of which secular revolutionaries were capable.
Khomeini only knew about Nuri through stories. But his second hero was someone whose public example he had followed for much of his youth. This was a Shiite notable named Seyyed Hassan Modarres, who persistently and publicly criticized the powers that be—above all Reza Shah, that fierce secularizer and founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. Modarres opposed Reza Shah’s assumption of dictatorial powers and ended up spending much of his life in jail as a result. The shah finally had him killed in prison in 1937. But during Modarres’s life, he offered the young Khomeini a compelling model for how a principled religious scholar could exercise moral force in the political arena. During the 1920s Khomeini often cut classes at the seminary in order to hear Modarres speak at the Iranian parliament. There, among other things, Modarres conducted master classes in parliamentary theatrics, dishing out one fearless tongue-lashing after another as he lectured the most powerful man in the nation on the imperatives of Islamic law and the constraints of the constitution.7 Khomeini still managed to find time to graduate. In 1936 he received his permission to act as a mujtahid, an expert on Islamic jurisprudence. He was unusually young to receive such a distinction.
The 1940s were a difficult time for Iran’s religious elite—just as they were for the country as a whole. The new leader in Qom, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Tabatabai Borujerdi, was, like his predecessor, a quietist, and he was reluctant to challenge the new shah directly. The Allied invasion of Iran and the period of political volatility that followed confronted the clerics with difficult choices, and they wanted to tread carefully.
Khomeini, however, was gradually losing his reservations. He watched the arrogant maneuverings of the infidel foreigners, the British and the Russians, with mounting fury. The young shah, as he saw it, was only too happy to serve as their pawn. In 1943 he published a book entitled Kashf-i Asrar (The Revealing of Secrets) that contained a withering assault on the secularizing tendencies of the shah, who wanted to continue the Westernization program inaugurated by his father. The word kashf, literally “unveiling,” came straight from the Sufi lexicon: it alluded to the process of stripping away deceptive appearances from the true face of the divine. For the first time Khomeini issued a plea for a virtuous “Islamic government” to be run along divine guidelines: “Government,” he wrote, “can only be legitimate when it accepts the rule of God and the rule of God means the implementation of the Shari’a.” And he specified that a truly Islamic government should ban any writing “against the law and religion . . . and hang those responsible for such nonsense.”8 Yet for all the invective he unleashed at the shah, he still stopped short of calling for the complete abolition of the monarchy.9 And Khomeini saved some of his harshest insults for his fellow clerics, whom he accused of cowardice when it came to standing up for the rights of their estate. His book did not win him a mass following, but some of his younger colleagues, who shared Khomeini’s concern about the direction the country was taking, took note.
During the 1950s the attitudes of the religious scholars remained divided. Some of them, like Modarres, supported Mossadeq’s plans to nationalize the oil industry and effectively curtail the shah’s powers. Others, like Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Mostafavi Kashani, ended up siding with the coup plotters who put an end to Mossadeq’s ascendancy and revitalized the rule of the shah. This divided religious establishment—some of them wooed by the shah with money and favors—was in no position to act as an alternate power center.
In 1961, Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi died. This gave his pupil Khomeini the freedom to act as he saw fit. He now had no reason to hold back from public attacks against the shah. The shah had not helped matters by acclaiming an ayatollah in Iraq as the preeminent spiritual leader of Iran’s Shiites—a transparent attempt to undermine the authority of politically minded clerics back in Iran like Khomeini and his older (and somewhat more cautious) colleague Ayatollah Mohamed Kazem Shariatmadari. Khomeini was ready.
In October 1962 the cabinet passed a law that allowed Iranians to vote for representatives to local councils. The new law gave the vote to women and no longer required Islam as a condition for holding office. Khomeini immediately made an announcement denouncing the bill as the “first step toward the abolition of Islam.” It was all part of a Zionist plot, he said, to destroy the family and spread prostitution.10 It wasn’t just the local councils law, though. The shah had already announced the first stage of a national land reform—the early stages of the White Revolution—and the clerics were worried that the measure could threaten the financial independence of the religious endowments that owned large amounts of land around the country. The shah’s plans to introduce a Soviet-style “Literacy Corps” also instilled anxiety in the clerics, who wondered whether this was a covert secularization measure designed to undercut the traditionally dominant role of religious scholars as village teachers.11
In reaction to the storm of protest, the prime minister ultimately rescinded the local councils law—at least for the time being. But land reform went ahead. In January 1963 the shah put land reform and five other measures on the ballot in a nationwide referendum. Though the 99.9 percent “yes” vote was clearly fraudulent, the clergy did not dare to issue religious rulings against the land reform, recognizing its popularity. The shah deepened the insult by referring to the clerics as the “black reaction.”12
In March 1963 Khomeini fired back with sermons accusing the government of plotting to destroy the religious classes in the interest of nefarious foreign interests. The shah’s patience snapped. He ordered a raid on the Faiziyeh seminary in Qom. At least one student was killed and dozens injured. Khomeini assailed the government for its assault and assured the shah that “I will never bow my head to your tyranny.” On June 3—during the holy month of Moharram, when Shiites celebrate the self-sacrifice of their greatest martyr in intensely emotional rituals—Khomeini held a famous speech at the Faiziyeh in which he settled accounts with the shah. Once again he accused the shah of acting as a proxy for Israel. Once again he denounced the shah in witheringly personal terms, addressing him as “you unfortunate wretch.” On June 5, the security forces arrived at Khomeini’s house and arrested him. Demonstrations erupted in Qom and other cities around Iran. Martial law had to be declared. Hundreds of people were killed. It was the worst unrest in Iran since the fall of Mossadeq a decade earlier.13
Some within the government apparently considered sending Khomeini to the executioner. But Shariatmadari ensured his safety by awarding him the title of “grand ayatollah” (since the constitution prevented anyone of that exalted rank from capital punishment). In 1964 Khomeini was finally released after ten months in prison—just in time to wade into yet another political fray. This time the issue was the new status-of-forces law the shah had signed with Washington. The law gave wide-ranging immunity to US forces stationed on Iranian soil—precisely the sort of cause that still tends to inflame popular opinion in countries already concerned about overweening US influence in their domestic affairs. “If the men of religion had influence,” Khomeini declared, “it would not be possible for the nation to be at one moment the prisoner of England, at the next, the prisoner of America. . . . If the men of religion had influence, governments could not do whatever they pleased, totally to the detriment of our nation.”14
The government arrested him again. This time, however, Khomeini was immediately expelled from the country. He was sent first to Turkey, where he lived for the better part of a year with the family of a Turkish government official before receiving permission to move to the holy city of Najaf in Iraq. Unlike 1963, however, his arrest and exile prompted little reaction from the religious establishment or the public at large. Land reform had won the government a certain degree of credit among the populace, and the senior clergy felt that they had taken enough risks in his defense.15 Khomeini’s departure from Iran in 1964 seemingly marked the end of his political career. He would spend the next thirteen years in Iraqi exile.
Khomeini took it all in stride. His strength of belief was extraordinary, if not eerie. Most of the Iranians who met him were deeply impressed by his otherworldliness and his powers of self-control. A story made the rounds about the death of Khomeini’s infant daughter. While Khomeini’s wife was pulling her hair in grief, Khomeini remained outwardly unmoved: “God gave me this gift, and God has taken it away.” Khomeini’s son noted that his father believed himself to have an especially intimate and privileged relationship with God.16 For a man with such a cosmic view of existence, a few years in exile from his home country was a triviality, a minor inconvenience.
Yet exile did change him in one respect: it radicalized him. This might seem hard to imagine, given the intensity of his pre-1964 invective against the shah. But even amid his most scurrilous attacks, Khomeini had never called into question the monarchy itself. He had insisted that the government observe sharia law. He had demanded a greater role for the ulama in appointing the shah, and at one point in 1963 he even asked the government to grant the religious authorities a say over education and a “few hours of radio time” each week.17
Now his views began to change.18 Exile forced him, perhaps, to confront the real balance of forces. This was not the timid, financially weak Iranian monarchy of the nineteenth-century Tobacco Protest. This was a strong, twentieth-century state with all the means of political control that went along with that: an all-encompassing secret police; a government-run educational system; official media, including television networks that reached into every cranny of society; state-of-the-art communications; an increasingly modern economy that threatened to rationalize away traditional interest groups; a well-equipped military; and the full political and economic support of the United States, the world’s most powerful country, and its allies. Even the religious authorities were now cowed into submission, as the subdued reaction to his exile had shown. And the secular intellectuals of the National Front and the leftist parties—they might criticize the shah, but they had no moral fiber. As for the Communists, they were atheists, but there were things that could be learned from them: political organization, planning, building resilient networks.
As the 1960s went on, Khomeini gradually became persuaded that the modern Iranian state could not be persuaded to change its ways. It would have to be captured. And the only way to do this was through revolution. Revolution was a word that, by now, had already become something of a religion in its own right for many young Iranians (even if the word was still anathema to most religious scholars). But even as Khomeini received and taught a steady flow of students from his homeland, he was also deepening his familiarity with the wider world of Islamic revivalism. By now a full-fledged “model of emulation” (marja-e taqlid) to Shiites around the Middle East, Khomeini was entitled to receive religious taxes contributed by his followers, and he began to put these funds to a variety of political uses (including support for the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose cause he held especially dear to his heart). He continued to digest the works of the modern Islamist thinkers and met members of the Muslim Brotherhood from around the Sunni world. All this helped to sharpen his awareness of how a genuinely Islamic state should look.
He was also building a political organization of his own, a covert network of young religious radicals. Known as the Combatant Clergy Association, it was based on a growing cadre of young clerics attracted by his principled stand against the shah. They came to Iraq to attend his lectures, absorbed his teachings, and then returned to Iran to distribute funding, advice, and cassette recordings of his sermons. They sought coalitions with those who had borne the brunt of the shah’s transformation of Iranian society, like the bazaaris and the dislocated denizens of the shantytowns.
Not everyone among the senior clerics shared Khomeini’s views. Most of them dismissed his theory of the Islamic state, regarding it as unorthodox. So a great deal of his polemical work in this period was directed at fellow members of the religious establishment. Throughout the years of exile, Khomeini kept up a steady drumbeat of pronouncements keyed to major political and religious events, and he carefully aimed them not only at general public opinion but also at the ulama. Shame was one of the most powerful weapons in his arsenal. In 1971, when Khomeini issued a tirade against the shah’s celebration of the twenty-five-hundreth anniversary of the monarchy, he reserved special contempt for fellow members of the religious class. Millions of Iranians were starving as the shah lavished the nation’s wealth on his senseless projects; when university students (including women) protested, the security forces attacked them viciously. Yet the religious elite, Khomeini acidly observed, had nothing to say:
Are we not to speak out about these chronic ailments that afflict us? Not to say a single word about all these disasters? Is it incompatible with our position as religious scholars to speak out? . . . How is that now, when it is the turn of the present generation of religious scholars to speak out, we invent excuses and say that it is “incompatible” with our status to speak out? . . . If the ‘ulama of Qum, Mashhad, Tabriz, Isfahan, Shiraz and the other cities in Iran were to protest collectively today against this scandalous festival, to condemn these extravagances that are destroying the people and the nation, be assured that results would be forthcoming.19
By this time Khomeini’s relationship with Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari, his ally back in 1963, was giving way to outright rivalry.20 Shariatmadari did not see the point in outright challenges to the power of the shah; it was better, he believed, for the religious establishment to remain united if it hoped to survive the onslaught of the state.
This position became increasingly hard to maintain as the economic and social contradictions of the shah’s modernization program intensified. The younger clerics were increasingly demanding a principled stand from the ulama. Aside from Khomeini, the only other leading religious scholar the young radicals took seriously was Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleqani, who had joined with Mehdi Bazargan in 1961 to form the Iran Freedom Movement. Taleqani, who spent much of the 1960s and 1970s in jail, would later join forces with Khomeini during the revolution.
Many Iranians had never heard of Khomeini before 1978; the riots of 1964 were part of the past. But for those in the know, he had already acquired a unique status. They began referring to him as “the imam”—a provocative break with Shiite tradition. True, the Lebanese Shiite leader Musa Sadr had been hailed that way by his followers starting in the 1960s—but they were Arabic speakers, and the word has a different connotation in Arabic, where it is a title of respect attached to anyone who leads the daily prayers. For Shiites, by contrast, it refers to the twelve spiritual and religious successors of the Prophet Mohammed, a line that begins with Ali ibn Abu Talib and ends with Mohammed al-Mahdi, the imam of the ages who will one day reemerge from occultation to inaugurate a new age of perfect justice. It is a term that is redolent with exalted emotion and apocalyptic yearning, and now, for the first time in centuries, Iranian Shiites were using it to refer to a living person.21
This, too, was a form of revolution. For centuries Shiite legal scholars had been expected to climb the ladder of their religious vocation through patient scholarship and teaching, laboriously building reputations and followings through the force of pious example and scholarly devotion. But now the acolytes of Khomeini were putting him above the rest—and they were doing it on the basis of his political engagement, not his religious credentials.
In the fall of 1977, the crowds who gathered at a Teheran mosque to commemorate the death of Khomeini’s son Mostafa hailed their leader as the “imam.” According to a report by SAVAK, several other ayatollahs in Qom refused to participate in the mourning ceremonies, saying that they regarded Khomeini’s exaltation as an “insult.” But soon the revolution would no longer allow them the luxury of nonparticipation.22