For most countries, 1979 dawned in a fog of uncertainty. News of the party plenum in December 1978 gave many Chinese an inkling that positive changes were on the way, but no one knew for sure how far-reaching the reforms would be or how quickly they would come. Britons, for the moment, remained mired in the frustrations of the Winter of Discontent; an end to the strikes was not in sight. The simmering rebellion in Afghanistan posed little in the way of a systemic challenge to the government. The election of John Paul II suggested the possibility of a shift in Vatican policy toward the East bloc, but the Communist authorities in Warsaw had yet to issue a response to the new pope’s request for permission to visit his homeland.
In Iran there was no ambiguity. The opposition’s long wait was coming to an end. The regime was fighting for its life. Cordite, tear gas, and the smell of burning tires laced the air of Iran’s big cities. By January 1979, demonstrations had become a daily occurrence. Security forces and antigovernment guerrillas engaged in firefights. The only question now was how long the shah would manage to hold on.
Everyone disagrees about when the Iranian Revolution began. Some historians argue that it really got under way with the guerrilla campaigns waged by the left-wing Islamist groups who took their inspiration from Shariati’s teachings in the 1970s. Others point to the economic slump of 1976 that followed the astronomical oil prices of the year before. Desperate to bring the economy back under control, the Iranian government tried to throttle back the rate of growth. The shah’s planners cut credit and froze prices. The bazaar merchants, already hit hard by earlier reforms, now found themselves at the receiving end of an “antispeculation campaign” that landed many of them in jail. (The corruption at the higher reaches of government and in the entourage of the shah remained untouched, of course.) The boom came to a screeching halt. Firms went bankrupt. Employees lost their jobs. All of it fueled anger with the government.
Some pinpoint the liberalization measures the shah cautiously implemented in 1977 in response to the human rights rhetoric of newly elected US president Jimmy Carter. Carter had entered office pledging to make human rights a central criterion in Washington’s relationship with its allies, and, at least in the case of the shah, he was as good as his word.
The shah’s relations with previous administrations had been straightforward. Richard Nixon had viewed Iran as America’s proxy in the Persian Gulf and had shown little inclination to involve himself in the country’s internal affairs. Gerald Ford had followed suit. But Carter’s arrival in the White House, and his disapproving rhetoric about the limits of freedom in Iran, disconcerted the shah. The Iranian ruler was highly sensitive to the slightest shifts in US policy; it was the Americans, after all, who had helped to put him back on his throne in 1953 when all had seemed lost. So he was quick to offer concessions.
He released some political prisoners and made it known that human rights organizations would thenceforth be allowed to operate (within limits). Activists quickly took advantage of the chink of freedom to establish high-profile campaigns. New political groups formed, and lawyers and writers signed declarations criticizing the government. A series of poetry readings late in 1977 sponsored by the West German cultural institute in Tehran sparked a series of public demonstrations that showcased the dissatisfaction of the middle-class intellectuals.1 For the moment, most of the religious establishment held its fire. The main exceptions were Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari, a politically active cleric who forged contacts with the moderate Islamist opposition groups, and Ayatollah Taleqani, a co-founder of the Iran Freedom Movement of Mehdi Bazargan. Shariatmadari, a cleric who had built up a powerful political organization among his followers, had grown critical of the White Revolution’s program of secularization and its encroachments on clerical power. Taleqani, who was strongly influenced by leftist thinking on economic justice, had lent his voice to Bazargan’s program of a “progressive” nationalism with a strong admixture of Islamic values. Yet most of the main clerics, still strongly influenced by quietism, were reluctant to enter the political fray.
This changed in October 1977. That month Khomeini’s eldest son died of an apparent heart attack, and thousands of the ayatollah’s supporters took to the streets to denounce the shah and his minions, whom they blamed for the death. Forty days later, when Islamic ritual dictated an additional mourning ceremony, they demonstrated again. Suddenly, Khomeini, largely forgotten until then, was back in the public eye. The shah vacillated, searching for a proper response. Then, in January 1978, one of Iran’s leading newspapers, Ettalat, published a long commentary denouncing Khomeini as a British agent, a sexual deviant, and a leader of the “black reaction,” the obscurantists who opposed the shah’s “progressive” reforms. (The shah’s camp always referred to the Communists as the “red reaction.”) By now Khomeini, still ensconced in his Iraqi exile, was a full-fledged marja-e taqlid,“a source of emulation” for millions of Shiites around the world. So this kind of insult could not go unanswered. The day after the article’s appearance, students in the seminary at Qom, the center of Iran’s spiritual life, told local merchants to shut down the bazaar. Then they filled the streets, their chants mocking the king who had dared to defame their hero. “We demand the return of Ayatollah Khomeini,” they chanted.2 The security forces opened fire. Dozens of students were killed. The next day Khomeini published a statement calling for more demonstrations and congratulating the “progressive clergy” for finally standing up to the shah and the American infidels. (This was, in part, a calculated nudge aimed at the quietists; Khomeini was trying to urge the fence-sitters among the senior clergy to join the cause.)
Forty days later, on February 18, the deaths of the students in Qom were commemorated with more demonstrations. Bazaars and universities shut down. Protesters attacked police stations and hotels, anything that evoked the shah’s authority or foreign cultural contamination. Thousands of protesters took to the streets in Tabriz. More demonstrators were shot, their deaths marked in another forty days. The traditional rhythms of Shiite mourning had become an accelerant of modern revolution.3 Violence surged again on March 29.
In May, however, Ayatollah Shariatmadari called for calm—and this time the protesters listened to him rather than Khomeini. Many observers concluded that the shah was regaining the upper hand. The government had tried to placate the religious opposition by cracking down on some of the most offensive manifestations of un-Islamic behavior, such as erotic cinemas and liquor stores. The shah’s officials tried to initiate talks with the largest of the myriad opposition groups that were now emerging into the open. Most of them were demanding a return to the constitutional framework defined in 1906. None of the major parties was calling for the overthrow of the monarchy—much less the establishment of an Islamic Republic.4 In early June, Prime Minister Jamshid Amouzegar declared, “The crisis is over.”5
Some of the revolutionaries were not ready to give up. In July 1978, Mehdi Bazargan sent Khomeini a memorandum on tactics. Bazargan, a bearded, bespectacled intellectual who had served as oil minister under Mossadeq and had written extensively on the theory of “Islamic economics,” was an experienced political professional. The shah was promising free elections to placate the opposition, and Bazargan advised accepting the offer. While agreeing that the shah should go, Bazargan suggested that it might be worth allowing the institution of the monarchy to continue. He stressed playing by the rules of the still-extant constitution, which—at least on paper—limited the authority of the sovereign and provided for expansive democratic representation. He proposed that Khomeini moderate his attacks on American “imperialism,” since the new Iran would still be reliant on help from the United States and the other Western countries. And he also counseled against “a clerical monopoly of the leadership of the movement,” since the ulama lacked adequate political experience.6
Khomeini, still in his Iraqi exile, did not take the advice. He maintained his attacks on the shah and the Americans and continued to stress that Islam was the guiding force of the revolution. “The whole nation, throughout Iran, cries out: ‘We want an Islamic Republic,’” he wrote. The monarchy needed to be eliminated, and the constitution for the new state should be “the law of Islam,” which he described, in a characteristic nod to leftist jargon, as “the most progressive of laws.”7 Yet when he was asked to explain what he meant by the evocative phrase Islamic Republic, he refused to be drawn, saying merely that the details would be provided in the future.
The relative respite of the summer proved deceptive. Near the end of August, a movie theater in the hardscrabble oil town of Abadan, the Cinema Rex, went up in flames. More than four hundred people died. Who was behind the attack has never been conclusively established. It is possible that hard-line Islamists, some of whom denounced movies for religious reasons, were behind the arson. The film being shown in the theater at the time, however, assailed the regime, and that prompted many Iranians to believe that SAVAK had started the fire as a way of intimidating the opposition. The fire proved an extraordinarily polarizing event. Many members of the middle class—their loyalty to the shah already dented by his erratic economic policies and contempt for individual rights—parted ways with him for good. This marked the point when the movement against the shah began to spread from Khomeinist and Marxist militants to a broader revolt that had its roots in the shah’s harsh authoritarian politics.
The Pahlavi dynasty now entered its death spiral. Under American pressure, the shah swung back to a harder line, empowering the military to crack down on the protests. In early September, as a religious holiday began, crowds chanting pro-Khomeini slogans filled the streets of Iran. The government declared martial law—but many Iranians were unaware of the announcement. The next day, on September 8, a crowd of up to twenty thousand gathered in Jaleh Square in the center of Tehran, in unintentional defiance of the state of emergency. Troops opened fire on the massed demonstrators; helicopter gunships machine-gunned the stragglers. The streets ran red with blood. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed. After “Black Friday,” as it came to be known, there was no way for the monarchy to redeem itself.
By now the shah had prevailed upon the Iraqi government to expel Khomeini, but this proved a Pyrrhic victory. Khomeini’s arrival in Paris quickly revealed its advantages as a headquarters. He was now even better positioned to propagate the revolution’s message. He gave hundreds of interviews to reporters from around the world. Iranians from all walks of life made pilgrimages to Neauphle-le-Château, and a cross-section of illustrious visitors paid their obeisance to the man whose portrait was now replacing the shah’s as the most ubiquitous in Iran. A crowd of well-wishers from the homeland gathered outside the police barricades, and whenever Khomeini appeared, they broke into ecstatic cries, hailing him as “the imam.” Sometimes the faintest hint of a smile played over his face, but aside from that, he maintained his distinctive air of otherworldliness, never betraying a sign of his emotions.
In Iran itself the demonstrations continued, growing larger by the week. Strikes rippled out across the country. In September the oil workers stopped work—a final crippling shock to the economy, which ground to a halt as oil revenues tapered off. Collective emotions ratcheted up again in December with the start of the holy month of Moharram, when Shiites commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hossein. Iranian sociologist Sattareh Farmaian, who wrote one of the most vivid memoirs of the revolution, recalled how Khomeini urged Iranians to emulate Hossein by sacrificing their lives:
Crowds large and small filled the streets, angry men and black-veiled women with waving fists and bulging eyes. Neighborhood organizers and the “beards” [pro-Khomeini activists] kept the protestors disciplined, but it was impossible to near a crowd without fearing that it might turn into a lynch mob. To set foot in the city was like getting caught in a slow-moving cyclone. A million people would move along Shahreza Avenue, the main artery across the city, stretching from one side of Tehran to the other, carrying banners and shouting slogans, a thick, black, living river. On every street one saw shuttered, empty, burned-out stores, broken pavements, flashing police lights, overturned cars and trucks. The smells of burning buildings and rubber tires, billowing smoke, and tear gas pervaded the chilly air.8
On Ashura, the climactic day of Moharram, Ayatollah Taleqani and National Front leader Karim Sanjabi led a demonstration of 2 million people through Tehran. By now the most effective slogan in the protesters’ repertoire was this one: “Brothers in the army: Why are you killing your brothers?” When young conscripts heard it, they often broke into tears, threw away their guns, and joined the demonstrators.
Iranians now faced a winter of political uncertainty, rampant violence, and shortages of food and fuel. The exiles in Neauphle-le-Château were feeling the cold, too. The ayatollah stuck to his rigorous schedule of prayer despite the complexities involved in remote-controlling a revolution. Throughout the year Khomeini had remained in constant contact with his network of supporters inside Iran. The state-of-the-art telephone switching system recently installed in Iran by the Americans was a major source of logistical support, enabling easy long-distance calls from Paris to anywhere inside the country. His speeches and statements, duplicated with the help of Xerox copiers, were smuggled in by the thousands. The cassette tape—cheap and portable—carried his sermons into the most remote corners of Iran.
The backbone of Khomeini’s network consisted of his former students, united by their teacher’s activist vision of Islam, and leaders from the firmly traditional caste of bazaar merchants (bazaari), who tended to be both deeply pious and profoundly skeptical of the culture of technocratic capitalism promoted by the shah’s reforms. The network financed its work both with donations from the bazaaris as well as with the traditional religious tax that Khomeini’s followers were duty bound to contribute to him. He had empowered one of his favorite students, Morteza Motahhari, to collect these funds and disburse them in accordance with the needs of the movement. Khomeini had already designated a group of other young clerics, including Motahhari, to act on his behalf in Tehran.
When he met with Bazargan in late October 1978, Khomeini asked him and his colleague Ebrahim Yazdi—the man who had asked Mohsen Sazegara to come to Paris from Chicago—to draw up a list of people who could advise him, acting as a sort of shadow government. The final group of eighteen that Bazargan and Yazdi came up with included members of Khomeini’s band of young activists as well as a cadre from Bazargan’s moderate Islamist Party, plus a sprinkling of bazaar merchants and ex-security officials who had fallen out with the shah’s regime. They formed the core of what came to be known as the Revolutionary Council, which would become one of the most important institutions in Iran after the fall of the monarchy.9
The formation of the Revolutionary Council was a clear indicator that the religious opposition to the shah was planning to take power. But Khomeini and his entourage chose not to advertise the fact. In public Khomeini was still careful with his views. He took every occasion to express his respect for democratic institutions, the vote, and freedom of the press. When asked what he meant by the enticing phrase Islamic Republic, he responded that it would be “a republic as you have in France.” Khomeini continued to make reassuring signals to the leftist groups, who, with their guns and radical ideas, still formed an important part of the militant resistance to the government. He made a point of saying that the new state would allow even Communists all the freedoms they wished as long as they pledged to stay within the law. Once he returned to Iran, he said, he would settle back down in Qom, hinting that he would leave the governing of the country to the politicians.
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.”13
To 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.14
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.”16 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.17
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
Many 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.
The executions of political opponents started in the days immediately following the ayatollah’s return. A firing squad operating under Revolutionary Council orders dispatched SAVAK officials and leading generals on the roof of the school. This marked the start of a new phase of violence. Until this moment, the overwhelming majority of those who had died in the revolution had been victims of the state. From now on it was the revolutionaries themselves who did most of the killing—sometimes among themselves. This type of bloodletting would prove hard to control.
Khomeini had originally intended to postpone his return until a provisional government, free from any ties to the shah, could be appointed, but that plan had been overridden by fears that the military might seize power.20 So now he set about creating his own. On February 4 he appointed Bazargan prime minister, with responsibility for the army, police, and civil service. There were now two people in Iran who held this office: the other was Bakhtiar, who still governed according to the existing constitution and refused to give way. But real power was draining away from him by the hour.
The military itself, one of the few of the shah’s institutions to have survived the revolutionary turmoil unscathed, now began to fragment as well. In the course of the preceding months, many lower-ranking officers and enlisted men had transferred their sympathies to the revolution. The unavoidable confrontation came on February 10. At a military base in Tehran, junior officers who sympathized with the revolution got into a gun battle with the Imperial Guard, the elite force of the shah’s army. Reinforcements from left-wing militias, the Fedayeen-e Khalq (“the People’s Strugglers”) and the Mujahideen-e Khalq (“the People’s Mujahideen”), rushed to the scene. Neither group, it should noted, took its orders from Khomeini; they were loyal to the “revolution.” The revolutionaries won—and then proceeded to march on other bases where royalist forces were still holding out. Around midday on February 11, the army proclaimed its “neutrality”—a euphemism for capitulation. This meant that there was no one left to defend Bakhtiar’s government. The revolution had triumphed. Bakhtiar left Iran in April, never to return.21
Iran’s 35 million people were now under the control of a revolutionary government. But what sort of government was it, precisely? The Bazargan cabinet did not appear particularly radical. He and his cabinet, which included no clerics, essentially wanted a secular, parliamentary state. One of the most important tasks Khomeini had entrusted it with was the passing of a referendum on the future form of government, to be followed by the drafting of a constitution and its submission to a constituent assembly. The precise timetable for these events remained unclear. For the moment, Bazargan accordingly announced, the 1906 constitution would remain in effect—minus the monarchy—until a substitute was approved. After all, the prime minister declared, Iranian society still needed some sort of ground rules. In speeches he depicted himself as a “delicate passenger car” that traveled on a “smooth asphalted road,” in stark contrast with Khomeini, the “bulldozer” of the revolution. Bazargan’s respect for the rule of law undoubtedly endeared him to nervous members of the middle and upper classes, but it was not necessarily the thing that died-in-the-wool revolutionaries—lusting for blood, power, or justice—wanted to hear. “Those who imagine the revolution continues are mistaken,” Bazargan’s press spokesman told the public. “The revolution is over. The era of reconstruction has begun.”22 It soon turned out that Khomeini had his own views on the matter.
Revolutionary government in Iran actually predated the formation of Bazargan’s cabinet. For months, extending well back into 1978, Islamists and other activists around the country had been forming komitehs (revolutionary committees) that coordinated protests, arranged supplies of food and fuel to neighborhoods, or stockpiled weapons. There were komitehs on the scale of a city block; others controlled major cities, some as early as December 1978. Students of history noted a striking antecedent: the Russian word soviet, meaning “council,” was used for the local groups formed by workers and soldiers after the overthrow of the czar in March 1917. Some of the komitehs had similar origins, and there were leftists who tried to refashion them as workers’ councils—an effort doomed as Khomeini’s supporters gained the upper hand.23 But most of the komitehs were organized by religious activists, often with a local mosque at their center. There were some one thousand of them in Tehran alone. They often indulged in the practice of arbitrary justice, sometimes erecting checkpoints that aimed to screen out whatever they deemed as seditious or “anti-Islamic behavior.” (There were cases of people shot for playing chess, which was associated with the reign of the shah.)24
Thus ensued the Iranian version of a situation common to many revolutions: dual government. The revolution had spawned two parallel structures of authority. Since each claimed superior legitimacy, rivalry was inevitable. The komitehs paid little attention to the edicts issuing from Bazargan’s provisional government. While Bazargan’s cabinet consisted primarily of moderate oppositionists, the komitehs consisted largely of religious radicals who were eager to see Islamic law applied on the ground. They tended to follow the lead of the Revolutionary Council, whose members increasingly had very different ideas from the government’s about the direction the revolution should take. The council was now dominated by clerics, since Bazargan’s secular allies had moved over to his cabinet. While Bazargan’s cabinet continued to churn out laws and decrees, the council increasingly exercised its will through the komitehs and the revolutionary tribunals that were springing up around the country.
For the moment, Khomeini did little to bring clarity to the situation. He was dissatisfied with the secularizing tendencies of Bazargan’s cabinet, but he had to be cautious. Secular political groups were trumpeting their own visions of the future. The left-wing parties—as they had demonstrated during the confrontation with the Imperial Guard—had powerful militias that remained a force to be reckoned with. And there were also challenges from Iran’s many ethnic minorities, who now began to foment separatist rebellions.25 Under these conditions, establishment of a system of rule by the religious elite was anything but ensured.
On top of all this, Khomeini’s theory of Islamic government had yet to meet with wide acceptance among the rest of the religious establishment. There were quietist clerics, like Ayatollah Khorasani, who rejected the entire premise of theocratic rule: the business of government, this camp argued, should be left to the politicians. Others, like Ayatollah Shariatmadari, approved of greater clerical involvement in government, but insisted on the maintenance of democratic freedoms. Shariatmadari’s Islamic People’s Republican Party, with a solid base in Tabriz, Iran’s second-largest city, was also a force to be reckoned with; his movement had tens of thousands of followers who were fiercely loyal to their leader and who could be sent into the streets on short notice if the occasion demanded. Meanwhile, Ayatollah Taleqani continued to side with Bazargan’s Freedom Movement.
The referendum on the nature of the postrevolutionary state was set for the end of March. On March 1, four weeks before, Khomeini laid down an important marker: he warned against using the modifier democratic for the new republic. The only proper adjective, he said, was Islamic. Finally, as Bazargan had promised, Iranians went to the polls to express their preference. On March 30–31, the revolutionary government asked voters to answer yes or no to a simple query: “Should the monarchy be replaced by an Islamic Republic?” No one knew precisely what was meant by the term. But the voters—at least those who participated—liked the sound of it, and 98.2 percent of them said yes.26 With this, the march toward clerical rule passed its first crucial watershed.
Iran, however, was not at peace with itself. Chaos reigned. The shah was gone, but as the months went by it became clear that the central issue of who would hold power in the state had still not been conclusively resolved. There were many groups vying for their share of power. In March the Kurds and Turkmens rose up in separatist revolts. The Tudeh Party was back in business, its armed wing roaming the streets, its leaflets coursing through the universities. Students battled each other over obscure doctrinal questions, and more and more of them gravitated toward the various armed groups: the leftist Fedayeen-e Khalq or the Mujahideen-e Khalq, or the new pro-Khomeini organization that was known simply as “the Party of God”: Hezbollah. The Hezbollahis were the storm troopers of velayat-e faqih. They attacked opposing demonstrations, swooped down on displays of ostensibly “anti-Islamic” behavior, and torched the offices of newspapers and political parties whose thinking they disagreed with. In some cases, particular localities had their own Islamist guerrilla groups.
All this was deeply worrying to Ayatollah Taleqani. Like his friend Bazargan, he was worried that the rise of the komitehs, the revolutionary courts, and Hezbollah was undermining the democratic freedoms achieved in the revolution and paving the way toward theocracy. (Though Taleqani—long one of Khomeini’s most important allies—was a cleric himself, that didn’t mean that he wanted his colleagues to seize power.) Increasingly, it appeared as though Khomeini was not only denying support to the government he had placed in power but also enabling activities that undermined its work. In April, Taleqani issued a public warning against a “return to despotism.” Thousands of his supporters, mostly “progressive Islamists” of a pro-Shariati coloration, took to the streets, chanting their ayatollah’s praises and denouncing “reactionaries”—meaning Khomeini and his entourage.
This was a serious matter. The chain-smoking Taleqani was the revolution’s second-most popular figure and, for a time, the chairman of the Revolutionary Council (a fact that became known only after his death). He was closely allied with Bazargan and enjoyed the backing of the People’s Mujahideen, the Mujahideen-e Khalq, who had lent him their support because of his opposition to clerical rule. If Bazargan ever had a chance to thwart the slide toward theocracy, this would have been it. But he failed to respond decisively. Pro-Khomeini forces arrested two of Taleqani’s sons; then Khomeini called Taleqani to Qom (where Khomeini was now ensconced) and forced him to recant. Taleqani, publicly humiliated, was hardly heard from again. (In September he died under mysterious circumstances.)
A key aspect of the growing struggle between the provisional government and the Revolutionary Council was control over the security forces. In late April, one of the moderate ayatollahs and the chief of the regular national police announced a plan to integrate four thousand members of the various revolutionary militias into the regular police force. This would have given a significant boost to the provisional government’s ability to crack down on the chaos in the streets. But on May i, 1979, Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari—the loyalist who had run Khomeini’s network of supporters inside Iran as well as helping to establish Hosseiniye Ershad, the site of Shariati’s most famous lectures—was killed by an assassin. For Khomeini, this was not only a profound personal shock (since Motahhari had been one of his most promising students). He also saw the attack as a direct assault on the clergy. The revolution was under siege, and the army, still staffed by officers appointed by the old regime, could not be relied upon to defend it.
In the week after Motahhari’s death, Khomeini entrusted Ebrahim Yazdi with the job of melding the various armed groups into a new force to be called the “Corps of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution.”27 From here on the Revolutionary Guard became the armed avant-garde of the nascent Islamic state. It was designed to provide a counterweight to the traditional military, which was ideologically suspect, and assumed responsibility for defending the revolution against those deemed to be its enemies by Khomeini and his followers. Its institutional partner in this task was the Islamic Republican Party (IRP), a new political organization created by the hard-line clerics to advance the Khomeinist agenda amid the rough-and-tumble of Iranian politics. The creation of the Revolutionary Guard was another watershed on the march toward theocracy.
By contrast, the draft constitution that Bazargan finally presented in June was surprisingly moderate. It abolished the monarchy and replaced the shah with an elected president according to the French model. It did not give any special role to the clergy. It provided for a Council of Guardians who were supposed to guarantee that laws conformed with the principles of Islam. Only a minority of the guardians would be clerics.28 Khomeini approved most of the draft, though he did add provisions that restricted women from becoming judges or assuming the office of the president. (They did, however, have the right to vote and to sit in parliament—entirely contrary to Khomeini’s position back in 1963, when he had made female enfranchisement the cornerstone of his resistance to the White Revolution.)
Why did Khomeini approve the draft even though it did not enshrine an Islamic government? It’s not entirely clear, but the best answer seems to be that he felt that it was as far as he could go for the moment. Perhaps he felt that the political situation was still too fluid to make a push for full-fledged theocracy. If so, such fears were entirely justified by the public reaction to Bazargan’s constitution. To Khomeini’s consternation, it touched off a frenzy of debate. At this stage revolutionary Iran still offered considerable freedom of discourse, and every party and civic group weighed in. Secular leftists, drawing on a wealth of legal opinions from various professional and human rights groups, proposed an alternate vision that made parliament supreme, guaranteed an independent judiciary, and enshrined broad human rights (including full rights for women). They pressed home their demands with a flurry of demonstrations and editorials. Most of these secular moderates were skeptical of private property and favored policies that promoted equality. They came out strongly in favor of broad nationalization and social justice. But they tended to oppose plans for a strong presidency, which, in their view, opened the way toward dictatorship. In fact, there was a remarkable degree of consensus among this secular bloc.29
But the tide was already running against the moderates. They could talk as much as they wanted; it was the institutions and groups under Khomeini’s sway that increasingly commanded real power in Iran. Jolted by the flood of criticism, Khomeini now decided it was time to push back on his plans for clerical rule. In July, in an acknowledgment of political realities, the beleaguered Bazargan accepted the appointment of four clerics to the provisional government.30 One part of the dual state established in the wake of the revolution’s triumph was now giving way to another. Back in 1917, Lenin had used the soviets to topple the moderate provisional government in postrevolutionary Russia and to impose his radical political agenda. Now Khomeini was using the komitehs and the other Islamist institutions to undercut Bazargan’s government and to give flesh to his theocratic vision.
Subsequent events underlined Bazargan’s powerlessness. He had shown little inclination to limit freedom of opinion. But in August, at Khomeini’s urging, the government introduced a new set of restrictive press laws that banned criticism of the Islamic Republic.31 The office of the moderate left-wing newspaper Ayandegan, accused of taking money from Israel and SAVAK, was attacked by Hezbollah thugs; then the paper was shut down altogether. It was only the first. Dozens of other newspapers, including the two largest in Iran, were closed in the weeks that followed. Hezbollahis also staged raids on the headquarters of the Tudeh Party and the two main left-wing militia groups.32
The focus of political struggle now shifted to the constituent assembly. In August, Iranians voted for the seventy-three members of the Assembly of Experts, who were to be entrusted with the job of drawing up the constitution for the Islamic Republic.33 Fifty-five of those chosen were clerics. This was more than enough to dominate the proceedings; by now, after all, Khomeini effectively controlled all the key levers of power in the country, including the press. They convened on August 18. Khomeini, addressing the delegates, warned them that the constitution must be “100 percent Islamic.” Khomeini’s old rival Ayatollah Shariatmadari, who was now becoming one of the foremost critics of the new order, had urged postponement, arguing that it would be better to stick to the 1906 constitution for the moment. But he was easily overridden. Public debate continued for the next few weeks. But that was enough to show Khomeini and his entourage that there was no serious opposition to their plans for a state run according to the principles that he had mapped out in Islamic Government. So the clerical party proceeded to draw up a constitution that enshrined Khomeini’s velayat-e faqih, the “guardianship of the jurist,” as its guiding principle.34
In 1918, Lenin had sent in the troops to dissolve a democratically elected constituent assembly that didn’t follow his plan for Communist government. Ayatollah Khomeini, by contrast, succeeded in controlling the drafting process from within. From now on it was the clerics who shared his vision who would define the ground rules for the state to come. Still, though the momentum was clearly on Khomeini’s side, the new order was not yet complete. A few significant pockets of opposition remained. But events would soon come to the clerics’ aid.