The Islamic Revolution unquestionably succeeded in its aim of fundamentally altering Iranian society. It did away with the shah and his regime, and brought many aspects of his ambitious Westernization program to a grinding halt. The thousands of foreign specialists who once lived in the country departed, never to return. So, too, did hundreds of thousands of Iranians, most of them pillars or beneficiaries of the old regime.
Scholars tend to measure the impact of revolutions by the extent to which they affect the status of those who hold power in a particular society. By this standard, the 1979 revolution in Iran was a profoundly transformative one. It brought stark change to the ruling classes, as historian Shaul Bakhash notes.1 Industrialists and bankers left; bazaaris with good contacts to ruling clerics pushed aside the elite merchants who had exploited their ties with the royal family. Many high-ranking members of SAVAK and the military who were unable to flee ended up in front of firing squads; so, too, did many officials of the shah’s government, like Amir Abbas Hoveyda, the reformist ex-prime minister who refused to exploit an opportunity for escape and insisted on staying in Iran after the revolution. He paid for it with his life.
The shift was felt even within the tightly knit world of Iran’s religious establishment. Well-established clerical families whose scions refused to endorse Khomeini’s views on Islamic government faced precipitous decline. Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari, who may well have saved Khomeini’s life through intervention on his behalf in 1963, ended his life as a virtual outcast, his family the victims of vicious persecution by the new revolutionary regime. But there were plenty of candidates eager to fill the ensuing vacuum—most of them middle-ranking clerics, some of them former students of Khomeini, all more than willing to propagate the ideals of the new theocratic regime. The new regime did not draw only on the ranks of the clerics, though. Mohammed-Ali Rajai, for example, was a street peddler and schoolteacher before he became prime minister of the Islamic Republic in 1980.2
Perhaps the best example of revolutionary social mobility is that of Seyyed Ali Khamenei, the current supreme leader. One of Khomeini’s most devoted students, Khamenei paid for his political engagement with a series of stints in the shah’s jails in the 1960s and ’70s. After the revolution, he became one of the imam’s key political advisers, distinguishing himself by his fanatical devotion to the principle of clerical rule. Khomeini had originally envisioned that only an ayatollah could fill the office of the supreme leader, but as he neared the end of his life, he realized that none of the likely candidates lived up to his criteria, so he pushed through a constitutional revision that lowered the bar to include mere “experts in Islamic jurisprudence.” Khamenei, who duly acceded to the position of supreme leader in the wake of Khomeini’s death, was acclaimed an ayatollah soon after taking office. Several of the highest-ranking clerics refused to accept Khamenei’s new religious status.
This collision between political and religious principles is key to understanding the evolution of the Islamic Revolution. In his search for a workable political structure that would ensure the “guardianship of the jurists” while observing the niceties of democracy, Ayatollah Khomeini created a system of unwieldy compromises and institutionalized chaos. The 1979 constitution, which remained in force for the first decade of the Islamic Republic, welded together the incompatible notions of a popularly elected legislature and virtually unchecked executive power vested in the supreme leader.
The inherent conflict between these two views of the revolution was anything but academic. They came out into the open, sometimes to lethal effect, during the power struggle between Khomeini and Abolhassan Banisadr, who was elected president in Januarys 1980. Banisadr, who had gained renown before the revolution with a book that detailed his own socialistic theory of “Islamic economics,” had a simple problem: he was not a cleric. When his aides had suggested a cleric as a candidate for the office of president, Khomeini had demurred, saying that the president should come from outside the clerical establishment. At this stage, Khomeini had no reason to doubt Banisadr’s devotion to the revolution; during the shah’s rule, Banisadr had established himself as an Islamist intellectual with his theoretical writings on Islam and the application of Quranic social justice to the economy. Yet once Banisadr assumed office, it quickly became clear that he, like Bazargan, had a considerably more restrained view of the clergy’s proper political role than Khomeini himself. As a result, Banisadr soon found himself engaged in all-out battle with the Islamic Republican Party, which controlled parliament. His main foe was the ruthless Ayatollah Mohammed Beheshti, the chairman of the IRP and the head of the revolutionary court system.
The divide between these camps deepened as the Khomeinists unleashed a campaign to purge the new regime of the last pernicious influences of alien culture. In April 1980, Khomeini gave a speech denouncing the lingering effects of the shah’s Westernizing policies. It was the signal for an all-out assault by the hezbollahi on universities and colleges around the country. The radical defenders of the new republic turned the campuses into battlegrounds, particularly targeting the student activist groups that provided much of the manpower for the left-wing militias that, by now, remained the only organizations capable of mustering armed resistance to the new regime. The most vicious of these groups was the People’s Mujahideen, which had declared itself in opposition to the new order and succeeded in assassinating several key figures of the Khomeini government. But moderates felt the heat as well—including many who saw Banisadr as the champion of a more tolerant approach to Islamic government. In an odd borrowing from Mao’s China, the leaders of the Islamic Republic called their purge “the Cultural Revolution.”3 Iran’s universities were closed for three years, and thousands of scholars and leading cultural figures lost their jobs. Many responded by going into exile.
For those who remained, Banisadr gradually became the last remaining focus of opposition to the stiffening clerical regime. The fronts between the two sides hardened. His own newspaper gradually became more outspoken in its criticisms of the harsh treatment the Khomeinists meted out to their foes. When the People’s Mujahideen declared their support for Banisadr, Khomeini’s entourage took that as further evidence of his traitorous intentions. The president’s supporters, invoking those sections of the constitution that drew on popular sovereignty, claimed his vote total as evidence of his popular mandate. Banisadr’s clerical opponents, on the other hand, could point to constitutional articles that enshrined the dominance of the supreme leader, who embodied the principle of the sovereignty of God over man. This was more than the usual constitutional feud between different branches of government; it was a conflict that expressed an inherent tension between the mutually exclusive worldviews that had been uncomfortably fused under the new system.
The schism also expressed itself in defense policy. In September 1980, Saddam Hussein, who had assumed the presidency of Iraq the year before, launched a series of attacks on Iran, his major rival for regional supremacy. Saddam believed that the revolutionary turmoil had compromised Tehran’s ability to defend itself, and he knew that the quality and equipment of his armed forces were superior. His assessment proved only partly correct, however. The Iranian military response eloquently demonstrated both the strengths and the weaknesses of the clerical regime. The war, which lasted for a total of eight years and ultimately claimed somewhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million lives, showed that countless Iranians were ready to defend Khomeinis state. The Iran-Iraq War gave ample display to the militant spirit unleashed by the revolution, a fervor that combined the deeply entrenched ethos of Shiite martyrology with the righteous new rhetoric of anti-imperialism.
Yet it also exposed the inherently unstable character of the Islamic Republic. Banisadr’s job as president came to include leadership of the Defense Council, and he embraced his position for all that it was worth, repeatedly showing up at the battlefront to underline his solidarity with the soldiers. The clerics, however, commanded the Revolutionary Guard, which distinguished itself by its single-minded devotion to the revolutionary cause. This lack of unity among the Iranian military leaders—in stark contrast to Saddam Hussein’s rigidly hierarchical, Soviet-style chain of command—did not contribute to efficient prosecution of the war and undoubtedly helped to prolong the conflict.
In the end, of course, Khomeini’s regime survived the war, shored up by the wave of patriotic emotion inspired by the fighting. Saddam, too, remained in place, right up until he was toppled by the US invasion of his country in 2003. But Banisadr did not have anything like the same staying power. In 1981 his enemies in parliament succeeded in impeaching him. By the time his removal from office became official, Iran’s former president was hiding in the underground in Tehran. He managed to escape the country and later established himself, now in French exile, as a leading opponent of the clerical regime. But the conflict between the branches of Iran’s government, as well as the underlying trend toward power struggles among the regime’s leading figures, continued.
The confusion extended to management of the economy. Here, too, the differences among competing constituencies ran deep and were aggravated by the jury-rigged quality of the Islamic Republic’s institutional arrangements. Part of the problem was the paucity of religious guidance on matters relating to modern economics. The Quran, while clearly defining social justice as the centerpiece of economic life, is notably silent on issues like monetary policy, labor relations, or industrial organization. In prerevolutionary Iran, a number of theorists—including both Bazargan and Banisadr—had published elaborate treatises on the proper Islamic approach to economics that arrived at strikingly divergent conclusions. Khomeini himself had little to say on the subject—a reflection of his general contempt for materialistic thinking. His assumption seemed to be that a proper Islamic government would effortlessly dispense with the inequities of development that so characterized Iran under the shah.
In practice, of course, that proved anything but simple. The new government expropriated the banks and factories of those who opted for emigration and transformed the Pahlavi Foundation, which controlled many of the royal family’s business interests, into a charitable organization devoted to the needs of the underprivileged. Such foundations, known as bonyads, quickly proliferated, often as cover for the business interests of the new governing class. Meanwhile, the war with Iraq bolstered state control over distribution networks. The Majlis, the popularly elected parliament, inclined toward quasi-socialist policies, favoring radical land reform and nationalization of industry. But the parliamentarians often found themselves running into resistance from the traditionalist clerics in the Council of Guardians, who, tending to regard private property as sacrosanct, canceled some of the more radical laws the legislators proposed.
Khomeini, who often indulged in scorching anticapitalist rhetoric, sided now with one view, then with the other. As historian Shaul Bakhash notes, clerics have never quite managed to achieve a consensus on the precise role of the state in economic affairs, including such crucial issues as the role to be played by private business or the extent to which the government should use policy to ensure more equitable distribution of wealth.4 The end effect of this back-and-forth is a system in which a wide-ranging welfare state and nationalized industry awkwardly coexist with privileged interest groups, from individual politicians to institutions like the Revolutionary Guard, that hold sway over large swaths of the economy. The shah’s defenders can point out, with some justice, that world leaders no longer take the trouble, as they did in the 1970s, to visit Iran for clues on how to achieve highspeed growth. Today’s Iran struggles to make ends meet. Globalization and the corresponding surge of technological innovation have largely passed the country by.
Khomeini died in 1989, not long after grudgingly agreeing to a compromise that ended the Iran-Iraq War without a clear victory for either side. Within Iran, of course, his influence is all-permeating. Khomeini holds a place comparable to the one that Mao once occupied for many Chinese: he enjoys near-divine status as the founding figure of the regime, the man who liberated Iran from long years of foreign domination. The system that Khomeini bequeathed to his political heirs, this bewildering blend of traditional faith and twentieth-century modernism, still reflects the sometimes mysterious motives of its chief architect. In 1987, indeed, Khomeini actually declared that the needs of the state take precedence over the dictates of the Quran—a move that dramatized the degree to which he was capable of startling departures from orthodoxy. Khomeini’s political views evolved according to the needs of the moment. He began his political career in 1963 by deriding the vote for women but extended the franchise to them during the revolution, when they had proved themselves avid supporters of the cause. For that matter, the phrase Islamic republic does not occur in his famous book Islamic Government. He once famously described Islam as a “religio-political faith.”5
To describe the government established by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as a reversion to medieval obscurantism is to miss many of its essential characteristics. As one historian has noted, the revolution drew its force both from the long-established institutions of the Shia clergy and from the rise of the centralized twentieth-century state; both factors are crucial to our understanding of the house that Khomeini built.6 Scholar Ervand Abrahamian notes Khomeini’s remarkable capacity for moving outside the limits of received religious wisdom. As he points out, the word fundamentalist evokes an image of inflexible dogmatism that does little credit to Khomeini’s penchant for innovative thinking. Khomeini showed a remarkable willingness to reject many Shia traditions that he regarded as irrelevant to current political problems while freely absorbing other concepts from the non-Muslim world. “The final product,” Abrahamian writes, “has less in common with conventional fundamentalism than with Third World populism, especially in Latin America.”7
It is worth noting that the postrevolutionary government quietly chose to continue some of the modernization programs started by the shah (like the Literacy Corps).8 Indeed, in some ways the Islamic Republic has accelerated that very process. By using the nationwide network of mosques—the most ubiquitous and deeply rooted social institution—as conduits for the transmission of government policy, the mullahs have extended the reach of the state into realms of private life that the shah never succeeded in penetrating.
In so doing, however, Khomeini’s vision of “Islamic government” may have ended up doing itself a disfavor. For most of the history of Islamic Iran, the religious establishment has existed as a separate institution, distinct from and parallel to the state. The events of 1979 changed that relationship to dramatic effect. It was Khomeini’s hope that clerical rule would purify the state, and thus restore truly Islamic principles to the everyday life of Iranian society. But there is an inescapable sense that the revolution has instead brought religion down to the grubby level of everyday politics. Iranian officials routinely decry the increasing apathy toward religion displayed by young people; studies suggest that mosque attendance in modern-day Iran is notably lower than in other Muslim countries.9 All-encompassing surveillance by overlapping security services, the obvious corruption of many government officials, and the conspicuous failure of the regime to provide for genuine economic development have all tarnished the reputation of the holy men who now hold the responsibility for the country’s administration. “A chasm has opened between public and private life,” wrote historian Bakhash on the tenth anniversary of the revolution. “A popular saying in Tehran has it that under the Shah, Iranians prayed in private and drank in public; under the Islamic Republic, they pray in public and drink in private.”10 If anything, that chasm is much greater today than it was when Bakhash was writing.
In the end Khomeini bequeathed to the Islamic Republic not only his religion-based philosophy of government, but also a volatile legacy of institutionalized instability, tensions between elections and despotism, brutal factional rivalry, and rigidly centralized control. Some thirty years after its founding, the revolution has yet to fulfill its original promise. Yet the simple fact that it was able to make that promise to begin with has been remarkably influential.
On October 23, 1983, a man drove a truck packed with explosives into a military barracks in Beirut and blew himself up. The explosion killed 241 members of the United States Marine Corps who had been dispatched to the Middle East by US president Ronald Reagan as part of an international intervention in the Lebanese Civil War. It was the greatest loss of life suffered by the Marine Corps in a single day since the Battle of Iwo Jima in the spring of 1945. Another near-simultaneous attack took the lives of 58 French paratroopers—the biggest single-day loss for a French force since the 1950s war in Algeria.
The organization that assumed responsibility for this strange new form of terrorism—based on the attacker’s self-immolation—called itself Islamic Jihad. (The same group had already claimed responsibility for an attack on the US Embassy in Beirut that had killed 60 people earlier in the year.) Although the group’s origins are somewhat mysterious, it was most likely an offshoot of Hezbollah, a militant organization of Lebanon’s Shiites that had been established not long before. In multinational Lebanon, the mostly rural Shiites traditionally occupied the bottom rung of the sectarian and ethnic hierarchy within the country. That began to change in the 1960s and ’70s, when a charismatic Iranian-born cleric named Musa al-Sadr began to organize the Shiites into a movement to campaign for their rights. His mysterious disappearance in Libya in 1978—orchestrated by Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi—temporarily derailed Shiite aspirations. But then came the revolution in Iran.
No sooner had Khomeini made his return to Tehran than the new revolutionary regime began working to spread the message. From the very start, Khomeini believed that the revolution had pan-Islamic implications. He did not believe that it should be confined to his own country. “In general, a Muslim should not just concern himself with only a group of Muslims,” he once observed. “We are all responsible to stand up to the oppression by the superpowers and discredit plans like those of Sadat and [Saudi King] Fahd.” From the outside, Khomeini was often viewed as a defender of Iranian Shiism, but he did not see himself this way. He saw himself as a holy warrior who was out to defend the entire global community of Muslim believers.11
The revolutionary government lost no time in pursuing this role—despite the economic and political problems at home. Radio Tehran became an aggressive outlet for Iranian propaganda, broadcast around the region—a factor that played a major role after the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabia, when Khomeini succeeded in fomenting unrest throughout the Islamic world by accusing the Americans of orchestrating the takeover. But the new government in Tehran did not restrict its pan-Islamic support to words. As early as December 1979, the Lebanese authorities found themselves coping with an influx of Iranian guerrillas eager to help their coreligionists take the fight to Israel.12 Ayatollah Montazeri declared that Iranian militants should have the right to enter other Islamic countries without passports or visas on the grounds that Islam “has no borders.”13
The response to the Islamic Revolution from Muslims around the world seemed—at least at first—to justify such high-flown talk. Islamist groups sang the praises of Islam’s great Iranian from Indonesia to Nigeria. (There are few Shiites in Nigeria, but in some quarters there after 1979, the word Shia came to serve as a synonym for those who aimed for the creation of an Islamic state.) The riots that took place from Islamabad to Tripoli in response to Iranian accusations about the Mecca mosque uprising attested to the emotive force of Khomeini’s appeals to Muslims throughout the umma. Khomeini’s former students—who were, of course, not only Iranians—helped to carry his message around the world. And the demonstrated ability of Islamic revolutionaries to overthrow a hated monarch also helped to foment a bloody but little-noted rebellion against the royal family in oil-rich Shiite provinces of Saudi Arabia. Shia Muslims constitute the majority of the population there, but the Sunni House of Saud, tightly wedded to the ultraconservative Wahhabi sect, has always regarded them as virtual heretics and discriminates against them accordingly. The Shia unrest of 1979 marked merely the first in a long series of uprisings against the central government that continue to this day.
Khomeini himself, however, focused above all on two particular areas: Palestine and Lebanon.14 His reasons for taking up the Palestinian cause were straightforward. Unlike the Marxist revolutionaries who still dominated the Palestine Liberation Organization, Khomeini saw the Arab-Israeli conflict in primarily religious terms. For him, waging war on Israel meant fulfilling Quranic injunctions against Jewish “hypocrites” inimical to the true faith as well as the ultimate recovery of the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, which he viewed as one of the holiest places in Islam. It was Khomeini who established the annual al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day in Iran’s revolutionary calendar: every year, to this day, the Tehran regime organizes demonstrations proclaiming the religious imperative for the reconquest of Jerusalem. Starting in 1979, Palestinians (who viewed the shah as an enemy because of his alliance with Israel) actively participated in various stages of the Iranian Revolution, and Iran started providing various Palestinian groups with military training early on. Later in the 1980s, Iran became one of the main sponsors of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist resistance group based in the Gaza Strip.
Still, the Shiite factor in Iran’s revolution was not to be discounted, and few Palestinians were Shiites. But what bound the two sides together was a fondness for radical politics. The Palestinians leaned naturally to revolutionary ideology since it challenged the status quo of the Middle East, and as long as this was true, the religious differences between them and the Iranians played a subordinate role. They shared a common enemy, and that was enough to help them overlook the problems of religion.
That was not true of Lebanon, which boasted its own large, and largely underprivileged, Shiite population. The revolution was still under way in Iran when the first portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini began to appear on the walls of homes throughout the Shiite villages and shantytowns of Lebanon. The Amal militia, the military wing of al-Sadr’s “Movement of the Disinherited,” suddenly found itself facing competition from a new group based on the paramilitary organization that had fought for Khomeini’s agenda during the revolution: Hezbollah, “the Party of God.” Sadr had envisioned his movement as one that would advance the cause of justice for all Lebanese. He made an effort to bring non-Shiites into its leadership and at least attempted to transcend sectarianism. Hezbollah, formed in part by Shiites who rejected Sadr’s more inclusive approach, had no such scruples. The group in its current form emerged in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, when its leaders publicly declared their allegiance to Khomeini’s theory of velayat-e faqih and pledged to transform Lebanon into an Islamic republic along Iranian lines. From the very beginning, its primary aims included the destruction of the state of Israel. Hezbollah’s fanaticism and success in the Lebanese Civil War gradually allowed it to supplant the more moderate Amal—even though many Shiite clerics in the country echoed some of their Iranian counterparts by rejecting Khomeini’s theory of the guardianship of the jurist.15
The Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Islamic army Khomeini created in parallel to the conventional military, assumed patronage of Hezbollah from the beginning in 1982. Guard instructors trained its fighters and outfitted them with weapons. Money flowed from Tehran to the shantytowns of Beirut. The Iranians also helped the new group build a media operation that has become one of the most effective means of public mobilization in Lebanon today. Over the past three decades—most notably during its 2006 war with Israel—Hezbollah has established itself as one of the most effective political and military organizations in Lebanon, and thus as a potent vehicle for the advancement of Islamist (and Iranian) agendas throughout the Middle East. It has been implicated in numerous terrorist attacks.
Perhaps the most fateful innovation that resulted from Iranian involvement in Lebanese politics was the suicide bombing. Islamic Jihad achieved such devastating success precisely because the Americans and French had not prepared defenses against attackers who were prepared to kill themselves. Oddly enough, the suicide bombing was a terrorist tactic with secular rather than religious origins; it was pioneered by secular nationalists during the Lebanese Civil War, and then used to particularly deadly effect by the People’s Mujahideen (Mujahideen-e Khalq or MEK), the Islamo-Marxist militia. The MEK, which turned against Khomeini in 1980, used suicide attacks as part of its terror campaign against the leaders of the clerical system.
But it was the institutionalized use of “martyrdom” by the Islamic Republic that firmly established suicide attacks as a modus operandi for Islamic fighters. By the time of the 1983 Beirut attacks, the Iran-Iraq War had been under way for three years, and the Iranians had already had ample opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of “martyrdom operations” against Iraqi troops that drew on the messianic fanaticism of believers still alight with revolutionary fervor. Young troops went into battle wrapped in slogans evoking the great traumas and triumphs of Shiite belief. The rhetoric of martyrdom drew on centuries of Shiite ritual adoration for Ali and Hussein, those lodestars of the true faith who were also the victims of cosmic injustice.
Nor did Khomeini view his war with the apostate Saddam Hussein as one whose consequences would be confined merely to their two countries. He saw the fight against Iraq as part of a larger crusade to restore Muslim rule throughout the Middle East. “The road to Jerusalem lies through Baghdad” was a slogan widely used by the Iranian regime during the war. “Our revolution is not tied to Iran,” Khomeini once remarked. “The Iranian people’s revolution was the starting point for the great revolution of the Islamic world.”16 All the more bitter for him, then, was the ignominious stalemate with which the war finally ended. Khomeini famously equated the agreement that formally concluded the war with Iraq with a “draught of poison.”
Khomeini’s aspirations to global leadership of the Islamic community had broader aspects as well. One was to establish Islam as a powerful alternative to the ideologies that then dominated global politics. Odd Arne Westad, a leading historian of the Cold War, observes that the Iranian Revolution marked the moment when the United States was jolted by the realization that “communism was no longer the only comprehensive, modern ideology that confronted American power.” Ironically, the events in Iran brought a similarly rude awakening to the Russians. Khomeini’s revolution presented a serious challenge to the Marxist theory of Third World revolutions. In this reading, “clerical reaction” was supposed to be just another way station on the path to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Yet this was clearly not what had happened in Iran.17
Indeed, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the philosophy that inspired it, political Islam remained essentially the only universalist ideology that could pose serious competition to the American and European ideals of liberal democracy in the Middle East.18 Khomeini’s fatwa against the British writer Salman Rushdie, which condemned him to death for allegedly slandering the prophet in his novel The Satanic Verses, can be viewed in this same context of Iran’s ideological rivalry with the West. The death sentence pronounced on Rushdie by the ayatollah was a transparent attempt to snatch back the mantle of leadership from various Sunni governments the Iranians depicted as too cowardly (and too craven to the United States) to defend the honor of Islam. Somewhat paradoxically, when the United States launched its post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, one effect was to greatly expand Iranian influence in the region by eliminating two of the regional competitors that Tehran despised most of all: the secular regime of Saddam Hussein and the ultraconservative Sunni government of the Taliban. Nonetheless, today the Islamic Republic remains one of the few foreign regimes that American politicians of all ideological stripes can reliably vilify at little cost to themselves.
But Khomeinis revolution had another legacy that was even more consequential. This was its impact on the centuries-old rivalry between the Shiite and Sunni branches of Islam. Before 1979 the intra-Muslim divide figured little in global politics. After 1979 it was impossible to avoid. That the Shiites had succeeded before any other Muslim nation in restoring the sovereignty of God was an extraordinary turn of events that some Sunni believers came to regard as something akin to a calculated affront. Some scholars argue that the motives for the seizure of the Grand Mosque in 1979 included the desire among some Sunni upstarts to show that they, too, could topple an unjust monarch and establish a truly Islamic state.
The implications of the newfound political self-awareness among hitherto downtrodden Shiite minorities rippled across South Asia. Iranian support for the Shiite mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan boosted the power of the Hazara ethnic minority, shocking a largely Sunni population that had long regarded Hazaras as second-class citizens. One of Khomeini’s students was a Pakistani who returned to his homeland to found the first Shiite political organization in that largely Sunni country, contributing to decades of sectarian violence there. Khomeini’s first foreign minister, Ebrahim Yazdi, met with Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad already in September 1979, establishing a close relationship between Tehran and the Assad dynasty that endures to this day—despite the Syrian government’s harsh suppression of its Sunni Muslim majority. (A mere 15 percent of the Syrian population belongs to the Alawi sect, but that group includes the Assads and much of the Syrian ruling elite among its members. Alawi beliefs, regarded as heterodox by most Sunnis, have much in common with Shia Islam.) And the Sunni secularist Saddam Hussein, who was worried about the restiveness of his own Iraqi Shiites even before the revolution in Iran, saw Khomeini’s ascendance as yet another reason to tighten control over the Shiite believers that constituted the majority of his population. It was, perhaps, inevitable that Tehran would become the main protector of the Shiite resistance groups, such as the Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, that later played a prominent role in governing the country after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
For decades after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the end of the caliphate in 1924, Islam was mostly a passive force, acted upon rather than putting forth programs of its own. It was left to others to craft new ideologies for the future: nation-state monarchies, pan-Arab nationalism, Baathism. But it is Khomeini who really deserves the credit for returning Islam to the forefront of the global political stage. It was he who converted his Islamic utopia into reality, and it was he who went further than anyone else in his efforts to transplant the primal community of the Prophet into the ministries and militias of a modern nation-state. After Khomeini, the Islamists did not just talk. They acted.
The most potent legacy of the Islamic Revolution in Iran was simply to show that it could be done. To be sure, that achievement has been greatly harmed by evidence of deeply entrenched corruption, economic anemia, and brutal authoritarianism of the regime Khomeini founded. Yet even in the twenty-first century, it is possible to encounter non-Iranian Muslims, Shiite as well as Sunni, who reflexively applaud the mullahs in Tehran for standing up to the United States and the West. This was a card that Khomeini had already learned to play by the end of 1979—often happily deploying a neo-Marxist vocabulary of “anti-imperialism” and “revolutionary struggle” that owed little to orthodox Islam. His pupils are legion. For all of its failures, Khomeinis dream retains its power to seduce.