. |
August 27, 2000
The People's Shah
By Elaine Sciolino
Ayatollah Ruhollah KhomeinI was not an easy man. Stern and vengeful, he
was not an easy man to like. Single-minded in his thinking, he was not
an easy man to negotiate with. He certainly was not an easy man to
interview. I remember the second time I interviewed him, in his exile in
a village outside of Paris in the months before the 1979 revolution. He
didn't like one of my questions. So he simply stood up from his
cross-legged position on the floor and, without a word, wrapped himself
in his cloak and left the room. Yet during his lifetime the ayatollah
achieved near-mythic status, and he was revered, even worshiped, by
Iranians who saw him as their savior on earth. Night after night before
the revolution, many people swore that they saw Khomeini's face -- his
turban, his eyes, his nose, his beard -- in the moon. In his
biography of Khomeini, Baqer Moin describes the harsh side of the cleric
who forever changed the course of Iran's history. ''Khomeini had never
been particularly interested in discussion and dialogue,'' Moin writes.
''He was an introvert; his dialogue was with himself rather than with
others.'' But then Moin, correctly, finds the key to understanding the
ayatollah elsewhere: ''His approach was intuitive.'' It was Khomeini's
extraordinary intuition, his innate sense that a cleric should be more
than a person who leads prayers every Friday and conducts rituals for
pay, that propelled him to lead a country into one of the most
far-reaching revolutions of modern history. True, Khomeini was a
man of religion; but even more important, he was a gifted and shrewd
politician, skilled in mobilizing his supporters and isolating his
opponents, supple in decision making when it served his goal of making
and consolidating a theocracy. He appealed to the masses with promises
to liberate them from oppression, surrounded himself with loyal clerical
lieutenants and attracted the religious bazaar merchants, who began to
offer him money, which in turn increased his following and influence.
And he had no patience with the clerics of his day, even his more senior
peers, who were determined to stay out of politics and were willing to
share power with a traditional Shiite monarchy as their predecessors had
done for over four centuries. ''Politics and religion are one,''
Khomeini often declared. Baqer Moin is ideally placed to have
written a biography of one of the most complicated political figures of
the 20th century. Moin grew up in Iran, where he learned Persian and
Arabic poetry, mysticism and philosophy from his father, who was trained
as a cleric but earned a living as a farmer. Moin himself studied in the
religious seminaries of Mashad before becoming a journalist. He now
heads the BBC's Persian service (even Khomeini listened to it). Moin has
produced the first serious and accessible examination of the ayatollah's
life. The most interesting parts of the book deal with the human
side of a man who was little known before his ascent to power and widely
misunderstood both before and after. Born into a family of clerics
descended from the prophet Muhammad, Khomeini enjoyed a comfortable
childhood in the village of Khomein in central Iran, where he was raised
in a large fortified compound with a vast garden, courtyards, balconies
and watchtowers. He was cared for by servants and protected by armed
guards. As a young man, Khomeini developed an interest in poetry and
wrote poetry himself, even using the language of love and drink. (''Keep
the door of the tavern open for me night and day, / Farewell seminary,
farewell mosque, / Let me go my way'' was typical of his style of
verse.) Later, dissatisfied with the orthodox version of Islam
practiced by the clergy, Khomeini became an intellectual rebel, plunging
into mysticism. Moin argues that he owed his fearlessness as a political
leader to his mystical sense of oneness with God. ''Intoxicated by the
cosmic vision of a mystic and bound by the firm belief of a jurisprudent
who carries out God's command, Khomeini the politician was a powerful
fusion. As a mystic, Khomeini was an elitist, but as a theologian he was
expedient and as a politician a calculating populist to the point of
being opportunistic. . . . For Khomeini, there was no distinction
between the persona of the jurist, the mystic and the politician.'' In
his first news conference in Iran, four days after his return in
February 1979, he unveiled the world's first modern theocracy. ''This is
not an ordinary government,'' he declared. Rather, it would be ''God's
government.'' That meant, he added, that opposition to the government
was opposition to God -- in other words, ''blasphemy.'' Moin
evokes Khomeini's rigidity through the memories of his host in Turkey,
where Khomeini lived for several months in 1964 after the shah sent him
into exile. When Ali Cetiner, a Persian-speaking colonel in Turkish
military intelligence who was assigned to be Khomeini's minder, couldn't
find a suitable place for him to stay he took him into his secular
middle-class home in the city of Bursa. Cetiner's wife installed a new
bed, bought new sheets and even put a Koran at Khomeini's bedside. She
cooked dinner and put on her best dress to greet their Iranian guest.
But when Khomeini arrived, he began protesting to Colonel Afzali, the
minder from Iranian intelligence who had accompanied him there. ''He
says the woman with the uncovered head should leave,'' Afzali explained
to Cetiner, whose wife replied: ''I am not his housekeeper here. I am
the lady of the house.'' Still, she put on a long nightdress and covered
her head. Over time, Khomeini came to respect her, standing up when she
entered the room, chatting with her amiably and even smiling as he
looked her in the eye. Moin provides a deft account of Khomeini's
emergence as a political leader: his writings, the dissemination of his
ideas through audiocassette tapes while he was in exile in France and
Iraq, his triumphal return to Iran, the hardening of his positions after
the revolution. But some of the central chapters in recent Iranian
history receive only the most cursory treatment. One of those chapters
was the 444-day seizure of the United States Embassy in Tehran, which
Khomeini blessed and then used to consolidate his power and purge his
enemies. Another was the Iran-contra affair, in which the United States
secretly sold weapons to Iran in violation of its stated policy and used
the profits to finance anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua. Iran's
purchase of weapons from the country Khomeini assailed as the ''Great
Satan'' underscored the regime's pragmatic streak. A third was
Khomeini's ambitious but unsuccessful campaign to export his version of
Islamic revolution to the rest of the Muslim world. Still, Moin
does capture many things well -- for instance, Khomeini's antipathy to
Israel. The Ayatollah's early writings and sermons have a distinctly
anti-Semitic tone, which he muted as he became more of a political
leader. Yet even today, Iran views the United States and Israel as
enemies and is uneasy with its Jewish population, as demonstrated by the
recent closed trial of 13 Jews on charges of spying for Israel. Not that
Jews are the only victims of intolerance in Iran. As Eliz Sanasarian
points out in her short but indispensable study, ''Religious Minorities
in Iran,'' Iran has been uncomfortable with its other minorities as
well, including the Zoroastrians, the Bahais, the Armenians and other
Christians, and has repressed and marginalized them to varying degrees
over the years. Sanasarian's book is an important contribution to
understanding the relationship between Iran's religious minorities and
the Tehran government. One can only imagine how Khomeini would deal
with the battles being waged on various fronts today -- the press, the
courts, the Parliament, the cinema, the universities, the streets. As
early as 1942, he wrote in an anonymous tract that he expected the
government of Islam to ''follow religious rules and regulations and ban
publications which are against the law and religion and hang those who
write such nonsense in the presence of religious believers.'' So he
would probably approve of the closures of all reformist publications in
the last few months and the trials and convictions of some of their
editors and publishers. Perhaps Khomeini would also have had them
executed. But then, Khomeini once protested the shah's
enfranchisement of women, and then encouraged women to participate in
his revolution and vote for his government when he needed their numbers.
He once promised that clerics would hold only temporary positions in
government and then allowed them to hold the most senior positions. He
pledged to continue the war against Iraq until its defeat and then
abruptly made peace. He once said that the fact that ''I have said
something does not mean that I should be bound by my word.'' Indeed, it
is that suppleness, that ability to improvise that has outlived Khomeini
and that continues to pervade the Islamic Republic, keeping it going.
©Copyright 2000, The New York Times Company
|
. |