Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [219]
In January 1978 US president Jimmy Carter visited Iran. He lauded his ally, shah Muhammed Reza Pahlavi, and pronounced Iran ‘an island of stability’, praise he coupled with criticism of the shah’s shabby human rights record. The regime’s modernising emancipation of women was accompanied by the repression symbolised by Savak, the shah’s secret police. Carter’s contradictory pronouncements were as helpful to the shah as traffic lights signalling red and green simultaneously are to a motorist. That summer and autumn, Iran was convulsed by demonstrations and strikes, which the shah, already suffering from cancer, answered with limited repression (under a thousand people died in the course of the Revolution) and concessions which his many different opponents brushed aside. The shah left his kingdom, never to return, on 16 January 1978; a year later, an elderly cleric, the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, flew in from his exile in Paris.2
Under the influence of the academic ideologue Ali Shariati, who had fused a fashionable Third Worldism with Islam before his untimely death in 1977, Khomeini broke with the political quiescence characteristic of Shia Islam, in which an indeterminate period of occultation would end with the return of a mahdi who had vanished in AD 874. Appealing to the disinherited, in a calculated echo of Frantz Fanon, Khomeini called for the establishment of an Islamic republic, with a dual system of power in which clerics controlled every lever that mattered, notably through a Guardians Council. Liberals and Marxists who had hoped to exploit Khomeini’s own manipulation of popular enthusiasms were trumped by the master of this game, who in any case had the unique backing of impressive ranges of Iranian society in what was one of the most popular revolutions in world history. Within a year, the new masters had killed not only the three thousand political prisoners Carter was so exercised about, but more people than Savak had murdered in the previous twenty-five years. One of the ways in which the clerics guaranteed their success was to prolong mass hysteria, which they did through the protracted siege of the US embassy in Teheran, in which ‘Death to America’ resounded from the erstwhile island of stability, and then through the martyrs who were mobilised for death in the eight years of total war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. An entire generation of children went to their deaths clutching their plastic keys to paradise. This bloodbath and the regime’s domestic repressions alienated even those few silly Western intellectuals, like Michel Foucault, who had celebrated this tantalising eruption against a Western rationalism which bored them. It is striking that, among the subjects that anger so many Muslims today, this obliteration of an entire generation is not among them.
The Islamic Revolution was also for export, notwithstanding the fact that 80 per cent of the world’s Muslims were Sunnis. They viewed the Shia as heretics who, in the Persian case, were given to contemptuously racist talk of Arab ‘lizard eaters’. But this was counterbalanced by widespread admiration for Khomenei’s Islamic regime, its hatred of Israel and its ostentatious defiance of the West, as symbolised by Carter’s disastrous attempt to rescue the US embassy hostages. Two immediate manifestations of exporting the Revolution were the creation, by Sunni Palestinian admirers of Khomeini, of a terrorist organisation called Islamic Jihad, which presaged the transformation of a conflict about rival nationalisms into one involving religion, and the parallel mobilisation of Lebanon’s Shi’ites through an Iranian surrogate called Party of Allah or Hizbollah, founded in late 1982, a process the Alawite rulers of Syria aided and abetted to extend their domination over their Westernised Lebanese neighbour.