Iran - Andrew Burke [18]
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My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad and published in the early 1970s, was an instant bestseller. In 1976 it became a TV series, and its story – of three families living under the tyranny of a paranoid patriarch – became a cultural reference point in the lead-up to revolution.
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Khomeini’s frequent broadcasts on the BBC’s Persian Service had made him the spiritual leader of opposition. But at 77 years old, everyone expected that once the shah was ousted he would assume a more hands-off, statesman-like role. They were wrong. On his return to Iran on 1 February 1979, Khomeini told the exultant masses of his vision for a new Iran, free of foreign influence and true to Islam: ‘From now on it is I who will name the government’.
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AYATOLLAH RUHOLLAH KHOMEINI
An earnest, belligerent and intensely committed man, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is reviled and little understood in the West but revered as a saint by many Iranians. Khomeini was a family man of modest means whose wife hennaed her hair orange until his death; a religious leader who reduced the age at which ‘women’ could marry to nine; a war leader who sent young men to their deaths on the Iraqi front by persuading them they would go straight to paradise as martyrs; the man who proclaimed the infamous fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
Born in the village of Khomein in central Iran about 1900, Sayyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini followed in the family tradition by studying theology, philosophy and law in the holy city of Qom. By the 1920s he had earned the title of ayatollah (the highest rank of a Shiite cleric) and settled down to teach and write.
He first came to public attention in 1962 when he opposed the shah’s plans to reduce the clergy’s property rights and emancipate women. In 1964 he was exiled to Turkey, before moving on to Iraq. In 1978 Saddam Hussein expelled Khomeini and he moved to Paris. When the shah fled in 1979, Khomeini returned to take control of Iran through force of character and ruthless efficiency, and remained leader of the world’s first Islamic theocracy until his death in 1989 Click here.
Today, Khomeini is officially known as Imam Khomeini, raising him to the level of saint, and almost every town in the country has a street or square named after him. His portrait, with prominent eyebrows and stern expression, is everywhere, often beside and thus legitimising that of the current leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
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THE AFTERMATH OF THE REVOLUTION
Ayatollah Khomeini soon set about proving the adage that ‘after the revolution comes the revolution’. His intention was to set up a clergy-dominated Islamic Republic, and he achieved this with brutal efficiency.
Groups such as the People’s Feda’iyin, the Islamic People’s Mojahedin, and the communist Tudah had been instrumental in undermining the shah and his government. But once the shah was safely out of the way they were swept aside. People disappeared, executions took place after brief and meaningless trials, and minor officials took the law into their own hands. The facts – that the revolution had been a broad-based effort – were revised and the idea of the Islamic Revolution was born. Leaders such as Ayatollah Taleqani were sidelined or worse. Taleqani is still revered as a hero of the revolution, but many Iranians believe he died because Khomeini refused him the asthma inhalers he needed to survive.
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Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution, by Nikki R Keddie, is a thorough analysis of