Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (18 page)

In reaction to the storm of protest, the prime minister ultimately rescinded the local councils law—at least for the time being. But land reform went ahead. In January 1963 the shah put land reform and five other measures on the ballot in a nationwide referendum. Though the 99.9 percent “yes” vote was clearly fraudulent, the clergy did not dare to issue religious rulings against the land reform, recognizing its popularity. The shah deepened the insult by referring to the clerics as the “black reaction.”
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In March 1963 Khomeini fired back with sermons accusing the government of plotting to destroy the religious classes in the interest of nefarious foreign interests. The shah’s patience snapped. He ordered a raid on the Faiziyeh seminary in Qom. At least one student was killed and dozens injured. Khomeini assailed the government for its assault and assured the shah that “I will never bow my head to your tyranny.” On June 3—during the holy month of Moharram, when Shiites celebrate the self-sacrifice of their greatest martyr in intensely emotional rituals—Khomeini held a famous speech at the Faiziyeh in which he settled accounts with the shah. Once again he accused the shah of acting as a proxy for Israel. Once again he denounced the shah in witheringly personal terms, addressing him as “you unfortunate wretch.” On June 5, the security forces arrived at Khomeini’s house and arrested him. Demonstrations erupted in Qom and other cities around Iran. Martial law had to be declared. Hundreds of people were killed. It was the worst unrest in Iran since the fall of Mossadeq a decade earlier.
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Some within the government apparently considered sending Khomeini to the executioner. But Shariatmadari ensured his safety by awarding him the title of “grand ayatollah” (since the constitution prevented anyone of that exalted rank from capital punishment). In 1964 Khomeini was finally released after ten months in prison—just in time to wade into yet another political fray. This time the issue was the new status-of-forces law the shah had signed with Washington. The law gave wide-ranging immunity to US forces stationed on Iranian soil—precisely the sort of cause that still tends to inflame popular opinion in countries already concerned about overweening US influence in their domestic affairs. “If the men of religion had influence,” Khomeini declared, “it would not be possible for the nation to be
at one moment the prisoner of England, at the next, the prisoner of America. . . . If the men of religion had influence, governments could not do whatever they pleased, totally to the detriment of our nation.”
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The government arrested him again. This time, however, Khomeini was immediately expelled from the country. He was sent first to Turkey, where he lived for the better part of a year with the family of a Turkish government official before receiving permission to move to the holy city of Najaf in Iraq. Unlike 1963, however, his arrest and exile prompted little reaction from the religious establishment or the public at large. Land reform had won the government a certain degree of credit among the populace, and the senior clergy felt that they had taken enough risks in his defense.
¹⁵
Khomeini’s departure from Iran in 1964 seemingly marked the end of his political career. He would spend the next thirteen years in Iraqi exile.

Khomeini took it all in stride. His strength of belief was extraordinary, if not eerie. Most of the Iranians who met him were deeply impressed by his otherworldliness and his powers of self-control. A story made the rounds about the death of Khomeini’s infant daughter. While Khomeini’s wife was pulling her hair in grief, Khomeini remained outwardly unmoved: “God gave me this gift, and God has taken it away.” Khomeini’s son noted that his father believed himself to have an especially intimate and privileged relationship with God.
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For a man with such a cosmic view of existence, a few years in exile from his home country was a triviality, a minor inconvenience.

Yet exile did change him in one respect: it radicalized him. This might seem hard to imagine, given the intensity of his pre-1964 invective against the shah. But even amid his most scurrilous attacks, Khomeini had never called into question the monarchy itself. He had insisted that the government observe sharia law. He had demanded a greater role for the ulama in appointing the shah, and at one point in 1963 he even asked the government to grant the religious authorities a say over education and a “few hours of radio time” each week.
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Now his views began to change.
¹⁸
Exile forced him, perhaps, to confront the real balance of forces. This was not the timid, financially weak Iranian monarchy of the nineteenth-century Tobacco Protest. This was a strong, twentieth-century state with all the means of political control that went along with that: an all-encompassing secret police; a government-run educational system; official media, including television networks that reached into every cranny of society; state-of-the-art communications; an increasingly modern economy that threatened to rationalize away traditional interest groups; a well-equipped military; and the full political and economic support of the United States, the world’s most powerful country, and its
allies. Even the religious authorities were now cowed into submission, as the subdued reaction to his exile had shown. And the secular intellectuals of the National Front and the leftist parties—they might criticize the shah, but they had no moral fiber. As for the Communists, they were atheists, but there were things that could be learned from them: political organization, planning, building resilient networks.

As the 1960s went on, Khomeini gradually became persuaded that the modern Iranian state could not be persuaded to change its ways. It would have to be captured. And the only way to do this was through revolution.
Revolution
was a word that, by now, had already become something of a religion in its own right for many young Iranians (even if the word was still anathema to most religious scholars). But even as Khomeini received and taught a steady flow of students from his homeland, he was also deepening his familiarity with the wider world of Islamic revivalism. By now a full-fledged “model of emulation” (
marja-e taqlid
) to Shiites around the Middle East, Khomeini was entitled to receive religious taxes contributed by his followers, and he began to put these funds to a variety of political uses (including support for the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose cause he held especially dear to his heart). He continued to digest the works of the modern Islamist thinkers and met members of the Muslim Brotherhood from around the Sunni world. All this helped to sharpen his awareness of how a genuinely Islamic state should look.

He was also building a political organization of his own, a covert network of young religious radicals. Known as the Combatant Clergy Association, it was based on a growing cadre of young clerics attracted by his principled stand against the shah. They came to Iraq to attend his lectures, absorbed his teachings, and then returned to Iran to distribute funding, advice, and cassette recordings of his sermons. They sought coalitions with those who had borne the brunt of the shah’s transformation of Iranian society, like the
bazaaris
and the dislocated denizens of the shantytowns.

Not everyone among the senior clerics shared Khomeini’s views. Most of them dismissed his theory of the Islamic state, regarding it as unorthodox. So a great deal of his polemical work in this period was directed at fellow members of the religious establishment. Throughout the years of exile, Khomeini kept up a steady drumbeat of pronouncements keyed to major political and religious events, and he carefully aimed them not only at general public opinion but also at the ulama. Shame was one of the most powerful weapons in his arsenal. In 1971, when Khomeini issued a tirade against the shah’s celebration of the twenty-five-hundreth anniversary of the monarchy, he reserved special contempt for fellow members of the religious class. Millions of Iranians were starving as the shah lavished the nation’s wealth on his
senseless projects; when university students (including women) protested, the security forces attacked them viciously. Yet the religious elite, Khomeini acidly observed, had nothing to say:

            
Are we not to speak out about these chronic ailments that afflict us? Not to say a single word about all these disasters? Is it incompatible with our position as religious scholars to speak out? . . . How is that now, when it is the turn of the present generation of religious scholars to speak out, we invent excuses and say that it is “incompatible” with our status to speak out? . . . If the ‘ulama of Qum, Mashhad, Tabriz, Isfahan, Shiraz and the other cities in Iran were to protest collectively today against this scandalous festival, to condemn these extravagances that are destroying the people and the nation, be assured that results would be forthcoming.
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By this time Khomeini’s relationship with Grand Ayatollah Shariatmadari, his ally back in 1963, was giving way to outright rivalry.
²⁰
Shariatmadari did not see the point in outright challenges to the power of the shah; it was better, he believed, for the religious establishment to remain united if it hoped to survive the onslaught of the state.

This position became increasingly hard to maintain as the economic and social contradictions of the shah’s modernization program intensified. The younger clerics were increasingly demanding a principled stand from the ulama. Aside from Khomeini, the only other leading religious scholar the young radicals took seriously was Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleqani, who had joined with Mehdi Bazargan in 1961 to form the Iran Freedom Movement. Taleqani, who spent much of the 1960s and 1970s in jail, would later join forces with Khomeini during the revolution.

Many Iranians had never heard of Khomeini before 1978; the riots of 1964 were part of the past. But for those in the know, he had already acquired a unique status. They began referring to him as “the imam”—a provocative break with Shiite tradition. True, the Lebanese Shiite leader Musa Sadr had been hailed that way by his followers starting in the 1960s—but they were Arabic speakers, and the word has a different connotation in Arabic, where it is a title of respect attached to anyone who leads the daily prayers. For Shiites, by contrast, it refers to the twelve spiritual and religious successors of the Prophet Mohammed, a line that begins with Ali ibn Abu Talib and ends with Mohammed al-Mahdi, the imam of the ages who will one day reemerge from occultation to inaugurate a new age of perfect justice. It is a
term that is redolent with exalted emotion and apocalyptic yearning, and now, for the first time in centuries, Iranian Shiites were using it to refer to a living person.
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This, too, was a form of revolution. For centuries Shiite legal scholars had been expected to climb the ladder of their religious vocation through patient scholarship and teaching, laboriously building reputations and followings through the force of pious example and scholarly devotion. But now the acolytes of Khomeini were putting him above the rest—and they were doing it on the basis of his political engagement, not his religious credentials.

In the fall of 1977, the crowds who gathered at a Teheran mosque to commemorate the death of Khomeini’s son Mostafa hailed their leader as the “imam.” According to a report by SAVAK, several other ayatollahs in Qom refused to participate in the mourning ceremonies, saying that they regarded Khomeini’s exaltation as an “insult.” But soon the revolution would no longer allow them the luxury of nonparticipation.
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I
n the capital of Afghanistan, the day of April 27, 1978, dawned cool and clear. Through the morning the staffers at Radio Kabul, the national Afghan broadcaster, stuck to their normal routine. Then, shortly before noon, a colleague asked Akbar Ayazi to read the midday news bulletin; for some reason his friend, who was supposed to do the job, preferred to pass. He promised the twenty-two-year-old Ayazi that he’d treat him to a kebab at a place around the corner in return for the favor.

As Ayazi read the bulletin, he found himself suppressing a growing sense of dismay. The news was ominous. The first item announced that the government of President Mohammed Daoud had placed all the leaders of the Communist Party under arrest.

It was immediately clear that Daoud’s move could have catastrophic consequences—for he was doing no less than embarking on a showdown with the world’s Communist superpower. For years Afghanistan had stood in the shadow of the Soviet Union. Leaders in the Kremlin, eager to counter America’s influence in Iran and Pakistan throughout the 1970s, had responded by boosting their assistance to Afghanistan in every way they could think of. The Soviets poured in billions of dollars in aid. They built Afghanistan’s industry, paved its roads, and purchased its oil and gas. They invited thousands of Afghans to study in the USSR. They supplied the Afghan military with tanks and planes and artillery and filled its ranks with Soviet advisers. And now the president of the country was throwing their friends in jail.

Despite his youth, Ayazi had already seen enough of Afghanistan’s factional politics to understand the potential for serious conflict. In Kandahar, where he grew up, his father was the principal of a local high school. Early in the 1970s the student body had begun to fragment into competing blocs. No sooner had the school’s young Communists formed a discussion group than militant Muslims responded with a cell of their own. Ayazi’s father, a secularist liberal who disagreed with both tendencies, had banned all activism from the school grounds, earning him the enmity of both camps. Just for good measure he had also forbidden his son to get involved in politics until he was mature enough to make informed choices.