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

At first Khomeini and his aides had tried to go to Kuwait, but at the border the Kuwaiti authorities had refused them entry. Now they had settled upon Paris as
the Ayatollah’s new place of exile. From there, the theory went, it would be easier to generate attention from the world’s media as the struggle against the shah shifted into high gear. “We need you to come and join us,” Yazdi beckoned Sazegara from Paris. This was what Sazegara had been waiting for. At age twenty-four he was already a fully credentialed member of the revolutionary movement.

He was so eager to get to the airport that he left behind most of his belongings. He made the transatlantic trip with eight dollars in cash. He had borrowed the money for his plane ticket—two hundred and fifty dollars—from a doctor in Chicago, an Iranian immigrant to the United States who was sympathetic to the cause Sazegara represented. A member of Khomeini’s entourage met him at Orly Airport and drove him to the Paris suburb of Neauphle-le-Château, where the ayatollah and his fellow activists were setting up a political headquarters that gradually took on the look of a government in exile. It was getting cold, and Sazegara soon found himself regretting that, in his hurry to leave Chicago, he had forgotten to bring along a winter coat. A friend scrounged an old German Army jacket for him.
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Sazegara and his comrades-in-arms would not be deterred by the elements. Some of the other Iranians in Paris refused to eat three square meals a day out of solidarity with their compatriots who were still suffering under the tyranny back home; some of them ended up suffering from a vitamin deficiency. In their ardor to topple the shah, they were continuing a long tradition of revolutionary idealism that would have been instantly recognizable to the French who had agitated against Louis XVI in 1789 or the Russians who had overthrown the Romanov dynasty in 1917. Like their European forerunners, these Iranians had elevated the notion of “revolution” to a kind of religion in itself, an all-encompassing ideal that transcended mere politics. And like many of their contemporaries in the Third World, they spoke obsessively about the need to defeat the evils of “imperialism” and “colonialism” by mobilizing the “oppressed masses” to rise up against the accursed monarchy.

Yet there was one thing that set these Iranians apart: they prayed. Five times a day they gathered together in a large tent set up on the grounds, prostrated themselves in the direction of Mecca, and paid obeisance to the Creator of All the Worlds. The man they had followed to this unlikely place, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was not a labor leader or a radical lawyer or a rabble-rousing young agitator with a thing for the opposite sex. He was a sere, elderly man who went about in the traditional black robes and turban of a
marja-i-taqlid
, a Shiite legal scholar who had devoted his life to the pursuit of the holy and the pure and had achieved the status of an exemplar of piety to be emulated by the faithful. Now, here in his Parisian suburb, he was doing something that no one of his kind had ever done in the nine centuries since Iran had adopted Islam. He was engineering the overthrow of Shah Mohammad
Reza Pahlavi, the monarch who had ruled the country for the past thirty-seven years. And not only that: Khomeini was calling for the end of the monarchy itself. He was putting himself on the side of revolution.

The notion of revolutionary transformation had been familiar to Iranians since the Constitutional Revolution in 1906 had bequeathed to the country the outlines of a constitutional monarchy. The shahs who followed honored it mostly in the breach. For years after that, giving life to the framework established in 1906 remained an honorable political goal but little more. In the early 1950s, the nationalist leader Mohammed Mossadeq demanded that the monarch respect the constitutional constraints on his power. He refrained, however, from calling for the shah’s overthrow.

In the years following the anti-Mossadeq coup, it was mainly the Communists and their allies on the Left who kept alive the demand for all-out revolution—even though their Soviet patrons sometimes advised them to moderate their tactics for reasons of expediency.
Revolution
, after all, was a word that evoked the great political struggles led by socialist parties. It is true that the Arabic word—
enqelab
, meaning “overthrow”—also occurs in the Quran, where it refers to the fate that must befall unjust rulers. But it was still not a term that Shiite clerics made a habit of using.

The 1970s, however, were a period of profound political change in Iran, and much of the change drew its energy from the universities. During the 1970s, the number of students enrolled in them reached 175,000, double the figure in the 1960s. The young men and women who emerged from these institutions expected that their degrees would pave their way into the growing middle class. Yet despite the economic boom, not all of them were able to find jobs upon graduation, which transformed many of them into a volatile class-in-waiting. In any country, the experience of a university education is almost always a catalyst for those with ambition or a penchant for activism, but under the shah the path to any genuine political participation was closed. As historian Said Amir Arjomand points out, the would-be members of the middle class who dreamed of “national sovereignty and popular democratic government” had no legal avenues for pursuing their aims.
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Their goals and their means for achieving them changed accordingly, shifting from critical engagement with the authorities to calls for wholesale transformation of the existing system.

So it should come as no surprise that Sazegara and his contemporaries aspired to a life as professional revolutionaries. By the time he came of age, various theories of violent emancipation were percolating in the minds of his contemporaries, and the universities had become the focus of discontent. Some of those who engineered the revolution were older than Sazegara, but many of those who actually
made it happen—who organized the demonstrations, marched in the streets, crafted the slogans, and took the fight to the shah’s security forces—were his contemporaries. They were both beneficiaries and victims of Iran’s headlong rush to modernization. The Iran of the late 1970s was a society of the young. It was also a place of violent contradictions, evolving values, tumultuous modernity coexisting with old ways. The rules that governed this society—or at least so it seemed to many of those who inhabited it—came from somewhere else, and they coexisted uneasily with everyday life (like the wholesale introduction of modern capitalist distribution systems in a country where such tasks had earlier been the prerogative of the bazaar).

Quite a few of these students, like Sazegara, traveled overseas to study in the universities of the West, where they were expected to absorb the technological and economic know-how of the modern world while somehow remaining immune to the ideological and political ferment that was washing through the campuses of Europe and North America in the 1960s and 1970s. In the dormitories where Iranian students clustered, they were free to trade in ideas that were regarded as pure sedition back home. Some of them absorbed the rhetoric and theater of the student revolutionaries in their host countries, but others found themselves rejecting Western ways and rediscovering the virtues of native traditions they had neglected back at home. “We don’t want Western civilization,” went the rallying cry. “We want our own traditions.” What was self-evident in Iran became a political and cultural statement in the alien West. Sazegara recalls one young Iranian woman who became a devout Muslim during her stay in the United States and began wearing the chador, the head scarf. Her secular father was shocked when he met her at the airport in Iran: “I thought I was sending you to America, not to Qom.”

This embrace of religion was not a statement in favor of the status quo. If you shared the view that Islam was under assault by the shah’s reforms and the influx of foreign customs, then taking up the chador became a gesture laden with radical significance. Many of the young intellectuals, indeed, rediscovered Islam through their political engagement, not the other way around. This was precisely Sazegara’s story. His father was a solidly middle-class shopkeeper who had little interest in religion. He regarded the clergy as reactionary and corrupt. Sazegara’s mother, on the other hand, stuck to traditional belief. There were seven children in the house, and the constant philosophical and political discussions made it feel, Sazegara says, “like a university dormitory.” Throughout his school years Sazegara consumed every book he could get his hands on—including critics of organized religion like Bertrand Russell.

Yet the arguments of the rationalists had the opposite effect on him, and, still in high school, he began to feel the pull of Islam. It was, he says, part a search for ultimate meaning in a society that seemed awash in materialism, part political statement. Shia Islam, after all, was the authentic essence of Iranian culture and tradition, a perfect vehicle for rejecting the tyranny of alien ideas. He began to pray. His more secular brothers and sisters made fun of him. Did religion really fit in the modern world? Wasn’t Islam a dead end?
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I
t was easy to lose your way in this swirling, bewildering, unevenly evolving Iran. The Shiite mystery play in the local bazaar was just a short walk away from the cinema where they were showing the latest film by Jean-Luc Godard. The geographical distance might be short, but psychologically it was huge. Iranians needed a special sort of mental daring, a particular eagerness to embark on an imaginative quest, to bridge such gaps. Few were capable or willing.

The thinker who did it to the most dramatic effect was a nervous, perennially distracted, prematurely balding scholar from a village near the holy city of Ma-shad, not far from the border with Afghanistan. His name was Ali Shariati. He was born in 1933 into a family with a long tradition of scholarly devotion to Islam, even though few of its members actually ended up attending seminary. His father was a pious Muslim who taught Islamic history to high school students and impressed upon his son from an early age the imperative of faith.
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But as Shariati came of age, his questing mind soon confronted the bustling paradoxes of mid-twentieth-century Iran, and his faith took an idiosyncratic turn, which was perhaps to be expected of a man with an equally intense passion for Sufi poetry and Marxist theory.

He took his degree in foreign languages (Arabic and French) from Mashad University in 1958. His first long literary work was a translation of an Arabic text about Abu Zarr, one of the Prophet Muhammad’s earliest and most illustrious companions. Shariati became so fixated on the figure of Abu Zarr that he soon wrote a tract of his own exploring the man’s life and legend. In Shariati’s telling, Abu Zarr was a man of stark egalitarianism who accepted unconditionally Allah’s demand that the faithful must provide succor to the weak. Abu Zarr later opposed the third caliph, Osman, for permitting the rise of a privileged class and allowing the social stratification of the previously egalitarian Muslim society.
⁵
Shariati went so far as to describe Abu Zarr as the “first socialist.”

Islam, in other words, had invented true socialism long before Karl Marx or his ilk. Shariati had managed to contrive a model of radical social justice that took nothing from the West—a neat solution to the problem of cultural alienation. The
Iranians who aspired to mimic European-style leftism had failed to realize, Shariati suggested, that Islam had actually solved the problem back in the seventh century. The Quran had proclaimed that the future belonged to the
mostazafin
, the oppressed of the earth, long before anyone had considered the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. Abu Zarr represented the socialist spirit in its most authentic form. True Islam drew its force from a radical emphasis on justice; it was not a creed that defended the status quo. It was a revolutionary religion. The figure of Abu Zarr, as an embodiment of this insight, never let Shariati go.

In 1959 Shariati won a state scholarship to study in France, thus becoming one of the growing army of young Iranians to venture abroad in search of fresh intellectual stimuli. He arrived in Paris at a moment when the culture of the radical Left was already in full bloom. The revolution in Algeria was in full swing, and the proclamations of the Islamic Marxist insurrectionists fascinated Shariati and his fellow Iranians.
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He immersed himself in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Che Guevara, Mao, and the North Vietnamese military strategist General Giap—all the while continuing with his reading of his favorite mystic poets. He took part in radical student politics and embarked on an enthusiastic correspondence with Frantz Fanon, the
tiers-mondiste
theorist and publicist for the Algerian cause who counseled would-be revolutionaries from the developing world to find insurrectionist programs that fitted their local identities. As Fanon saw it, the colonial powers imposed their will on oppressed populations in part by imposing imported ideologies upon them. In this indictment Shariati experienced the shock of self-recognition. One of the most influential books he wrote after his return from Paris bore the suggestive title
Return to Oneself
. Where Shariati differed with the atheist Fanon was in his assessment of the centrality of religion. Iranians, Shariati argued, should understand that their inherited Shiite Muslim culture was not a barrier to modernity, as the shah and the European leftists so often asserted. Islam, in fact, was the original path to a revolution that would end in a perfect, classless society unified in adoration of the One God. Marx, by comparison, was a pale Johnny-come-lately.

Shariati was by no means the first thinker to fuse Islam and revolution. By now many young Iranians were familiar with the works of early-twentieth-century Muslim activists like Hussein al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Abul Ala Mawdudi, the Pakistani Islamist who had popularized the notion of an “Islamic state.” The Islamist reformers of the early twentieth century had rejected the image of an Islam mired in premodern superstition and tried to reclaim their faith for the modern age. Islam, they argued, was just as “progressive” as any of the fashionable ideologies like Marxism or revolutionary nationalism, but it also held
out the promise of transcending materialism and returning man to the consoling unity of the divine.