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| Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the Iranian Revolution (photo: al-Majalla) |
See also Sources of the Iranian Revolution and Benchmarks in the History of Iran
Iran's Ruhollah Khomeini was the first Muslim cleric in modern times to create an Islamic government based solely on his personal conception of what such a government should entail. Along with Mawdudi and Qutb, Khomeini became an architect of late twentieth century Islamic revolutionary thinking.
Khomeini was descended from the Mussavi Sayyeds, a family tracing its lineage from the Prophet Muhammad through the Shiite seventh imam, Musa al-Kazem. Khomeini's father, Mustapha, a well-known clergyman in Iran, was murdered seven months after Ruhollah's birth. His mother died when he was 16.
Ruhollah's education reflected a strong Persian dualist outlook on the world: a tendency to draw sharp boundaries between the worlds of light and darkness, between black and white, between haq ("truth") and batel ("falsehood"). This approach to the world, undergirded by a traditional Iranian Shia conviction that the world is unsafe for Shiites, that neither the Prophet Muhammad, his family, nor any of the twelve Shia imams died a natural death ("We are either poisoned or killed."), contributed to the construction within Khomeini of the uncompromising personality of one who feels relentlessly persecuted.
Growing up intelligent and introverted in a climate where the religious establishment was losing ground in the face of modernist secular challenges, Khomeini took refuge in mysticism, especially in the works of Ibn Arabi and Rumi and their notion of the "Perfect Man" who will guide society from multiplicity to unity, from blasphemy to faith and from corruption to a life of absolute perfection. Khomeini came to believe that he embodied this "Perfect Man." So preoccupied did he become with his mission that after the revolution, officials who came to see him often left complaining that he had no time or patience for real people with real problems.
By the early 1960s, Khomeini had become the point man in Shia religious resistance against modernizing reforms in Iran, embodied in the Shah's self-styled "White Revolution." The Shia had also been deeply offended by the Shah's glorification of Iran's Persian past in his coronation ceremony (held in 1971). On June 5,1963, Khomeini was arrested by SAVAK, the Shah's secret police. Ten months later, in April, 1964, he was released unrepentant. This led the Shah in November, 1964 to send him into exile, first to Turkey, then in October, 1965, to the holy Shia city of Najaf in Iraq, burial place of the fourth caliph and first Shia Imam Ali (the tomb is located four miles from Kufa where Ali was felled by Kharijite assassins in 661). Khomeini moved to Paris in October, 1978.
Throughout 1978, demonstrations against the Shah's regime took place in Iran. Ailing from cancer, the Shah departed Iran on January 16, 1979. Two weeks later, Khomeini's supporters recalled him from exile in Paris, and on February 1, 1979, he returned to construct his revolutionary "reign of virtue" according to his principle of the velayet e-faqih ("vice regency of the theologian"). Iran became a pure theocracy in just a little over two years. Khomeini died in 1989.
The Iranian revolution inspired sunni revivalist movements around the world as well as Shiite revivalist movements such as Hizbullah in Lebanon, and Khomeini became the point man for anti-Western sentiments throughout Islam. Khomeini used the term - "westoxification" ("gharbzadigi") - to describe what he considered the poisonous influences of Western culture. The Farsi term Gharbzadigi derives from the Arabic root gh-ra-ba. It was the title of an influential treatise written in 1962 by Jala Al-e Ahmad.
By the end of the twentieth century, it was clear that Khomeini's revolution was unraveling fast. Seventy percent of Iran's population was under thirty, too young to remember the revolution and impatient with the theocratic rule of the mullahs. Perhaps no one summed up the change in mood better than Khomeini's own grandson, Sayyid Hussein Khomeini, who, from his home in Baghdad, described the American invasion of Iraq as a "liberation," and said that people in the region welcomed freedom wherever it came from, even a country which his grandfather had dubbed "the Great Satan." He predicted that unless reforms occurred in Iran, there would be an exodus of Shia scholars from Qom to Najaf, one of the major centers of Shiite learning in Iraq and the burial place of the Shia Imam Ali. (see Neil MacFarquhar, "A Khomeini Breaks With His Lineage to Back U.S.," New York Times, Aug. 6, 2003)
(Click for more on the Iranian Revolution, 1979. See also Sources of the Iranian Revolution. and Benchmarks in the History of Iran )
Sources:
Baqer Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).
Baqer Moin, "Khomeini's Search for Perfection: Theory and Reality," in Ali Rahnema (ed.), Pioneers of Islamic Revival (London: Zed Books, 1994), 64-97.