Ayatollah Khomeini

Iranian religious leader

• Born: May 17, 1900, or September 24, 1902
• Birthplace: Khomein, Iran
• Died: June 3, 1989
• Place of death: Tehran, Iran

One the most infamous postmedieval Muslim religious leaders, Khomeini directed the Iranian revolution of 1978 and 1979, established the Islamic Republic of Iran in April, 1979, and ruled the country thereafter for ten years. His legacy also included inspiring fundamentalist Muslim activism throughout the world.

Early Life

Ayatollah Khomeini (i-ah-TOH-lah koh-MAY-nee) was born in the small town of Khomein to a local Shia cleric who was killed a year later in a quarrel with employees of an absentee landlord. Khomeini was reared at an aunt’s house, there apparently being insufficient money or room at home for him. At an early age, he began traditional religious education, partly under the tutelage of an elder brother. In 1919, shortly after the deaths of his aunt and his mother, Khomeini went to the city of Arāk to continue his theological studies. There Khomeini joined the group around ShaykhՙAbdolkarim Ha՚eri Yazdi and in 1920 followed Ha՚eri to Qom, where he completed his basic theological education in 1926.

Meanwhile, in Tehran a military officer called Reza Khan participated in a 1921 coup d’état against the central government and later emerged as the strongest political actor on the national scene. In 1924, Reza Khan visited Ha՚eri in Qom, which the latter was molding into a leading Shia theological center. Shia clerics, wary of Reza Khan’s Persian nationalism, blocked a plan to replace the Qājār monarchy with a republic. In 1925, Reza Khan, now Reza Pahlavi, deposed Ahmad Shah and brought the Qājār Dynasty to an end. A year later, he crowned himself shahanshah (emperor) and embarked on ambitious programs of Westernization and secularization, which made the Pahlavi monarchy Khomeini’s lifelong arch enemy.

In 1930, returning from a pilgrimage to the Shia shrine at Mashhad, Khomeini visited Tehran and married a prominent cleric’s daughter called Batul, who was ten years old at the time. In 1932, Khomeini’s first son, called Mostafa, was born. Khomeini’s second son, Ahmad, was born in 1936. By this time, Khomeini was an established instructor of Islamic jurisprudence in Qom and had even conducted some of the recently deceased Ha՚eri’s advanced theology classes. In 1937, Khomeini made the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca.

In the fall of 1941, on the arrival of British and Russian occupation forces, Reza Shah Pahlavi was forced to abdicate the Iranian throne. The Allies allowed his son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi , to succeed him, despite efforts by Shia clerics to persuade the British to put an end to the monarchy.

By 1946, Ayatollah Mohammad-Hussein Borujerdi emerged as the leading Shia cleric and proceeded to advocate an apolitical course. Khomeini became a Borujerdi aide and taught in the Qom theological school system. At a 1949 meeting of leading clerics, while Borujerdi advocated withdrawal by leading clerics from active participation in politics, Khomeini sided with clerics advocating political activism. Later, these activists played a role in events that led in August, 1953, to an American-orchestrated coup that toppled the nationalist prime ministerMohammad Mossadegh and reestablished Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi on the throne. In 1955, now a very prominent instructor of Islamic sciences, Khomeini supported, and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi allowed, the persecution of the Baha՚is.

In 1960, Borujerdi and other clerics opposed a land reform law, which Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was consequently obliged to have annulled. In 1961, Khomeini, now an ayatollah, published Tawzīh al-masā՚il (A Clarification of Questions , 1984). When Borujerdi died in the same year, no single ayatollah was recognized as his successor as the chief Shia leader, although Khomeini received support from clerics advocating, as he did, political activism on their part.

Life’s Work

By 1962, Khomeini was being referred to by the title Grand Ayatollah. In January, 1963, he published an attack on a government land redistribution proposal. In March, he was arrested after speeches in which he ordered the Shia faithful not to celebrate Nowruz (Iranian New Year). In April, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi went regally to Qom and castigated the clergy. Then on June 3, which coincided with the anniversary of Shia Imamḥusՙ ibnՙAlī’s death at Karbala in 680, Khomeini again preached against the government, calling the shah an agent of Israel. After his arrest two days later, riots ensued. Khomeini remained in jail in Tehran for three months and was thereafter kept under house arrest. In October, he was again arrested, this time for advocating a boycott of elections. In April, 1964, by now the leading opposition figure, Khomeini was allowed to return to Qom. In November, Khomeini gave a speech protesting an Iranian/American bill that would extend diplomatic immunity to U.S. military personnel in Iran and asserting the shah’s subservience to the U.S. government. Again arrested, Khomeini was this time exiled to Turkey. In January, 1965, Khomeini settled in Najaf, Iraq, where he was forced and allowed to go after protesting Western dress codes in Turkey. On January 20, Prime Minister HasanՙAlī Mansur was assassinated at the behest of Khomeini aides, after a secret Islamic court condemned him to death. The social reformer Kasravi had been similarly assassinated by Shia activists in 1946, as had Prime Minister HajՙAlī Raz-Mara in 1951.

In June, 1967, after Israel defeated the Arabs in the Six-Day War, Khomeini discussed clerical political rule for Iran and an Islamic holy war against Israel. In 1968, Khomeini resumed his teaching of theology and thereafter implored Iranians to overthrow the Pahlavi monarchy. Based on that teaching, Khomeini’s Hokumat-e-Eslami (Islamic Government , 1979) was published in 1971. In it, while arguing that Muslim jurisprudents were uniquely qualified to govern societies, he predicted the overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy and the establishment of an Islamic state. About this time, Khomeini met the prominent Arab religious leader Musa Sadr, whose niece had become Ahmad Khomeini’s wife. In 1975, Khomeini called for a boycott of the newly formed Rastakhiz Party, the basis for the shah’s new, one-party state.

In October, 1977, Khomeini’s son Mostafa died in suspicious circumstances in Iraq. In December, students in Tehran demanded that Khomeini be allowed to return to Iran. In January, 1978, an article planted by the government in a national daily newspaper slandered Khomeini. A series of protests, clashes with the government, and memorial services ensued throughout that spring. In July, the Rex Cinema inĀbādān burned down, with hundreds of people locked inside. Clerical involvement in the tragedy was assumed, but Khomeini blamed the shah’s security forces. In October, expelled from Iraq and denied entry to Kuwait, Khomeini traveled to Paris, from which, via television, he became a household name throughout the world. Demonstrations in Tehran in December, coinciding with the anniversary ofḥusՙ ibnՙAlī’s death, called for Khomeini to return to lead Iran. The magnitude of the demonstrations made it obvious that the shah would not survive politically.

On February 1, 1979, Khomeini returned triumphantly to Tehran, two weeks after the abject departure of the shah. In March, the Islamic Republic of Iran was established, with Khomeini as its leader. The execution of hundreds of Pahlavi government officials followed. Sensing the strict theocratic basis of the new social order, tens of thousands of educated, secular-minded Iranians began leaving the country. In November, 1979, Iranians identifying themselves as followers of “the Imam’s line” seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held some fifty hostages until January, 1981. Khomeini orchestrated the release of the hostages to take place the moment that Ronald Reagan was sworn in to succeed Jimmy Carter as president of the United States.

In September, 1980, Iraq had invaded Iran, and a war commenced that served to unite some elements of the Iranian population behind Khomeini. By the time hostilities had ended inconclusively in mid-1989, it had cost hundreds of thousands of Iranian lives and devastated the economy.

In 1981, a longtime supporter of Khomeini called Sheik Mohammad Saduqi declared that Baha՚i blood might be legally spilled. In June of that year, the Islamic Republic’s president, Abal Hassan Bani Sadr, was deposed as mullahs grew more powerful. A hundred or more clerical leaders and officials died in a bombing at a party headquarters in June, for which the subsequently outlawed Mujahedeen-e-Khalq-e-Iran (People’s Combatants of Iran) claimed responsibility. In 1982, former Khomeini supporter and foreign minister Sadeq Ghotbzadeh was executed for plotting Khomeini’s overthrow. In 1983, leaders and thousands of members of the Tudeh Party of Iran were arrested. An assembly of experts was charged in 1984 with planning for Khomeini’s successor. His will and testament were deposited in a safe at the parliament building for publication the moment he died. In 1988, Khomeini declared edicts on governmental prerogatives that are binding for Shiites. Early in 1989, Khomeini called for the death of Indian-born British author Salman Rushdie because of the latter’s alleged insults to Islam in a novel called The Satanic Verses (1988).

Khomeini died on June 3, 1989. Millions of Iranians mourned his death and attended his funeral, one of the largest in history. The chant “Death to America” was an integral part of the proceedings. In late July, former Parliament speaker Hashemi Rafsanjani was elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, thereafter consolidating his position as Iran’s most powerful political figure and sending signals that he might harmonize Islamic teachings with modern realities.

Significance

From his early adult years until 1979, Khomeini labored to achieve two ends, the collapse of the Pahlavi monarchy and the installation of an Islamic government. Incorruptible, ascetic, religious, single-minded, and self-confident in pursuing these goals, Khomeini proceeded in 1979 to show the world an authoritarian, autocratic leadership style (as an arguably traditional Iranian patriarch), intense xenophobia against the West and Israel, and ignorance of things beyond the pale of Islam. In asserting that U.S. president Carter was a manifestation of Satan and consequently deserved assassination, and that women should be in their husbands’ homes by the time they menstruate for the first time, among other things, Khomeini presented a challenge to the nonfundamentalist Muslim world and to the non-Muslim world: how to deal with a leader whose perspectives and thought processes are different and who does not believe in compromise.

As the leader of one of the world’s great revolutions, as the architect of a successful fusion of theology and politics in the establishment of perhaps the first “fundamentalist” Islamic republic in the history of Islam, as the implementor of a historical alternative to secular misrule, and as one who successfully thwarted Western values, Khomeini stands as an almost uniquely successful political leader in the short term. As a pan-Islamic activist who argued for the substitution of the notion of the Islamic community for the Iranian nation or Iranian nationalism, Khomeini offers a political vision with serious consequence in the long term for nation-states with significant Muslim populations. History alone will tell how lasting his vision and influence will ultimately prove to be.

Bibliography

Arjomand, Said Amir. The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. A sociologist’s examination of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran and an “assessment of its significance in world history.” This study details Khomeini’s role as a chief actor in the Iranian political arena, compares him with other famous revolutionary leaders, and demonstrates the success of his Islamic revolutionary ideology.

Brumberg, Daniel. Reinventing Khomeini: The Struggle for Reform in Iran. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Brumberg traces the battles for democratic reform in Iran to the Khomeini-led revolution of 1979.

Ferdows, Adele. “Shariati and Khomՙi on Women.” In The Iranian Revolution and the Islamic Republic of Iran, edited by Nikki R. Keddie and Eric Hooglund. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986. A discussion of a most sensitive issue in modernizing Muslim societies, that of the continuing relegation of women in Islam to inferior social status. Khomeini’s conservative views receive treatment along with those of the Western-educated and anti-Pahlavi social reformer Ali Shariati.

Fischer, Michael M. J. “Imam Khomeini: Four Levels of Understanding.” In Voices of Resurgent Islam, edited by John L. Esposito. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. A biographical sketch and an analysis of Khomeini’s public persona in an attempt to account for his success as a charismatic religious and political leader.

Harris, David. The Crisis, the President, the Prophet, and the Shah: 1979 and the Coming of Militant Islam. New York: Little, Brown, 2004. Harris recounts the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1981.

Martin, Vanessa. Creating an Islamic State: Khomeini and the Making of a New Iran. New ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. A history of the Khomeini-led Iranian revolution of 1979, analyzing Khomeini’s concept for a new Iranian government and society.

Mottahedeh, Roy. The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. Intended for the “intelligent general reader of Middle Eastern history” and in the context of “an extended reading of Iranian culture,” including historical interchapters, this study traces the life of a prominent contemporary Iranian Shia Muslim cleric given the pseudonym Ali Hashemi. Although not the explicit focus of the presentation, Khomeini figures prominently in it because Hashemi’s life revolves around Khomeini’s political activism and role in Iranian affairs as of the late 1970’s.

Rose, Gregory. “Velayat-e Faqih and the Recovery of Identity in the Thought of Ayatullah Khomeini.” In Religion and Politics in Iran: Shiism from Quietism to Revolution, edited by Nikki Keddie. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983. A sympathetic treatment of Khomeini’s response to what he perceived as the Muslim world’s identity crisis and pervasive alienation. With a review of the history of the concept of authority or governance of the Muslim jurisprudent over the affairs of the Muslim community, the essay describes Khomeini’s view that Shia Islam needs to be a revolutionary ideology.

Taheri, Amir. The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution. Bethesda, Md.: Adler & Adler, 1986. Although not a sympathetic portrait and not inclusive of Khomeini’s last three years, this is the fullest and most informative treatment to appear.