The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution Read online

  Eventually, however, the Executive Committee of Interpol issued “red alert” notices against only one of the four Alis, Fallahian, along with four other Islamic Republic officials. The four are General Mohsen Rezai; a former IRGC commander; General Muhammad-Reza Asgari, the deputy defense minister; General Ahmad Vahidi, military advisor to the Supreme Guide; and Mohsen Rabbani-Amlashi, a mullah attached to Khamenehi’s office. Also in the 1990s, the French antiterror judge Jean-Louis Bruguière sought arrest warrants for a number of other Islamic Republic officials in connection with a series of assassinations of Iranian dissidents in France. The officials included Muhammad Gharazi and Hussein Sheikh Attar, both former members of the Islamic Republic’s Council of Ministers, as well as Muhammad Hejazi, a senior official of the IRGC. no other regime in recent history has seen so many of its highest officials implicated in political murders at trials taking place in countries where the rule of law is respected.

  In an extended interview published by the pan-Arab daily newspaper Asharq Alawsat on May 14, 2008, a senior Iranian ayatollah spoke of how he had helped create both the Lebanese branch of Hezballah and the armed wings of the Palestinian movement Hamas. A former ambassador of the Islamic Republic to Damascus, Ayatollah Muhammad Hassan Akhtari, spelled out the crucial role played by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in “recruiting, training, arming, and deploying” groups that the State Department in Washington, along with governments in more than two dozen other countries, officially designates as “terrorist.” “Hezballah, Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine, and Hamas are legitimate offspring of our Iranian revolution,” Akhtari boasted. The leader of the Lebanese branch of Hezballah has always boasted that his movement “owes everything” to the Islamic Republic. not all terrorist movements are fascist, but all fascist movements and states include a strong element of terrorism. Generic fascism leads to the creation of a kakistocracy, rule by the worst elements of society—elements that resort to terrorism when their masters deem it necessary. Since 1989, Tehran has hosted an international gathering of terrorist organizations every February. Known as the Ten Days of Dawn, the event attracts scores of terror groups from more than seventy countries across the globe.

  Some Western analysts believe that Sunnis and Shiites, divided as they are by deep theological differences, could not come together to fight the United States and its allies. The truth is that Sunni and Shiite extremists have always been united in their hatred of the United States and their desire to “bring it to destruction,” in the words of Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. To understand the problem with Islamist fascists, it is important to set aside the Sunni-Shiite divide and focus on common hatreds. Theology is useless here; what we are dealing with is politics. For Khomeini and his successors, the slogan “Death to America” is as important as “Allah is the Greatest”—hence the ayatollah’s insistence that it be chanted at all public meetings and repeated after each session of the daily prayers. To that end, Khomeinists have worked with anyone, not only Sunnis but even Marxist atheists.

  For more than a quarter century, Tehran has been host to the offices of more than three dozen terrorist organizations, from the Colombian FARC to the Palestinian Hamas, and including half a dozen Trotskyite and Leninist outfits. The regime also finances anti-American groups and parties of both the extreme right and the extreme left in Europe and the Americas. Ahmadinejad has bestowed the Muslim title of “brother” on Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. Communist north Korea is the only country with which the Islamic Republic maintains close military-industrial ties and holds joint annual staff sessions. For years, until a recent change of policy, Tehran financed and offered shelter to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Marxist movement fighting to overthrow the Turkish Republic. This support reflected Tehran’s displeasure with Turkish membership of NATO and ties with the United States.

  The suicide attacks that claimed the lives of over 300 Americans, including 241 Marines, in Lebanon in 1983 were joint operations of the Khomeinist Hezballah and the Marxist Arab Socialist Party, linked to Syrian intelligence services. For almost three decades, the Syrian regime has been the closest ally of the Khomeinist regime, despite the fact that Shiite clerics regard the Alawite minority that rules in Damascus as heretics. George Ibrahim Abdallah, the Lebanese maverick who led a campaign of terror in Paris in the 1980s on behalf of Tehran, was a Christian. So was Anis naqqache, who led several death squads sent to kill exiled Iranian leaders. Tehran’s surrogate in Lebanon, Hezballah, formed an alliance in 2006 with a Maronite Christian faction led by the ex-general Michel Aoun to oppose the democratic majority bloc that favors close ties with the West. In May 2008, Hezballah armed gangs attacked the Sunni Muslim districts of Beirut in a massive show of force. To terrorize the populace, they burned social clubs and libraries, ransacked offices of the independent media, looted luxury shops, and killed over sixty people. While Hezballah was terrorizing Sunni Muslims, Aoun’s supporters were moving into Christian districts to intimidate their coreligionists.

  The Islamic Republic has financed and armed the radical Afghan Sunni Hizb Islami (Islamic Party) since the 1990s. It also financed the Front for Islamic Salvation (FIS), a Sunni political-terrorist outfit in Algeria between 1992 and 2005. In 1993, a senior Iranian delegation led by Ayatollah Mehdi Karrubi, the speaker of the Islamic Parliament, attended the Popular Arab Islamic Conference organized by Hassan al-Turabi, nicknamed “the Pope of Islamist Terror,” in Khartoum. At the end of this anti-American jamboree, a nine-man Coordinating Committee (known as the Majlis al-Shuyukh or Assembly of Elders) was announced, and Karrubi was a member. The fact that Karrubi was a Shiite mullah did not prevent him from sitting alongside Sunni sheikhs.

  In 1996, a suicide attack claimed the lives of nineteen American servicemen in Al Khobar, eastern Saudi Arabia. The operation was carried out by Hezballah in Hejaz, an Iranian-financed outfit, with the help of the Sunni militant group called “Sword of the Peninsula.” In 2000, Sunni groups linked to al-Qaeda killed seventeen U.S. servicemen in a suicide attack on the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen. This time, a Shiite militant group led by Sheikh al-Houti, Tehran’s man in Yemen, played second fiddle in the operation. In Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Tehran has for years supported two Sunni movements, the Rastakhiz Islami (Islamic Awakening) and Hizb Tahrir Islami (Islamic Liberation Party). In Azerbaijan, Tehran supports the Sunni Taleshi groups against the Azeri Shiite majority—because the Taleshi Sunnis are pro-Russian and anti-American, while Shiite Azeris are pro-American and anti-Russian.

  There are no Palestinian Shiites, yet Tehran has become the principal source of funding for radical Palestinian Sunni groups, notably Hamas and Islamic Jihad, along with half a dozen leftist-atheist mini groups. Tehran is the only place on earth where all Palestinian terror groups maintain offices. The Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh refuses to pray alongside his Iranian hosts during his visits to Tehran, but when it comes to joining Khomeinist crowds in shouting “Death to America” he is in the forefront. With Arab oil kingdoms no longer as generous as before, Iran has emerged as the chief source of funding for Hamas. The national budget that came into effect on March 21, 2008, allocated over $2 billion to the promotion of “revolutionary causes.” Much of this money was ear-marked for Hamas and the Lebanese branch of Hezballah.

  In Pakistan, the Iran-financed Shiite Tehrik Jaafari (Jaafari Movement) joined a coalition of Sunni parties to govern the northwest Frontier Province, until they all suffered a crushing defeat in the 2008 parliamentary elections. The fact that Sunnis and Shiites in other provinces of Pakistan continued to kill each other did not prevent them from developing a joint anti-U.S. strategy that included the revival of the Afghan Taliban and protection for the remnants of al-Qaeda. Almost all self-styled “holy warriors” who go to Iraq on a mission of murder and mayhem are Sunnis, yet most pass through Syria, a country dominated by a sect with a militant anti-Sunni religious doctrine
. The 9/11 Commission report states that Tehran was in contact with al-Qaeda at various levels before the 2001 attacks. Tehran has acknowledged the presence of al-Qaeda figures in Iran on a number of occasions and has arranged for the repatriation of at least thirteen Saudi members in the past five years. The bin Laden family admit that at least two of Osama’s sons, Sa’ad and Seyf al-Islam, have lived in Iran since 2002. It was in Tehran that Osama bin Laden met the Tajik Islamist leader Abdallah nouri in the 1990s. Since 2002, eyewitness reports suggest that scores of Taliban leaders and several al-Qaeda figures spend part of the year in a housing estate near the village of Doust Muhammad on the Iranian frontier with Afghanistan. These reports are hard to verify because Tehran has declared large segments of eastern Iran a “no-go” area, even for its own state-owned media.

  The regime uses Khomeini’s writings and speeches to justify support for “Jihad against the enemies of Islam”—what others would regard as terrorism. Here is how Khomeini justifies terror and war:

  Those who say that Islam should not kill, don’t understand [it]. Killing is a great [divine] gift that appears [to man]. A religion that does not include [provisions for] killing and massacre is incomplete. Those who claim that Jesus was averse to killing and war, harm his prophetic mission. The prophet has a sword to fight with. Why do you insist on reading the Koran’s merciful verses and not verses that urge killing? Killing is the same as mercy. Our imams were all military [men] and killed people.12

  Finally, the twelfth characteristic of generic fascism is its rejection of the normal language of society. All brands of fascism invent their own vocabularies and literary styles. Mussolini’s affected Latinism was at times hilarious, while Ezra Pound’s “pure Aryan lingo” was intriguing. The German used by Hitler and Goebbels was closer to the argot of Munich beerhouses than to the language of Kleist or Goethe. Jean-Marie Le Pen is careful about his imparfait du subjonctif. The backbone of the Khomeinist newspeak version of Persian is a list of over three hundred words and terms, most of them new coinages. The total vocabulary of this newspeak is around two thousand words, quite sufficient for a fascist type of system. Anything more might lead people into the temptation of thinking. In Khomeinism, as in all forms of fascism, what matters is zikr, the incantation of authorized texts, rather than fikr, or critical thought. Fascism destroys the normal syntax in an unconscious bid to pre-empt the development of rational thought and critical analysis.

  Islamist writers had always tried to subvert the Persian language by bringing it closer to Arabic. The late Jalal al-Ahmad, a Stalinist who converted to Islamism in the 1960s, often wrote Persian with a pseudo-Arabic syntax. (In Persian, the order of words is subject, object, verb; in Arabic it is verb, subject, object.) Khomeini went further than al-Ahmad by doing away with all order. His speeches and writings reflect his inability to think clearly beyond repeating his anti-American leitmotiv in a jumbled style. The effect is often so hilarious that many Iranians read Khomeini’s writings for entertainment at informal gatherings. It is only in the United States that the ayatollah’s work is presented as “philosophy” and taught to unsuspecting university students.13

  Besides imposing its own vocabulary, generic fascism also employs censorship. Khomeini censored his own collection of poems, which appeared in a limited edition only after his death, and his Hal al-Masa’el (“Solution to Problems”) was “purged of unsuitable ideas” before being published. The censorship list in Tehran reads like a who’s who of Persian and world literature and thought: every imaginable writer or poet of importance in any language is either totally banned or heavily censored in the Islamic Republic. Even classics of Persian literature are “edited” to remove ideas that might undermine the regime. The largest department in the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture is the one in charge of censorship. (There, a blind man heads a special unit to censor movies: he listens to descriptions of cinematic scenes and decides which to cut!) newsreels and photos are edited or airbrushed to eliminate those who have broken with the regime and give those in the ascendancy higher profiles. Successive editions of Khomeini’s works are edited and partly rewritten to remove embarrassing passages and add new ones to justify the current policies.

  What happened in Iran in 1978-79, and the system subsequently created, has a mainly if not exclusively political relationship with Islam and Shiism. The Khomeinist system is a beda’a (innovation) ultimately opposed to Islamic as well as Persian philosophy, theology, and political thought and practice. Its roots can be found in generic fascism, a largely Western product that has invaded Iran in a dramatic instance of mimetic madness. This mimesis is Westernizing Iran more than the nation’s previous 150 years’ experience with the gradual assimilation of some aspects of Western life. One of Khomeini’s closest associates in the early phases of the regime, Mehdi Bazargan, argues that even the use of the term “revolution” to discuss the ayatollah’s seizure of power was a sign of Westernization. “Revolution is in essence an import from the West,” he writes, “something alien to the culture of Iranians and Muslims.”14 The argument is based on the fact that none of the main languages of Muslims contained a word for “revolution” as used in a political sense in European languages. The Arabic word enqelaab, which means “counterfeiting,” was originally used in Persian to mean “sudden change of weather.” (Arabs still use it in that sense.) It was only after the 1930s that some writers started to use enqelaab in the sense of a political revolution. Initially, Khomeini and his advisors had thought of presenting their movement not as a revolution but as a nehzat, an Arabic word meaning “awakening.” It was under the influence of his Stalinist allies that the ayatollah decided to sanction the term enqelaab (revolution).

  One of Iran’s best-known philosophers has written a book arguing that by ideologizing Islam, the Khomeinist movement is, perhaps unwittingly, introducing the West into all aspects of Iran on a scale never known before.15 The problem is that the West is coming to Iran in its totalitarian version, just as it had come to other developing nations in its socialist or communist versions. Bazargan recognized this when he portrayed the Khomeinist revolt in these terms: “Those clenched fists, dour faces, and cries calling for death and violence were more reminiscent of a Communist class revolution than an image of Allah’s mercy.”16 He rejected the claim that street demonstrations against the shah gave legitimacy to the Khomeinist regime: “The fact that some people gathered and marched in the streets of Tehran or on the campus of the university, even if their number is estimated at around one million, in a city that had seven or eight million inhabitants, does not imply majority support for the rulers’ legitimacy.”17

  A mixture of political immaturity, opportunism, and outright irresponsibility led Iranian liberals, democrats, socialists, and social-democrats to transfer power to the fascist movement led by Khomeini. Many Iranian intellectuals failed to recognize the wolf disguised as the grandmother. The beards, the turbans, the mishlahs (a kind of shawl worn by men), the miswaks (toothbrushes made of sandalwood), the piety patches on foreheads, the qamis (a men’s long shirt), the beards—pogonophilia gone mad—do not demonstrate that Khomeinism is a religious movement. These props of terror are as representative of Islam as the uniforms of Mao’s Red Guards were of China’s Confucian tradition. Those who thought they could ally themselves with fascism to win power against a regime they did not like were not familiar with the proverb about falling from the frying pan into the fire. Almost all the intellectuals that the shah had detained for brief periods were shot, imprisoned, or driven into exile by Khomeini even though they had signed the “devil’s pact” with him—or maybe because they had done so. They fought a regime they disliked, rightly or wrongly, by supporting a movement that disliked them.

  The Iranian people are the primary victims of Khomeinism just as the Germans were the first victims of Hitlerism and the Russians of Leninism. The main lesson that Muslim intellectuals must learn from the Iranian tragedy is that they should not abandon their core politica
l beliefs. Today, most regimes in the Muslim world are corrupt and despotic, and must be fought as enemies of their people; but this must be done from positions that are more humane, more progressive, and more democratic than those of the regime in place.

  9

  The Feeble Ones

  The Islamic Republic of Iran has three phobias: women, Jews, and America. Of these three, perhaps the strongest is the regime’s fear and hatred of women, often referred to as zaeefeh (the feeble ones).

  In fact, the first issue that turned Khomeini from a quietist mullah into a political activist was the shah’s decision to enfranchise women as part of a package of social and political reforms in 1962. In a cable to the monarch, Khomeini, still using deferential terms, warned that giving women the right to vote and seek election amounted to an attack on Islam.1 The shah ignored the cable, and women were enfranchised. Later, the shah went further by asking parliament to pass a landmark law that removed most of the inequalities women had suffered since the advent of Islam. Women were granted the right to sue for divorce, as well as protection against “repudiation,” an Islamic practice under which a man could divorce any or all of his four wives without even informing them. The new law, known as the Family Protection Act, made Iran the first Muslim nation to acknowledge women as citizens with equal rights.