The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution Read online

  The Khomeinist ideology has tried hard to deny or ignore the central fact of Iran’s existence as a nation, its unity in diversity. The regime’s propaganda has attempted to reduce Iran’s rich and complex identity to a single component: Islam. Even then, the regime ignores the diversity of Islam as practiced in Iran. To start with, Muslim Iranians are divided between Shiites and Sunnis, the former accounting for 86 percent of the population and the latter 12 percent. The word “Shiite,” moreover, is an umbrella term that covers a range of heterodox beliefs and practices. These include the Ismailis, the Ahl e Haqq, the Ali-Allahis, the Yazidis, and the Heydaris.8 Even mainstream Shiites, known as the Jaafaris, are divided into dozens of schools, Sufi fraternities, and religious traditions.

  As long as Iran was known simply as Iran—that is to say, until the mullahs seized power in 1979—this diversity was accepted as a fact and celebrated as a “divine gift.”9 The use of the adjective “Islamic” to describe the regime created by Khomeini posed the question of which Iranians were Muslims and which were not, and, perhaps more importantly, what was meant by Islam. Thus Islam, rather than serving as a unifying element, became a divisive force, especially in the ever shifting and constricting definitions presented by the regime to suit its political interests. As Khomeini once observed, being a Muslim was not enough to give an Iranian the right to seek a place in the leadership; one had to be “committed to the system.”

  4

  The Triple Oxymoron

  The system that Khomeini created and his successors perfected is officially called the Islamic Republic of Iran. These words amount to a triple lie, for the system is neither Islamic nor republican, and it certainly is not Iranian.

  The adjective “Islamic” in this context is based on the assumption that Islam offers a model of government, but that is far from the truth. The Koran, Islam’s fundamental text, presents no thoughts on how to organize a government; there is not a single mention of such terms as “government” or “politics.” Muhammad acted as a ruler, general, and spiritual guide for over a decade, but refused to create a system that could be defined without himself at its center. The absence of any clear rules, let alone model of government, was at the root of the civil wars triggered by the Prophet’s death.

  Islamists present Muhammad’s decade-long reign and the three decades in which the Muslim community (ummah) was ruled by his four immediate successors, the “Well-Guided Caliphs,” as a “Golden Age.” That would be true if gold had the color of blood. Muhammad’s rule was marked by eleven wars, countless raids against trade caravans, and the massacre of tribes that refused to convert or pay tribute. Of the four Well-Guided Caliphs, three were assassinated, two of them in dynastic and sectarian conspiracies.1 Their reign was dominated by uninterrupted war—first inside Arabia, where tribes who had reverted to their original faiths after Muhammad’s death were massacred by the armies of the first caliph, Abu-Bakr, and his successor Omar, and then across the borders against the Persian and Byzantine empires. Under Osman a new layer of violence was added in the form of dynastic feuds, which led to full-scale civil wars during Ali’s caliphate. The Golden Age also failed to produce a system of law beyond the pre-Islamic tribal codes that Muhammad had adopted with some modifications. Islamists claim that there could be no Islam without the Shariah, a compendium of pre-Islamic Arab tribal rules with an admixture of Jewish, Byzantine, and Persian practices; but there was no Shariah during the Golden Age. It was not until five decades later under the Umayyid caliphs, by then based in Damascus, that Byzantine and Persian judges and theologians developed the Shariah as a body of common law.

  Because there has never been an Islamic model of government, the term “Islamic” could be used to describe virtually any political system, and it has been during the past fourteen centuries. The Umayyids and the Abbasids claimed that their rule was Islamic, just as did the Turks and the Mongols, new converts to Islam who conquered the Middle East and Central Asia. Some scholars have argued that because Islam makes a distinction between what is religious duty (shar’e) and what concerns the nonreligious aspects of life (urf), all governments in Islam have been and must be secular in the sense of a separation between mosque and state. In those terms, the only nonsecular Muslim state was the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt, in which the caliph held both sacred and temporal authority. Other scholars insist that an Islamic government should be modeled on that of Muhammad in Medina, where he acted as both temporal and religious ruler. Still others solve the problem by attaching the term “Islamic” to almost any system of government. Today, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Mauritania each describes itself as an “Islamic Republic,” something that Iranian mullahs dismiss as a “sordid claim.”2

  To a majority of Muslims, however, it is Khomeini and the regime he created that could be accused of making sordid claims. To start with, Khomeini was a Shiite and as such belonged to a community that accounts for just 12 percent of the world’s estimated 1.3 billion Muslims. Furthermore, Khomeini’s views belonged to a small minority within the Jaafari “Twelver” Shiite community.3 Other Shiite groups such as the Ismailis, nizaris, and Zaydis—not to mention more heterodox groups such as Alevis, nusairis, and Druze—would shudder at the thought of living in an “Islamic” republic like the one Khomeini created. Of the grand ayatollahs of the 1970s and 1980s, when the “Islamic Republic” took shape, none but Khomeini himself endorsed the system.4 Some Shiite theologians, along with almost all their Sunni counterparts, regarded Khomeini as an “innovator,” a term of abuse in Islamic polemics, and the system he created as a “satanic novelty” (bid’ah shaytaniah).

  A majority of Muslims, divided into four schools (mazahib) of Sunni theology, have always been ambivalent at best on whether Shiites should be regarded as Muslims. On the surface, the difference between Shiism and Sunnism seems to be over the matter of Muhammad’s successors. Sunnis respect the succession as it happened, while Shiites believe that Muhammad had meant his cousin and son-in-law Ali to succeed him, but the plan was derailed because of conspiracies by Muhammad’s closest companions and immediate successors, Abu-Bakr, Omar, and Osman, with the help of Ayesha, the favorite among the Prophet’s twenty-five wives. As to why Ali didn’t protest the usurpation of his right, but instead served under the three caliphs that preceded him, Shiites claim that he was merely practicing taqiyyah or dissimulation to save his life and bide his time. To confuse his enemies further, Ali even offered one of his daughters, Hafsa, as a teenage bride to Omar, his archrival, and volunteered to serve in the usurper’s armies for conquest beyond Arabia. The question of succession, however, only scratches the surface of a deeper doctrinal schism. One could argue that Shiism, although an offshoot of Islam, has developed into a distinct religion in which the Koran and the Prophet—and, as some scholars have argued, even Allah—are assigned cameo roles, while the imams take center stage.5

  Shiism’s divergence from Islam starts with major doctrinal innovations. Islam, as presented in the Koran and through sayings (hadith) attributed to Muhammad and his companions, is a radically monotheistic creed. Contrary to claims by Muslim scholars, it was not Muhammad who discovered or invented Allah as Supreme Being. Allah was the name that the Hanifs, a pre-Islamic sect of Arabs influenced by Judaism, gave to a god whom they regarded as superior to other gods. Muhammad’s own father was called Abdallah (Slave of Allah) long before the future Prophet received his celestial message. Abdallah and its variations, such as Abdul-Mutallib (the name of Muhammad’s uncle) and Abdul-Malik, were popular names among Arabs prior to Islam. What distinguished Muhammad’s faith from that of the Hanif was its uncompromising monotheism: Allah was no longer presented as the Greatest of Gods but the only God.

  The earliest war cry of Islam, Allah Akbar! (still in use as part of the Azan, or call to prayer), means “Allah is the Greatest” and reflects the Hanif influence. Soon a new slogan superseded it: La ilah il-Allah, which means: “There is no God but Allah.” During the twenty-three years of Muhammad’s prophet
ic mission, anyone who bore testimony to the uniqueness of Allah was considered a Muslim. After his death, his two immediate successors added a second article of faith: an acknowledgement of Muhammad’s position as a messenger of Allah. Thus, to become a Muslim one had to repeat a new formula: “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Messenger.”6

  Some early Muslims were uneasy about the elevation of Muhammad’s prophecy to the same level of importance granted to the oneness of Allah. The first two caliphs, however, needed the change as part of a propaganda effort against several “false prophets” who claimed to be Muhammad’s heirs as Allah’s messengers. The most successful among them, one Musaylamah—branded by Muslims as al-Kazzab, “the False One”—managed briefly to win over a majority of the Arab tribes. To prevent the emergence of more false prophets, thus removing the prospect of endless tribal wars in the name of rival “messengers of Allah,” the caliphs agreed to a further dilution of the strict monotheistic creed. Reinterpreting some verses from the Koran, they declared that Muhammad was not only a messenger of God, but his very last one. The term used to describe Muhammad was Khatam al-Anbia, “the Seal of the Prophets.” The fact that the Koran uses the term in a poetic rather than a literal sense and applies it to other prophets as well (notably Joseph) was ignored. Muhammad had to become the last prophet, even if that meant a theoretical restriction of Allah’s boundless powers, including the power to change his mind and dispatch other messengers.

  Still later, as Islam slowly began to develop a theology and organize itself as a religion, a third article of faith was added: the belief in resurrection (Ma’ad), the idea that on a given day all who had existed and died would return to life for a final judgment by Allah. The fact that an official text of the Koran had not been established until a quarter of a century after the death of the Prophet, and then in a manner that has raised many questions, facilitated the evolution of doctrine to suit the political needs of the day.

  At the time of Muhammad’s death in 632 A.D., it was sufficient to believe in the oneness of Allah to be accepted as a Muslim. By 635, one also had to believe that Muhammad had been Allah’s very last prophet and that Islam was the final divine message to mankind. A decade later, even that was no longer sufficient: one was also required to believe in resurrection.

  This doctrinal triptych remained unchallenged until the emergence of Shiism as an organized faith during the lifetime of Imam Jaafar Ibn Muhammad (702-765).7 Since Jaafar has not left any writings, it is difficult to know what role he actually played in developing Shiism. One thing appears certain: he was a student of philosophy who devoted his life to learning and speculation. Some of his disciples developed the initial form of the Shiite doctrine from sayings attributed to him, though it is not certain that Jaafar regarded himself as Shiite in the sense the term was used after his death. Among his pupils were Abu-Hanifah, the founder of the Hanafi Mazhab, the largest of the four schools of Sunni Islam, and Malik Ibn Anas, who was to found the Maliki Mazhab, another school of Sunni Islam. More interestingly, perhaps, another pupil of Jaafar was Wasil Ibn ‘Ata, the man who founded the Mutazelite school of rationalism, later destroyed by the Abassid caliphs as a heresy.

  One of Shiism’s basic claims is that Muhammad’s three immediate successors as caliph were usurpers who had come to Islam with hidden agendas to destroy it from within. Yet Jaafar named two of his sons after the two first caliphs, Abu-Bakr and Omar. More importantly, Jaafar does not appear to have subscribed to the idea of guilt by association, alien to Islam in its original Koranic form but a key doctrinal point in Shiism. While Jaafar may well have upheld his family’s claim to special treatment in the realm of Islam, it is not at all certain that he wished to introduce a fundamental reinterpretation of the faith.

  nevertheless, remarks attributed to Jaafar were used as the basis for adding two new principles to the three doctrinal principles of Islam as established before the eighth century. The first was Adalah (justice), meaning that men should strive to fulfill God’s will in this world rather than wait for divine justice in the hereafter. This was a revolutionary departure from the original message of Islam based on the concept of an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator whom man could never properly understand. By making efforts to understand and carry out the will of God an article of faith, Shiism claimed an active role for man in deciding and shaping worldly events—something that original Islam would have seen as lèse majesté.

  The second new article of faith was the concept of Imamah (imamate). This theory is based on the assertion that the world—indeed, the universe as a whole—in order to be sustained, needs the presence of an infallible guide who represents divine power. The problem is that God has created no more than fourteen infallible human beings and will never add to their number. The first of these is Muhammad. next comes his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, followed by eleven of Ali’s male offspring from his marriage to Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter. Fatima herself completes the list, though as a woman—the only one among the fourteen infallibles—she is excluded from the “chain of imamate” set up by Allah to “complete the prophetic chain.” Equal in status to Muhammad, the imams are superior to all the other 124,000 prophets that Allah has sent since Adam, including Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Muhammad Baqer, the fifth imam, is quoted as saying: “If the imam is taken away from the world even for an hour, the earth and all that is on it will shake like waves that rise from the ocean.” Jaafar Sadeq is quoted as saying: “If the earth is left without an imam even for one second, it will sink.”8 The imams are the hujjat or “proof ” of God’s existence, and those who don’t believe in them cannot be regarded as Muslims. By that definition, some 88 percent of Muslims would be regarded as “unbelievers” because, being Sunnis, they do not share the cult of the imams.

  The concept of imamate modifies one of the fundamental aspects of Islamic doctrine: the direct relationship between man and the Creator. Islam excludes all possibility of intercession, as man will face divine judgment alone. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad tried to intercede with Allah on behalf of his own parents. The Prophet argued that since his parents had died while he was still a boy, and thus long before Allah transmitted his message of Islam, it was unfair to treat them as unbelievers consigned to hell for eternity. Allah rejected the argument, because there could be no intercession in Islam. The Shiite system, however, is based on intercession. The imams could save you from the fires of hell, and so could mullahs who know the formulas to persuade Allah to change his mind. Under the Khomeinist regime, the intercessory claims of Shiism have generated an expanding industry of indulgences, employing tens of thousands.

  In its extreme versions, Shiism even casts doubt on Muhammad’s own version of his prophetic mission. According to Shiite theology, Allah had initially intended to choose Muhammad’s cousin, Ali, as Prophet. Archangel Gabriel was dispatched to Arabia to find Ali and deliver the divine message to him. Arriving in Mecca, Gabriel saw two Arabs sleeping side by side on a mat, half dazed by the intense heat. The two were Muhammad and Ali. Gabriel could not tell them apart, as both were roughly the same size and wore similar flowing robes (deshdash). Taking Muhammad to be Ali, the archangel delivered the message to the wrong man. By the time Allah realized that a mistake had been made, it was too late to reshoot the scene, so to speak. Thus Muhammad became the Prophet, with the understanding that the younger man would succeed him as leader of the Islamic ummah. The overwhelming majority of Muslims find such beliefs heretical and painful.

  Khomeini went so far as to castigate God himself for having allowed Abu-Bakr, Omar, and Osman—branded “evil men”—to become caliph in usurpation of Ali’s divine right. In his book Kashf al-Asrar (“Revelation of Secrets”), Khomeini writes: “We worship a God and believe in Him whose every act is in accord with wisdom, and not a God who builds a majestic edifice of justice, rectitude and divine magnificence, and then Himself demolishes it by giving the reins of government to tyrants and scoundrels such as Yazid, Muawyyah, an
d Osman.”9 Khomeini further asserts that the three caliphs who preceded Ali conspired to delete references to his right of succession from the Koran.

  This claim defies the Muslim belief that the Koran—unlike Jewish and Christian scriptures that have been “tampered with”—has come down in its original, authentic form as dictated by Allah to Muhammad. The Koran as known to Muslims today was compiled, edited, and authorized under Osman, regarded by Shiites as one of the three “evil men” who succeeded Muhammad. Shiites believe that the only true and complete text of the Koran was held in secret by Ali and will be revealed only at the end of time when the Hidden Imam returns to cleanse the world of Sunnis and infidels. The Mahdi will also bring with him two books “superior to the Koran.” In the Islamic Republic, the belief that the Sunnis have tampered with the Koran is so strong that editions of the text published outside Iran are banned and treated as contraband by customs agents. (The Sunni nations repay the compliment by banning Korans printed in Iran.)

  Shiite texts make scant reference to the Koran itself, almost always preferring to quote the imams or treatises compiled by the clergy; they attach greater importance to the sayings of the imams than those attributed to the Prophet. Shiites justify this emphasis by claiming that those who related the Prophet’s sayings, as Sunnis, could not be regarded as true believers, and thus their reports are unreliable or downright mendacious. The first task of the Hidden Imam on his return is to “kill all Sunnis everywhere” before proceeding to massacre the non-Muslim infidels.