The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution Read online

  On February 1, 1979, Khomeini boarded an Air France chartered jet to return to Iran after sixteen years of exile in Turkey, Iraq, and France. Over two hundred associates, aides, and journalists accompanied him. Moments before the aircraft was to land in Tehran, a French journalist, Paul Balta, asked Khomeini what he felt on “returning home, after so many years.” Khomeini’s answer was simple: “nothing!”1 To the ayatollah, Iran was nothing but “a piece of land,” a base for his global ambitions in the name of his version of Shiite Islam. As he stepped out of the plane, the many thousands who had gathered to greet him at Mehrabad Airport expected him to kneel, kiss the soil of Iran, and offer a prayer for its people. none of that happened. The ayatollah even refused to bless the Iranian flag that someone had offered him. Months later, as master of Iran, he was to replace the national flag with one of his own, symbolizing his fascist rule.

  Khomeini and his associates never tried to disguise their hatred of the very idea of Iran as a nation with a distinct history, culture, and identity. In the early days of the revolution, one of Khomeini’s closest aides, Sadeq Khalkhali—nicknamed “Judge Blood” for his role in sentencing thousands of people to death in mock Islamic tribunals—even suggested changing the name of Iran to Islamistan (Land of Islam). Three decades later, the foreign minister Manuchehr Mottaki suggested changing the name of the Persian Gulf to the “Gulf of Friendship” so as to please Iran’s Sunni Arab neighbors.2 Even before returning to Iran, Khomeini had worked hard to prevent the revolutionary movement from assuming patriotic colors. He had spoken of “Islamic rule” (hokumat Islami) in opposition to “national government” (hokumat melli). The various councils and committees he had created to run the revolution were all described as “Islamic.” The word “Iranian” appeared nowhere. When someone suggested that he issue a special message on the occasion of now-Ruz (new Day), Iran’s ancestral new Year, predating Islam by some fifteen centuries, Khomeini lost his temper. “That is for the Magus [Magians], not for Muslims!” he shouted.3

  Receiving a group of Iranian students in France in October 1978, Khomeini warned against “nationalist feelings,” saying: “nationalists are feeding on the leftover of the Gabr,” a pejorative term for Zoroastrians. “They are opposed to the very foundations of religion. They want to return to the same aggressive and people-killing Gabrs [sic] and speak of pan-Iranism and the principles of being Iranian.”4 Addressing another group of Iranian visitors three months later, Khomeini again spoke of Islam’s incompatibility with nationalism. “Up to now, we had problems with the nationalist ambitions of Muhammad Reza [the shah],” he said. “now we have to cope with the problem of nationalism and democracy and similar things. You should not believe any such things.”5 Khomeini made countless other attacks on the very idea of Iran as a nation-state and insisted that loyalty to Iran, or indeed to any other nation-state, is a form of sherk, a Koranic term that means associating other gods with Allah. The idea is that loyalty to Allah should be exclusive. The homeland of a Muslim is his faith.

  To show that he could never accept the Iranian solar calendar in which days and months bear pre-Islamic Persian names, the ayatollah always used the Islamic lunar calendar in which the months bear Arabic names. The committee set up to write the new constitution in 1979 recommended the creation of a parliament and suggested that it retain the name of the old one set up after the Constitutional Revolution of 1906: the national Consultative Assembly. Khomeini was furious. To him, the adjective “national” was anathema. The Khomeinist parliament was called the Islamic Consultative Assembly (Majlis Shuray e Islami). In February 1983, marking the anniversary of his revolution, Khomeini received the president of the Islamic Republic along with a number of foreign Islamist militants. He told them that the Islamic Republic was “the home of every true Muslim,” and added: “Basically, we do not recognize a country named Iran. We have an Islamic Republic located in Iran but it belongs to Muslims everywhere.”6

  One of the first moves of the new regime was to change the Iranian national emblem of a lion wielding a sword, with a sun rising behind it. This was replaced by the word “Allah” in stylized calligraphy, in the original Arabic rather than the Persian equivalent, “Khoda.” More interestingly, the calligraphy did not follow any of the Persian styles established over the previous fourteen centuries. The idea was to make a clean break with the past, in accordance with Khomeini’s claim that pre-Islamic Iran had been a land of “darkness and barbarity” and that Islamic Iran, too, had lost its soul until his seizure of power in 1979. “This child of the Muslim nation is being born again,” Khalkhali said, referring to Iran. What Khomeini either did not realize or chose to ignore was that the image of lion and sun was a symbol of Iranian Islam, more specifically in its Shiite form. For centuries, Ali, the first imam of Shiism, has been known as Assad-Allah (the Lion of Allah). The Safavid dynasty, which imposed Shiism on Iran in the sixteenth century, had adopted the image in honor of Ali. The pre-Islamic Iranian symbol had been the hawk (shahbaz), regarded as the Shah of the Birds. Later, the image of the rising sun was added to recall Iran’s pre-Islamic past, but it was not meant to minimize the role of Islam. The idea was to show that Iran, an ancient nation, claimed a leading position in Islam thanks to Ali and his sword, known as Dhul-Fiqar (Double-Edged).

  The ayatollah also replaced the Red Lion and Sun that had served for six decades as the Iranian equivalent of the Red Cross. Instead, he adopted the Red Crescent, in line with Arab and other Muslim countries. In doing so, he ignored the fact that the crescent for centuries had been the symbol of Iran’s Ottoman enemies in countless wars, while the lion had symbolized the Iranian side.

  Some of the ayatollah’s associates even wanted to change the name of the Iranian currency, the rial, a modified version of the Spanish word réal, meaning “royal.” To them, the word was associated with Iran’s 2,500-year monarchic tradition and thus had no place in an Islamic system. The ayatollah, however, was persuaded not to make the change by a number of scholars who argued that the rial had been the currency of Muslim Spain and was now Saudi Arabia’s currency, and thus the name was acceptable as an Islamic term.

  To tone down Iran’s Iranian-ness, Iraniyat in Persian, the ayatollah suppressed several national festivals dating back to pre-Islamic days. The national calendar was reorganized to reduce the number of days designed to celebrate Iraniyat and replace them with special occasions to promote the ayatollah and his revolution. Khomeinists also tried to destroy the remains of some of Iran’s best-known archaeological and historic sites, such as Persepolis, the first capital of the Achaemenid Empire, which had been burned and destroyed by Alexander of Macedon. It was thanks to strong popular protests against such moves that the ayatollah had to back down. In May 2008, Khamenehi paid a publicized visit to the southern province of Fars, the heartland of Iran’s ancient culture and birthplace of the first Persian Empire. Local authorities, expecting the Supreme Guide to respect a well-established tradition, had included a visit to Persepolis. Registered as part of the cultural heritage of mankind by UNESCO, the site is the most popular destination for Iranian and foreign tourists alike; it attracted more than ten million visitors in 2007. Some regard the ruins as a kind of shrine to Iranianism. But Khamenehi had no time for Persepolis. “Those ruins are leftovers of tyrants,” he told the local authorities, according to the official Islamic Republic news Agency. “Iran achieved glory only after the arrival of Islam.”

  Iranians, however, have always thought otherwise. Persian poetry and prose over the past 1,100 years is a hymn to what Iranians believe was one of the greatest civilizations, built long before Islam appeared in Arabia. Some leading Persian poets and writers were clearly not Muslims, although they took care to hide behind fake Islamic identities to protect their lives. Others adopted Islam as part of their broader Iranian identity. For them, Islam was part of Iran, and they could take from it what they found worthy. The typical diwan (collected verse) of a Persian poet starts with a sonnet or an ode in prai
se of God, followed by homage to Muhammad. But once these obligations are out of the way, the poet feels free to use a palette of religious, philosophical, mythological, and cultural references far greater than anything Islam could offer. This is how the poet Rumi put it: From the Koran, we took the kernel, To donkeys, we threw the skin.

  Khomeini did not consider himself Iranian by blood, but claimed to be a sayyed (master), that is to say a descendant of the Prophet through Mussa bin Jaafar, known as al-Kazim (the Self-Restrained One), the seventh imam of Shiism, and thus of Arab stock—a claim reflected in Khomeini’s family name, Mussavi. Some writers have questioned the claim to be a sayyed, pointing out that the ayatollah’s grandfather, Ahmad, never mentioned it. The tombstone of Khomeini’s grandfather does not call him a sayyed, an unlikely omission if he had believed himself to be one. It seems that the family decided to claim sayyedship during the final years of the ayatollah’s father, Mostafa.

  Until the twentieth century, Iranians did not have family names. It was only in the 1930s that national identity cards were issued and Iranians were asked to choose family names. The ayatollah’s family adopted the name “Hindi” (“Indian”), presumably to distinguish itself from thousands of other families who also claimed to be Mussavis, that is to say descendants of the same imam Mussa al-Kazim, reputed to have had dozens of concubines who produced scores of children.7 The choice of Hindi was not because the family were of Indian origin, as their enemies later suggested, but because one of their ancestors had spent time in Kashmir propagating Shiism in the eighteenth century. Some of Khomeini’s relatives, including his nephews, still bear the name Hindi, which Khomeini himself used as a nom de plume in his poems.8 The name Khomeini refers to the central Iranian village of Khomein, where the ayatollah was born; it was added to his name because the registrar of patronyms would not let him be designated with the name Mussavi alone. (There were too many Mussavis all over the place and the state wanted to distinguish them from one another.)

  The ayatollah’s father used the word sayyed to underline his Arab origins. In Shiism, being a sayyed carries honorific as well as material advantages. When a sayyed enters a room, others must stand up and offer him the place of honor. Looking at the face of a sayyed first thing in the morning heralds a good day. Believers should reserve a portion of their income as an offering to sayyeds, in cash or kind. This is known as sahm e sayyed (the sayyeds’ share) and is considered a means of “cleansing” ill-gotten wealth.9 Inventing a role for themselves as “intercessors” (shafi’e), a function that did not exist in Islam, the sayyeds, genuine or not, claim they can negotiate deals with Allah on behalf of individuals, to obtain lesser punishments or even divine forgiveness. “Pay a sayyed and buy peace in the hereafter,” says one favorite dictum of the mullahs. Sayyeds also perform miracles, such as helping barren women to conceive, the chronically sick to recover, failing businesses to improve their bottom line, and impotent men to regain the vigor of youth. According to extremist Shiites, Allah created the whole universe solely to please the family of Muhammad. Thus, serving Muhammad’s descendants, the sayyeds, is the highest of religious duties for any Muslim.

  But how does a person become a sayyed? One may base a claim of sayyedship on a genealogical tree (shajareh nameh) obtained from a professional forger, at a hefty price. Or one may rely on a declaration by another sayyed of good reputation. It works like this: The prominent sayyed convenes the local notables and reports that he has just had a dream in which the Prophet—or if one is more ambitious, one of the twelve imams—appeared, usually riding a white horse. The holy rider called on the dreamer to wake up and inform everyone that so-and-so is a sayyed, without knowing it. “Go and tell everyone that they are blessed with the presence of a sayyed, a man of pure Arab blood in their midst, a child of my very flesh,” the rider said. Another way of “discovering” a sayyed is by examining an individual’s face, especially the part between the eyebrows. If the inspection reveals a vein that is likely to swell in anger, the individual in question is pronounced a sayyed. The protruding vein is supposed to be peculiar to Hashemites, a clan of the Arab Quraish tribe of which Muhammad was a member. (It is known as rag-e-Hashemi, the “Hashemite vein.”) Countless families of sayyeds have started with an individual discovering such a vein between his eyebrows.

  There have been claims of sayyedship on even more spurious grounds. Historians have been perplexed by the extraordinarily high number of sayyeds in the frontier areas of Khorassan, Iran’s province bordering on Central Asia. The Russian scholar Ilya Pavlovitch Petroshevsky provided a clue in his seminal work Eslam Dar Iran (“Islam in Iran”), where he showed that the newly Islamicized Turkic and Turkmen tribes frequently raided the region to capture Persians as slaves for sale in the markets of present-day Turkmenistan and the Chinese province of Xinjiang. The local Persians discovered that claiming to be a descendant of the Prophet protected them against capture and enslavement. Thus in the seventeenth century the number of sayyeds in the region soared. But then something unexpected happened: a change of taste in the slave markets made ownership of sayyeds fashionable. As the price of sayyed slaves rose, numerous families suddenly discovered that they had no relation to Muhammad after all.

  The idea of tracing one’s ancestry to Muhammad through his cousin and son-in-law Ali was first made popular by the Safavids, a clan of Kurdish adventurers who converted Iran to Shiism by force, starting in the sixteenth century. Although they certainly had no Arab blood, the Safavids needed the claim of sayyedship to back their ideological war against the Sunni Ottomans. They also helped foment the legend that Hussein, Ali’s second son and the third imam of Shiism, had married Princess Shahrbanu, a daughter of Yazdegerd III, the last Sassanid emperor. This was a clever propaganda trick because it persuaded Iranians that the new Safavid version of Islam was based on an ancient blood connection with Iran. After all, if Shahrbanu had really married Hussein, all nine subsequent imams, including the most important one, the twelfth and last, were half Iranian by blood. The fact that the story was a hoax did not matter to the mullahs. They well knew that Hussein, age twelve at the time the marriage is supposed to have taken place, was thousands of miles away from Iran in Medina. nor were they bothered by the fact that Yazdegerd had had no daughter named Shahrbanu. Their aim was to make Shiism more acceptable to Iranians.

  In the eighteenth century when Agha Muhammad Khan, the eunuch founder of the Qajar dynasty, turned Tehran into his capital, he asked the mullahs to find some “holy place” that would lift the nondescript city out of its obscurity. The mullahs duly obliged by announcing that the Hidden Imam had visited them in dreams to point them to a spot where, unbeknownst to all for over 1,200 years, his grandmother Bibi (Lady) Shahrbanu was buried. The spot was transformed into a shrine and became a place of pilgrimage with a host of sayyeds on hand to perform all sorts of miracles. After Khomeini’s seizure of power in Tehran, the number of Iranians describing themselves as sayyeds exploded. At one point in 1982 even the secretary general of the Soviet-sponsored Tudeh (Masses) Party claimed to be the grandson of an ayatollah and a sayyed.10 Tens of thousands of people added the title sayyed to their names as a means of enhancing their social status and/or securing access to rare goods and services. Individuals who had pure Persian—that is to say non-Islamic—names replaced these with Arabic names, some describing them as the “slaves” or even “dogs” of this or that imam.11

  It is difficult to estimate the number of those who claim to be sayyeds. Judging by names in the Tehran telephone directory, they could account for around 2 percent of the population. The overwhelming majority, however, have little or nothing to do with the family of the Prophet or any other Arab clan, for the Arabs who settled in Iran as conquerors numbered no more than a few hundred thousand and were absorbed into the native population within two or three generations. Over thousands of years of existence in one political form or another, Iran has absorbed ethnic elements from many different origins: Elamite, Anshanite, Sumero-Ak
kadian, Arab, Turkic, Mongol, and Tatar, to name but a few. To be sure, not all who claim to be sayyeds put their Arabo-Islamic identity above their love for and loyalty to Iran. History is full of sayyeds who fought and died for Iran, at times against the very Arabs with whom they claimed kinship. Khomeini and his associates, however, have used the title as a device in their anti-Iran campaign. Four of the six men who have become president of the Islamic Republic since 1979 have claimed to be sayyeds.12 One of the remainder, Ahmadinejad, claims to be half sayyed since his mother is supposed to be a descendant of Muhammad. It was to reap the benefits of this connection that Ahmadinejad’s father in 1950 changed his family name from Saberian to Ahmadinejad, meaning “from the stock of Muhammad.” Among high officials of the Khomeinist regime at any given time, a large number claim descent from the Prophet through the imams.

  According to Khomeini, Muslims cannot speak of national identity since Islam does not divide the believers into nations. “All this talk about being Iranians and what we should do for Iran is not correct,” the ayatollah told visitors to his home in September 1979. “The claim that we must pay attention to national identity and patriotism is completely baseless.”13 In another meeting, he claimed that nationalism was a Western invention used to sow dissension among believers. “How many slaps in the face we have had because of this idea of a nation,” he said. “nationalism is a conspiracy by colonialists. We say: those who talk of the nation should go get lost!”14 Patriotism is a form of corruption, Khomeini said in another speech.