The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution Page 9

Bulahab was from the very soil of Yathrib.a

  However, he couldn’t value the call to prayer.

  Salman, on the other hand, was a Persian

  Who strived hard for the faith.

  Who could forget his love of Persian

  Or take the crown of honour from Salman’s head?

  Soon after the Arab invasion, some Iranians tried to build up Salman, known to Islamic history as Salman Farsi (the Persian Salman), into a co-founder of Islam. A soldier in the King of Kings’ army and a mysterious figure, Salman seems to have traveled to Arabia after quarreling with his superiors. There he met Muhammad and decided to help promote the new prophet’s message. Although claims that he might have been the author of the Koran must be discounted, there is no doubt that he was close to Muhammad and acted as his chief military strategist in a number of key battles that helped Islam defeat its early enemies. The Prophet’s attachment to Salman was clear when he decided to build seven mosques for his closest companions in Medina: he devoted the largest mosque (still standing) to Salman.

  Among the many innovations that the invaders introduced into Iran was slavery. Persian society had been hierarchized in accordance with a loose system of castes, at the apex of which stood the warrior class, including the royal family and the aristocracy, with the farmers constituting the base of the pyramid. The intellectual elite, known as dabiran or bureaucrats, stood in the middle along with artisans. There were no slaves. The Arabs, on the other hand, had no caste system but always had slaves. The capture of new territories provided them with fresh opportunities for a flourishing slave trade that, having started in Mesopotamia, soon expanded into Central Asia in the east and north Africa through the Levant, and continued until the twentieth century.

  Religious intolerance was another of the innovations that the invaders brought to Iran. Although Iran had experienced the consequences of bigotry on occasions, including the massacre of Mazdakites under the Sassanid King Khosrow Anushiravan in the seventh century, the overall attitude of Iranians towards followers of other faiths was one of tolerance. The many Christian sects that faced persecution because of schisms in the Roman Empire always found a home in the Sassanid Empire. Many followers of Arianus fled to Iran after being chased out of north Africa and the Levant by Roman emperors. They founded the Persian Church of Christ, which the Romans attacked as “the Persian Party.” no doubt, part of the welcome accorded to Roman schismatic fugitives was due to political calculations: the Sassanids missed no opportunity to foment discord within the Roman Empire and its successor, the Byzantine Empire. Iranians were also used to seeing people of other faiths in high places. They had seen their monarchs take Jewish and Christian wives while many non-Zoroastrians reached the highest echelons of public service. Muslims, however, had no tradition of tolerance at the time. non-Muslims were given the choice either to convert to Islam or to pay a poll tax that most of them, impoverished by the collapse of the economy, could not afford. As a result, many of Iran’s religious minorities immigrated to lands still free of Arab domination. They left behind names of villages and whole areas that recall a Christian or Jewish past. In addition to Jews and Christians, hundreds of thousands of Zoroastrian Iranians immigrated to India, taking with them as many of the sacred texts as they could save from Arab rage.

  The invaders tried to break the will of the Iranians just as they had done with Syrians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Egyptians, Libyans, Vandals, and Berbers that fell under their rule. This is how Muawyiah spelled out his policy in a letter to one of his provincial governors:

  If you wish to tame the Iranians, remember that they cannot be kept in rein except with the method of Omar bin Khattab [i.e. the second caliph, whose armies began the conquest of the Sassanid Empire]. These people, you ought to humiliate. You ought to hit their heads so hard that they cannot raise them. Reduce their income to a minimum, and give them as little sustenance as possible. They are best kept in check when hungry. Because, once they are well fed the first thing they think of is revolt. On the war front, dispatch them to the front-line so that they become the first targets of the enemy. Make sure that they are inflicted with whatever hardship and punishment possible. I repeat: humiliate and crush them, and see how they bow their heads to your rule.5

  Although a majority of Iranians started to convert to Islam from the middle of the ninth century, they did not tone down their hatred of the Arabs as invaders and destroyers of their ancestral culture. According to one study, the Arab invasion, the active part of which lasted fifteen years, cost Iran the equivalent of half a century of its gross domestic product in modern terms. In a sense, Iran never recovered from the damage done to its economic infrastructure. Many of the underground water channels, known as kariz and qanat, an Iranian invention, were never repaired, leaving vast tracts of once cultivated land exposed to desertification. As for the windmill, another original Iranian invention, it all but disappeared from the plateau. The invaders also destroyed hundreds of dams that had enabled Iranians to develop a sophisticated irrigation system in a land that depended on seasonal rain. The result was the loss of agricultural production on a vast scale, especially in Khorassan and Central Asia. The systematic chopping down of trees by the invaders, especially on the central plateau, led to a rapid extension of Iran’s two inner deserts, Dasht e Kavir and Kavir e Lut, enabling Arab desert-dwellers to feel more at home. Some contemporary Iranian writers have argued that Iran never recovered from the physical and spiritual damage done to it by invading Arabs. To them, repairing that damage remains the central task of the current generation of Iranians.

  Some of the Zoroastrian fire temples destroyed by the invaders were later revived as Islamic holy shrines, often claimed as the burial ground of someone related to the imams. But some major ruins were left to oblivion, covered by the fog of fantasy and myth. The ruins of Persepolis, the capital of the first Iranian Empire, came to be known as Takht-e-Jamshid, or the Throne of Jamshid, a mythical monarch. The Mausoleum of Cyrus the Great at Pasargad, in the southern province of Fars, was taken to be the tomb of King Solomon’s mother. Azargoshasp, the largest of all fire temples, located in Azerbaijan, was renamed Takht Suleiman (Solomon’s Throne). It was not until the nineteenth century that many of these ruins were properly studied, regaining their original names and identities. As the mist of centuries lifted, Iranians began to rediscover their pre-Islamic past; and the more they discovered, the greater the pride they took in their ancient culture and civilization.

  It is this pride that the leaders of the Islamic Republic, from Khomeini to Ahmadinejad, have identified as the greatest threat to their anti-Iranian regime. As Ayatollah Muhammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, Ahmadinejad’s theological master, put it:

  We have had all this talk of Iran and Iranian-ness from the beginning of our revolution. Even Bazargan [Khomeini’s first prime minister] spoke of Iran. But Bazargan was an honest man; he wanted Iran for Islam, not the other way round. Today, we face people who want Islam for Iran. Even worse, there are those who are prepared to sacrifice Islam for Iran. We, however, do not care about Iran. What we care about is Islam.6

  A quarter of a century earlier, the first president of the Islamic Republic spoke of how Khomeini kept launching new ideas to trigger new crises. “His Islam cannot function without crises. He doesn’t care what happens to Iran.”7

  Iranians have adopted Islam, but in the process have subjected it to substantial changes. But, unlike many other nations that became Muslim, they could never quite forget their pre-Islamic past. Anyone familiar with Persian literature—which in its modern form spans a period of over a thousand years—would know that it regards Islam as no more than one part of a much broader Iranian identity. Persian literature’s humanism, love of beauty, praise for wine and other “celestial gifts,” and celebration of diversity stand in sharp contrast to the bigotry projected by people like Khomeini in the name of Islam. In Persian literature, steeped in nostalgia about ancient and eternal Iran, most heroes are pre-Islamic. This is
one of the roots of the national schizophrenia from which Iran has suffered ever since, a subject that we will examine more closely later.

  8

  A Strange Beast

  The so-called Islamic Republic of Iran is a triple lie on a grand scale. It is neither a republic nor Islamic in the sense acceptable to most Muslims. And, although located in Iran, it certainly is not Iranian. What kind of beast, then, is the regime invented by Khomeini? To start with, it is an ideological regime in a post-ideological age. It has mixed up elements of Islam with half-understood ideas from Western radicalism, both left and right, and added a bit of tiersmondiste rage, real and fake, ending up with a deadly cocktail known as Khomeinism. Iran today is a rentier state, heavily dependent on income from oil, which is used to purchase domestic support and finance terrorism abroad. It is a terrorist regime towards Iran’s own population as well as other nations.

  The first person to describe the Khomeinist regime as “fascist” was Maxime Rodinson, a French scholar of Islam. At a discussion in 1981, having just returned from a visit to what he jokingly described as “Khomeini’s kingdom” (le royaume du Khomeiny), Rodinson explained that he had at first regarded the anti-shah revolution as an Islamic version of “liberation theology,” a form of left-wing Christianity then fashionable in Latin America. “now, however,” he said, “I see that what Khomeinism has taken from the left resembles what the fascists took from socialism. Fascism is entering Iran, perhaps the Muslim world, in the guise of Islamic revival.”1

  not all of Rodinson’s compatriots agreed with his analysis. Michel Foucault saw something different when he visited Tehran in the autumn of 1978, as the Khomeinist revolution was gathering pace. He saw “an explosion of spiritual energy in the streets . . . a sudden intrusion of religion in the affairs of the city.” Foucault, of course, later changed his tune, especially when the mullahs who had seized power thanks to that “spiritual energy” started hanging his homosexual friends, alongside everyone else, in the streets of Tehran.

  The active phase of the revolution lasted no more than four months, during which the self-styled “soldiers of Allah” robbed numerous banks, cut the throats of lowly officials including traffic wardens, disfigured women by throwing acid at their unveiled faces, and set fire to hundreds of cinemas, bookshops, concert halls, girls’ schools, restaurants, and other “places of sin.” In a single incident in August 1978, over four hundred people were burned alive at Cinema Rex in Abadan, set on fire by one of the commandos that Foucault had admired. The commando had blocked the emergency exits from the outside and destroyed firefighting equipment to make sure that a maximum number of people would die. The Supreme Guide of the revolution, Khomeini, dismissed the incident as “a sign of the rage of our youth.”

  Foucault was not alone among Western leftists to be seduced by Khomeinism. Some of the historic figures of the May 1968 student revolts in Europe visited Iran during these troubled days to see their fantasy revolution take shape in a Third World country. Like impotent voyeurs, they watched the tragedy imposed on Iran by a revolution they could only dream of in their own countries. In 1967, a group of radical West German students, working with their Iranian counterparts in Frankfurt and Hamburg, had tried to kill the shah during a state visit by blowing up his cortege with a booby-trapped Volkswagen. now that the shah was being blown up by an explosion of popular anger on the streets of his own cities, no Western revolutionary worth his salt would want to miss the show. For Western return-ticket revolutionaries, watching the Iranian tragedy was—and for some, still is—a way of obtaining vicarious pleasure without a price in pain. Just as quite a few Western pedophiles travel to Third World nations to gratify the bestial tastes they cannot easily indulge at home, aging European and American revolutionaries flocked to Iran to see a revolution such as they no longer hoped to see in their own countries, and they tried hard to describe it as a “people’s revolution.”

  Originally, the Khomeinist leadership itself had hesitated to use the “Islamic” label, speaking instead of a “popular uprising” (qiyam mardomi ) so as to attract leftist groups and reassure the middle classes that feared religious rule. Soon, however, they realized that they needed Islam to mobilize the muscle required to neutralize the shah’s armed forces. The poor and downtrodden would not fight for any leftist ideology; only the claim that Islam was in danger could persuade them to join the revolt. The “Islamic” appellation did not please the Western intellectuals, but their Iranian counterparts in various Communist outfits—from Moscow-backing to Mao-adulating to Fidel-adoring to Trotsky-nostalgic and Titophile—willingly adopted it. A “people’s revolution,” after all, was their business, not that of the mullahs who were clearly leading the Iranian revolt at the time. To those leftist ideologues, the “Islamic revolution” was an Oriental version of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions dreamed of in the West; it represented the resolution of contradictions between the nation and imperialism, paving the way for a later “proletarian revolution.”

  But the “Islamic” label has impeded a proper understanding of what has happened in Iran over the past thirty years. It has also prevented a correct analysis of similar developments in other Muslim countries. Those who later became conscious of the inadequacy, not to say outright impropriety, of the term “Islamic” to describe the Khomeinist revolt and the government that it produced have tried to further complicate matters by injecting the term “fundamentalism,” or intégrisme in French. Instead, the revolution of 1978-79 and the system it created should be regarded as the product of a large-scale mimetic enterprise. It is a violent intrusion into Iranian reality of Western dystopic ideas and methods, which, as Rodinson and others have observed, could be properly explained with reference to ur-fascism or generic fascism.

  Latin Americans divide dictatorships into dictadura and dictablanda, a word play that distinguishes “hard” from “soft” regimes. One could also speak of “hard” and “soft” fascism. A system need not fulfill all the conditions set by, say, Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini or even Juan Perón to be described as fascist. Two cousins may look and behave differently yet bear a family resemblance—un air de famille, as the French say.

  What are the main characteristics of generic fascism and how do they apply to Khomeinism?

  First, all fascist movements and systems are totalitarian inasmuch as they seek to control all aspects of individual and community life. They are one-party systems. In Iran the slogan is “Only one party: the Hezballah!” Fascists reject diversity and scorn alternative lifestyles. The state and the dominant party must dictate every movement of all citizens at all times. Khomeini’s book Hal al-Masa’el (“Solution to Problems”) includes more than six thousand fatwas regulating every issue, from Weltanschauung to rules for urinating. The totalitarian state wants to control the past as well as the present and the future, stopping history at points it deems suitable to its own designs.

  The second characteristic of generic fascism is that it is deeply antireligious, even when it pretends to be religious. In Iran, the mosques have been turned into supermarkets and centers for distributing consumer durables. A Tehran joke puts it well: Before the mullahs, we used to pray in private and drink in public; now we drink in private and pray in public! numerous mosques are used as offices of the Imam Committees (Komiteh in Persian), the parallel police created by Khomeini in the early days of the regime. On occasion, mosques are used as temporary prisons for criminals and for political opponents of the regime. Hardly any new mosques have been built in Tehran since Khomeini came to power. Instead, the regime has financed the building of takeyh and husseinieh, meaning Shiite centers for political rallies disguised as religious ceremonies. The Khomeinist regime has made a mockery of Shiite rules for choosing the marja taqlid or “source of imitation”—rules that go back more than three centuries.2 More than three hundred mullahs and students of theology have been executed and thousands are in prison, while many others have fled into exile. Koranic and religious studies hav
e been cut from six hours a week to four; the remaining two hours are used for a study of “the political thoughts and acts of Imam Khomeini.” More than a hundred religious seminaries have been closed, and all of Iran’s grand ayatollahs have been put under house arrest on different occasions. People going to Mecca for the Hajj pilgrimage are chosen in accordance with quotas fixed by revolutionary organizations. Tens of thousands of Muslims in Iran have been executed or killed in clashes with government forces.

  The third characteristic of generic fascism is a cult of tradition, which in practice often means reviving old superstitions. All that man needs to learn is assumed to be already present in some cryptic message of either religious or pagan provenance. The idea is to return to the source, which could be ancient Hellas, the Rome of the Caesars, or the imagined Medina of the seventh century. The past is idealized, the present vilified, the future painted as fantasy. In Iran, regime-backed mullahs try to justify their oppression of women, religious minorities, and dissidents on the grounds of sonnat, “tradition.”

  Under Khomeinism, all sorts of superstitions long dead in Iran have been revived and used as the centerpiece of a growing industry under the banner of tradition. Iranian newspapers are full of advertisements for what is presented as “faith services,” where one learns how to contact those who claim to ensure success at university entrance examinations, in finding well-paid jobs or wealthy spouses, and in overcoming illness. All sorts of fortunetellers, charm-makers, soothsayers, magicians, and astrologers are on the market. Some pretend to predict the future by opening the Koran at random and interpreting the verses. Others have a little bird pick from among a number of small envelopes the one that contains the answer to your question. Still others read the future by slowly pouring a handful of sand on the ground. In almost every town and village there is at least one individual who claims to be in contact with the Hidden Imam. Each year, several men are arrested on the charge of pretending to be the Hidden Imam.