Many people in the west were dismayed by the astonishing spectacle of the funeral of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in June 1989. Huge crowds surged round the bier and at one point the corpse fell off: it was as though they wanted to keep their Imam with them forever. This was bewildering to the people of western Europe and north America, who regarded the Ayatollah as a demon. Only a few months earlier, his infamous fatwah against Salman Rushdie had challenged freedom of expression, one of the sacred values of modernity. Khomeini's career had also overturned an entrenched western idea: by the middle of the 20th century, it was assumed that secularism had prevailed and that religion would never again play an important part in world events. Revolutions were supposed to be secular events but the 1978-9 Islamic revolution in Iran had toppled what had seemed to be one of the most modern, secular regimes in the middle east. An Islamic revolution seemed a contradiction in terms.
Western bewilderment rested on ignorance of the difficulties of the modernising process in non-western countries, and of the role religion can play in this painful transition. The Islamic revolution was followed by an Islamic revival in several other Muslim countries, a swing towards religion in Israel, and the rise of the new Christian right in the US. Today, Islam is as popular among the people of Egypt as Nasserism was during the 1950s and 1960s. Fundamentalism has erupted in every major faith and constitutes a widespread revolt against the secular rationalism of modern culture. Wherever a western-style society has established itself, a fundamentalist movement has grown up alongside it, expressing a profound hostility to modernity. These movements are not archaic: Khomeini was not a throwback to the middle ages. His interpretation of Shii Islam was as revolutionary as if the Pope were to abolish the mass. He was a man of the 20th century-and until we understand this we shall fail to comprehend our own turbulent era.
Most people who live privileged lives in first-world countries have experienced modernity and secularism as liberating and empowering. We have forgotten how problematic it was to transform our own societies from pre-modern ones, based on a surplus of agricultural produce, to modern societies based on technology and the constant reinvestment of capital. The kind of society that began to emerge in western Europe in the 17th century was unprecedented, and required a huge change in intellectual, religious, social, political and economic life. Democracy, secularism and toleration of minorities gradually emerged, not simply because of the beneficence of the western soul, but because it was found that these values served the needs of the modern state. For example, as more people became involved in the productive process, even at a humble level (as factory workers or clerks, say), they required a modicum of education, and, once that had been granted, they demanded a greater share in decision-making. If a country wanted to exploit all its human resources in order to become more competitive and productive, it found it necessary to bring outgroups into the mainstream (as with the Jews). By the 19th century, this new kind of civilisation had come into its own, and it made the west invincible. But it had been a traumatic process. It had taken some 300 to 400 years, with periods of revolution, state terror, ethnic cleansing, ruthless suppression of ideological deviants, exploitation of labour, despoliation of the countryside, and great anomie and poverty in the new cities. Today we see similar upheavals in places such as Iran.
But in non-western countries, the modernisation process is even more difficult. They have not been able to proceed according to the dynamic of their own culture, but have had to adapt to a western programme. Moreover, Iran has had particular problems: its vast, intractable terrain and the existence of autonomous, nomadic tribes made it difficult to create an effective centralised state until the advent of modern methods of communication and coercion. Modernisation only began in earnest in the 1920s, and the new values and institutions were understood only by a small elite with a western education; they did not trickle down gradually to the rest of society, as in Europe. Modernisation had to be imposed by force. Further, in the west the modern spirit had two main characteristics: independence and innovation. From the 17th century on, modernisation was accompanied by constant declarations of independence: political, intellectual, and religious. People demanded freedom from ecclesiastical constraints, for example, when exploring the new scientific ideas. The dawning of modernity was also exciting, because many people were-literally-discovering new worlds, making inventions, thinking in unprecedented ways. But this has not happened in the Islamic countries. Modernisation there did not come with independence, but with colonial subjugation. Muslims did not come to this brave new world by innovation, but by imitation: by copying the west.
iran experienced these difficulties to the full. It was never a western colony, but from the 19th century it was dominated by Britain and Russia, who imported only those aspects of modernity which suited them. Many elite Iranians wanted to modernise; they embraced Europe and wanted to copy its achievements. In 1906 they staged a successful revolution and forced the Shah to grant them constitutional rule, but the new majlis (parliament) was not allowed to function freely. The discovery of oil had made Iran a valuable prize and the British were anxious to make the country a protectorate. They rigged the elections to prevent nationalists from controlling the oil. When the Pahlavi dynasty was founded by Reza Khan in 1921, the new regime was almost a dictatorship. Iranians wanted independence, but neither their own rulers nor the western powers would allow them to have it. Their impotence was demonstrated in 1953, when a coup, organised by British intelligence and the CIA, toppled Muhammad Mussadiq's government, which had nationalised Iranian oil, and reinstated Reza Khan's son, Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, who had earlier been forced to flee the country. As a result, the second Pahlavi Shah had no real legitimacy with the people, and Iranians rightly saw the 1953 coup as an example of western hypocrisy: the west proudly proclaimed its commitment to freedom and democracy, but insisted that Iran be governed by dictators.
The mullahs of Iran were not blinkered anachronisms as they were in some other Muslim countries. The more progressive clerics had joined in the revolution of 1906; others had campaigned for Mussadiq. The Iranian clergy had a long tradition of challenging the despotism of the Shahs on behalf of the people. But they were cowed by the Pahlavi's aggressive secularisation. Shah Reza's soldiers would go through the streets removing women's veils with their bayonets. He wanted Iran to look modern. In 1935, he gave his soldiers orders to shoot at unarmed demonstrators in the holy shrine of Mashhad, who were protesting against obligatory western dress. Hundreds died that day. Ayatollah Mudarris, who opposed the Shah in the majlis, was ejected from parliament and then assassinated. In this climate, it is not surprising that millions of Iranians experienced secularisation not as a liberation but as an assault.
Shah Muhammad Reza, who succeeded his father in 1941, continued in the same manner. In 1957, he set up Savak, his infamous secret police. Then, in the early 1960s, he began an ambitious modernising programme: closing down the majlis, establishing state capitalism, and reforming feudal forms of land ownership. The west applauded this "white revolution," but the reforms widened the gap between the westernised elite and the poor. Intellectuals tried to voice their disquiet, but could not speak in a way that made sense to the masses. Marxist and Islamic paramilitary groups resorted to terror, but had little effect.
Then a hitherto unnoticed cleric began to attract attention. In the early 1960s, theology students at the shrine city of Qom were attracted to the class on ethics taught by Ayatollah Khomeini at the prestigious Fayziyah madrasah (school). Khomeini would leave his pulpit-coming, as it were, off the record-and sit on the floor beside his pupils, openly criticising the regime. But in 1963, Khomeini went public. Speaking from his pulpit in his official capacity, he protested against the injustice of the Shah's rule, his unconstitutional dismissal of the majlis, the torture, the suppression of all opposition, and his subservience to the US. Khomeini was particularly moved by the plight of the poor: the Shah, he suggested, should leave his palace and look at the shantytowns in South Tehran, where people were dying in the streets. Reprisals were swift. On 22nd March 1963, Savak forces surrounded the madrasah and killed a few students. Khomeini was arrested.
The date of his arrest was symbolic: it was an important day in the Shii calendar. Like all Muslims, Shiis regard the opposition to tyranny as a sacred duty. The chief message of the Koran is that a Muslim's task is to build a just society, where wealth is shared. The wellbeing of the ummah (the Muslim community) is crucial. If it is abused, humiliated or corrupted, Muslims can feel as distressed as a Christian might feel at the spectacle of somebody spitting on the Bible or violating the eucharistic host. Shiis, a minority group within Islam, take this opposition to injustice especially seriously, and Iran has been a predominantly Shii country since the 16th century.
Shiis revere a line of sacred imams (leaders), the direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad who, they believe, should have been the political heads of the Islamic community rather than the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs who belonged to the Sunnah, the dominant form of Islam, and ruled the Islamic empire from the mid-7th to the 13th centuries. In particular, Shiis mourn the tragic death of Imam Husain, the Prophet's grandson, who was killed by the Umayyad army on the plain of Karbala in Iraq in 680: his crime was to lead a small demonstration of his family and disciples to protest against the corruption and injustice of Caliph Yazid. Shiis march through the streets on the anniversary of Husain's martyrdom, beating themselves and lamenting the injustice and corruption of mainstream Muslim society, which, they believe, has never lived up to the Koranic ideal. In recent centuries, the Shahs of Iran had suppressed these processions, but Khomeini would change that.
Imam Husain was not the only martyr venerated by the Shiah. Iranian Shiis revere 12 imams in all, all of whom were believed to have died at the hands of different caliphs. Shiis regarded these imams as the rightful rulers nonetheless, and when the last of the line had mysteriously disappeared, it was declared in 934 that God had miraculously concealed him from view. This Hidden Imam, a messianic figure, would return at the End of Days to inaugurate a golden age of justice. In the meantime, no government was legitimate and Shiis could take no official role, although they were allowed to protest against an iniquitous regime.
The Shah had little time for the Shii calendar, which he intended to abolish. He chose to arrest Khomeini on the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Sixth Imam, who was poisoned by one of the Abbasid caliphs in 765. This was a mistake-the Shah thus cast himself in the role of the unjust ruler, the enemy of the imams and the Shiah. When Khomeini was released from prison, he immediately resumed his offensive against the regime. In killing the theology students of the madrasah, Khomeini insisted, the Shah had acted like Yazid, the Umayyad caliph who had been responsible for the death of Imam Husain. He was the enemy of religion and of the poor. To the west, this rhetoric belonged to a bygone age. But the mass of Iranians would have found a western-style critique incomprehensible. Shiism was not an anachronism to them; it resonated with their deepest fears and longings. When they heard the Shah compared to caliph Yazid, they understood exactly what Khomeini meant: he was summoning them to the army of Imam Husain to fight against tyranny.
When Khomeini was arrested for the second time, on 4th June 1963, many parts of Iran erupted. Thousands poured out in protest on the streets in Tehran, Mashhad, Shiraz, Kashan, and Veramin. Savak was given orders to shoot to kill. Prominent clerics led the demonstrations; some put on white shrouds, to show that, like Husain, they were willing to die as martyrs. University and madrasah students fought alongside one another; laymen and women alongside the mullahs. It took Savak a week to suppress the uprising. When order was restored on 11th June, hundreds of people had died, but Khomeini was a hero.
This was baffling for most western observers. To them, Khomeini seemed entirely lacking in political charisma. He never looked people in the eye, and spoke in a monotone. But Shiis recognised this demeanour as one of the hallmarks of what the Islamic tradition calls the "sober" mystic, who cultivates an iron self-control to keep the emotional extremity of mysticism at bay. Khomeini was a lifelong practitioner of irfan (Islamic mysticism) and people who met him were struck by his absorption in the spiritual. In Iran, where religion was still a vital force in the lives of most people, this gave them confidence. Like the imams, Khomeini was a champion of justice; like the imams, he had bravely opposed the might of a temporal ruler; like some of the imams, he had been imprisoned by a tyrant and had narrowly escaped execution. In the summer of 1963, the Shah deported him to the holy shrine city of Najaf in Iraq. Living near the tomb of Ali, the Prophet's cousin and the First Shii Imam, Khomeini seemed to many to be like the Hidden Imam, physically inaccessible, but able (thanks to modern communications) to guide them from afar. One day he would return.
In an Islamic context, Khomeini's message was modern. Faith, he argued, was not a matter of personal belief but an attitude "that compels men to action." He wrote: "Islam is the religion of militant individuals who are committed to faith and justice... It is the school of those who struggle against imperialism." Unlike the other ayatollahs, Khomeini did not speak in remote academic language. His opposition to western imperialism was similar to that of other third-world ideologues. "We have completely forgotten our identity, and have replaced it with an alien identity," he used to say. The way to heal this malaise was to create a society based on the laws of Islam. Yet this did not mean blind obedience to tradition. In exile in 1974, Khomeini wrote his Islamic Government, arguing that clerics should rule the state, to safeguard the sovereignty of God. Khomeini's theory of Velayat-i-Faqih (Mandate of the Islamic Jurist) appalled the conservative mullahs, many of whom remained opposed to Khomeini because he broke with centuries of Shii tradition, based on quietism and withdrawal from government.
Yet the Iranian revolution could not have succeeded if secularists had not joined forces with Khomeini supporters. The experiences of the Marxist guerrillas, the secular political groups, and the help of the intellectuals and middle classes (who had a very different view of Islamic government from Khomeini), were all indispensable. But Khomeini was the only figure who could command the support of the masses, and the imagery of the revolution was heavily Shii and religious. People spoke of the revolution as a religious experience, one that was transformative and purifying. They felt that they were ridding themselves and their society of a poison which had weakened them, and that they were returning to their true selves. After the revolution, experts predicted the imminent fall of Khomeini's Islamic government and the emergence of "moderates," but this did not happen. The secularists, who had hoped to exploit Khomeini, found themselves outmanoeuvered. The majority wanted a more religious regime and were willing to give the Islamic polity a try.
But it is always easier to be in opposition than in power. Revolutions are usually succeeded by a period of coercion, and this was certainly the case in Iran. Khomeini in power insisted on an intellectual conformity which is foreign to Islam but not to revolutions. Iranians had to accept his doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, and opposition was quashed. The Koran forbids any coercion in matters of religion and regards ideological orthodoxy as potential idolatry, because it raises human speculation to an unacceptably high level.
Similarly, Khomeini's fatwah against Rushdie, which purported to defend Islam, was a violation of Islamic tradition. A month after it was announced, in March 1989, the fatwah was condemned as un-Islamic at the world Islamic conference by 44 out of 45 Muslim countries. Not only did the fatwah defy the ban on religious coercion, not only was it contrary to Islamic law, but also it was deeply against the teaching of one of Khomeini's spiritual mentors, the 17th century mystic Mulla Sadra, who insisted on the sacred value of freedom of thought. Khomeini's dispatch of children to the battlefields, encouraging them to die as martyrs against Iraq, further violated fundamental values, religious and secularist alike. So did the taking of the American hostages. By exploiting the hostage crisis for political reasons, to help him over a period of internal opposition, Khomeini tarnished the image of the new Islamic republic.
Nevertheless, Khomeini never lost the support of the masses, especially the bazaaris (merchants), the madrasah students, the lower clergy and the poor, who had not benefited from the Shah's modernisation. Where western secularists had come to see defiance of tradition as Promethean and heroic, Khomeini's followers still saw the sovereignty of God as paramount, and did not see individual rights as absolute. They still thought in a pre-modern way.
The gulf this created between Iran and the west was widened by routine misinterpretation of the revolution. People in the west were shocked to hear Iranians call America "the great Satan." However foolish the policy of the US may have been in Iran, it was not Satanic. But in popular Shiism, the Shaitan ("the Tempter") is not a figure of monstrous wickedness, as in Christianity. He is a pathetic creature, unable to understand spiritual values. Instead of prophets and imams, the Shaitan is happy with fortune tellers; his mosque is the bazaar; and he seeks wine and women instead of God. He is, in fact, incurably trivial.
fundamentalism has enjoyed some success in the past two decades in dragging religion from the marginal position to which it had been relegated in modern society. The fundamentalist offensive in every major faith shows that many people all over the world want to see religion reflected more clearly in their polity. Secularists may regret this, but they must also recognise it as a fact, and reflect upon its consequences. But in so far as fundamentalism distorts the faith it is trying to preserve, as Khomeini did, it also represents a defeat for religion. In part, this fundamentalist extremism is caused by the fear of annihilation. Every movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced that the secularist, liberal, establishment wants to wipe them out. This is not always a paranoid reaction: secularism was often experienced in Iran as lethal and destructive. Fundamentalism, therefore, develops in a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive secularism; in the course of the struggle, the faith itself becomes more belligerent. So when secularists inveigh against fundamentalist excesses, they should also consider that secularist and liberal disdain for faith has been partly responsible for this religious resentment. What we might call "bad secularism" is partly responsible for this eruption of "bad religion."
When Khomeini returned to Iran in triumph after the 1979 revolution, the struggle had only begun. He had to contend with internal opposition (and the assassination of some of his closest allies), with huge international opposition, and with the war against Saddam Hussein. Khomeini felt beleaguered; this was exactly the kind of survival struggle which creates a fundamentalist reaction.
But was the Islamic revolution a disaster, as many in the west believe? In Europe, democracy grew out of an economy which required skilled-and thus educated-workers. But it takes time to transform an agrarian, pre-modern economy like Iran's. Khomeini's grasp of economics was weak, yet his revolution should not be blamed for "destroying" Iran's economy. Khomeini and his advisers had plans to develop a more Islamic economy, based on the egalitarian ethos of the Koran. These plans, however, were shelved because of the Iraq-Iran war; the economy also suffered from the sudden sharp fall in oil revenue after the American hostage crisis. The struggle to modernise the economy continues to this day.
In other respects the revolution has represented a more unambiguous advance. At the very end of his life, Khomeini was trying to moderate his theory of Velayat-e Faqih and pass more power to the majlis: he was pushing Iran towards democracy. As usual, he did this in a Shii idiom which westerners could not always follow. Khomeini allowed the pragmatic Speaker of the House, Hojjat ol-Islam Rafsanjani, to reinterpret the Mandate of the Jurist; and in an extraordinary sermon on 12th January 1989, Rafsanjani suggested, with Khomeini's tacit approval, that Iranians were evolving their own form of democracy. They were creating something better than the west, because Iranian democracy would be rooted in God.
Before the revolution, Iranians had not been allowed representative government. Now they have parliamentary institutions and, despite the recent conservative backlash, are trying to create a modern Islamic democracy. The democratic institutions of Islamic Iran are flawed, but it took the west, too, a long time to become democracies. President Khatami is seeking a more democratic and liberal interpretation of Islam; popular demonstrations and election results show that democracy, which had been tarnished by association with those western countries which supported the Shah, is becoming more widely acceptable. But Khatami is not reneging on Khomeini or his revolution: Iranians want to come to modernity on their terms, and insist, like other Muslim countries, that it is not necessary to be western to be modern. This can be seen in the work of Abdolkarim Sorush, who held high office under Khomeini. He has a more balanced view of the west than that which prevailed in 1979, but he will not accept its secularism. Iranians, he insists, must value the insights of modern science, but must also adhere to their Shii faith. He admires Khomeini still, but believes that Iran is now confident enough to take another step forward, to create a form of Islam for the 21st century.
The combination of traditional and liberal can be seen in the position of women. Because fundamentalism is a revolt against the modern, and because the emancipation of women is one of the hallmarks of modernity, fundamentalists tend to stress traditional gender roles. Under the Pahlavi, only women of the upper classes benefited from western freedoms. Now, Iranian women may be veiled but they dominate the universities and are active in politics. Khatami is pushing for further liberalisation.
At the time of the American revolution, very few of the colonists could relate to the enlightenment rationalism of the founding fathers, which some of them regarded as Satanic. Most Americans then were Puritans who had never read John Locke and disapproved of Tom Paine. But they evolved their own Puritan ideology, which drew them into the modernising struggle for independence. Religion had enabled these colonists to make the painful rite of passage to the new world of modernity. The same may also be true in Iran. The Islamic revolution may be seen in future as one of the great modernising revolutions of the 20th century, and to have been in the end a force for good, despite the shortcomings and violence which seem endemic to revolutionary struggle. To demonise Khomeini is to be guilty of a secularist orthodoxy which can be as blinkered and distorted as the fundamentalist view of secularism. If the Iranians have to rediscover the humane traditions of Islam, some of which were swamped in the revolutionary furore, westerners, too, must try to reach a more compassionate and dispassionate view of Iran and its revered Imam, in order to live up to the tolerance on which the west prides itself. n
