<Archive Obituaries> Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (June 4th 1989)
Bill Schenley
Iranian Spiritual Leader
Photo: http://i-cias.com/e.o/ill/khomeini.jpg
FROM: The New York Times (June 4th 1989) ~
By Raymond H. Anderson
The life of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was so shadowy, so
overlain with myth and rumor, that there was lingering
disagreement or uncertainty about his ancestry, his true
name and his date of birth.
But when he returned in triumph to Teheran on Feb. 1, 1979 -
after almost 15 years in exile - the imposing man in a black
robe with a white beard and intense dark eyes left little
doubt about who he was, or what he wanted for his ancient
land.
Ayatollah Khomeini felt a holy mission to rid Iran of what
he saw as Western corruption and degeneracy and to return
the country, under an Islamic theocracy, to religious
purity.
The Islamic Shiite leader's fervor helped drive Shah
Mohammed Riza Pahlevi from the Peacock Throne on Jan. 15,
1979, and into foreign exile. The Shah's eventual arrival in
the United States for cancer treatment was the spark that
set off the American hostage crisis.
Hostility for the West
Under the Ayatollah, Iran was wrenched backward from
widespread economic development and social change and onto a
path that was broadly hostile to the Western world.
The Ayatollah's path also led to eight years of bloody,
costly, inconclusive war between Iran and its Arab neighbor
Iraq. He demanded that his country fight unrelentingly after
Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, but he eventually
accepted a truce in 1988.
Many longtime Iranian opponents of the Shah hoped that the
Ayatollah would turn over power and allow a democratic
society to emerge. But he held to his dream of an Islamic
republic and retained his Islamic fervor -scuttling a
tentative economic and political opening to the West in with
his call for the killing of a British author, Salman
Rushdie, whose novel ''The Satanic Verses'' was deemed to
have blasphemed the faith.
A month later, he dismissed Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri,
a relative moderate who had been designated as his political
heir. There has been speculation that Ayatollah Khomeini's
son, Hojatolislam Ahmad Khomeini, is emerging from a power
struggle as a prime contender to inherit his authority. A
Leader Beyond Challenge There was no one in Iran with
sufficient authority to challenge the Ayatollah
successfully. In the aftermath of the revolution, he moved
relentlessly toward his theocratic goal, consolidating power
and silencing the opposition.
In a frenzy of political retribution and Islamic
purification, thousands of people were executed in public,
including the Shah's officials, torturers, criminals,
homosexuals and prostitutes.
A 1987 report of the United Nations Commission on Human
Rights estimated that as many as 7,000 people were shot,
hanged, stoned or burned to death after the 1979 revolution.
Executions continued over the years, the report said, but
declined in number.
In 1979, a year of intense militancy, the leadership feared
an American-inspired countercoup to restore the Shah, as
happened in the early 1950's after Iran, under the
nationalist grip of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh,
seized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in a royalties dispute
and caused fright in Britain and the United States.
U.S. Feared Soviet Inroads
In 1953, Washington was fearful of a Communist takeover and
expansion of Soviet influence in the strategic region. It
put the Central Intelligence Agency to work to undermine Dr.
Mossadegh and to restore the Shah's power. The plot
succeeded and the C.I.A. and its Teheran operatives prided
themselves on it, wrote about it and talked about it for
decades as a model of strategic conspiracy.
Twenty-six years later, in 1979, the Shah was again out of
power and abroad, and again the United States played a
central role in the turmoil as the new leaders insisted that
the Shah be returned to Iran to stand trial for corruption
and abuse of power.
Amid this dangerous mood of militancy, President Jimmy
Carter overruled diplomatic advisers and intervened to allow
the Shah to enter the United States for cancer treatment. In
a fury, Iranians clambered over the walls of the American
Embassy in Teheran on Nov. 4, 1979, seizing diplomats, staff
members and military personnel as hostages to trade in
exchange for the Shah.
The hostage crisis caused agony, fear and humiliation in the
United States. There was well-founded dread that the
captors, mostly student militants, might start shooting
hostages to dramatize their demand for the Shah.
Under growing pressure in an election year, President Carter
endorsed a desperate military rescue mission in April. The
mission was abandoned at a desert site southeast of Teheran
after three of eight helicopters had problems, leaving too
few for a safe operation. As the rescuers rushed to get away
before dawn, a helicopter crashed into a C-130 transport and
exploded. Eight men died in the fire.
For the Ayatollah and most Iranians, the collapse of the
rescue mission was cause for jubilation. Crowds celebrated
in the streets. But for Mr. Carter, as he conceded later, it
was the ignominious beginning of the end for his Presidency.
It was not until Jan. 20, 1981, Inauguration Day for Ronald
Reagan, that the hostages were released, after 444 days.
They flew out of Iran's airspace at almost the very moment
that Ronald Reagan was taking the oath of office.
The seizure of the hostages was an assertion of defiance
that had rallied Iranians behind the Ayatollah and helped
insure approval of his new Constitution establishing Iran as
an Islamic republic.
Lifelong supreme authority was vested in the Ayatollah, with
the title Velayat Faghi, or Religious Leader.
Wide Dissent in the Land
Despite approval of the Islamic republic by an overwhelming
majority, there was opposition to the Ayatollah among
liberals, rival religious leaders and many of Iran's ethnic
minorities.
During the crisis over Americans being held hostage in
Teheran, a renegade in Saudi Arabia, proclaiming himself the
Mahdi, or Messiah, seized the venerated Grand Mosque in
Mecca with a band of armed followers.
Within hours, the Ayatollah's office accused the United
States and ''Zionists'' in the deed. Outraged Muslims in
Islamabad, Pakistan, stormed and burned the United States
Embassy. The Ayatollah sought to use the emotional issue to
rally all Islam against the United States.
''This is not a struggle between the United States and
Iran,'' he declared. ''This is a struggle between Islam and
blasphemy.'' He talked again and again in such acerbic tones
about the United States, the ''Great Satan.''
The Iranian regime's hatred for the United States played
itself out many times in the Ayatollah's years. On July 31,
1987, thousands of chanting Iranian pilgrims in the holy
city of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, rampaged and fought with the
Saudi Arabian riot police. Many were killed and wounded.
''Death to America! Death to France! Death to Israel!'' they
shouted.
Again, the Ayatollah's regime accused the United States of
having plotted the violence. Deep Divisions Over the U.S.
But there were occasional reports of differences in Iran on
the issue of relations with the United States, and these
hints of emerging ''moderation'' in Iran led to the greatest
foreign-policy debacle of the Reagan years: the Iran-contra
afffair.
Some Americans in the Reagan White House spoke of
''moderates'' in Teheran who looked to a time when the
Ayatollah would pass from the scene. It was to such
''moderates'' that the White House turned in 1985, seeking
influence to win the release of Americans being held in
Lebanon by Islamic Shiite fundamentalist terrorists.
Complex deals of arms for hostages were played out, with
disastrous results. The deals led to an uproar in Washington
and across the country when it was discovered that the
United States had traded arms to Iran in exchange for the
release of American held captive in Lebanon.
In a troubling twist that was ultimately deemed illegal, the
profits from the sales of American arms to Iran -mostly
missiles that Iran used to in its long and bloody war with
Iraq - went to support the Nicaraguan guerrillas.
In the fall of 1986, Ayatollah Khomeini criticized Iranians
who had taken part in the dealings with Washington, calling
them ''Satan-oriented.''
''I never expected such things from such people,'' he said.
Iran retreated even further from the West.
Conflicting Birthdates
The man who became the Islamic ruler of Iran and a force in
much of the world was born, by varying accounts, in 1900,
1901 or 1902. Iranian accounts put his age at 86, but May
27, 1900, has become the most accepted date for the
Ayatollah's birth, making him 89 at the time of his death.
His birthplace was the town of Khomein, about 180 miles
south of Teheran. His father was a mullah, or religious
leader.
Little is known of the Ayatollah's childhood except for one
event that possibly influenced his character. When he was an
infant, his father was murdered, apparently in a dispute
with a landowner over irrigation rights.
The Ayatollah's supporters have asserted that his father was
killed on orders of Riza Khan, the officer who seized power
in 1921, assumed the throne as Riza Shah in 1925, took the
dynastic name Pahlevi and changed the name of Persia to
Iran, for its prehistoric Aryan roots.
But a flaw in the account was the fact that the murder of
the Ayatollah's father had occurred two decades before Riza
Khan's coup. Studies Theology And Takes a Bride Raised by
his strong-willed mother and aunt, the Ayatollah began
religious studies in Khomein. According to various accounts,
he continued his studies at the Marvi Theological School in
Teheran, in the Shiite shrine city of Najaf in Iraq and in
Isfahan and Arak.
In the 1920's, Ayatollah Khomeini followed his tutor to Qum,
where he completed his studies, worked as a teacher and
became interested in Islamic mysticism and Plato's
''Republic,'' which may have helped shape his vision of an
Islamic state led by a philosopher-king.
It was during these years that the Ayatollah married,
reportedly a woman from Qum. They had a daughter who died in
infancy and a son, Mustafa, whose death in the 1970's
provoked speculation that he had been killed by the Shah's
secret police.
According to some accounts, the Ayatollah's first wife died
and he then married the daughter of a wealthy landowner.
They had, it was said, three daughters and a son, Ahmad, who
went on to serve as his father's chief aide.
Dissent Stirred in 1941
The Ayatollah apparently concentrated on theology through
most of Riza Shah's reign, for there are no accounts of
opposition activity until 1941, the year that the old Shah,
pro-German and anti-British, was deposed by British forces
in favor of his son, Mohammed Riza. The Ayatollah was
unequivocal when he did speak out, in a book called,
''Unveiling the Mysteries.''
''The orders of the dictatorial state of Riza Shah,'' he
declared, ''are valueless and all laws approved by the
Parliament must be burned.''
The book, foreshadowing the Ayatollah's later campaign,
accused Riza Shah of persecuting the clergy, destroying
Islamic culture and submitting to foreign domination. It
also had the first known outline of the Ayatollah's Islamic
state, which he came to regard with increasing fervor as the
only legitimate form of government.
''God,'' he wrote, ''has formed the Islamic Republic. Obey
God and his Prophet and those among you who have authority.
It is the only government accepted by God on Resurrection
Day. We don't say that the Government must be composed by
the clergy but that the Government must be directed and
organized according to the divine law, and this is only
possible with the supervision of the clergy.''
Polemics Attracted the Young
The book created an uproar. Students applauded it but the
older, more conservative mullahs were uneasy.
Although he continued to speak out and was gaining a zealous
following, the Ayatollah's campaign was overshadowed in 1951
when the National Front Government of Dr. Mossadegh came to
power and when, in 1953, the Shah was briefly driven into
exile. The Ayatollah sympathized with the opposition to the
Shah but he regarded the Mossadegh Government as too secular
and yearned for an Islamic state.
It was in the years after the Shah was restored to the
throne by the C.I.A. that Ruhollah Khomeini acquired the
honorific Ayatollah, or Reflection of Allah, a title that is
bestowed by acclamation of a mullah's followers. It is held
by more than a thousand mullahs in the Shiite world.
By the time he took the lead in the opposition to the Shah,
he had received the title of Grand Ayatollah, held by only
six other mullahs in Iran at the time. That was 1962, when
the Ayatollah led a general strike against a ruling that
witnesses in court no longer had to swear by the Koran.
Opposed the Shah's Modern Society In 1963, the Shah
announced his White Revolution to modernize Iran swiftly and
from top to bottom, a program that included emancipation of
women and seizure of the vast lands controlled by the
clergy. The Ayatollah spoke out forcefully against it.
He won support from the students at Teheran University, who
distributed as many as 200,000 copies of his statements,
marking the first link between the religious leader and
young intellectuals opposed to the Shah.
In June, when the Ayatollah, preaching to 100,000 at a Qum
mosque, demanded that the army depose the Shah, he was
arrested. Riots followed.
Released from jail, he was kept under house arrest for
almost a year and then detained again in November 1964 when
he vehemently protested an agreement exempting American
servicemen in Iran from the jurisdiction of the country's
courts.
When he was brought before Prime Minister Hassan Ali Mansour
and refused a last-minute appeal to drop his opposition to
the Government, the Prime Minister reportedly slapped him
and ordered him into exile.
Weeks later, Prime Minister Mansour was assassinated by a
young gunman carrying the Ayatollah's picture.
A Relentless Campaign
The Ayatollah went first to Turkey but then moved his base
to Iraq, settling in Najaf and continuing his relentless
campaign against the Shah.
Because of the Shah's control of Iranian politics and such
institutions as the press, it was to the mullahs, with their
traditional role as champions of the downtrodden, that the
discontented turned for leadership.
As an exile in neighboring Iraq with more freedom to speak
out than people at home, Ayatollah Khomeini provided the
polemics and inspiration.
The Shah, backed by the army and the country's oil wealth,
ignored the constant denunciations, but as the Ayatollah's
influence grew - fed by growing disenchantment with
corruption, repression and the cultural upheavals of
modernization - the Government grew ever more concerned.
In January 1978, an article mildly critical of the Ayatollah
was planted in a Teheran newspaper and proved an immediate,
and costly, mistake.
In response, demonstrators carrying pictures of the
Ayatollah poured into the streets of virtually every city
and town in the country. The yearlong battle for Iran was
on. By September the revolt had spread to the oilfields,
where workers began a crippling strike, leading the Shah to
declare martial law. For the Shah, It Was Too Late The next
month, Iraq, reportedly acting at the request of Iran,
stationed policemen around Ayatollah Khomeini's house,
provoking more demonstrations. The Shah, finally recognizing
the Ayatollah's influence, switched tactics and proclaimed
an amnesty that would have let him and thousands of other
exiles to return home. It was too late. The Ayatollah
refused, saying he would not return until the Shah was gone.
When the Ayatollah was expelled from Iraq he moved to France
and set up headquarters in the Paris suburb of
Neauphle-le-Chateau. There, he and his aides coordinated the
activities of hundreds of mullahs in Iran by telephone.
In the frantic days of December 1978, the Ayatollah refused
offers of compromise, insisting on the Shah's ouster.
When the Shah left Iran on Jan. 16, the Ayatollah denounced
the new Government that the Shah had appointed.
Attempts to Thwart Return
Caught between the Ayatollah's intransigence and a powerful
army still loyal to the Shah, Prime Minister Shahpur
Bakhtiar first closed Teheran airport to thwart the
Ayatollah's return, then relented.
Finally, on Feb. 1, Ayatollah Khomeini flew home, reclining
on a carpet on the floor of an Air France plane.
Within days, the Bakhtiar Government had faded away and the
Ayatollah was in full control.
He told the Iranians, ''The remaining one or two years of my
life I will devote to you to keep this movement alive.''
Insisting at first that he would defer to the provisional
secular Government he established, the Ayatollah went to Qum
but was soon undercutting his own ministers at virtually
every turn, ridiculing the Prime Minister, Mehdi Bazargan,
as weak and ruling increasingly through a secret,
mullah-dominated Islamic Revolutionary Council and similar
bodies.
To the dismay of the National Front and other secular groups
that had helped lead the struggle against the Shah and hoped
to establish a modern democracy, the Ayatollah moved to
impose Islamic rule. Orders Women To Wear Veils He ordered
women to wear the modest chador, a full-length gown, and
veil, he allowed no criticism of his rule and when his Oil
Minister resisted demands for a purge of non-Islamic workers
among the industry's 40,000 employees, he dismissed him as a
traitor.
Asked by the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1979 about
reports of executions of homosexuals, prostitutes and
adulterers, the Ayatollah said: ''If our finger suffers from
gangrene, what do you do? Do you let the whole hand, and
then the body, become filled with gangrene, or do you cut
the finger off?''
The Ayatollah described music as ''no different from opium''
and banned it from television and radio. Music, he said,
''stupefies persons listening to it and makes their brain
inactive and frivolous.''
Because of Iran's increasing isolation in the Khomeini era,
it was often difficult to assess the precise role of the
Ayatollah in ruling the country. But his influence as
interpreter of the divine will and symbol of the Islamic
Republic was strong and durable. In the years after his rise
to power, his Government endured an ineffective Western arms
embargo, rebellion by Kurdish and Baluchi minorities and a
wave of assassinations in 1981 when the Marxist Mujahedeen
turned against him.
Backing to Terrorists
After 1980, the the Government began financing and
supporting local rebel groups in Persian Gulf countries,
including Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and according to
the United States, gave backing to terrorist bombings and
hostage taking.
The Ayatollah's hopes that his revolution would spread were
not fulfilled. But as the Baghdad-born University of London
scholar Elie Kedourie wrote in May 1989 in the Times
Literary Supplement - a British weekly - an abiding goal of
the Iranian Islamic Republic is ''to liberate the
disinherited masses of the Muslim world, whether these live
in independent states like Egypt or Saudia Arabia or Morocco
or the Emirates of the Gulf, or whether they are under
non-Muslim rule, as in the Soviet Union or Israel.''
Understandably, not a few Western analysts of the Middle
East came to believe that the Ayatollah's Iran was
inflexibly bent on expanding its brand of revolutionary
fundamentalism across the Arab world - and were then
surprised at how easily Iran adjusted to the truce in the
Gulf War. A War Without Victory or Defeat That the
Ayatollah's regime managed to survive that gruelling
conflict was a striking success of sorts. After the initial
Iraqi invasion, as the Iranian Army, with the help of
Revolutionary Guards, volunteer suicide squads and masses of
young conscripts, retook land with human wave attacks, and
then lost it again, the Ayatollah's Government used the
nationalist fervor to consolidate its rule. The war was
fought to a bloody stalemate.
Casualties on both sides were immense and the financial cost
enormous. The war threatened a new international oil crisis
as attacks increased on tankers in the gulf. In July 1987,
the United States put naval forces in the gulf to escort
Kuwaiti tankers.
Despite the suffering and cost, Ayatollah Khomeini urged his
people to fight on until victory over Iraq. Speaking in
February 1987, he called the war a ''divine cause.''
''Almost every day, Iran is hit and many children,
youngsters, old men and ordinary people see their homes fall
in on them,'' he said. ''But as soon as they clamber from
the rubble they speak of the need for us to make war until
victory.'' But in the months that followed, it became more
and more evident that Iran's larger army would not bring it
victory over Iraq, which remained largely on the defensive
but controlled the air with its warplanes and sometimes made
telling use of missiles and even poison gas.
Peace a 'Deadly Poison'
It was on a note of Islamic fatalism that the Ayatollah
finally, in July, 1988, announced his acceptance of the
truce. ''I had promised to fight to the last drop of my
blood and to my last breath,'' he noted in a statement
reported by the Teheran radio.
''Taking this decision was more deadly than taking poison,''
he went on, ''I submitted myself to God's will and drank
this drink for his satisfaction.''
With the hostilities ended, there followed an upsurge in
political crosscurrents and bickering in Iran. Ayatollah
Khomeini's ouster of Ayatollah Montazeri as his
successor-designate in March, 1989. came after that cleric
suggested that the Iranian revolution was off course: in
radio and television messages he had criticized aspects of
the regime, including its its view that those who did not
unquestioningly support it were foes of Islam. In the months
that followed, Ayatollah Khomeini's son Ahmad came to be
seen, amid a welter of rivalries, as a chief candidate to
assume his father's leadership role. No new heir was
formally named.
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Photo: http://www.coej.org/islamic_education/khomeini.JPG
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Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini: The Mullah Who
Transformed Iran
FROM: The Washington Post (June 5th 1989) ~
By Richard Pearson, Staff Writer
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who died Saturday at age 86,
was an austere and uncompromising Shiite Moslem religious
leader who overthrew the shah of Iran, humiliated the United
States, waged a bloody war with Iraq and transformed his
nation from a modernizing regional power into a puritanical
religious state.
He was a prodigious if pedantic scholar, a shrewd and
ruthless politician, and a relentless, xenophobic zealot in
the cause of Islam as he understood it. He spent many years
in obscure exile in provincial Iraq, but in the decade after
he swept to power, his brooding visage became familiar to
the world as he reshaped the Middle Eastern power structure
and challenged the worldwide hegemony of Western culture.
By profession he was a writer and teacher, but his decades
of analyzing the Koran and expounding on Shiite traditions
led him to a narrow view of the world. To Khomeini, the
merit of every human activity was judged according to how it
conformed to his version of Moslem law. This cultural tunnel
vision served him well as he conspired to overthrow Iran's
worldly monarchy, but it left him ill-prepared to govern in
a sophisticated world.
At his death, Iran was a melancholy and politically
turbulent land, wracked by war and economic collapse, and he
never came close to achieving his object of worldwide
Islamic revolution. On the contrary, his extremism and his
use of violence alienated millions of Moslems throughout the
world who might otherwise have been attracted to Khomeini's
campaign for cultural purity.
The purpose of Khomeini's revolution was to rescue Iran from
what he perceived to be a corrupt and heretical regime that
was in the economic and cultural grip of the "Great Satan,"
the United States.
Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi had used the country's vast oil
wealth to improve the living conditions of Iran's 33 million
people. But the Iranian who saw electricity, schools and
roads come to his village also saw an influx of tens of
thousands of Western workers and advisers, socially
straining a nation struggling with its ancient identity and
values. Iranians saw the shah welcome these Westerners and
the changes they helped bring about, changes that seemed to
many to promote materialism and cosmopolitan ideas at the
expense of indigenous culture. The man denouncing the shah,
foreigners and change was Khomeini.
Return of Mullahs
What Khomeini promised, and came to deliver, was the
destruction of westernization as it conflicted with his
fundamentalist Shiite Moslem teachings; an end to the
conspicuous consumption and financial corruption of those
around the shah, and a return to the political primacy of
the mullahs, the senior Shiite scholars and jurists who now
dominate the country. Khomeini also had attacked the shah's
dealings with the West, especially the United States, and
had opposed the shah's ties with Israel.
The Iran that Khomeini made over in his image of Islam is a
country where women must cloak themselves in the traditional
chador, a country free of alcoholic beverages, its airwaves
cleansed of Western films, television and music. It is also
a society purged of almost all non-Moslem elements in its
population, as Jews and Bahais were driven into exile.
Despite the assassination of several close aides and the
defection of others, Khomeini crushed opposition from both
left and right.
His rise to power and initial popularity can be partly
explained by the fact that he became the symbol of all who
opposed the regime of the shah. If the shah seemed
impregnable, the ayatollah commanded the loyalty of the only
institution never suppresed or co-opted by the regime -- the
religious hierarchy, at the head of which are the few senior
leaders who are accorded the title ayatollah, or "sign of
God."
The shah commanded what was thought to be one of the most
powerful and modern military machines in the Middle East and
was respected, even admired, in foreign capitals, especially
Washington. As late as 1978, a year before his ouster, he
said, "Nobody can overthrow me. I have the support of
700,000 troops, all of the workers and most of the people. I
have the power."
Khomeini's call to arms was a harsh, even feudal one, but
essentially uncomplicated. He once wrote: "If there is a
fear of domination of Islamic countries by foreigners
because of the political relationship between the Islamic
governments and foreign governments, even if it is political
and economic denomination, it is incumbent upon all Moslems
to oppose these relations and force the Islamic governments
into breaking these kinds of relations."
His vision of a pure Islamic state was as old as the
religion itself, but he used the most modern tools of
political agitation. From exile, first in Iraq, then in
France, the direct-dial telephone kept him in close touch
with his followers, tape-recorded messages were smuggled to
mosques throughout Iran, and he gave frequent newspaper and
television interviews.
Pictures of his stern, dark-browed visage, crowned with a
black turban signifying direct lineal descent from the
prophet, became the banner of the struggle to overthrow a
monarchy that traced its ancestry back 2,500 years.
Cheered by millions when he returned to Iran in February
1979 after 15 years in exile, he took power from a monarch
who simply abandoned the struggle. From then until his
death, no one seriously challenged Khomeini inside Iran.
In March 1979, a plebiscite approved the transformation of
Iran from a hereditary monarchy to an Islamic republic. A
new constitution created the position of national religious
leader, the vilayat-e-faqih. Article 107 gave Khomeini this
office for life. As such, he was supreme commander of the
armed forces and Revolutionary Guards and he appointed a
majority of the National Defense Council. He also had the
power to declare war and dismiss the president.
In theory, this official was to be "pious, dedicated and
sincere," providing moral guidance but aloof from the
everyday decision-making process. But in fact Khomeini,
though he never held the title of president or prime
minister, made all important decisions. His refusal to
interfere when radicals seized Americans at the U.S. Embassy
in Tehran amounted to official authorization for the
hostage-taking. And it was only on Khomeini's insistence
that the war with Iraq dragged on for eight devastating
years, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of Iranian lives.
Iran has seldom been far from the world's consciousness
since the founding of the new state.
The victory of the Islamic Republic unleashed vengeful
conflicts within Iran and internationally. Revolutionary
tribunals summarily tried and ordered executed more than 600
of the shah's former officials and army officers, as well as
adulterers, homosexuals and persons who were found guilty of
religious crimes. By 1982, it was estimated that more than
4,500 people had been executed and about 30,000 were
imprisoned.
Iran was in this country's headlines every day after the
takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by radical "students"
who objected to the fact that the dying shah had been given
refuge in the United States. Embassy workers and other
Americans were held hostage for 444 days. It was not until
Jan. 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated to
succeed Jimmy Carter as president, that the last 52
Americans were released.
The hostages were not released until after an abortive raid
on Tehran to liberate them by American arms and months of
diplomatic wrangling. The crisis undoubtably contributed to
the defeat of President Jimmy Carter after a single term in
office.
But the biggest impact on the lives of most Iranians
probably resulted not from diplomatic tiffs with the West,
or even the severe economic dislocations brought on by the
revolution, or the triumph of a new socio-political order,
but by the war with Iraq.
On Sept. 22, 1980, President Saddam Hussein sent the Iraqi
army into Iran. Superficially, it seemed an obvious attempt
to take territorial advantage of the new Iranian regime and
an army that was thought to be disaffected after purges of
its officer corps. Hussein obviously hoped to seize the
Shatt-al-Arab waterway, the 120-mile confluence of the
Tigris and Euphrates rivers that forms part of the
Iraqi-Iranian border and is Iraq's only outlet to the sea,
and perhaps to take over Iran's Khuzistan region. Khuzistan
has vast stores of oil and its people are mostly Sunni
Moslems, often restive under Shiite rule and presumably
sympathetic to the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein. The Sunni
Moslems of Arab Iraq and the Shiites of non-Arab Iran have
struggled for primacy in the region for 12 centuries.
The latest war not only lasted eight long years but also
became one of the most bloody and expensive since World War
II. It has been estimated that the two sides' casualties
included about a million dead, more than 1.5 million
refugees, and even more wounded. It also is believed that
the war cost the two states more than $ 400 billion.
Khomeini insisted throughout the war that it would continue
until Saddam Hussein was overthrown, but in 1988 Iran's
exhaustion forced him to accept a cease-fire he called "more
deadly to me than poison."
War was hardly a new experience for Iran or a concept
foreign to Khomeini. Since time immemorial, the Iranian
monarchy had been forged in war, against Moghul India,
Ottoman Turkey, czarist Russia, imperial Britain, and hordes
of Arabs, Afghans, Mongols and Uzbeks.
Internally, Iran's great internal conflict was between the
crown and the mullahs. Shiite Moslems believe that spiritual
authority resides in descendants of Muhammad's cousin and
son-in-law, Ali. Ayatollahs such as Khomeini are heirs to a
tradition in which religious leaders are free to challenge
temporal authority.
By the early 20th century, the religious elders controlled
education, law and charities, and had huge wealth. The
mujtahid, or religious leader, added to his independence by
his method of gaining power. He was not chosen by the
government nor by formal election from the other senior
religious figures. He achieved his authority by a
combination of learning and popular following.
Son of an Ayatollah
It was in this historical setting that Ruhollah ("soul of
God") Mussavi Khomeini was born on Sept. 23, 1902, in the
small town of Khomein, 180 miles south of Tehran. He was the
youngest of six children of Ayatollah Sayed Mustafa Mussavi
and Hajar Saghafi. His father, his maternal grandfather and
a brother were all ayatollahs. Following a tradition in
which ayatollahs adopt the names of their home towns, he
took the name Khomeini about 1930. As a student of Islamic
law, he earned the title ayatollah in the late 1950s.
When Khomeini was an infant, his father was murdered, some
say by government agents. His father was not to be the last
close relative the future leader would lose to violence. His
eldest son died under mysterious circumstances during
Khomeini's exile, and a grandson was killed by Savak, the
shah's hated security service.
Khomeini was raised by his iron-willed mother, imbued with
the zeal to fight those he considered enemies of the
prophet. At age 19, he went to Arak to study under the noted
Ayatollah Abdul Karim Haeri, one of the era's leading
Islamic theologians. In 1922, he and Haeri moved to the city
of Qom, where the old ayatollah founded the Madresseh
Faizieh, a leading center of religious learning, which was
to be the Ayatollah Khomeini's real home.
Khomeini became an authority on Islamic law, but he also
delved into Islamic mysticism, and his fascination with
Western philosophy led him to claim that Plato's "Republic"
was part of his model for an Islamic republic. He wrote
lyric poetry and more than 20 books on Islamic theology.
During those early years, he was said to have taught about
1,200 future members of the religious hierarchy.
Riza Shah Pahlavi, the last shah's father, systematically
persecuted the religious leaders and attacked religious
culture while trying to Westernize his state along the lines
set by Kemal Ataturk in Turkey. His son carried on this
tradition, and when Mohammed Riza Shah visited Qom in 1953,
Ayatollah Khomeini signaled his opposition. Alone, in a
group of about 50 religious elders, he refused to rise upon
the shah's entrance.
By 1962, Khomeini was recognized as head of the Shiite
community's opposition to the shah. That year, he led a
successful general strike in opposition to the shah's ruling
that court witnesses no longer need swear by the Koran. A
year later, the shah launched his "White Revolution," a
domestic reform program that called for state confiscation
of religious lands. Women's rights, extended by the White
Revolution, were directly counter to Islamic teaching,
according to the ayatollah, as were various programs
involving education and the law.
In the spring of 1963, government forces broke into the
Madresseh Faizieh and killed more than a dozen young
scholars. Khomeini organized not only the religious leaders
but also students at Tehran University, where rioting caused
the shah to proclaim martial law. Khomeini also organized
opposition to a status-of-forces agreement that insulated
American military personnel from Iranian law -- an appeal to
anti-American sentiment that became a hallmark of Khomeini's
politics. Months in jail and nearly a year under house
arrest were the ayatollah's reward. In late 1964, he was
sent into exile.
He first lived in Turkey, but was expelled from that country
after demonstrations of support by Iranian students there.
In 1965, he moved to Iraq and settled in Najaf, a town
revered by Shiites because it is the site of the tomb of
Imam Ali. At Najaf, the ayatollah operated a theological
school and began tape-recording sermons and messages that
were smuggled to Iran and played at mosques throughout the
country.
By the 1970s, he no longer accepted the possibility of a
limited monarchy as defined in the Iranian constitution of
1906. In his 1970 book, "Islamic Government," he rejected
both the constitution and the monarchy as un-Islamic and
foreign. He said the shah usurped the legitimate authority
of the state's supreme religious leader.
Through much of the 1960s and 1970s, the now-aged ayatollah
seemed a figure from another age, one whose time had passed
generations before. Yet as internal opposition to the shah
mounted, as corruption and terror spread, the authority and
popularity of the one ayatollah who had never bowed to the
shah continued to rise.
The ayatollah appealed to the average Iranian as the
legitimate voice of Iran. He appealed to the new middle
classes as a non-communist alternative to the increasingly
repressive and inept Pahlavi regime, and to the religious
leaders as one who would reinstate their traditional wealth
and authority.
In 1977, after the death of his eldest son, Mustafa, who may
have been killed by Savak, Khomeini called upon the Iranian
army to "liberate their country" from the shah.
The shah tried to strike back at Khomeini in 1978 through
the press. A government-controlled newspaper published a
piece that attacked Khomeini's character, questioned his
devotion to Islam, raised the possibility of his actually
working for the communists, and said that he was probably
part Indian. (A grandfather had worked in India for a time.)
That attack backfired. Riots broke out in Qom and Tabriz,
then spread across the nation. The shah responded by
prevailing upon the Iraqis to expel Khomeini. This too
played into Khomeini's hands.
The ayatollah moved his operations to a village about 25
miles from Paris. His new location enabled him to keep in
touch with his supporters by long-distance telephone, and
also gave him access to the Western news media, projecting
him into a prominence he could never have achieved in Iraq.
His support in Iran came from more than 150,000 mullahs,
wealthy merchants and student leaders. His calls for strikes
and civil demonstrations were always obeyed.
On Dec. 29, 1978, the shah, his power crippled by strikes
and popular dissent, appointed Shahpur Bakhtiar, a leader of
the Union of National Front Forces, as prime minister. The
economy was at a standstill because of an oil workers'
strike called by the ayatollah. On Jan. 16, 1979, the shah
left Iran, never to return.
A Triumphal Return
Two weeks later, on Feb. 1, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini
returned to Iran in triumph. Bakhtiar resigned as prime
minister and was replaced by Mehdi Bazargan, a respected
liberal who was head of the religiously oriented National
Liberation Movement of Iran. Bazargan was the first in a
series of officials to exercise some nominal government
authority in Iran only to be shunted aside when they came
into conflict with Khomeini.
When Khomeini was exiled, he believed the political role of
clerics was to provide moral guidance to secular forces who
would manage the technical aspects of the state. Statements
he made in Paris left the "modernists" in his movement the
impression that they would have primary importance in any
new government once the shah left. When the time came, the
modernists were put in stewardship roles and traditionalists
made the major decisions. The modernists were later mostly
purged.
Throughout the 1980s, news from and about Iran was almost
unrelievedly grim. The war with Iraq -- a war in which
Iranian teenagers marched as soldiers to the front carrying
their own coffins -- dominated all else, but domestic life
was grim as well. The euphoria of the revolution quickly
evaporated in an atmosphere of economic hardship, social
austerity, political repression and occasional violence. But
Khomeini never wavered. Living modestly in a one-story
dwelling near the center of Qom, he continued to call for
religious and cultural purity -- he profesed never to have
heard of Bach or Verdi but he banned their music anyway just
because it was foreign -- and for the destruction of his
enemies.
Increasingly frail since the end of the war with Iraq, he
had been little heard from until earlier this year when he
shocked the world with a public call for the assassination
of British author Salman Rushdie, whose novel, "The Satanic
Verses," Khomeini regarded as blasphemous.
He is survived by his wife, Batoul, and four children. One
of his sons, Ahmed, was among Khomeini's closest personal
and political advisers -- the link, in effect, between the
ayatollah and the politicians who struggled to run the
government while they jockeyed for position in the
post-Khomeini era.
---
Photo:
http://www.venusproject.com/ecs/images/photos/ruhollah_khomeini.jpg
---
FROM: The Independent (June 5th 1989) ~
By Baqer Moin
Ruhollah Khomeini, religious leader, born Khomein September
1902, married 1927 Khadjia (two sons, three daughters; and
three children deceased), died Tehran 3 June 1989.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic
Republic, was elevated to sainthood by followers and enjoyed
a semi-prophet and god-like status while his detractors saw
him as a blood-thirsty dictator, Lucifer and Satan
incarnate.
History may prove both views to be extreme interpretations
of this complex character, who turned Iranian history upside
down, and who initiated, though perhaps inadvertently, a
major reformation in Islam.
What is certain about this contradictory personality was the
charisma, sense of expediency and mysticism of a man who
maintained that he was the people and God rolled into one, a
belief which under different circumstances could have led to
his excommunication and possible death at the hands of the
very people who helped him achieve supreme power.
Khomeini, a major political theorist in Islam, due to lucky
circumstances managed to his own surprise to implement his
idea of an Islamic government within a short time, an ideal
he had hoped others would achieve in 'two or three
centuries'.
Despite his lack of eloquence, his shrewd use of vague
generalities in a simple language enabled him to appeal to
and manipulate not only the downtrodden but the educated
elite who found his 'peasant-like Persian accent' an affront
to their own very civility.
Khomeini attempted to Islamicise the 'decadent society' left
behind by the Shah, while at the same time to reform Islam
itself. As an old man in a hurry, once in power, he imposed
his concept of the Islamic government on a nation with
hardly any understanding of it, thus alienating
secular-minded supporters.
His attempts at reforming centuries-old theological concepts
also led to the near break-up of his constituency among the
clergy in whose name he assumed power.
The quick success of his revolution in putting paid to 2,500
years of monarchy in Iran gave Khomeini the illusion that
his new Islamic Republic could soon put an end to the
supremacy of the 'Godless Communist empire' and the
'world-devouring Western imperialism' in the same way as
Prophet Muhammad and his followers quickly conquered the
seemingly invincible superpowers of the time - the Byzantine
and Persian empires. His over-zealous vision of Islam, his
revolutionary 'ravings' and disregard for geopolitical
realities, unleashed a war against his mission, forcing him
to quench his thirst with the poisonous chalice of reality.
Khomeini's strength and self- righteousness, which enabled
him to withstand the enormous pressure of swimming against
the tide, was based on his mystical view that he had been
through the four journeys, sought by the Sufis, to reach
absolute unity with God: first, from 'man to god', leaving
behind carnal desire; from 'god to god', annihilation in
god; from 'god to man', returning with godly attributes to
man; and finally from 'man to man', merging with people and
god at the same time. Whoever has experienced these journeys
becomes the logos, the 'Perfect Man', 'the centre of the
universe' and 'the gravity of being.'
Although Khomeini, outwardly, occasionally stated he was an
imperfect mortal seeking divine perfection, inwardly he was
imbued with the love of his god, at one with him while
enjoying the pleasure of 'presence,' a status attainable
only by the perfect man.
This mystical view affected Khomeini's political and
theological thinking and made him intransigent and resolute.
'We are not here to worry about the result of our action. We
are duty bound to carry it out.' Yet he was an epitome of
contradiction. 'He will cry if you kill a fly, but he would
not shed a tear if you killed 2,000 infidels,' remarked his
son, Ahmad. Examples of this abound during Khomeini's rule
as Iran went through its darkest period of human rights.
But how did this man who came to be a pariah in the West,
manage to grip the imagination of an entire nation? Until
1944, long after the Allies had removed the secular-minded
Reza Shah for his Nazi sympathies, Khomeini's reputation was
confined to the gates of seminaries in the holy city of Qom.
He was born in 1902 in the small town of Khomein, Central
Iran. His family were originally from India, his grandfather
having left India last century. Khomeini's father was
assassinated by local bandits when Khomeini was only five
months old. It was left to his aunt and mother to bring him
up. He was sent to the local Quranic school to learn the
holy book and classical Persian poetry. Later he attended
modern schools which were beginning to spread around the
country. He was physically strong and a champion of
leap-frog in the school. He also showed interest in
calligraphy and learned to write beautifully, a skill he
demonstrated even in old age.
At 16 he lost his aunt and mother. His elder brother
Mustafa, seven years his senior (and who survives him),
looked after young Ruhollah, introducing him to Arabic
grammar and semantics - essential for any aspiring mullah.
At 19 Khomeini went to the nearby city of Iraq to continue
his studies. A year later he went to the holy city Qom where
he resided in a seminary and came to be known as a hard-
working, determined young seminarian who not only excelled
in theology but showed interest in mysticism and philosophy.
He went for long walks with friends memorising poetry as
well as writing it, but in the seemingly rigid atmosphere of
Qom one could not boast about any topic but orthodox
jurisprudence.
Khomeini the poet and mystic remained unknown to the people
at large. He taught mysticism privately but publicly he
chose to teach ethics and theology through which he
attracted hundreds of young students of theology.
In 1944 Khomeini wrote his first political book denouncing
the monarchy and asking for the government of Islam. He was
in this book more of a pan-Islamic than a fundamentalist in
the modern sense of the word. Not until 1960 did Khomeini
actively enter the political arena, following the death of
the then Shiite supreme leader Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi.
There were no obvious successor for Borujerdi. A dozen
ayatollahs were around who had their constituencies. The
Shah's ability to suppress his nationalist foes created a
political vacuum well-detected by the observant Khomeini.
When the Shah decided to assume authoritarian rule, and
began to implement reforms sought by the now silenced
opposition, Khomeini challenged the Shah.
Khomeini's religious credentials and age placed him at a
disadvantage for assuming national religious leadership, so
his challenge to the Shah put him in a strong position among
the opposition as well as other clergy.
What most strengthened Khomeini's hand among the opposition
was his charge that the Shah was an American stooge. This
earned Khomeini 10 months in prison as well as national fame
and prestige. Khomeini had already strengthened his links
with religious leaders and the Bazaaris who in his absence
organised demonstrations and staged an abortive uprising.
The pressure finally brought about Khomeini's release.
Despite the Shah's conciliatory mood, Khomeini was
uncompromising, resorting to harsher language branding the
monarch as the agent of Zionism and imperialism.
In November 1964, Savak, the Shah's secret police, announced
'Mr Khomeini has been sent into exile.' Khomeini first
settled in Turkey, where he was under virtual house arrest
for a year before being allowed to go to the Holy City of
Najaf in Iraq. From Najaf Khomeini was able to resume his
links with supporters in Iran and Iranian students in the
West.
In 1969 Khomeini began to develop his theory of 'the
guardianship of jurisprudence', or Islamic government, in a
series of lectures which found little sympathy amongst the
conservative religious establishment in Najaf.
But his revolutionary ideas that the clergy had the same
authority as that of the prophet to administer the community
and implement divine laws did not fall altogether on deaf
ears. In fact Khomeini told his audience that he was putting
forward ideas so they might be put into practice by future
generations. The lectures were published in the form of a
book which failed to impress the Ayatollah's followers.
What came to Khomeini's rescue was the failure of the Shah
to establish a meaningful dialogue with his opponents or
listen to his supporters. Iran's economic expansion through
oil money only intensified the Shah's political and social
problems. Though he suppressed his active internal
opponents, Khomeini was out of the Shah's reach. Having kept
his contacts with Iranian students abroad and merchants and
clergy inside the country, Khomeini's statements and tapes
were distributed throughout the country.
In return Khomeini was receiving millions of rials every
year from his followers in the Shiite world. In 1977 when
general dissatisfaction began to surface into a protest
movement Khomeini's name was invoked more than that of any
other political or religious leader.
A article against Khomeini planted by the Shah in the daily
Ettela'at led to the first riots and blood-letting in
January 1978 in the Holy City of Qom. It was the beginning
of the revolution.
Khomeini's popularity increased. By October 1978 the Shah
could no longer tolerate Khomeini's activity even in Iraq.
Khomeini was forced to leave Iraq. Ironically, Paris, where
he took refuge, gave Khomeini the best possible access to
the world media. An old man in medieval attire, sitting
cross-legged against an apple-tree could not be missed.
February 1979 saw the return of Khomeini to Tehran. He was
the triumphant leader of the revolution: the most peaceful
revolutionary movement the world had ever seen. Millions of
Iranians welcomed their hero for whom Khomeini's name
invariably conveyed messages of hope, freedom and justice.
For Khomeini this was just the beginning. On 11 February,
the Shah's last prime minister Dr Bakhtiar fell. It was the
end of the monarchy.
Khomeini's first prime minister was the veteran opposition
leader Mahdi Bazargan. He formed a coalition cabinet of
Nationalist and Islamic forces. As the Ayatollah's plan for
the Islamicisation of Iran began to unfold, the
revolutionary movement began to lose its unity. The Islamic
constitution alienated most secular forces, not to mention
many Islamic and nationalists.
The take-over of the American Embassy by the militant
students was helpful in toppling Bazargan's government,
pushing through the Constitution and using the documents to
disgrace the opponents as the agents of imperialism.
Khomeini even described the take-over as the second
revolution. But Khomeini paid a heavy price in the
international scene.
Khomeini's support isolated Iran but allowed the clergy to
take the machinery of the state into their hands to push the
Islamic constitution through and silence the liberals. His
militant rhetoric against the Americans, Iran's isolation
and purges in the armed forces encouraged Saddam Hossein to
launch an all-out war against Iran in September 1980.
Within two years the Iranians pushed back the Iraqis to the
international border. Iran's military and moral victory
encouraged Khomeini to continue the war into Iraq - a
disastrous decision, as the Iraqis fought back with
international help to bring war to a stalemate. It was a
humiliating acceptance of the ceasefire in July 1988 by
Khomeini: the first major defeat to his uncompromising
image. Khomeini himself described the acceptance of the
ceasefire as more bitter than drinking hemlock.
For a short period Khomeini took a back seat allowing his
heirs to reassess the mistakes of the past. The trend was
moving towards its natural conclusion which for many was
Khomeini's retirement, but as Iran could not cope with the
consequences of the stalemate to which no programme for
reconstruction existed Khomeini unexpectedly surprised his
friends and enraged his foes further by attacking the
pragmatists and condemning Salman Rushdie, the author of The
Satanic Verses, to death.
This move by Khomeini radicalised the scene at the expense
of his followers who wanted to put Iran on a constructive
base. Clashes between the pragmatists and the doctrinaires
finally ended in the dismissal of his successor Ayatollah
Montazeri in March 1989. In May Khomeini was taken to
hospital for internal bleeding and heart conditions from
which he never recovered.
Undoubtedly it is too early to say whether the Ayatollah has
earned himself a chapter in world history or just a
footnote, but in the history of Islam he will remain a
figure who single-mindedly tried to apply ideas belonging to
1,400 years ago to a late-twentieth-century society. He
succeeded in setting up an Islamic republic, but he failed
to create an Islamic society free from fear, decadence,
injustice and impurities.
---
Photos: http://www.ri-khomeini.org/images/home1/imam.gif
http://www.worldpress.org/images/0122khomeini.jpg
http://www.aref-adib.com/archives/connery_khomeini.jpg
http://www.art.net/Studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/images/ron-wave.jpg
Khomeini in art: http://badraie.com/images/khomeini5.JPG
http://www.yasseraggour.com/images/khomeini.jpg
http://www.islamicvoice.com/march.2000/images/KHOMEINI.jpg
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iran/images/khomeini-05.jpg
http://www.qikrux.com/images/ayatolla_khomeini.JPG
http://library.thinkquest.org/TQ0312702/toilet.gif
http://www.istc.org/static/img/lp_images/middle_east/iran/bn499_1701.jpg
Khomeini ... the gnome:
http://www.whataretheysaying.org/blog/images/ugkhom.jpg
Khomeini ... the 5000 Rials:
http://static.marktplaza.nl/images/1/Iran-5000-Rials-Ayatolla-Khomeini-606051.jpg
Khomeini ... the political button:
http://ansoye-napeyda.freesuperhost.com/iran_leaders/images/khomeini_pin.gif
Khomeini ... the laytex mask:
http://www.lucyindisguise.com/PartyRoom/Masks4Web/Khomeini.jpg
Khomeini ... the stamp:
http://www.middle-east-info.org/league/iran/bloodstamp.jpg
Khomeini's Hitler card:
http://goddoubleplusblessamerica.org/jest/hitlers/adolf-hitler-ayatollah-khomeini-iran-1979.jpg
Best photo ever taken of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini:
http://images.encarta.msn.com/xrefmedia/sharemed/targets/images/pho/t373/T373829A.jpg
deb...@comcast.net
of that old poop, the Ayatollah Khomeini!
The Kentucky Wizard
news:1117863913.1...@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com
> I'll be honest, the only obituary that ever made me happy was the
> death of that old poop, the Ayatollah Khomeini!
I'd be willing to wager that you are the only person who ever referred to
Khomeini as "that old poop".
--
© The Wiz ®
«¤»¥«¤»¥«¤»
deb...@comcast.net
"Danse Macabre" :)
J.D. Baldwin
In the previous article, Bill Schenley <stra...@ma.rr.com> wrote:
> The life of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was so shadowy, so
> overlain with myth and rumor, that there was lingering
> disagreement or uncertainty about his ancestry, his true
> name and his date of birth.
And his date of death. There was a lot of speculation in the U.S.
intelligence community that he actually died some months before his
death was announced, and that his voice was impersonated for his radio
addresses.
--
_+_ From the catapult of |If anyone disagrees with any statement I make, I
_|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |am quite prepared not only to retract it, but also
\ / bal...@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it. -T. Lehrer
***~~~~-----------------------------------------------------------------------