Children of Paradise (6 page)

To many of the demonstrators, the cinema was a symbol of licentiousness, Westoxication, and corruption. To Alireza it was the location of a 70-millimeter film festival he’d planned to attend the next day. Capri had already shown
Ryan’s Daughter
and
Ben-Hur
; Alireza wanted to see
Spartacus
. When he arrived that morning, there was a line for tickets, but the posters of John Wayne and Barbra Streisand that had long graced the cinema windows now winked through broken glass. The moviegoers asked the owner what had happened.

He could have said, “An Islamic revolution has begun.” In just a month or two, the demonstrations would spread to Tehran, and in the years of revolutionary and postrevolutionary violence to follow, some 195 of Iran’s 525 movie houses would be demolished. But that morning in northern Shiraz, none of this was even thinkable. The cinema owner ventured a guess: “Some drunks must have gotten into a fight.”

• • •

O
F ALL
I
RAN’S REVOLUTIONARY THINKERS,
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was the least ambivalent. He wrote and thought with a vigorous
clarity, the lines of his logic clean and straight. He had the discipline of a philosopher, the certitude of a man of the cloth, the soul of a mystic, and an ambition whose patience and magnitude would one day astound the world. With his deep-set eyes and chiseled features, Khomeini was a man with a commanding physical presence. From beneath his great black eyebrows—he had a habit of arching only one of them—his gaze beamed a cold, dignified intelligence that seemed to encompass things unseen.

Khomeini was born near the dawn of the twentieth century, and he lost his father, a provincial cleric, when he was only five months old. His mother and then his brother raised him. As a teenager, Khomeini helped build bunkers for World War I and learned to fire a rifle. He entered the seminary at seventeen. By the time he was thirty-four he had completed his advanced clerical studies and begun publishing treatises on everything from poetry to politics, jurisprudence to mysticism. Like Shariati, Khomeini was inflamed by the situation in which he found his country, and he saw his religion as a source of resistance and power.

Shiism, the world’s second-largest Islamic sect, emerged in the seventh century as the creed of those who believed that the rightful leader of the Muslims was the Prophet Mohammad’s first cousin, Ali, and after him, the line of his descendants. The Prophet had twelve such successors, whom the Shia called imams, each of them infallible and endowed with divine wisdom. But worldly adversity and tragedy diverted the imams from their rightful paths, as the Muslim community was not united in accepting their divine leadership. The twelfth imam went into occultation, meaning that his presence on earth would be revealed only at God’s appointed hour.

Shiism was the most hierarchical branch of Islam, often likened to the Catholic Church. Shiite clerics were ranked in their prestige, from the
mojtahed
fresh out of the seminary to the grand ayatollah, who had not only achieved the most distinguished level of scholarship but who had answered the call of his students and followers to publish a compendium of his fatwas on a broad range of practical matters. Ordinary Muslims could select from among these grand ayatollahs a
marja al-taqlid
, or source of imitation,
whose religious injunctions he pledged to follow. Ruhollah Khomeini became a
marja
in 1963, the same year he catapulted to political prominence as an opponent of the monarchy.

In a 1944 book called
Revelation of Secrets
, Khomeini argued that the only legitimate government was an Islamic one guided by the clergy. That year he called for clerics and their followers to rise as militants. The shah, Khomeini believed, had sold his country to foreigners, who would not only pillage its resources but corrupt its very soul. For unlike Shariati and the religious modernists, Khomeini did not have mixed feelings about Western cultural influence: rather, he was averse to it. In 1963 the shah unveiled a reform package that included female suffrage and permission for non-Muslims to hold public office. These two measures, Khomeini protested, were against Islam. In fact, they were
a cover to allow Bahais, members of a post-Islamic religious minority, to infiltrate the government and ensure its fealty to Israel. What the shah called the White Revolution, Khomeini viewed as American reforms.

Although the White Revolution was probably not evidence of it, the shah’s subservience to the United States was hardly subtle. The Iranian monarch had become obsessed with building his military, whose equipment and advice all came from the United States. A growing community of American businesspeople, particularly from the defense industry, took up residence in Iran. In 1964, as part of a deal with Washington, Iran’s parliament passed a bill that made American military personnel and their families living in Iran immune from criminal prosecution. Khomeini thundered:

If some American’s servant, some American’s cook, assassinates your marja in the middle of the bazaar, or runs over him, the Iranian police do not have the right to apprehend him! Iranian courts do not have the right to judge him! The dossier must be sent to America, so that our masters there can decide what is to be done! . . . Let the American President know that in the eyes of the Iranian people, he is the most repulsive member of the human race today because of the injustice he has imposed on
our Muslim nation. Today the Quran has become his enemy, the Iranian nation has become his enemy. Let the American government know that its name has been ruined and disgraced in Iran.

The shah had Khomeini arrested and put down the ensuing protests with bullets, leaving as many as four hundred dead and sending Khomeini into exile in neighboring Iraq. But the ayatollah’s words had resonated deeply with an offended public, and his rough treatment at the shah’s hands only burnished his prestige.

During his years of exile, Khomeini elaborated his political vision, which he had first intimated decades earlier. God could not have meant for Muslims to live in darkness during the occultation of the twelfth imam. But all the world’s regimes, Khomeini noted as early as 1941, had been established by force of arms. They had no claim to legitimacy or justice. Only a government of God could possess those virtues. In the absence of divine rule, one had only to look around, “from the streetsweeper to the highest official,” to see the prevalence of “disordered thoughts . . . self-interest, lechery, immodesty, criminality, treachery, and thousands of associated vices.” Such, one might think, was the human condition. But Khomeini believed that man was capable of higher states. He believed it first as a mystic, committed to a spiritual path to personal perfection, and then as a matter of politics. A just and divine government, under clerical guidance, would elevate its subjects and deliver them from the disorder and darkness to which they were prone.

A series of lectures Khomeini gave in Najaf, Iraq, and published in 1974 became his treatise on the subject, called
Islamic Government
. In it
Khomeini argued for a state that would have neither a constitution nor legislation beyond the revealed word of God. In the absence of the twelfth imam, the duty of guiding such a nation must fall to its most esteemed Islamic scholar, or
faqih
, who would be uniquely qualified to interpret the divine texts.

Khomeini wrote: “
The governance of the
faqih
is a rational and extrinsic matter; it exists only as a type of appointment, like the appointment of
a guardian for a minor. With respect to duty and position, there is indeed no difference between the guardian of a nation and the guardian of a minor.” Khomeini’s view of the people as infantile and incapable of judgment dovetailed with Shariati’s rationale for “directed democracy” and with Plato’s for the philosopher king of his
Republic
, who would rule in his wisdom over citizens as benighted as cave dwellers. The Platonic elements were not accidental. Few places on earth have preserved the ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers with more reverence than the Shiite seminaries of the Middle East, where Aristotle and Plato have exerted a far-reaching influence on Islamic scholarship.

During the very years Khomeini spent painstakingly setting forth this vision, he attracted an enormous following among young Iranians who hardly acknowledged it. What they thrilled to was Khomeini’s assertion of a proud and defiant national identity and an indomitable will to resist tyranny. His letters and declarations, written in a more vernacular language than
Islamic Government
and distributed more widely, carried these messages. They recalled the man who had stood up to the shah in 1964. They inveighed against the two empires, in the East and in the West, that had conspired to inflict the state of Israel on the Muslim world as its oppressor. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a deception—“
the opium of the masses,” Khomeini pointedly wrote—its signatories concerned exclusively with the rights of superpowers. Only Islam would protect the rights of Muslims. Khomeini was cruder and more direct than Shariati, but his identity politics struck familiar chords. That could hardly have been accidental. For Shariati, far more than the clergy, had rallied Iran’s youth away from the secular left in favor of Islam. While most clerics denounced Shariati for his anticlericalism, Khomeini shrewdly said nothing and opened his arms to Shariati’s followers. Political Islam gathered like a perfect storm.

Demonstrations like the one Alireza witnessed in Shiraz broke out across the country. The more brutal the shah’s response, the more determined the protesters became, until the shah declared martial law in the fall of 1978 and rolled tanks through city streets. The country was slipping
from the monarch’s hands. Iraq, no longer able to shelter the man at the center of the maelstrom next door, pushed Khomeini to emigrate. When the Kuwaitis refused him entry, the ayatollah resettled in France.

Khomeini abided patiently, outspokenly, in a white stucco house in a town called Neauphle-le-Château, where he dispensed wisdom beneath an apple tree during the last months of the shah’s reign. He expressed no desire, then, for direct clerical rule. The clerics would offer “supervision” behind the scenes, but the executive affairs of state were best left to technocrats. The liberal nationalist circle that had once surrounded Mossadegh coalesced around Khomeini now. The Freedom Movement of Iran, a long-standing group of nationalist Islamic liberals headed by an engineer named Mehdi Bazargan, practically became the ayatollah’s entourage. These nationalists held no brief for
velayat-e faqih
. Their presence in the ayatollah’s inner circle suggested that Khomeini was willing to accommodate the revolutionary movement’s complexity, and that those who did not favor clerical rule had nothing to fear from placing Khomeini at the movement’s center. The nationalists, in turn, worked tirelessly on Khomeini’s behalf, assuring the shah’s Western allies that the coming transition would be liberal and democratic should they let the shah go.
The nationalists even forged a relationship with the American embassy in Tehran and acted as intermediaries among Khomeini, the Americans, and the shah’s army, which had to be persuaded to stand down.

• • •

T
HE REVOLUTIONARIES HAD ATTACKED
one of the things Alireza loved most—cinema—in the name of the other thing he loved most—religion. It was a scene that stayed with him for decades to come, but it did not anger him or alienate him or tear him apart. Alireza was moderate by temperament, and political to the core of his being. What he thought was that attacking the cinema was an ill-chosen tactic, that it would have a negative effect on the feelings of the people, but that, while he would not join in it, he was powerless to stop it. Together with the throwers of those rocks, he attended demonstrations every day against the shah, mesmerized by the pulse
of history come alive—history that he absorbed from the air and exhaled into the burgeoning crowds. He became a character in one of the European novels he’d read and loved: Ignazio Silone’s
Bread and Wine
, about Italian peasants resisting fascism in the name of both religion and the left. In Shiraz, the pavement and the walls and the cypress trees throbbed with meaning.

Still, Alireza stood apart from himself. He was as much a creature of history, he mused, as its agent. If he’d been born in Israel, maybe he would be an Orthodox Jew. Ideas, he suspected, chose their bearers as much as their bearers chose them. Because he could think this thought, he decided, he would seek to understand the views of Iranians unlike himself, and to choose from among their creeds the one that most truly captured his revolution. He went to meetings of half a dozen communist groups. His rich, secular relatives belonged to these groups; some were Stalinists, others Trotskyists or Maoists. For the first time Alireza found himself at the center of a competition among his cousins, each of whom wanted credit for recruiting their poor relation from the south of Shiraz to his or her particular leftist cause.

Alireza enrolled in a Marxist indoctrination seminar at the university. He read Marx alongside his religious texts and searched for inconsistencies. After a while the exasperated seminar leader told him there would be no more time for his questions in class, and he could bring them only afterward. The atmosphere was much the same at the meetings of the Mojahedin-e Khalq youth organization, which Alireza attended in the mornings, also as part of his effort to open his mind to all the revolutionary strains. The Mojahedin was the Islamic leftist guerrilla group that recruited from among Shariati’s followers at Hosseiniyeh Ershad, but by the time of the revolution it had coalesced around a charismatic leader named Massoud Rajavi. His were the only books to be read or discussed at the meetings. Alireza stopped attending.

The only place where Alireza felt at home was at meetings of a splinter group of Shariati’s followers, an organization composed mainly of self-styled intellectuals who adhered to Shariati’s vision of a militant Shiism committed to social justice. Egalitarian and radical, this group took so
seriously Shariati’s claim that clerical intercession was unnecessary for true believers that it did not embrace
velayat-e faqih
. Divine wisdom, its thinkers argued, was accessible to all educated people.