Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective (29 page)

Read Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective Online

Authors: Lawrence Kaplan

Tags: #Religion, #General, #Fundamentalism, #Comparative Religion, #Philosophy, #test

BOOK: Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective

9.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Page 121

of the rich and the oppressors"; "Islam originates from the masses, not from the upper class"; "the poor were for the Prophet, the rich were against Him"; "the mostazafin died for the Islamic Revolution, the mostakberin plotted against it''; "the martyrs of the Islamic Revolution all came from the lower classesfrom the peasantry, the working class, and the bazaar merchants and tradesmen"; ''the mostazafin of the world should unite against imperialism"; "the mostazafin of the world should create the Party of the Mostazafin"; "workers and peasants are the two main pillars of national independence"; and, "a day in the life of a worker is more valuable than the whole life of a capitalist exploiter." Khomeini's radical disciples used some of these phrases as potent street slogans.
¹⁴

Khomeini, moreover, reinterpreted early Islamic history to reinforce these populist notions. He argued that the Prophet had been a humble shepherd who had considered the "sweat of a worker to be more valuable than the blood of a martyr"; that Imam Ali had been a hard-working water carrier who had championed the
mazlum
(oppressed) against the
zalem
(oppressors); and that many of the early prophets had been laborers who had looked forward to the day when the "mostazafin would become the mostakberin and the mostakberin would become the mostazafin." He, furthermore, claimed that the Shia ulama, including the grand ayatollahs, had always championed the rights of Iran, kept alive "national consciousness," originated among the common people, died with few worldly possessions, and lived lives as simple as the "lower masses" (
mardom-e payin
).
¹⁵

Khomeini's populist rhetoric reached a crescendo on the eve of the Iranian Revolution. In the last months of the shah's rule, Khomeini began to call for both an
engelab
(revolution) and a
jomhuri
(republic), two terms he had until then scrupulously avoided because of their negative connotations among the traditionalists. He now argued that the Islamic Revolution would pave the way for an Islamic Republic, which, in turn, would eventually bring about the ideal Islamic society. This, being in exact opposition to Pahlavi Iran, would be free of want, hunger, unemployment, slums, poverty, inequality, illiteracy, ignorance, crime, alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, nepotism, corruption, oppression, political repression, class exploitation, cultural alienation, and, yes, even of bureaucratic red tape. It

Page 122

would instead be a community based on equality, fraternity, and social justice where there would be no class conflict, no gap between people and state, and no dependency on foreign countries.

In promising utopia, Khomeini managed to discardfirst implicitly and in later years explicitlytwo important tenets of traditional Shiis. For centuries, Shiis had looked back longingly on Mohammad's Mecca and Imam Ali's caliphate as the Golden Age of Islam. Khomeini now suggested that these early societies had been full of insoluble problems and that revolutionary Iran had already surpassed them in implementing real Islam.
¹⁶For centuries, Shiis had prophesied that the Mahdi would return when the world was overflowing with tyranny, injustice, and oppression. Khomeini now argued that the Mahdi would reappear only when Muslims had returned to Islam, and that true believers could hasten his reappearance by spreading the revolution abroad and by working to establish a truly Islamic society.
¹⁷The traditional quietist tenet had been turned inside out. Khomeini has been praised as an "idol-breaker"; "tradition-breaker" would have been more apt.

Notes

1. R. Khomeini,
Kashf Asrar
(
Secrets Unveiled
) (Tehran: 1943), pp. 166, 18588, 226.

2. Ibid., p. 195.

3. Ibid., p. 322.

4. Khomeini, Speech,
Jomhuri-ye Islami,
2231 December 1979;
Ettela'at,
25 August 1986;
Kayhan-e Hava'i,
18 November 1987.

5. For Khomeini's speeches and proclamations from 1962 to 1964, see: H. Ruhani (Ziarati),
Nahzat-e Imam Khomeini
(
Imam Khomeini's Movement
) (Teheran: 1980), vol. 1, pp. 142735; Front for the Liberation of Iran (JAMA),
Khomeini va Jonbesh
(
Khomeini and the Movement
), N.p. (1973), pp. 135.

6. Ruhani,
Nahzat-e,
pp. 195, 198, 458.

7. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 159.

8. R. Khomeini,
Velayat-e Faqih: Hokumat-e Islami
(Tehran: 1977).

9. R. Khomeini, Speech,
Ettela'at,
2 December 1985.

10. Khomeini,
Velayat-e Faqih,
pp. 67127.

11. Ibid., pp. 6567, 106, 67, 24, 85.

12. S. M. Askari Jafery, trans.,
Nahjul Balagha
(New York: 1981), pp. 13, 124.