Introduction

The regime could not permit this kind of talk, and in 1973 the husaimyyah was closed down. Shariati was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned. He then endured a period of internal exile in Iran, before being permitted to leave the country. His father recalled that one night during this period, he heard Shariati weeping as he bade farewell to the Prophet and Imam All before his death. In 1977, Shariati died in London, almost certainly at the hands of SAVAK agents. Shariati prepared the educated, Westernized Iranians for an Islamic revolution.
He was as pivotal a figure for intellectuals during the 1970s as Al Ahmad had been in the sixties. In the days leading up to the Revolution in 1978, his picture was often carried in procession alongside Khomeini’s.
The majority of Iranians, however, continued to look to Khomeini for guidance. Paradoxically, he was freer to express his opposition in exile in Iraq than he had been in Qum. His books and tapes were smuggled into the country, and his fat was such as the one that declared the regime to be incompatible with Islam after the shah had changed the calendar, were taken very seriously. In 1971, Khomeini published a landmark book, Hokomate eslami (“Islamic Government”), which developed a Shii ideology of clerical rule. His thesis was shocking and revolutionary.
For centuries, Shiis had declared all government to be illegitimate during the absence of the Hidden Imam, and had never thought it correct for the ulema to rule the state. But in Islamic Government, Khomeini argued that the ulema must take over the government in order to safeguard the sovereignty of God. If faqih, an expert in Islamic jurisprudence, took control of the administrative and political institutions, he could ensure that the Shariah was implemented correctly.
Even though the faqih was not on the same level as the Prophet and the Imams, his knowledge of the divine Law meant that he could command the same authority as they did. Since God was the only true Lawgiver, instead of a parliament creating its own man-made legislation, there should be an assembly to apply the Shariah to every aspect of day-to-day life.
Khomeini knew that his argument was highly controversial and challenged a fundamental Shii conviction. But, like Qutb, he believed that this innovation was justified by the present emergency. Like Shariati, he did not believe that religion could be privatized any longer. The Prophet, Imam All, and Imam Husain had all been political as well as spiritual leaders, and had struggled actively against the oppression and idolatry of their day. Faith was not a matter of personal belief but an attitude “that compels men to action”:
Islam is the religion of militant individuals who are committed to faith and justice. It is the religion of those who desire freedom and independence. It is the school of those who struggle against imperialism.
It was a very modern message. Like Shariati, Khomeini was trying to prove that Islam was not a medieval faith but had always championed values that the West thought it had invented. But Islam had been infected and weakened by the imperialists. People wanted to separate religion and politics on the Western model, and this had perverted the faith: “Islam lives among the people as if it were a stranger,” Khomeini lamented.
“If somebody were to present Islam as it truly is, he would find it difficult to make people believe him.” The Iranians were in the grip of spiritual malaise.
“We have completely forgotten our identity, and have replaced it with a Western identity,” Khomeini used to say. Iranians had “sold themselves and do not know themselves, becoming enslaved to alien ideals.” He believed that the way to heal this alienation was to create a society based entirely on the laws of Islam, which were not only more natural for Iranians than the imported law codes of the West, but were of sacred origin. If they lived in a divinely ordered milieu, impelled by the law of the land to live exactly as God intended, they themselves and the meaning of their lives would be transformed. The disciplines, practices, and rituals of Islam would create within them the Muhammadan spirit that was the ideal for humanity. For Khomeini, faith was not a notional acceptance of a creed, but an attitude and lifestyle that embodied a revolutionary struggle for the happiness and integrity that God intended for humanity.
“Once faith comes, everything follows.”
Such faith was revolutionary because it constituted a revolt against the hegemony of the Western spirit. A Westerner was likely to find Khomeini’s theory of Velayat-e Faqih (“the Government of the Jurist”) sinister and coercive, but the “modern” government that Iranians had experienced had not brought them the freedoms that people took for granted in Europe and America. Khomeini was coming to embody in his own person an alternative Shii ideal to the Pahlavi monarchy. He was known to be a mystic and to embody divine knowledge in a way that was similar, if not identical, to that of the Imams. Like Husain, he had challenged the corrupt rule of a tyrant;
like the Imams, he had been imprisoned and almost put to death by an unjust ruler; like some of the Imams, he had been forced into exile and deprived of what was rightfully his. Now in Najaf, living beside the shrine of Imam All, Khomeini seemed rather like the Hidden Imam:
physically inaccessible to his people, he still guided them from afar and would one day return. There was a rumor that Khomeini had dreamed that, despite his present exile, he would die in Qum. Western people found it difficult to understand how Khomeini, who had none of the charm or charisma that they expected in a political leader, had managed to inspire such devotion in the Iranian people.
Had they known more about Shiism, they might have found this less of a mystery.
When Khomeini wrote Islamic Government, he probably had no idea that revolution was imminent. He believed that it would be two hundred years before Iran would be ready to implement Velayat-e Faqih. Khomeini was at this date more concerned with the religious ideal than with the practical underpinning of his theory. In 1972, the year after the publication of Islamic Government, Khomeini wrote an article which he called “The Greater Jihad,” which found a mystical justification for the controversial Velayate Faqih. The title refers to one of his favorite hadith, which has the Prophet say after returning home from a battle: “We are returning from the lesser jihad to the greater jihaqd.”
This perfectly expressed Khomeini’s conviction that the battles and campaigns of politics were the “lesser” struggle, of far less import than the effort to effect the spiritual transformation of society and to integrate one’s own heart and desires. He was convinced, like Shariati, that a political solution could not succeed without a deeply religious renewal in Iran.
In his 1972 article, Khomeini suggested that afaqih who engaged in the mystical quest described by Mulla Sadra could acquire the same “infallibility” (ismah) as the Imams. This did not mean, of course, that the jurist was on the same level as the Imams, but as the mystic approached God, he had to rid himself of the egotism that held him back from the divine. He had to divest himself of the “veils of darkness.”
“attachment to the world,” and the lure of sensuality. At the peak of his journey to God, he was thus purged of the inclination to sin: “If a man believes in God Almighty and with the eye of his heart sees Him as clearly as he sees the sun, it is impossible for him to commit any act of sin.” The Imams had had special divine knowledge, which was a unique gift, but they had also acquired this lesser infallibility by the ordinary processes of spirituality, Khomeini believed. Thus, it would not be impossible for afayi/i who was expert in Islamic Law and mystically reborn in this way to lead the people to God. There was a potential idolatry here, but, again, it must be emphasized that in 1972 nobody, not even Khomeini, believed that it would be feasible to topple the shah in an Islamically inspired revolution. Khomeini was now seventy years old. He must have thought it very unlikely that he would become the ruling faqih. In both Islamic Government and “The Greater Jihad,” Khomeini was trying to see how the mythology and mysticism of the Shiah could be adapted to break centuries of sacred tradition and allow a cleric to rule Iran. He had yet to see how this mythos would work out in practice.
in israel, a new form of Jewish fundamentalism had already started to translate myth into hard political fact. It had its roots in the religious Zionism which had grown up in the shadow of secular Zionism in the pre-state days in Palestine. These religious Zionists were modern Orthodox, and from an early date, they had started to found their own observant settlements alongside the socialist kibbutzim.
Unlike the Haredim, this small group of religious Jews did not see Zionism as incompatible with Orthodoxy.
They interpreted the Bible literally: in the Torah, God promised the Land to the descendants of Abraham, and thus gave Jews a legal title to Palestine. Moreover, in Eretz Israel, Jews would be able to observe the Law more fully than had been possible in the Diaspora. In the ghetto, it was obviously not feasible to observe many commandments relating to the farming and settlement of the Land, or the laws regarding politics and government. As a result, Diaspora Judaism had perforce been fragmented and compartmentalized.
Now at last in their own land, Jews would be able to observe the whole of the Torah once again. As Pinchas Rosenbluth, one of the pioneers of Zionist Orthodoxy, explained:
We accept upon ourselves the entire Torah, its commandments and ideas.
The fold] Orthodoxy made do in fact with a small part of the Torah ... observed in synagogue or the family ... or certain areas of life. We want to carry out the Torah all the time and in every area, to grant [Torah] and its laws sovereignty in the life of the individual and the public.
Far from being incompatible with modernity, the Law would complete it.
The world would see that Jews could create a new social order that was truly progressive because it had been planned by God.
There was a desire for wholeness that would always characterize religious Zionism; it was a way of finding healing and a more holistic vision after the trauma and constrictions of exile. But it was also a rebellion against the rationalist vision of the secular Zionists, who did not take these religious settlers seriously and who saw their ambition to create a Torah state in Eretz Israel as not only anachronistic but repellent. The religious Zionists were very conscious of being rebels. When they established their own youth movement, Bnei Akiva (“Sons of Akiva”), in 1929, these youngsters took as their role model Rabbi Akiva, the great mystic and scholar of the second century ce, who had supported a Jewish revolt against Rome. The secular Zionists had also been rebels, but against religious Judaism.
Now the Bnei Akiva felt that they “must call for a rebellion against the rebellion, against the views of the [secular] youth which is opposed to Judaism and to Jewish tradition.” They were fighting a battle for God. Instead of wanting to marginalize and exclude the divine from political and cultural life, they wanted religion to suffuse their existence “all the time and in every area.” They refused to allow the secularists to “own” Zionism completely. Tiny minority though they were, they were staging a mini-revolution against what they regarded as the illegitimate domination of the secularists’ wholly rational ideology.
They needed their own schools and institutions. During the 1940s, Rav Moshe Zvi Neria founded a series of elite boarding schools for religious Zionist boys and girls. In these yeshiva high schools, academic standards were high; students studied secular subjects alongside Torah. Unlike the Haredim, these neo-Orthodox religious Zionists did not feel that they should cut themselves off from major currents of modern life. This would betray their holistic vision; they believed that Judaism was quite large enough to accommodate these gentile sciences, but they also took Torah study very seriously indeed, and employed graduates from the Haredi yeshivot to teach them Torah and Talmud. In the yeshiva high schools, mythos and logos were still seen as complementary. Torah provided a mystical encounter with the divine and gave meaning to the whole, even though it had no practical utility. As Rabbi Yehoshua Yogel, the principal of Midrashiat Noam, explained, students did not study Torah to make a living or “as a means for economic, military, and political existence.” Rather, Torah must be studied “for its own sake”; unlike the logoi of the secular subjects, it had no practical use, but was simply the whole “purpose of man.” Study, however, was not enough for the young religious Zionists after the foundation of the State of Israel. In the 1950s, yeshivot were established for older students which had a special “arrangement” (hesder) with the new Israeli government, giving religious youth a way of combining their national service in the I.D.F. with Torah study.
Religious Zionists had thus carved out for themselves a distinctive way of life, but during the early years of the state, some suffered a crisis of identity.
They seemed to fall between two worlds: they were not Zionist enough for the secularists, and their achievements could not compete with the triumph of the secular pioneers, who had brought the state into being.
In the same way, they were not Orthodox enough for the Haredim, and knew that they could not match their expertise in Torah. This crisis led, during the early 1950S, to yet another youth rebellion. A small circle of about a dozen fourteen-year-old boys, who were pupils at Kfar Haro’eh, one of }heyeshiva high schools, began to live more stringently religious lives, in much the same way as the Haredim. They insisted upon modest dress and the segregation of the sexes, banned frivolous conversations and trivial recreations, and supervised one another’s lives in a system involving public confession and trials for miscreants. They called themselves Gahelet (“glowing embers”), linking their Haredi rigor with an intense nationalism. They dreamed of building a kibbutz with zyeshiva in the center, where the men would study Talmud day and night, like Haredim, while the women, relegated, ultra-Orthodox style, to the inferior but complementary sphere of logos, supported them and farmed the land. The Gahelet became an elite group in religious Zionist circles, but they felt that their Orthodoxy would not be complete until, like the Hasidim and Misnagdim, they found a rabbi to bless and guide them. In the late i95os they fell under the spell of the ageing Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the son of Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Kook, whose work we considered in Chapter Six.
By the time the Gahelet discovered Rabbi Zvi Yehuda, he was almost seventy years old, and was generally considered to be not half the man his father had been. He was the principal of the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva in north Jerusalem, which had been founded by his father but was now dwindling, with only twenty students. But Kook the Younger’s ideas appealed immediately to the Gahelet, because he went much further than Abraham Yitzhak and yet, at the same time, had so simplified the elder Kook’s complex dialectical vision that it had the streamlined form of a modern ideology. Where Kook the Elder had seen a divine purpose in secular Zionism, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda believed that the secular State of Israel was the Kingdom of God tout court, every clod of its earth was holy:
Every Jew who comes to Eretz Yisrael, every tree that is planted in the soil of Israel, every soldier added to the army of Israel, constitutes another spiritual stage, literally; another stage in the process of redemption.
Where the Haredim forbade their students to watch the army parade on Independence Day, Kook the Younger insisted that, because the army was sacred, it was a religious duty to watch it. The soldiers were as righteous as Torah scholars, and their weapons as holy as a prayer shawl or phylacteries.
“Zionism is a heavenly matter,” Rabbi Zvi Yehuda insisted.
“The State of Israel is a divine entity, our holy and exalted state.”
Where Kook the Elder had believed that Jews should take no part in politics, because in the unredeemed world, all politics was tainted, Kook the Younger believed that the messianic age had begun and that political involvement was, like the mystical journey of the Kabbalist, an ascent to the pinnacles of holiness. His vision was literalistically holistic. The Land, the People, and the Torah formed an indivisible triad. To abandon one was to abandon all three. Unless Jews settled in the whole Land of Israel, as this was defined in the Bible, there could be no Redemption: the annexation of the whole land, including territory at this time belonging to the Arabs, had become a supreme religious duty. But when the Gahelet met Kook in the late 1950s, there seemed little hope of achieving this. The borders of the State of Israel, established in 1948, included only Galilee, the Negev, and the coastal plain. The biblical land on the West Bank of the Jordan currently belonged to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. But Kook was confident.
Everything was proceeding in accordance with a preordained pattern.
Even the Holocaust had pushed Redemption forward, since it had forced Jews to leave the Diaspora and return to the Land. Jews had “clung so determinedly to the impurity of foreign lands, that, when the End Time arrived, they had to be cut away with a great shedding of blood,” Kook explained in a Holocaust Day sermon in 1973. These historical facts revealed God’s divine hand, and had brought about “the rebirth of the Torah and all that was holy.” History thus provided an encounter, “an encounter with the Master of the Universe.”
The transposition of myth into fact had finally occurred. In the premodern world, mythology and politics had been distinct.
State-building, military campaigns, agriculture, and the economy had all been the preserves of the rational disciplines of logos. The myth contained these pragmatic activities and gave them meaning; myth could also serve as a corrective, and remind men and women of values, such as compassion, that transcended the pragmatic considerations of reason. An earthly reality could become a symbol of the divine, but was never itself holy; it pointed beyond itself to where reason could not go. But Kook had overridden these distinctions and created what some might call idolatry. Can an army be “holy” when it is often obliged to do terrible things, such as killing the innocent with the guilty?
Traditionally, messianism had inspired people to criticize the status quo, but Kook would use it to give absolute sanction to Israeli policy.
Such a vision could lead to a nihilism that denies crucial values. In making the State of Israel holy and its territorial integrity supreme, Kook had succumbed to the very temptation responsible for some of the worst nationalist atrocities of the twentieth century. Rabbi Kook the Elder’s inclusive vision, which had reached out to other faiths and to the secular world, had been lost. Kook the Younger was filled with burning hatred of Christians, of the goyim who interfered with Israeli ambitions, and of the Arabs. There had been wisdom in the older vision, which had seen reason and myth as complementary though separate. There was great danger in Kook the Younger’s yoking of the two together.
The Gahelet did not take this view, however. Rabbi Kook’s holistic ideology made Zionism a religion, and was just what they had been looking for.
They became full-time students at Merkaz Harav, and put this obscure yeshiva on the map of Israel. They also made Kook a sort of Jewish pope, whose decrees were binding and infallible. These young men became Kook’s cadre and would become the leaders of the new fundamentalist Zionism:
Moshe Levinger, Yaakov Ariel, Shiomo Aviner, Harm Drukman, Dov Lior, Zaiman Melamed, Avraham Shapira, and Eliezar Waldman. In Merkaz Harav during the 1960s they planned an offensive designed to win the nation back to God and to make the secular state realize its religious potential. Instead of the dialectical synthesis of secular and religious envisaged by Kook the Elder, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda expected an imminent takeover of the secular by the divine.
For all their enthusiasm, however, the Gahelet could do no more than plan. There was nothing they could effectively do to settle the whole land or to change the heart of the nation. But in 1967, history took a hand.
On Independence Day 1967, some three weeks before the outbreak of the Six Day War, Rabbi Kook was delivering his usual sermon at the Merkaz Harav yeshiva. Suddenly he emitted a sobbing scream, and uttered words that completely broke the flow of his speech: “Where is our Hebron, Shechem, Jericho and Anatoth, torn from the state in 1948 as we lay maimed and bleeding?” Three weeks later, the Israeli army had occupied these biblical cities which had previously been in Arab hands, and Rabbi Kook’s disciples were convinced that he had been inspired by God to make a true prophecy. By the end of this short war, Israel had conquered the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.
The holy city of Jerusalem, which had been divided between Israel and Jordan since 1948, was now annexed by Israel and declared to be the eternal capital of the Jewish state. Once again, Jews were able to pray at the Western Wall. A mood of exultation and near-mystical euphoria gripped the entire country. Before the war, Israelis had listened on their radios to Nasser vowing to throw them all into the sea; now they were unexpectedly in possession of sites sacred to Jewish memory. Many of the most diehard secularists experienced the war as a religious event, reminiscent of the crossing of the Red Sea.
But for Kookists the war was even more crucial. It seemed conclusive proof that Redemption was indeed under way and that God was pushing history forward to its final consummation. The fact that no Messiah had actually appeared did not worry the Gahelet; they were moderns, and perfectly prepared to see the “Messiah” as a process rather than a person. Nor were they disturbed that the “miracle” of the war had a perfectly natural explanation: the Israeli victory was entirely due to the efficiency of the I.D.F.
and the ineptitude of the Arab armies. The twelfth-century philosopher Maimonides had predicted that there would be nothing supernatural about the Redemption: the prophetic passages that spoke of cosmic wonders and universal peace referred not to the Messianic Kingdom in this world but to the World-to-Come. The victory convinced Kookists that it was now time to mobilize in earnest.
A few months after the victory, rabbis and students held an impromptu conference at Merkaz Harav to find ways of foiling the plan of the Labor government to relinquish some of these newly occupied territories in exchange for peace with their Arab neighbors. For Kookists, the return of even one inch of the sacred land would be a victory for the forces of evil.
And they found, to their surprise, that they had secular allies.
Shortly after the war, a group of distinguished Israeli poets, professors, retired polititians, and army officers had formed the Land of Israel Movement to prevent the government from making any territorial concessions. Over the years, the Movement helped the Kookists to formulate their ideology in a way that would appeal to the public, and gave them financial and moral support.
Gradually, the Kookists were being drawn into the mainstream.
In April 1968, Moshe Levinger led a small group of Kookists and their families to celebrate Passover in Hebron, the city where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are thought to be buried. Since Muslims also venerate these Jewish patriarchs as great prophets, Hebron was a holy city for them too. For centuries, Palestinians had called Hebron al-Khalil, because of its sacred associations with Abraham, the “friend” of God.