Introduction

K-home ini was aware of the tension between the mystical and the practical.
He understood that a modern state needed popular participation and a fully representative government. As the West had discovered in the course of its own modernization, this was the only type of polity that worked in an industrialized, technicalized society. His theory of Velayat-e Faqih had been an attempt to provide modern political institutions with an Islamic context that would give them meaning to the people. The Supreme Faqih and the Council of Guardians would give the elected Majlis a mystical, religious significance that a Muslim people, who could not relate to the Western secularist ideal, needed:
Velayat-e Faqih was thus an attempt to provide a mythical foundation for the practical activities of parliament, and contain the modern within a traditional vision. But Khomeini had evolved the theory of Velayat-e Faqih in a madras ah in Najaf. What sounded good on paper, as it were, proved to be problematic when put into practice in Iran.
This became apparent as early as 1981, and the difficulty continued to exercise Khomeini for the rest of his life.
In 1981, the Majlis proposed some important land reforms, which would ensure a fairer distribution of resources. Khomeini sympathized with this move, which would be beneficial to the people, even though it contradicted the letter of the Shariah. He could also see that unless Iran was able to achieve this type of basic reform, it would remain feudal and agrarian, and any modernization would be superficial. But the Land Reform Bill ran into difficulties. According to the constitution, all legislation had to be passed by the Council of Guardians, who had the right to reject laws which they deemed un-Islamic. Many of the ulema on the Council had large land holdings and when they were presented with the bill, they exercised their right of veto, citing the Shariah laws to support their decision. Khomeini tried to reason with them. The clergy, he said, “should in no way interfere in matters for which they are not qualified.” This “would be an unforgivable sin, because it will lead to the nation’s mistrust of the clergy.” The clergy understood religion mdfiyh, but not modern economics; the Islamic republic must be a modern state, which required specialists to work within the field of their expertise.
But the deadlock continued. The Council of Guardians refused to budge on the issue, so Khomeini tried a more spiritual approach. In March 1981, he told a group of clerics: “One should not expect, without having been reformed himself, to attempt to reform another.” The clergy could not bring the people back to Islam if they were themselves crippled by selfishness and locked in futile power struggles. Every single one of the ulema must overcome this egotism that was impeding the Islamic development of the country.
The solution was to “reach a stage where you ... overlook yourself.”
“When there is no self to contend with,” Khomeini concluded, “there is no dispute, no quarrel.” This sprang directly from Khomeini’s practice of mystical irfan; as the seeker approaches God, he gradually divests himself of his selfish desires until he is able to behold the transforming vision of God.
But the dynamic of modern politics is very different from spiritual contemplation.
The ulema of the Council of Guardians remained deaf to Khomeini’s plea.
Politics usually attracts men and women with a heightened sense of self. Modern governmental institutions work by means of a balance of competing interests, not by this kind of self-effacement. When he had evolved his theory of Velayat-e Faqih, Khomeini had believed that the ulema on the Council of Guardians would assert the mystical, hidden (batin) values of the Unseen; instead, they seemed mired, like most ordinary mortals, in the materialism of the zahir.
To break the deadlock with the Council of Guardians, the energetic Speaker of the Majlis, Hojjat ol-Islam Hashemi Rafsanjani, urged Khomeini to use his authority as Supreme Faqih to get the Land Bill passed. The constitution gave the Faqih final say on all Islamic matters, and he could overrule the decision of the Council of Guardians. Khomeini could, Rafsanjani suggested, cite the Islamic principle of maslahah (“public necessity”), which allowed a jurist to legislate “secondary ordinances” about issues not directly provided for in the Koran and the Sunnah, if the welfare of the people demanded it.
But Khomeini did not wish to do this. He was beginning to realize that the position of the Supreme Faqih could weaken the authority of the institutions that the Islamic republic needed if it was to survive in the modern world. He was an old man. If he kept intervening and overturning the decisions of government institutions on the basis of his personal charisma, the Majlis and Council would lose their credibility and integrity, and the Islamic constitution would not survive his death. The impasse between the Council and the Majlis continued.
Khomeini tried to shame the ulema by pointing to the example of the Iranian children who were dying every day as martyrs in the war with Iraq.
These child martyrs show the moral dangers of translating a mystical insight into practical policy. From the moment war was declared, adolescents had crowded into the mosques begging to be sent to the front. Many of them came from the slums and shanty towns and had been radicalized during the Revolution. Afterward, they found their inevitably dull and grim lives an anticlimax. Some had joined the Foundation for the Downtrodden or worked for Construction Jihad, but this could not compare with the excitement of the battlefield. Iran was technically ill-equipped for the war; there had been a population explosion, and the youth formed the majority group in the country. The Foundation for the Downtrodden became the nucleus of an army of twenty million young people who were eager for action. The government passed an edict which allowed male children from the age of twelve to enlist at the front without their parents’ permission. They would become the wards of the Imam, and could be assured of a place in paradise in the event of their death. Tens of thousands of adolescents, wearing crimson headbands (the insignia of a martyr), poured into the war zone.
Some cleared minefields, running ahead of the troops and often getting blown to pieces. Others became suicide-bombers, attacking Iraqi tanks kamikaze style Special scribes were sent to the front to write their wills, many of which took the form of letters to Imam Khomeini, and spoke of the light he had brought into their lives and of the joy of fighting “alongside friends on the road to Paradise.”
These young people restored Khomeini’s faith in the Revolution; they were following the example of Imam Husain, dying in order to “witness” to the primacy of the Unseen. It was the highest form of asceticism, through which a Muslim transcends self and achieves union with God.
Unlike their elders, these children had ceased to be “slaves of nature,” wedded to selfinterest and the material world. They were helping Iran achieve “a situation which we cannot describe in any other way except to say that it is a divine country.” As long as men and women focused solely on the material and the mundane, they became less than human.
“Dying does not mean nothingness,” Khomeini declared, “it is life.”
Martyrdom had become a crucial part of Iran’s revolt against the rational pragmatism of the West and essential to the Greater Jihad for the nation’s soul. But despite Khomeini’s insistence that martyrdom was not “nothingness,” there was nihilism in this shocking dispatch of thousands of children to an early, violent death. It contravened fundamental human values, crucial to religious and secularists alike, about the sacred inviolability of life and our instinctive urge to protect our children at the cost of our own lives, if necessary. This cult of the child martyr was another fatal distortion of faith, to which fundamentalists in all three monotheistic traditions are prone.
It sprang, perhaps, from the terror that comes from battling against powerful enemies who seek our destruction.
But it also shows how perilous it can be to translate a mystical, mythical imperative into a pragmatic, military or political policy.
When Mulla Sadra had spoken of the mystical death to self, he had not envisaged the physical, voluntary death of thousands of young people.
Again, what works well in the spiritual domain can become destructive and even immoral if interpreted literally and practically in the mundane world. It was clearly proving very difficult to create a truly Islamic polity. In December 1987, Khomeini, now frail and ailing, addressed himself once again to the constitutional issue. This time, the Council of Guardians was blocking the labor laws, which, they claimed, contravened the Shariah.
Khomeini, who supported the populist Majlis against the more elitist and reactionary ulema on the Council, declared that the state had the power to replace fundamental Islamic systems if the welfare of the people demanded it. The Shariah was a preindustrial code, and needed to be radically adapted to the needs of the modern world, and Khomeini seemed to sense this. The state, he said, could substitute those fundamental Islamic systems, by any kind of social, economic, labor .. urban affairs, agricultural, or other system, and can make the services ... that are the monopoly of the state into an instrument for the implementation of general and comprehensive policies.
Khomeini had made a declaration of independence. The state must have a “monopoly” in such practical matters, and must be emancipated from the constraining laws of traditional religion. Two weeks later, he went further.
President Khameini had interpreted his remarks to mean that the Supreme Faqih had the right to interpret the law. Khomeini replied that this was not what he had meant. Government, he repeated, making no mention of his own rule as Faqih, did not merely have the power to interpret divine law, but was the vehicle of that law itself. Government was a crucial part of that divine rule which God had delegated to the Prophet, and had “priority over all peripheral divine orders.” It even took precedence over such “pillars” of Islam as prayer, the Ramadan fast, and the Hajj:
The government is empowered to unilaterally revoke any lawful agreement... if the agreement contravenes the interests of Islam and the country. It can prevent any matter, whether religious or secular, if it is against the interests of Islam.
For centuries, Shiis had insisted on a separation of spheres: the absolute mythos of religion and spirituality gave meaning to but was quite distinct from the pragmatic logos of politics. Now Khomeini seemed to be insisting that government must not be impeded in its utilitarian pursuit of the interests of the people and the greater good of Islam.
Some assumed that Khomeini was referring to his own government and thought that he was promoting his doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih to a status that was superior to the “pillars” of Islam. Western observers accused K-home ini of megalomania. But Speaker Rafsanjani noted that Khomeini had not mentioned the Faqih. To the consternation of Khomeini’s most radical supporters, he suggested that by “government” Khomeini had meant the Majlis. In an extraordinary sermon on January 12, 1988, Rafsanjani gave a new interpretation of Velayat-e Faqih. God had not revealed all the laws that were needed by the ummah to the Prophet in the Koran. He had delegated his authority to Muhammad, who had become his “vice-gerent” and allowed him to use his own initiative on these secondary matters. Now Imam Khomeini, the Supreme Faqih, had delegated his authority to the Majlis, which must also make up new laws, on its own initiative. Did this mean that Iran was embracing Western-style democracy? By no means. This right to legislate did not come from the people but from God, who had passed his authority to the Prophet, to the Imams, and now to Imam Khomeini, and it was they--not the people--who gave legitimacy to the rulings of the Majlis.
“So you see,” Rafsanjani argued, “democracy is present in a form better than the West,” because it was rooted in God. It was a “healthy style of government of the people, by the people, with the permission of Velayat-e Faqih.” Yet again, as had happened in the West, the needs of the modern state had propelled Iran toward a democratic polity, but this time it came in an Islamic package to which the people could relate and link with their own Shii traditions.
Rafsanjani had probably gone beyond his brief, but Khomeini seemed pleased. In the spring elections of 1988, he merely asked the people to support the Majlis, making no mention of the clergy. The people, who were longing for economic reconstruction, did not miss this implied rebuke, and the ulema lost half their seats. In the new Majlis, only 63 out of the 270 members had received a traditional madras ah education. Again, Khomeini seemed pleased with the results. He also gave the green light to the more pragmatic politicians who, in the winter of 1988, sought to amend the constitution.
In October, he insisted that the ulema must not be permitted to impede the progress of the country. The reconstruction program should be led by “experts, in particular, cabinet ministers, the appropriate Majlis committees, ... scientific and research centers, ... inventors, discoverers and committed specialists.” Two months later, he allowed a committee to convene to revise the constitution. The more radical Islamists, who saw any dilution of Velayat-e Faqih as a betrayal of the revolution, were dismayed, but the pragmatists seemed to be winning the day, with the Imam’s approval.
It was in this context of internal conflict that, on February 14, 1989, four months before his death, Khomeini issued his fat wa against the British Indian author Salman Rushdie. In his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie had created what many Muslims regarded as a blasphemous portrait of the Prophet Muhammad, which presented him as a lecher, a charlatan, and a tyrant, and--most dangerously--suggested that the Koran had been tainted by satanic influence. It was a novel that brilliantly expressed the giddy confusion of the postmodern world, where there are no boundaries, no certainties, and no clearly or easily denned identity. The passages that gave offense were the recorded dreams and fantasies of a deracinated Indian film star, who is suffering a breakdown and has interiorized the anti-Islamic prejudices of the West. The blasphemy was also an attempt to cancel the clinging relics of the past and to achieve an independent identity, free of old shibboleths.
But many Muslims experienced this portrait of Muhammad as profoundly wounding. It seemed a violation of something sacred to their own Muslim personae. Dr. Zaki Badawi, one of Britain’s most liberal Muslims, told The Guardian newspaper that Rushdie’s words were “far worse to Muslims than if he had raped one’s own daughter.” So internalized was the Prophet by the practices of Islam in every Muslim’s being, that the novel was “like a knife being dug into you or being raped yourself.” There were riots in Pakistan, and the novel was ceremonially burned in Bradford, England, where there was a large community of Muslims of Indian and Pakistani origin, who objected to the British blasphemy laws that punished only insults to Christianity, and were aware of widespread prejudice in England against Islam. On February 13, Khomeini saw the Pakistani police open fire on the demonstrators and concluded that the novel must be evil. His fat wa commanded Muslims all over the world “to put to death Salman Rushdie and his publishers, wherever they are found.”
At the Islamic Conference the following month, the fat wa was condemned by forty-four out of the forty-five member countries as un-Islamic.
It is not permissible in Islamic law to sentence an offender without trial, nor to apply Muslim law in a non-Muslim country. The fat wa was yet another distortion of Islam. Mulla Sadra, one of Khomeini’s chief spiritual mentors, had been adamantly opposed to any such inquisitorial violence and coercion.
He had insisted upon freedom of thought. Muslim outrage sprang, yet again, from a conviction that Islam had received a deadly blow; the years of suppression, denigration, and secularist attack had scarred Muslim sensibilities. The fat wa was an act of war, and was experienced as such by secularists and liberals in the West, who felt that their most sacred values had been violated. For them, humanity--not a supernatural God--was the measure of all things; men and women must have the freedom to fulfill their potential in their pursuit of artistic excellence. Muslims, for whom the sovereignty of God is the supreme value, could not accept this. The Rushdie affair was a clash of two irreconcilable orthodoxies; neither side could understand the viewpoint of the other. Different groups, living in the same country, were diametrically opposed to one another and in a state of potential war.
This polarization between religious and secularists became clear when Khomeini died in June 1989. In the West, Khomeini was regarded as the enemy, and people were bewildered to see the unfeigned grief of the Iranians at his funeral. The mob surged around his coffin with such passion that the corpse fell out; it was as though they wanted to keep the Imam with them forever. However, the Islamic Republic did not fall apart after his death.
Indeed, it showed signs of greater flexibility. Even though the fat wa had, like the Hostage Crisis, incurred the enmity of the West, Iran seemed to be moving closer to the Western spirit. The new constitution, which was passed on July 9, 1989, showed a marked move toward a more secular, pragmatic style of government. Mystical powers were no longer attributed to the Supreme Faqih, nor was he to be instated, as Khomeini had been, by popular acclaim. He had to be reasonably well-versed in Islamic law, but need no longer be one of the senior mujtahids. If there were several possible candidates, “political perspicacity” was to be the decisive quality of the new leader. The Council of Guardians retained its right of veto, but its power was qualified by the new Expediency Discernment Council, which would adjudicate all disputes with the Majlis. As a result of these changes, the Majlis was able to enact all the reforms that had been blocked by the Guardians.
On the day after Khomeini’s funeral, Ayatollah Khameini was proclaimed Faqih, and on July 28, 1989, Rafsanjani became the new elected president.
His cabinet excluded the radicals; a third of his ministers had been educated in the West, and they pushed for more Western investment and a more capitalist, diminished role for the government in economic matters. There would still be problems. The hard-liners continued to fight the pragmatists; the conservatives on the Council of Guardians would still manage to block reforms, and the institutional apparatus remains faulty. But the needs of the state seem to be pushing Iranians toward greater pluralism and to a secularization based on Shii rather than on Western tradition. The people are less hostile to modern values than before, because they are able to approach them in an Islamic milieu.
The shift in emphasis can be seen in the work of Abdolkarim Sorush, one of Iran’s leading intellectuals. Sorush had studied the history of science at London University and held important posts in Khomeini’s government after the Revolution. Today he is no longer part of the political establishment, but he strongly influences those in power. His Friday lectures are frequently broadcast, and he is one of the most prominent speakers in the mosques and universities. Sorush admires both Khomeini and Shariati, but goes beyond them. He has a more accurate view of the West, going so far as to say that by the end of the twentieth century, many Iranians had three identities:
pre-Islamic, Islamic, and Western, which they must try to reconcile.
Not everything Western was contaminating or toxic. But Sorush will not accept the more radical secularist ethos of the West. Scientific rationalism cannot, in his view, provide a viable alternative to religion. Human beings will always need a spirituality that takes them beyond the material. Iranians should learn to appreciate the values of modern science, but hold on to their own Shii traditions too. Islam must also change: fiyh must adapt to the modern industrial world, develop a philosophy of civil rights and an economic theory capable of holding its own in the twenty-first century. Sorush is also opposed to ulema rule, because “the cause of religion is too great to be entrusted only to the clergy.” Sorush is often harassed by the more conservative clerics, but his popularity suggests that the Islamic republic is moving toward a post revolutionary phase that will bring it closer to the West.
This seemed clear on May 23, 1997, when Hojjat ol-Islam Seyyed Khatami came to the presidency in a landslide victory, gaining 22 million out of a possible 30 million votes. He immediately made it clear that he wanted to achieve a more positive relationship with the Western world, and in September 1998, he dissociated his government from the fat wa against Salman Rushdie. This was later endorsed by the Faqih, Ayatollah Khameini.
Khatami still finds his reforms impeded by the Council of Guardians, but his election signaled the deep desire of a large segment of the population for greater pluralism, a gentler interpretation of Islamic law, economic protection for the “downtrodden,” and more progressive policies for women. (This became even more evident in the summer of 1999, when Iranian students came out onto the streets to demand more democracy and an Islamic government that is not impeded by reactionary ulema.) There is no retreat from Islam. Iranians still seem to want their polity to be contained within a Shii package, which seems to have made modern values more acceptable than when they were regarded as a foreign import. It could be that if a radical religious movement is allowed its head, works through its aggressions and resentment, it can learn to interact creatively with other traditions, eschew the violence of the more recent past, and make peace with former foes. Religion becomes most violent when suppressed.
This had become clear in Egypt in 1981, when the Western world was grieved to hear of the assassination of President Anwar Sadat by Sunni fundamentalists.
Sadat had been officiating on October 6 at the parade celebrating the achievements of the 1973 war against Israel. Suddenly, one of the trucks in the parade pulled out of line just in front of the presidential stand, and when Sadat saw First Lieutenant Khaled Islambouli jump out and run toward him, he stood up, assuming that the officer wanted to salute him. But instead there was a volley of machine-gun fire. Islambouli shot round after round into the body of Sadat, even after he had himself been wounded in the stomach, shouting, “Give me that dog, that infidel!” The attack lasted only fifty seconds, but seven people besides Sadat were killed, and twenty-eight others injured.
Westerners were shocked by the ferocity of the assault. They had liked Sadat. Unlike Khomeini, Sadat was a Muslim ruler they could understand.
He seemed devout without being a “fanatic”; Westerners admired his peace initiative with Israel and his Open Door policy. A bevy of American and European princes, politicians, and presidents attended Sadat’s funeral.
No Arab leaders came, however, and there were no crowds lining the streets.
On the night of Sadat’s death, the streets of Cairo were eerily quiet.
The Egyptian people did not weep for Sadat, nor did they mass, grief-stricken, around his coffin as the Iranians would later mob the corpse of Khomeini.
Once again, the modern West and the more traditional societies of the Middle East were poles apart and could not share each other’s vision of events.
As we have seen, there were a significant number of Egyptians who thought that Sadat’s rule had more in common with the jahiliyyah than with Islam. In 1980, on the Eid al-Adha, one of the holiest days in the Muslim year, the student members of the jamaat al-islamiyyah, who had been forbidden to hold their summer camp in Cairo, occupied the Saladin Mosque, denounced Camp David, and condemned Sadat as a “Tartar,” one of the Mongol rulers of the thirteenth century who had supposedly converted to Islam but were Muslim only in name. Other members of the suppressed jamaat had joined the network of secret cells, dedicated to violent jihad against the regime. Khaled Islambouli, who had studied at the University of Minya, was a member of this Jihad organization.