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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kim Ghattas
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February 3, 2021 - January 7, 2024
How could clerics who could barely manage the daily affairs of Najaf, the holiest city of Shiism, run a whole country?
The fire was sparked in 1977. It began with the death in June of Ali Shariati, the dangerous visionary ideologue of the revolution.
coined the term Red Shiism, one tinged with Marxism ready for sacrifice to attain social justice. It stood in opposition to Black Shiism, the quietist, ritualistic one who submitted to rulers and monarchs. By rediscovering an authentic Islam, he asserted, Iran could be a utopian society with a perfect leader, a philosopher king, as in Plato’s Republic. The similarity to Khomeini’s faqih was striking, except that Shariati did not believe clerics had any role to play in politics. Khomeini despised secular thinkers, but he let the militant fervor that Shariati had awakened serve his purposes.
There had been years of unrest in Iran, but the moment when the dam truly broke was in November 1977, when the shah allowed Khomeini’s relatives in Iran to mark the fortieth day of mourning for Mostafa.
That same month, Arab honor died too, or so it felt for millions across the region, who watched, incredulously, as Nasser’s successor, president Anwar Sadat, crossed enemy lines and traveled to Jerusalem to address the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Tears streamed down the faces of children as rage burned inside the hearts of men. How could Egypt break rank and betray the Arab and Palestinian cause? Peace talks would soon begin between Israel and Egypt—so who would wipe the shame from the forehead of Arab men now?
In the fall of 1977, with the civil war in Lebanon well into its third year, Husseini bought a state-of-the-art AKAI stereo system with a double cassette tape deck and vinyl player.
Before the Internet, before Twitter, there were the cassette tape and the fax machine. Husseini and Imam Sadr got to work.
While the shah was focused on controlling the message on television, radio, and in the newspapers, the underground business of revolutionary tapes was mobilizing the masses and chipping away at the facade of a king in control.
The meeting, organized by the anti-Western Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, was supposed to help them settle their differences.
The turning point in the heat of a summer of unrest had been an arson attack on the Rex Cinema in the city of Abadan, killing 420 people on August 19. The date of the attack seemed highly symbolic: the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1953 coup against Mossadegh.
was all part of a concerted plan to sow panic in Iran and assert new rules of religious conservatism. But the Rex Cinema arson stood out in its enormity, described as “a holocaust” by one newspaper. In the fervor of anti-shah sentiment, a twisted logic set in: the ruling regime would burn down a cinema to damn the opposition. Thousands of Iranians had stayed on the sidelines for various reasons: they had not suffered in jails or been exiled, they were apolitical, they disliked the clergy. But in that instant of rumormongering, many came to believe that the shah could, and would, dispose of
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few weeks later, in Tehran, the ranks of protesters swelled to almost half a million. September 8, 1978, Black Friday, was another dramatic turning point. Thousands converged on Jaleh Square, chanting Marg bar shah, Death to the shah. The crowd of mostly men was a mix of Khomeini supporters, students, and leftists. Among them, behind the first lines of women and young people, there were guerrilla fighters, many trained in Lebanon by the Palestinians. By 9:21 a.m. the first shots rang out. The result was a gun battle, a stampede, and—according to the official toll—eighty-six civilian deaths.
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In Iraq, Saddam had had enough of Khomeini. The Iranian cleric was beginning to stir hope in the hearts of people across the region, Sunni and Shia alike, who resented their kings or their dictators and wished for a more just rule. Some
Worryingly for Saddam, some Shia clerics were now beginning to use more sectarian language, and Khomeini’s Iraqi adepts were agitating against the state. Saddam put enough restrictions on Khomeini that the Iranian cleric finally opted to leave. He tried to go to Kuwait but was refused entry. Traveling with Khomeini were his son Ahmad, the LMI operative Yazdi, and two other aides. In France, Ghotbzadeh, the flamboyant revolutionary, and Banisadr, the Parisian intellectual, quickly arranged for three-month visas after convincing Khomeini that Paris would afford two key advantages: freedom to
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In Najaf, Khomeini had been a tired exile with no clear path home. Before his French sojourn, Khomeini’s name had barely appeared in the international media. In Neauphle-le-Château, over the course of a four-month stay, he would give 132 interviews and become the face of the revolution, recognized throughout the world. The seventy-six-year-old cleric was invigorated.
Khomeini had been admonished by Banisadr after his first press interview, during which he had talked at length in Persian to a French reporter about his plans to turn Iran into a Muslim theocracy. Banisadr took liberties with the translation to polish the message, and Khomeini never again discussed the wilayat al-faqih in public.
There was a third crucial element: France’s leftist intellectuals. Hugely influential in shaping public opinion, they were antiestablishment, antipower, and anti-imperial.
early as 1964, Banisadr had enlisted Sartre to preside on a committee to raise awareness about Iranians in the shah’s jails. Sartre had once declared: “I have no religion, but if I had to pick one it would be Shariati.”
October 1978, while Khomeini was in Neauphle-le-Château, the philosopher Michel Foucault traveled to Iran and wrote long dispatches in which he described the calls for an Islamic government as a utopian, romantic ideal, while chiding the Christian West for having abandoned what he described as political spirituality. Meanwhile, the CIA was apparently unaware of Khomeini’s thesis about Islamic government and was more obsessed with a possible communist takeover of Iran.
The Saudis also seemed to know little about Khomeini and were worried about a “Soviet onslaught,” as some Saudi newspapers had described it.
Meanwhile, Iran was in chaos. Basic services were collapsing, and people close to the regime were running for the exits, while hundreds of Iranian dissidents were returning to participate in the revolution: communists, leftists, religious extremists.
January 16, 1979, the shah and the queen left their residence at the Niavaran palace complex in northern Tehran and flew west on two helicopters to the nearby Mehrabad airport.
Khomeini repeated the sentiment. “Hichi ehasasi nadaram.” I don’t feel a thing.
But the real meaning of hichi would not stay hidden long—there were too many people watching those few seconds once ABC’s tape was beamed to America and the rest of the world. The ayatollah’s words were a portent, parsed and understood differently by supporters and foes, in the moment, and in hindsight.
Khomeini had no attachment to the grandeur of the Persian empire, or the cultural and intellectual richness of its history, only to his own sense of importance.
Confident of his relationship with God, Khomeini had seemingly no connection to the worldly concept of nation—he looked beyond countries and borders to the Muslim nation, the ummah.
1969 Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla by the Brazilian Marxist revolutionary Carlos Marighella,
on building a people’s army and meeting with Iranian volunteers from around the world to teach them the art of revolution from the chapters in his books: firing groups, sabotage, guerrilla security, war of nerves. The volunteers were then sent to Lebanon for quick military training.
Yazdi, Ghotbzadeh, Mohsen … the LMI were all left behind. Banisadr, the man who had first identified Khomeini as the conduit to the masses, would later remark, “It seemed that the duty of the intellectuals was to bring Khomeini to Tehran and hand him over to the mollahs.”
Deep inside, the modernist revolutionaries knew the risks of coming back in haste to a country they had themselves left years before, without first consolidating their power.
In Iran, there are high-ranking clerics, his friends, and they will take him out of our hands. Whatever we have done so far will be ruined by them.” Khomeini understood that dynamic too, which is why he wanted to go home. He wanted to seize the moment and seize the revolution.
Millions of supporters hoped he would lead Iran to justice, freedom, and a better future. But Khomeini’s devotion was to the past, to re-creating an Islamic society fashioned after the one in the days of the prophet.
After a few days of insurgency and street battles, now reinforced by those who had been trained in Lebanon and in Neauphle-le-Château, with mutiny in barracks and tanks on the move in cities across the country, the army declared its neutrality on February 11, 1979. Bakhtiar had nothing left to fight with. He resigned and slipped out of the country. The Pahlavi dynasty had been defeated. The revolution was victorious. Revenge started almost immediately.
continue for a decade, beyond his own tenure. He would become known as the “hanging judge,” and would later write, “I killed over 500 criminals close to the royal family, hundreds of rebels of Kurdistan, Gonbad and Khuzestan regions, and many drug smugglers … I feel no regret or guilt over the executions. Yet I think I killed little. There were many more who deserved to be killed but I could not get my hands on them.” His biggest regret? That the Pahlavis had gotten away.
It would take years for some of the early revolutionaries to accept the truth: they had delivered their nation to a theocrat, an irredeemable monster.
One man purely rejoiced, even before the fall of Bakhtiar, boasting he had made the right bet from the very start: PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, who was close to the Beheshti camp. He felt that this was his revolution as much as it was Khomeini’s, and he was eager to claim credit. After all, Palestinians had helped train the men who had brought an end to 2,500 years of Iranian monarchy.
But Arafat was delighted to land in Tehran at six in the evening on that Saturday, the first foreign leader to visit Iran after the revolution.
In Beirut, there was celebratory gunfire in parts of the city, and thousands rallied to cheer the achievement. Socialist leftists, pro-Syrian and Palestinian leaders, all said the same: this was a triumph for their cause and for Arab unity over Israel and the United States. THE SHAH IS GONE. TOMORROW SADAT, read one banner.
While Arafat took a victory lap in Tehran, the Egyptians were making headlines with their negotiations with the Israelis at Camp David. The juxtaposition of those news stories on front pages made Arafat look like the hero and the Egyptians like sellouts.
Khomeini’s son Ahmad went everywhere with the guest of honor and declared: “The victory of the people of Iran did not end with the defeat of the shah. Our hope is to raise the flags of Iran and of Palestine on the hills of Jerusalem.”
The fifteen hundred Israeli citizens working in the country had been evacuated before the shah had even left the country. Thousands of Iranian Jews had been airlifted
Yazdi had come up with the idea of holding al-Quds Day, Jerusalem Day, every year on the last Friday of the fasting month of Ramadan. The first would be in a few months, during the long hot days of August. Khomeini would take credit for what served him, including the idea of this new ritual marking Iran’s calendar.
Khomeini wanted to control the Palestinian narrative and pressed Arafat to label his own movement an Islamic resistance. Although one man was Shia and the other Sunni, this was not an obstacle, as those words rarely featured in the politics of that era. The tension that was setting in was between nationalism and religion, between secular activism and religious fundamentalism. And Arafat, just as cunning and unscrupulous as the ayatollah, didn’t want to be owned; he wanted to lead. He would never adopt the name of Islamic resistance.
Some of those who would come to oppose Arafat’s leadership would be Palestinian Islamists, like the Hamas movement, and they would look to Iran for support.
The shah had initially warned that the partition of Palestine would lead to conflicts for generations, but in 1950 he recognized the new state and maintained ties with Israel throughout his reign. Iranian Jews were the oldest Jewish community in the region, dating back to the days of Esther, the Jewish queen married to a Persian king, who had thwarted the massacre of her people, a story at the heart of the festival of Purim.
The point was not to reject everything from the West, but to find Iranian answers to the Western machine rather than simply submitting to it in an exercise of self-loathing. Persian and Shia culture were deeply intertwined with Western culture; religious seminaries taught ancient Greek and philosophy, Iranians abroad influenced as much as they were influenced by the culture they encountered.
At its core, the Brotherhood was a missionary, revivalist movement, similar to the Fedayeen. One was Sunni, the other Shia, but they had much in common ideologically.
Afterward, Safavi traveled to Cairo, where Qutb hosted him for a week. The Iranian was disappointed by the reception. No one in official circles would meet him. He thought he had come to a country that was ruled by Islam, where the Muslim Brotherhood was the dominant force. Instead, he had found a conservative but secular country with music and theater, where women spoke back and even a sheikh had ridiculed him for turning his face away when speaking with a woman. Still,
The connection between the Brotherhood and the Fedayeen outlived Safavi. To develop his theory and plans for an Islamic state, Khomeini borrowed heavily from Qutb
When the Persian shah Ismail I had founded the Safavid empire and forced his subjects to convert to Shiism in the fifteenth century, the decision had been mostly tactical. The shah belonged to a small messianic Sufi Shia order, which had started out as Sunni. As he conquered Ottoman territory and solidified his empire, the Safavid ruler sought to rally his subjects around a distinct identity, sharpening the front line with the enemy.
