A Holy Insurrection of the Masses, or More National Emulation?
In the 1970s, as the Shah intensified his Westernizing reforms with the help of a repressive security apparatus, and retreated further into his bubble of pro-monarchist elites and Western admirers, Shariati became his iconic opposition in Iran. Shariati’s biggest supporters were among Iran’s nascent intelligentsia comprised of university students, intellectuals, urban classes of workers and migrants. But, echoing Rousseau’s distrust of intellectuals, Shariati was careful to confine the intelligentsia, the critical conscience of the society, to the task of initiating a ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Reformation’. There was no need for a technocratic and intellectual vanguard. It was the people who would bring about revolution.
So they did in 1978, a year after Shariati died, under a leader he might have condemned as a very model of clerical despotism and arbitrary vanguardism. Born in a small town in 1902, Khomeini was educated as a cleric and philosopher. He came to prominence in 1963 at the head of a vigorous opposition to the Shah of Iran’s programme of modernization called the ‘White Revolution’, which included the privatization of state-owned enterprises, enfranchisement of women and mass literacy. He spent most of the next decade and a half in exile while Iranian youth absorbed the message of Al-e-Ahmad and Shariati. (Iran’s current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was present at one of their rare joint meetings in Mashhad back in 1969.)
Khomeini censured laymen interpreting Islamic scripture. He thought that Sayyid Qutb was an impostor who ‘could interpret only a certain aspect of the Quran, and that much only imperfectly’. He would have raged against such a figure as Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American Salafi ideologue, who, despite lacking all formal Islamic training, would build a large base of followers in Europe and America with his internet disquisitions on the Quran and Hadith. But he was careful not to criticize his intellectual predecessors in Iran. In fact, he borrowed from Shariati and Al-e-Ahmad in forging his amalgam of revolutionary discourse and Islam:
Colonialism has partitioned our homeland and has turned the Moslems into separate peoples … The only means that we possess to unite the Moslem nation, to liberate its lands from the grip of the colonialists and to topple the agent governments of colonialism is to seek to establish our Islamic government. The efforts of this government will be crowned with success when we become able to destroy the heads of treason, the idols, the human images and the false gods who disseminate injustice and corruption on earth.
Khomeini railed against the whole notion of appropriative mimicry: ‘As soon as someone goes somewhere or invents something, we should not hurry to abandon our religion and its laws, which regulate the life of man and provide for his well-being in this world and the hereafter.’ In 1978 Khomeini returned from exile in France to assume the leadership of a massive popular revolt against the Shah.
The clergy’s influence had grown and grown in preceding years; the Iranian masses, uprooted from their rural homes and crowded into south Tehran’s slums, gravitated to authoritative figures in their radically new conditions of uncertainty. The Shah’s brutal state had exterminated or silenced many secular and left-wing opponents of the regime. In this vacuum, Khomeini cemented the clergy’s hold. Khomeinism also initially attracted secular intellectuals, the rushanfekran, even though its primary social base was constituted by clerics, their bazaari allies and the urban poor.
As in the original revolution of the modern era (the French), popular sovereignty in Iran turned out to be as ruthlessly absolute as royal sovereignty. ‘We must smother,’ Robespierre had said, ‘the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with them.’ Soon after assuming power, Khomeini inaugurated his own post-revolutionary reign of terror, sentencing thousands of enemies of the Islamic Republic to death. These were held guilty of mofsed fel-arz (spreading corruption on earth) or for being taghuti (idol-worshippers) and monafeqin (hypocrites). Khomeini himself coined much of the new language of retribution against members of the venal ancien régime.
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One of his typical victims was Amir Abbas Hoveida, the prime minister of Iran until 1977. Born into an aristocratic family, and educated predominantly in French, Hoveida was a francophile connoisseur of poetry and art, whom the Shah himself arrested just before his downfall in a failed attempt to distance his regime from Westernized Iranians. Khomeini, however, was determined to strike a deeper blow.
Sending Hoveida to the gallows, he stopped the Shah’s nuclear programme, and also mothballed his first-rate collection of modern art. He assured fellow revolutionaries worried about rising inflation that ‘Iran’s Islamic Revolution was not about the price of melons.’ This vigorous contempt for the religion of the modern age – economic growth and material improvement – was part of Khomeini’s Rousseauian nostalgia for a lost community of virtue. As he put it:
For the solution of social problems and the relief of human misery require foundation in faith and morals; merely acquiring material power and wealth, conquering nature and space, have no effect in this regard. They must be supplemented by and balanced with, the faith, the conviction, and the morality of Islam, in order to truly serve humanity, instead of endangering it.
If the emphasis on morality and scorn for material success is reminiscent of Rousseau, the argument for religion reminds one of Robespierre in his last phase as well as such Catholic reactionaries as Joseph de Maistre and Vicomte de Bonald. Khomeini’s emphatic rejection of human pretension and appeals to transcendental authority led Foucault to see a form of ‘spiritual politics’ emerging in Iran. In his view this politics was emphatically not shaped by an abstract, calculating and incarcerating reason, but a ‘groundswell with no vanguard and no party’.