Ayatollah Khomeini Quotes

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…

It is difficult for the ordinary voter to come to grips with the notion that a truly evil man, a truthless monster with the brains of a king rat and the soul of a cockroach, is about to be sworn in as the president of the United States for the next four years. . . . And he will bring his gang in with him, a mean network of lawyers and salesmen and pimps who will loot the national treasury, warp the laws, mock the rules and stay awake 22 hours a day looking for at least one reason to declare war, officially, on some hapless tribe in the Sahara or heathen fanatic like the Ayatollah Khomeini.

While I would champion any campaign to support Muslim women who do not wish to cover. I would now also protest vigorously for the right of a woman to wear that covering, if it is what she wants and believes in. Ayatollah Khomeini and Jacques Chirac have much more in common than either of them would care to acknowledge. Each tried to solve overarching social problems by imposing his will on the bodies of women.

Other ayatollahs considered the female voice arousing and barred women from speaking in mixed gatherings unless they first put a stone in their mouths to distort the sound. Khomeini,

As he defended the book one evening in the early 1980s at the Carnegie Endowment in New York, I knew that some of what he said was true enough, just as some of it was arguably less so. (Edward incautiously dismissed 'speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings or sabotage commercial airliners' as the feverish product of 'highly exaggerated stereotypes.') Covering Islam took as its point of departure the Iranian revolution, which by then had been fully counter-revolutionized by the forces of the Ayatollah. Yes, it was true that the Western press—which was one half of the pun about 'covering'—had been naïve if not worse about the Pahlavi regime. Yes, it was true that few Middle East 'analysts' had had any concept of the latent power of Shi'ism to create mass mobilization. Yes, it was true that almost every stage of the Iranian drama had come as a complete surprise to the media. But wasn't it also the case that Iranian society was now disappearing into a void of retrogressive piety that had levied war against Iranian Kurdistan and used medieval weaponry such as stoning and amputation against its internal critics, or even against those like unveiled women whose very existence constituted an offense?

Perempuan adalah makhluk yang indah. Dia memiliki kemampuan yang kuat [dan] menakjubkan.

Two-year-old Christine Hanson and four-year-old Juliana McCourt would never visit Disneyland. Neither they nor David Gamboa-Brandhorst would know first days of school, first loves, or any other milestone, from triumph to heartbreak, of a full life. Andrea LeBlanc would never again travel the world with her gregarious, pacifist husband, Bob. Julie Sweeney wouldn’t bear children, grow old, and feel safe with her confident warrior husband, Brian. Delayed passengers wouldn’t hear recitals of Forrest Gump dialogue from Captain Victor Saracini. First Officer Michael Horrocks’s daughter wouldn’t rise from bed with the promise that her daddy loved her to the moon. Ace Bailey and Mark Bavis would never again share their gifts with young hockey players or with their own families. Retired nurse Touri Bolourchi, who’d fled Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini, wouldn’t see her grandsons grow up as Americans.

Here are some people who have written books, telling what they did and why they did those things: John Dean. Henry Kissinger. Adolf Hitler. Caryl Chessman. Jeb Magruder. Napoleon. Talleyrand. Disraeli. Robert Zimmerman, also known as Bob Dylan. Locke. Charlton Heston. Errol Flynn. The Ayatollah Khomeini. Gandhi. Charles Olson. Charles Colson. A Victorian Gentleman. Dr. X. Most people also believe that God has written a Book, or Books, telling what He did and why—at least to a degree—He did those things, and since most of these people also believe that humans were made in the image of God, then He also may be regarded as a person… or, more properly, as a Person. Here are some people who have not written books, telling what they did… and what they saw: The man who buried Hitler. The man who performed the autopsy on John Wilkes Booth. The man who embalmed Elvis Presley. The man who embalmed—badly, most undertakers say—Pope John XXIII. The twoscore undertakers who cleaned up Jonestown, carrying body bags, spearing paper cups with those spikes custodians carry in city parks, waving away the flies.

During the hostage crisis we sent a number of secret delegations into Iran, which was fairly easy to do because the Iranian leaders wanted to maintain as normal an environment as possible and relished all the favorable publicity that resulted from visits by foreign news media. Even the Ayatollah Khomeini gave personal interviews to American journalists. On one occasion we had a few CIA agents in Tehran who were traveling with false German passports, since many Iranian leaders had been educated in Germany. As our people were leaving, one of them had his credentials checked and was waved past by the customs officials. He was called back, however, and the official said, “Something is wrong with your passport. I’ve been here more than twenty years and this is the first time I’ve seen a German document that used a middle initial instead of a full name. Your name is given as Josef H. Schmidt and I don’t understand it.” The quick-thinking agent said, “Well, when I was born my given middle name was Hitler, and I have received special permission not to use it.” The official smiled, nodded, and approved his departure.

Here are some people who have written books, telling what they did and why they did those things: John Dean. Henry Kissinger. Adolf Hitler. Caryl Chessman. Jeb Magruder. Napoleon. Talleyrand. Disraeli. Robert Zimmerman, also known as Bob Dylan. Locke. Charlton Heston. Errol Flynn. The Ayatollah Khomeini. Gandhi. Charles Olson. Charles Colson. A Victorian Gentleman. Dr. X. Most people also believe that God has written a Book, or Books, telling what He did and why—at least to a degree—He did those things, and since most of these people also believe that humans were made in the image of God, then He also may be regarded as a person… or, more properly, as a Person. Here are some people who have not written books, telling what they did… and what they saw: The man who buried Hitler. The man who performed the autopsy on John Wilkes Booth. The man who embalmed Elvis Presley. The man who embalmed—badly, most undertakers say—Pope John XXIII. The twoscore undertakers who cleaned up Jonestown, carrying body bags, spearing paper cups with those spikes custodians carry in city parks, waving away the flies. The man who cremated William Holden. The man who encased the body of Alexander the Great in gold so it would not rot. The men who mummified the Pharaohs. Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret.

Here are some people who have written books, telling what they did and why they did those things: John Dean. Henry Kissinger. Adolph Hitler. Caryl Chessman. Jeb Magruder. Napoleon. Talleyrand. Disraeli. Robert Zimmerman, also known as Bob Dylan. Locke. Charlton Heston. Errol Flynn. The Ayatollah Khomeini. Gandhi. Charles Olson. Charles Colson. A Victorian Gentleman. Dr. X. Most people also believe that God has written a Book, or Books, telling what He did and why—at least to a degree—He did those things, and since most of these people also believe that humans were made in the image of God, then He also may be regarded as a person . . . or, more properly, as a Person. Here are some people who have not written books, telling what they did . . . and what they saw: The man who buried Hitler. The man who performed the autopsy on John Wilkes Booth. The man who embalmed Elvis Presley. The man who embalmed—badly, most undertakers say—Pope John XXIII. The twoscore undertakers who cleaned up Jonestown, carrying body bags, spearing paper cups with those spikes custodians carry in city parks, waving away the flies. The man who cremated William Holden. The man who encased the body of Alexander the Great in gold so it would not rot. The men who mummified the Pharaohs. Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret.

quoted from a statement Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—the leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran—had said just the day before. “. . . it is incumbent upon students to forcefully expand their attacks against America and Israel, so that America will be forced to return the criminal, deposed Shah.” Then she read a lengthy statement prepared by the students. Several lines jumped out at Charlie. “We Muslim students, followers of Imam Khomeini, have occupied the espionage embassy of America in protest against the ploys of the imperialists and the Zionists. We announce our protest to the world, a protest against America for granting asylum and employing the criminal Shah while it has on its hands the blood of tens of thousands of women and men in this country. . . .

I quickly learned that the congressional delegation from Alaska was deeply committed to the oil industry and other commercial interests, and senatorial courtesy prevented other members from disputing with Senators Ted Stevens (Republican) and Mike Gravel (Democrat) over a matter involving their home state. Former Idaho governor Cecil Andrus, my secretary of interior, and I began to study the history of the controversy and maps of the disputed areas, and I flew over some of them a few times. Environmental groups and most indigenous natives were my allies, but professional hunters, loggers, fishers, and the Chambers of Commerce were aligned with the oil companies. All the odds were against us until Cecil discovered an ancient law, the Antiquities Act of 1906, which permitted a president to set aside an area for “the protection of objects of historic and scientific interest,” such as Indian burial grounds, artifacts, or perhaps an ancient church building or the site of a famous battle. We decided to use this authority to set aside for preservation large areas of Alaska as national monuments, and eventually we had included more than 56 million acres (larger than the state of Minnesota). This gave me the bargaining chip I needed, and I was able to prevail in the subsequent debates. My efforts were extremely unpopular in Alaska, and I had to have extra security on my visits. I remember that there was a state fair where people threw baseballs at two targets to plunge a clown into a tank of water. My face was on one target and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s on the other, and few people threw at the Ayatollah’s.

With Iran’s revolution, an Islamist movement dedicated to overthrowing the Westphalian system gained control over a modern state and asserted its “Westphalian” rights and privileges—taking up its seat at the United Nations, conducting its trade, and operating its diplomatic apparatus. Iran’s clerical regime thus placed itself at the intersection of two world orders, arrogating the formal protections of the Westphalian system even while repeatedly proclaiming that it did not believe in it, would not be bound by it, and intended ultimately to replace it. This duality has been ingrained in Iran’s governing doctrine. Iran styles itself as “the Islamic Republic,” implying an entity whose authority transcends territorial demarcations, and the Ayatollah heading the Iranian power structure (first Khomeini, then his successor, Ali Khamenei) is conceived of not simply as an Iranian political figure but as a global authority—“the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution” and “the Leader of the Islamic Ummah and Oppressed People.” The Iranian constitution proclaims the goal of the unification of all Muslims as a national obligation: In accordance with the sacred verse of the Qur’an (“This your community is a single community, and I am your Lord, so worship Me” [21:92]), all Muslims form a single nation, and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has the duty of formulating its general policies with a view to cultivating the friendship and unity of all Muslim peoples, and it must constantly strive to bring about the political, economic, and cultural unity of the Islamic world.

The ultimate irony of the influence of communism was that those who opposed it so ferociously – first the Ba‘th Party and then the Islamists – borrowed heavily from its ideological framework and organisational model. (For the influence of Marxism on the ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini, see Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism, London, I. B. Tauris, 1993.) Khomeini, beyond his denunciations of ‘world-devouring’ jahankhor imperialism, also celebrated 1 May as the Festival of the Islamic Worker. He cited a hadith (a saying of the Prophet) to the effect that the sweat of the worker meant more in the eyes of Allah than the prayers of the faithful.

The war against jihadism has been chronically misunderstood because of our failure to acknowledge the religious motives of Muslim jihadists. This failure began in 1979 with the Iranian revolution. Trapped in our Western secularist paradigms, we interpreted the uprising against the Shah as an anti-colonial revolt against a “brutal” autocrat propped up by the West for its own exploitative economic and geostrategic purposes. The aim of the revolution, the argument went, was to create a government more sympathetic to national sovereignty and Western pluralistic government. However, it soon became clear with the political triumph of the Ayatollah Khomeini that the revolution was in the main a religious one, inspired in part by anger at the Shah’s secularization, modernization, and liberalization policies. As Khomeini said in 1962, the Shah’s regime was “fundamentally opposed to Islam itself and the existence of a religious class.

It is impossible to make predictions—to say if the Islamic Republic will collapse or if it will survive in its current form. Certainly its current form isn’t the one it took in the immediate wake of the revolution. Although Khamenei has been committed to safeguarding the revolution, he has also created a new theocracy—one that relies on the greed of the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij instead of the loyalty of its founding fathers. Khamenei has banished nearly all the clerics who held power when Ayatollah Khomeini was alive. Despite falling oil prices and economic sanctions, Khamenei had enough petro-dollar to satisfy his military base of support: the Guards and the Basij. The oil revenue has been the biggest deterrent to democracy in Iran, even though the windfall has transformed the fabric of Iranian society. The Iranian middle class, more than two-thirds of the population, relies on the revenue instead of contributing to economic growth, and thus has been less likely to fulfill a historic mission to create institutional reform. It has been incapable of placing “demands on Iranian leadership for political reform because of its small role in producing wealth, as in other developing countries. The regime is still an autocracy, to be sure, but democracy has been spreading at the grassroots level, even among members of the Basij and the children of Iran’s rulers. The desire for moderation goes beyond a special class. As I am writing these lines, Khamenei’s followers are shifting alliances and building new coalitions. Civil society, despite the repression it has long endured, has turned into a dynamic force. Khamenei still has the final word in Iranian politics, but the country’s political culture is not monolithic. Like Ayatollah Khomeini, who claimed he had to drink the cup of poison in order to end the war with Iraq, Khamenei has been forced to compromise. The fact that he signed off on Rohani’s historic effort to improve ties with the United States signals that the regime is moving in a different direction, and that further compromises are possible.

Perhaps nowhere was this process of blaming the West more prevalent than in Iran during the early stages of the revolution. “All the problems of Iran”, Khomeini elaborated, are “the work of America”. Ayatollah Sayyed Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini, Collection of Speeches, Position Statements, 1977, edited by Joint Publications Research Service, Arlington 1979, p. 3.

Senators, MPs, diplomats and journalists belatedly realized that they needed to know about the new menace. They had looked the other way because they worried the demented Ayatollah Khomeini would invade Iraq and be in a position to move into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and control most of the world’s oil. Now the demented Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and could move into Saudi Arabia and control most of the world’s oil.

(“We are not against cinema,” Ayatollah Khomeini had declared as his henchmen set fire to the movie houses, “we are against prostitution!”)

Four months before the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran in February 1979, the Catholic Church dealt with the "malaise" by elevating a 58-year-old Pole by the name of Karol Wojtyla to the chair of Peter. According to Wojtyla, the "malaise" of 1979 derived from "the dehumanizing tendencies of modern culture — a threat he saw as much in the rampant modernizing capitalism of the West as in the atheistic materialism of the East.

This was also the year in which the Ayatollah Khomeini died, and the year in which his successor approved birth control. The results of that change have proven disastrous for Iran, which has seen its birth rate go from 3.4 in the period immediately following the revolution to 1.7, which is to say below replacement level, which is where it stands today. If this demographic collapse continues, Iran will cease to exist as a nation after 2,500 years of history.

Mubarak had been a resolute ally, key to peace with Israel and to the 1991 Gulf War coalition (praised by George H. W. Bush as “my wise friend”), and then in the campaign against Al Qaeda. Barack Obama’s senior advisers—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Vice President Joe Biden—urged caution in joining the rush to push Mubarak out. Gates was on the National Security Council in 1979 when, in his view, the United States had pulled the rug out from under the shah, with the expectation that a democratic revolution would follow. The result instead was the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini, U.S. diplomats held hostage for 444 days, and the implacably hostile Islamic Republic.

One of the results of the Islamic Revolution spreading outside Iran was the creation of Hezbollah, a Shiite terrorist organization in Lebanon. The organization’s name declares its dedication and commitment to Islam. The word Hezbollah is derived from the Arabic Hizb Allah, which means “party or fellowship of Allah.”2 This phrase comes from a Quranic verse (Surah al-Ma’idah, 5:56), which appears in red letters at the top of Hezbollah’s yellow-and-green flag: “The fellowship of Allah that must certainly triumph.”3 At its formation in 1982, Hezbollah was inspired by the ideology behind the Iranian Revolution and its principal leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.4 It adheres to Khomeini’s vision of an Islamic cleric-ruled state,5 vilayat-e-faqih, and thus views Iran as the ultimate example of the successful implementation of that vision. The group reveres Khomeini as the “divinely inspired ruler” of the community of true Muslim believers and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s current Supreme Leader, as the modern “Legal Guardian of Muslims.”6 Hezbollah believes that Allah has established Iran as the “nucleus of the world’s central Islamic state.”7

The West found an excuse for every incident and boxed and labeled it under the context of the country in which it took place. They attributed Iran’s conflict and the victory of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini to an inner conflict within Iran. They considered the Lebanese war a civil war among factions. They considered the overall Arab-Israeli conflict a Palestinian-versus-Israeli conflict over land. Yet in all these conflicts radical Islam was the driving force or lingered just under the surface.

It is obvious that every dogmatic faith produces around itself a secondary layer of doubt, denial and outright skepticism — about rival faiths. The most bigoted Bible Fundamentalist, for instance, is capable of quite corrosive cynicism about the miracles of Buddha. The most fanatic Marxist is also a cynic, about the infallibility of the Pope. The Ayatollah Khomeini believes every word of the Koran, he says — but he is downright atheistic about the pronouncements of the U.S. State Department. This is universal: every faith, every acceptance, creates a necessary doubt, or rejection, of things outside the faith. Every Idol is jealous of other Idols.

The irony is that the Iran of the fundamentalist ayatollahs owes its ultimate birth pang to cities of sin and freedom: Beirut, capital of Arabic modernity, once known as the Paris of the Middle East; and Paris, birthplace of the Age of Enlightenment. If not for the permissive freedoms in both, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—a patient man with a cunning mind—might have died forgotten in a two-story mudbrick house down a narrow cul-de-sac in the holy city of Najaf, in Iraq.

Much of the revulsion and anger the Iranian people had felt towards the Shah’s reign was fuelled by the brutal tactics of his secret police force, SAVAK – comparable to East Germany’s Stasi – who routinely tortured and executed his opponents. Political dissidents, trade unionists and communists were targeted and demonstrators protesting against the Shah’s lavish lifestyle were killed in the streets. But what had really changed with the revolution? Khomeini had whipped up a storm with all the rhetoric of a people’s revolution, but as soon as power was seized and the Islamic Republic created, he quickly set about creating his very own brutal security services – the all-powerful Revolutionary Guards, and beneath them, the shadowy Basij, who were regarded as thuggish mercenaries doing the bidding of the ayatollahs. For the people of Iran, a new era of fear and intimidation had replaced the previous one, just with new uniforms, no neckties and more facial hair.

as Khomeini and Khamenei appeared again at the exit, I wondered how long it would take for me to get used to these two men seemingly monitoring my every move. I had travelled in many other countries where leaders ensured they loomed large in daily life, but I had never witnessed a cult of personality employed on this scale. I found the ayatollahs’ constant presence intimidating and sinister, but I guessed that soon they would meld into the background and merely become part of the everyday fabric of life in Iran. This, of course, was the desired effect and, in its way, an even more chilling thought.

Ibrahim found the passage and began to read it. “‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, “Behold, I am going to break the bow of Elam, the finest of their might. I will bring upon Elam the four winds from the four ends of heaven, and will scatter them to all these winds; and there will be no nation to which the outcasts of Elam will not go. So I will shatter Elam before their enemies and before those who seek their lives; and I will bring calamity upon them, even My fierce anger,” declares the Lord, “and I will send out the sword after them until I have consumed them. Then I will set My throne in Elam and destroy out of it king and princes,” declares the Lord. “But it will come about in the last days that I will restore the fortunes of Elam,” declares the Lord.’” “Elam is Iran?” Ali asked. “Yes,” said Birjandi, still leaning back, eyes still closed. “Elam is one of the ancient names of Iran, just like Persia. The passage tells us that in the last days, God will scatter the people of Iran all over the earth. For many centuries, this seemed impossible because we Persians are such a proud and nationalistic people. But as incredible as it was, this prophecy actually began to come to pass in 1979. In that year, for the first time in history, our people were scattered all over the globe. When the Shah’s regime fell and Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, Iran went into upheaval. Many were overjoyed, myself included. We were deceived. Our eyes were blinded. But many others understood the evil Khomeini represented. They understood Islam was not the answer and jihad was not the way, which is why many fled Iran as soon as they could. Guess how many Iranians now live outside our country.” “Half a million?” Ibrahim guessed.

Criminals should not be tried. The trial of a criminal is against human rights. Human rights demand that we should have killed them in the first place when it became known that they were criminals,” proclaimed Ayatollah Khomeini, responding to protests by international human rights organizations of the wave of executions that followed the revolution.

Quotations from Ayatollah Khomeini—WHETHER WE KILL OR ARE KILLED WE SHALL BE VICTORIOUS! OUR UNIVERSITIES MUST BE ISLAMIZED! THIS WAR HAS BEEN A DIVINE BLESSING FOR US!—accompany the pictures.

Like our other facial equipment, eyes are something we all have in common—even that old poop the Ayatollah Khomeini had a pair. But to the best of my knowledge, no horror movie has ever been made about a nose out of control, and while there has never been a film called The Crawling Ear, there was one called The Crawling Eye. We all understand that eyes are the most vulnerable of our sensory organs, the most vulnerable of our facial accessories, and they are (ick!) soft. Maybe that’s the worst

Between 1983 and 1988, Searle Pharmaceuticals CEO Donald Rumsfeld, acting as Ronald Reagan’s envoy in Iraq, arranged for the top-secret shipment of tons of chemical and biological armaments, including anthrax and bubonic plague, to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, hoping to reverse his looming defeat by Iran’s million-man army. Ayatollah Khomeini’s victorious Iranian forces were then routing Saddam in their war over the Persian Gulf. The Bush administration feared

This mixture of political and geographical considerations compounded Saddam’s failure to grasp the operational requirements of such a campaign. Rather than allowing his forces to advance until their momentum was exhausted, he voluntarily halted their advance within a week of the onset of hostilities and then announced his willingness to negotiate a settlement. This decision not to capitalise on Iraq’s early military successes by applying increased pressure had a number of dire consequences which, in turn, led to the reversal of the course of the war. It saved the Iranian army from a decisive defeat and gave Tehran precious time to re-organise and regroup; and it had a devastating impact on the morale of the Iraqi army and hence on its combat performance. Above all, the limited Iraqi invasion did nothing to endanger the revolutionary regime, nor to drive Ayatollah Khomeini towards moderation.

It was 2 pm on 20 July, and even though President Khameini had announced Iran’s acceptance of the ceasefire resolution three days earlier, Khomeini’s message still came as a shock to the Iranian people. ‘Happy are those who have departed through martyrdom’, ran the ayatollah’s statement. ‘Unhappy am I that I still survive … Taking this decision is more deadly than drinking from a poisoned chalice. I submitted myself to Allah’s will and took this drink for His satisfaction.

as in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where large numbers of women turned out during the June 2009 post-election demonstrations. Clearly, these women’s grievances went far beyond a single rigged election. One explained, “I see lots of girls and women in these demonstrations. They are all angry, ready to explode, scream out and let the world hear their voice. I want the world to know that as a woman in this country, I have no freedom.” This was not surprising, since Iranian law was formulated in scrupulous adherence to the Koran and Islamic tradition and law. Even the Ayatollah Khomeini’s granddaughter, Zahra Eshraghi, declared that under Islamic law, “a woman is there to fill her husband’s stomach and raise children.” And just weeks after President Barack Obama defended the right of women in non-Muslim countries to cover their heads, brave Iranian women were throwing off their head coverings as a sign of protest against the Islamic regime—with no peep of support from Obama. Journalist Azadeh Moaveni, author of the feminist book Lipstick Jihad, noted that “while it’s not at the top of women’s grievances, the hijab is symbolic. Taking it off is like waving a red flag. Women are saying they are a force to be reckoned with.”10

Every generation of Christians and Muslims yields up its crop of madmen and howlers at the moon, and they always spook the rationalists of their eras. A previous generation noted with concern the Iranian revolution's rhetoric of apocalypse. More than half of American evangelicals believe, or profess to believe, in imminent doomsday. Luckily, most apocalyptic movements sputter out, soften their tone, or turn out to be bluffing. Many of the Iranian revolutionaries who thought the Ayatollah Khomeini would reveal himself as the Mahdi—a messianic figure said my most Shia to have been in hiding since 941—now deny they ever believed such a thing. The ruling mullahs are at least as interested in trade agreements as in nuclear weapons. As for American evangelicals, they claim to believe they live in the end times, but they still contribute to their retirement accounts. There is similar reassurance in the belief that when a jihadist tells you he wants to kill you and billions of others to bring about the end of the world, he is just speaking for effect.

This ran contradictory to the religious ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini, who was swept into power during the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ousted the Shah. Backed by a large Shia following, Khomeini vowed to eradicate state nationalism, insisting there should be no division between religion and politics, because the highest unifying entity was Islam. He positioned himself as the leader of a borderless, Islamic empire that would encompass the entire Middle East.

It is not illegal for an adult male to ‘thigh’ or enjoy a young girl who is still in the age of weaning; meaning to place his penis between her thighs, and to kiss her.

the process.10 To add insult to injury, some in the US government and media attempted to blame Iran somehow for this attack when it had nothing to do with it. To the contrary, it must be emphasized that Iran, while having some chemical weapons capability of its own at the time, never retaliated against Iraq in kind for its chemical weapons attacks even though international law, and specifically the reservations to the 1925 Geneva Protocol,11 would have allowed for such retaliation. Indeed, during the height of the war and of the suffering being inflicted upon Iran by Saddam’s chemical weapons attacks, Ayatollah Khomeini made clear his view that Islamic law, which forbids the willful destruction of the environment, necessarily prohibits the development and use of chemical weapons.12 He made it clear, therefore, that Iran would not use such weapons against Iraq even though Saddam was using such weapons, and the available evidence supports the conclusion that Khomeini lived by his word.

The Americans had been prepared to make friends with the Shah; now they were trying to cement ties with the regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Substantial military and economic support was given to an unsavoury group of characters in Afghanistan solely on the basis of long-standing US rivalry with the USSR. Saddam himself had been brought in from the cold when it suited policymakers in Washington –but then sacrificed when it no longer suited them. Putting American interests first was not in itself the problem; the issue was that conducting imperial-style foreign policy requires a more careful touch –as well as more thorough thinking about the long-term consequences. In each case, in the late twentieth-century struggle for control of the countries of the Silk Roads, the US was cutting deals and making agreements on the hoof, solving today’s problems without worrying about tomorrow’s –and in some cases laying the basis for much more difficult issues. The goal of driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan had been achieved; but little thought had been given to what might happen next.

The great figure of this movement was the Zoroastrian religious leader Kartir, known in Persian as the magupat, or chief of the Magi. Kartir was honored as an ehrpat—“a master of knowledge”—a Zoroastrian title comparable to the modern Shia Muslim title Ayatollah. Indeed, remarkably resembling Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in his stature and policies, Kartir set out to purge and unify Iran,

A new figure had arisen among the ulama. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had become the most popular teacher in Qom.

Three days later, the streets of Tehran were thronged with a million people who celebrated the end of the monarchy. Then, on February 1, the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran.

Two weeks into the Bakhtiar government on February 1, after an absence of 13 years, the 76-year-old Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran from 1941 to 1979, changed his country’s direction until his inability to handle too much power led to the fall of an empire. He’s a reminder to never get so confident as to underestimate an opponent such as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the revolt that exiled him.