Iran Khamenei Quotes

Sitting cross-legged on the rug, puffing on a pipe, wearing a fat gold Rolex on his wrist, Khamenei asked the colonel, “If we were to release all of you now, without any conditions, how long would it be before you could begin to supply us again with spare parts for our military forces?

Muslim women have the freedom of choice, taking away this freedom is non-Islamic, it is dictatorship in Islamic clothing.

Or take the opportunity offered to the United States following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when both Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mohammed Khatami condemned the Sunni al Qaeda terrorism in no uncertain terms and Iranians held vigils for the victims in the streets of Tehran...or the help Iran gave to the US-led coalition against the Taliban later that year; or the Iranian offer for substantial talks following the fall of Baghdad in the Spring of 2003.

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.

When Ayatollah Khamenei needs to make a crucial decision about the Iranian economy, he will not be able to find the necessary answer in the Quran, because seventh-century Arabs knew very little about the problems and opportunities of modern industrial economies and global financial markets. So he, or his aides, must turn to Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and the modern science of economics to get answers. Having made up his mind to raise interest rates, lower taxes, privatize government monopolies, or sign an international tariff agreement, Khamenei can then use his religious knowledge and authority to wrap the scientific answer in the garb of this or that Quranic verse and present it to the masses as the will of Allah. But the garb matters little. When you compare the economic policies of Shiite Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia, Jewish Israel, Hindu India, and Christian America, you just don’t see that much of a difference.

Human beings are members of a whole In creation of one essence and soul. Ben informed me that those lines were written by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa’adi, one of the most beloved figures in Iranian culture. We found this ironic, given how much of my time at UNGA was devoted to trying to curb Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. Apparently, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad didn’t share the poet’s gentle sensibilities.

Ismail recognized that “victory” on the religious battleground could not be won only with violence, so he also invoked an Iranian form of civic propaganda that long predated Islam.

A period of near chaos followed until 1587, when the surviving heir, the 16-year-old Abbas, took the throne from his father.

The Quran had proclaimed that, although Islam was the same religion as Judaism and Christianity, it was specially aimed at the Arabs in their language, Arabic. So when the Muslims spoke of Islam, they meant the Arab religion. There was no provision for the conversion of non-Arabs.

Shiis (Partisans)

the orthodox, or Sunni, Arab Muslims.

Tehran produced two notable histories, The Chronicles and The Experiences of the Nations.

the Iranian Shia Muslim audience was led to a stunning outburst of emotion, a deep sense of personal guilt, weeping, and even mutilation in their attempts to expiate the sin they had inherited from the forefathers.

The difference of religion [Sunni versus Shii] bred great broiles [quarrels or fights]

Soleiman drank himself to death by the time he was 47 years old. But his successor was no better. Shah Sultan Hossein kept the old vices and added new ones. He sent agents around Iran to abduct attractive women for his huge (and very expensive) harem.

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.

for convenience we can think of the Shiis and Sunnis as comparable to the Protestants and the Catholics

we call them IndoEuropeans.1

Mounted on or pulled by horses, they fanned out over much of Asia and Europe beginning about 2000 BC.

Zoroaster,

Scholars have put forward guesses that are a thousand years apart—anywhere between roughly 1500 and 500 BC.

The Good comes directly from the supreme god, Ahura Mazda, who dwells in the “Abode of Light.

Opposed to the supreme god, but also created by him, was disorder, untruth, and evil, known as drug. Drug was the preserve of Ahriman, the Devil, whose abode is darkness.

Human life is thus a struggle between good and evil, asha and drug.

They can take heart from the belief that, on “the Last Day” (the rasho-keretfi or frashegird), a world savior or messiah, the Soshyant, will return to earth to raise the dead and judge them, passing them through holy fire to burn away their sins.

Also strongly asserted in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the role on that Last Day of God’s agent—the Hebrew and Christian messiah, the Muslim mahdi, and the Zoroastrian Soshyant—who will “return” to earth to perform God’s final work with humankind.

Finally, and even more important, is the concept of a single, supreme God, which is fundamental to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Where agriculture could not be practiced, the population existed by nomadism based on herding animals, often trekking hundreds of miles over great mountain barriers from the lowland pastures in the winter to upland meadows in the summer.

sometime around 800 BC, the Indo-European peoples who would become Persian moved south of the Caspian Sea along the Elbruz mountain chain.

The Medes and the Persians had merged into Iran’s first empire in around 553 BC.

one group of them, known as the Mada or Medes, settled in what is now northern Iran, where they became agriculturalists and formed a number of small village “kingdoms.

Herodotus was a Persian subject. Born about 485 BC on the west coast of Asia Minor in the little Greek city-state of Halicarnassus (now the Turkish city of Bodrum), he was uniquely qualified to try to understand both political systems.

Herodotus traveled widely and talked to an astonishing range of both Greeks and Persians;

in the middle of the sixth century BC, a man of the Parsa peoples of the south, Cyrus, who was a vassal of the Median ruler of the north, had achieved dominance over the Medes

While in Babylon, he gave the resident Jews, whom the Assyrians had exiled to the “Babylonian Captivity,” permission to return to Jerusalem and restored to them the temple utensils that Nebuchadnezzar had confiscated.

in 336 BC,

Alexander, inherited a military force that no Greek city could counter.

Alexander crashed through the Persian Empire: From Egypt, through Syria to Iraq, on to Central Asia and Afghanistan, and down to India, he chased the Persian ruler and destroyed his armies.

He died in 323 BC in Babylon.

Arsaces and his successors gradually unified the Persians enough to drive the Seleucids out of Iran. In 141 BC, they completed the task when they captured Babylon.

So it was that around AD 224, the governor of the central province of Pars broke away to establish a new order that became the Sasanian Empire.

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,

After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, many of the previously pagan tribes of Arabia ended their allegiance to Islam.

Across Arabia’s vast steppe and desert, Muhammad’s “empire” vanished like a mirage.

The Sasanian regime was exhausted and bankrupt; its Zoroastrian “clergy” was blamed for some of its ills, particularly by the large numbers of Persians who in the previous century had converted to Christianity; and the governing elite appear to have been disaffected.

So a new sort of Iranian came into being, usually called a mawla (Arabic plural: muwali). Soon, the muwali sought to regularize their status in Islam by proclaiming themselves Muslim but to keep their national identity by becoming Muslim in a particularly Iranian way. This tendency began early and was ultimately to produce the Shia sect of Islam.

In the aftermath of battle, many had seized Persian women, appropriated Persian property, and treated Persians as second class. Persians were not allowed to marry Muslim (i.e., Arab) women, but Arabs could marry Persian women.

the invasions of the Turks and Mongols.

Far to the east, across Asia in China, a Turkish general overthrew the T’ang dynasty in AD 907 and set in motion the first ripples of what would become the tidal wave that swept across most of the world.

Herat, for example, was sacked six times between 1270 and 1319—and in the wake of the armies came famine and pestilence. Cities shrank into towns, and towns shrank into villages. Many villages simply disappeared. The well-informed Persian (and probably Jewish) historian Rashid al-Din reported that half of the houses in Iran’s cities were abandoned,

the greatest of the Iranian dynasties, the Safavids.

Ismail was empowered by his inheritance.

Ismail was born in 1487,

But more than Khomeini, Ismail claimed direct descent both physically and, more important, spiritually from the Prophet Muhammad through his cousin and son-in-law Ali and from Ali through an unbroken line of imams. I will now examine what contemporaries thought

So it was that in the summer of 1501, when Ismail conquered the Turkmen capital, Tabriz, where he crowned himself Shah, he decided to force the people of Tabriz, who were Sunnis, to adopt Shiism.

Iranians had tended to write in Arabic; then sometime around AD 900, a few began to write in the mixture of Arabic and what is known as “middle” Persian or Pahlavi, which would form the new Persian language (Farsi).

In 1779, Agha Muhammad escaped the prison in which he had spent 20 years to seek refuge in the northern Iranian

After he had reconquered most of the territory of Iran ruled by the Safavids, Agha Muhammad Khan decided to take the title Shah in 1796,

The Shiism

belief in the mission of the Prophet Muhammad. In the Quran, Muhammad is described as the “messenger” (rasul) whom God appointed to deliver the true religion,

Sunni Muslims

They believe that Muhammad was the “Seal of the Prophets” and that the Quran completes the message of God.

Where Shiism most fundamentally differs from Sunnism is in its assertion that God chose to continue the mission of Muhammad. Continuation of the task was necessary, Shiis believe,

first three caliphs, distorted his mission.

Shiis believe that Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, should have been his successor.

Ali’s sons, particularly Husain, tried to lead the Muslims back to what they regarded as the true path.

In a battle between opposing Arab forces, Husain was killed and thus became a martyr for the true faith. His martyrdom forms the emotional core of the Shiism.

These intense emotions are generally not shared by Sunni Muslims.

Ali was passed down from generation to generation among designated members of his progeny. These men became known as imams.

Iranian Shiis believe that a sequence of twelve imams followed the Prophet Muhammad until, in AD 874, 242 years after his death, the Twelfth, Muhammad al-Mahdi, “disappeared.

Twelfth Imam is in a sort of abeyance, ready to return to earth on the Last Day.

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

From his exile in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf, Khomeini mounted a powerful propaganda campaign against the Shah’s government.

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.

… the government-sponsored acts of terror are facilitated, financed and directed at the highest levels of the regime, with the authorization of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself.

Although some aspects of this scenario cannot be proved or disproved, the end of the story is public knowledge. As Captain Sick wrote, the Iranians released the remaining 52 hostages in January 1981 “exactly five minutes after Mr. Reagan took the oath of office,” and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of “arms started to flow to Iran via Israel only a few days after the inauguration.

the arms-for-hostage deal that in the twilight of the Reagan presidency became known as the Iran-contra affair,

Casey promised that, if he was elected, Reagan would return the blocked assets and supply the requested equipment and supplies but that Iran must release the hostages to him, not to Carter.

In a television address, Khamenei blamed the riots on the United States.

For Ibn Khaldun, asabiyah meant “that emotional attachment to a group which causes men to overcome their selfish aims to act in the collective interest.

Obviously very worried about his decision, he faced his advisers on October 19 and, with uncanny prescience, “wondered aloud what advice they would give him when the Iranians took the embassy in Tehran and held the Americans hostage.

the seizure of the American embassy by a large group of young Iranians on November 4, 1979.

on November 4 a group of several hundred young people calling themselves “Students Following the Imam’s Line” rushed the embassy and took some 70 members of the staff hostage.

The questions Carter and his advisers had to answer were: How to negotiate? And with whom to negotiate?

They were right. The detention would last almost 15 months.

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.)

Indeed, our concept of “East versus West”—or, as it has been called, “the clash of civilizations”—arises from Greek opposition to Persia.

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.

The failure of the West fully to take advantage of the opportunity offered by a reformist president in Iran already looks like a bad mistake. One such opportunity came after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States when members of the Iranian leadership (not just Khatami, but also Khamenei) condemned the terrorist action in forthright terms, and ordinary Iranians showed their sympathies with candlelit vigils in the streets of Tehran—more evidence of the marked difference of attitude between Iranians and other Middle Eastern peoples. Another opportunity came after Iran gave significant help to the coalition forces against the Taliban later in 2001, helping to persuade the Northern Alliance to accept democratic arrangements for post-Taliban Afghanistan.2 In 2002 Iranians were rewarded with President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, which lumped Iran with Iraq and North Korea. Finally, the Bush administration ignored an Iranian offer in the spring of 2003 (shortly after the fall of Baghdad), via the Swiss, for bilateral talks toward a Grand Bargain that appeared to promise a possible resolution of the nuclear issue and de facto Iranian recognition of Israel. The purpose of all this is not to reinforce the cringing sense of guilt that bedevils many Western observers who look at the Middle East. It is not All Our Fault, and no doubt if the Iranians had been in the position of strength that Britain was between 1815 and 1950, or that the United States has been in since then, they would have behaved as badly, and quite possibly worse. The Iranians also missed opportunities for rapprochement in the Khatami years. But too often we have gotten things wrong, and that has had a cost. It is important to see events from an Iranian perspective, to see how we got things wrong, and to see what needs to be done in order to get them right. The most important thing is this: if we make commitments and assert certain principles, we must be more careful to mean what we say and to uphold those principles.

The Iranian reaction after 9/11 shows in high relief the apparent paradox in Iranian attitudes to the West, in general, and to the United States, in particular. As we have seen, Iranians have real historical grounds for resentment that are unique to Iran and that go beyond the usual postures of nationalism and anti-Americanism. But among many ordinary Iranians there is also a liking and respect for Europeans and Americans that goes well beyond what one finds elsewhere in the Middle East. To some extent this is again a function of the Iranians’ sense of their special status among other Middle Eastern nations. Plainly, different Iranians combine these attitudes in different ways, but the best way to explain this paradox is perhaps to say that many Iranians (irrespective of their attitude to their own government, which they may also partly blame for the situation) feel snubbed, abused, misunderstood, and let down by the Westerners they think should have been their friends. This emerges in different ways—including in the rhetoric of politics, as is illustrated by a passage from a televised speech by Supreme Leader Khamenei on June 30, 2007: Why, you may ask, should we adopt an offensive stance? Are we at war with the world? No, this is not the meaning. We believe that the world owes us something. Over the issue of the colonial policies of the colonial world, we are owed something. As far as our discussions with the rest of the world about the status of women are concerned, the world is indebted to us. Over the issue of provoking internal conflicts in Iran and arming with various types of weapons, the world is answerable to us. Over the issue of proliferation of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and biological weapons, the world owes us something.

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 so-called ‘morality police’ is a work of fiction that extremist governments have created to control their people, it has no background in the Islamic faith and never existed historically in any form since the dawn of this religion. It is and has always been a weapon for the collective mentality to control and silence individual expression.

By painting the suffering of the Iranian people as a rage against Islam the Western media is not only misrepresenting these brave protests but demeaning them.

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.

Khomeini and Khamenei were everywhere; on giant billboards at the roadside, as vast lurid murals on concrete apartment blocks and, less impressively, on sagging vinyl banners outside schools and mosques. With their almost identical appearance and surnames they reminded me of an Islamic Thomson and Thompson, the hapless detectives of the Tintin books. But that, I feared, was where the similarity ended.

the Mongol rulers of what became Iran, a few Christian

History is the laboratory of social science theories.

Iran has been given a powerful argument for making a decision. It did not want to make to build a nuclear weapon, and we have in place an 86 year old supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei who has been very cautious on this issue, and kept the decision that the founder of the Islamic Republic, namely the fatwa that banned weapons of mass destruction as haram, forbidden in Islam. He's kept that in place; he is due to step down. [...] What leads anyone to think that the successor of Khamenei will be as restrained and as devoted to the fatwa as he has proven? I think, if you believe that, I would love to engage in a negotiation with you, to get you to transfer all your wealth to me — you probably would agree. (Excerpt from interview "Amb. Chas Freeman: Turning Point in Global Power: Iran Attacked, Russia Reacts")