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…

Niggas be 13-14 and already gay like damn nigga, did you at least try to get some pussy first?

We're not afraid of sanctions. We're not afraid of military invasion. What frightens us is the invasion of western immorality.

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.

تو و قلب تو یکی از نوامیس الهیه هستید، حق تعالی غیور است نسبت به ناموس خود

When anyone studies a little or pays a little attention to the rules of Islamic government, Islamic politics, Islamic society and Islamic economy he will realize that Islam is a very political religion. Anyone who will say that religion is separate from politics is a fool; he does not know Islam or politics.

من از آن آخوندها نیستم که در اینجا بنشینم و تسبیح دست بگیرم، من پاپ نیستم که فقط روزهای یکشنبه مراسمی انجام دهم و بقیه اوقات برای خودم سلطانی باشم و به امور دیگر کاری نداشته باشم، پایگاه استقلال اسلامی اینجاست، باید این مملکت را از این گرفتاری‌ها نجات داد.

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.

Only God, the Exalted, is the light; everything else is darkness.

We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.

If you have divine motives, material benefits will follow suit but they are no longer material; they have become divine.

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 we grown-ups talked and speculated, my five-year-old daughter looked intently out of the window. Suddenly she turned around and shouted, "Mommy, Mommy, he is not dead! Women are still wearing their scarves." I always associate Khomeini's death with Negar's simple pronouncement—for she was right: the day women did not wear the scarf in public would be the real day of his death and the end of his revolution. Until then, we would continue to live with him.

One foreign correspondent came up to be friendly. He asked this man what he should think about what Khomeini had said. How seriously should he take it? Was it just a rhetorical flourish or something genuinely dangerous? “Oh, don’t worry too much,” the journalist said. “Khomeini sentences the president of the United States to death every Friday afternoon.

You were invigorated by mindfulness of God, migration from oneself to God—which is the greatest migration—migration from ego to the truth, and from this world to the unseen world.

If one permits an infidel to continue in his role as a corrupter of the earth, the infidel's moral suffering will be all the worse. If one kills the infidel, and this stops him from perpetrating his misdeeds, his death will be a blessing to him.

We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry 'There is no god but Allah' resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle.

Islam is politics or it is nothing.

All those against the revolution must disappear and quickly be executed.

It seemed that the duty of the intellectuals was to bring Khomeini to Tehran and hand him over to the mollahs.

Different people with different dreams, from Tehran to Jerusalem, from Paris to Beirut, looked to Khomeini and saw a man who could serve their agenda, not realizing they were serving his.

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?

وای به حال کسی که با نماز و طاعتش وارد جهنم شود! امان از کسی که صورت صدقه و زکات و صلاتش صورت‌هایی باشد که زشت‌تر از آن‌ها تصور نشود! بیچاره تو مشرکی! خداوند به فضل خود موحد اهل معصیت عصیان‌کار را می‌آمرزد، ان شاءالله، ولیکن فرموده است که مشرک را نمی‌آمرزم اگر بی توبه از این دنیا برود. در احادیث شریفه، چنانکه شنیدی، می‌فرماید: «مرائی [ریاکار] مشرک است.» کسی که ریاست دینی خود، و امامت خود، تدریس خود، تحصیل خود، روزه خود، نماز خود، و بالاخره اعمال صالحه خود را ارائه به مردم دهد برای منزلت در قلوب، مشرک است، و به موجب اخبار اهل عصمت، صلوات الله علیهم، و به موجب آیه شریفه مشمول غفران حق نمی‌شود. پس، ای کاش اهل معاصی کبیره بودی و متجاهر به فسق بودی و متهتک حرمات ظاهره بودی، و موحد بودی شرک به خدا نمی‌آوردی.

The prophetic mission created a scientific-gnostic change in the world that converted the insipid Greek philosophies, which were formulated with all their past and present worth by the Greeks themselves into an objective mysticism and a veritable intuitive perception for masters of divine insight.

Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious. Islam does not allow swimming in the sea and is opposed to radio and television serials. Islam, however, allows marksmanship, horseback riding and competition.

Ao contrário da fatwa proclamada por Khomeini, que condenou à morte Salman Rushdie, a castração corretiva sonhada por Buckley não vinha acompanhada de nenhum incentivo financeiro para possíveis executores. No entanto, foi ditada por um espírito tão exigente quanto o do aiatolá, e em nome de ideais tão elevados quanto os dele.

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

Is progress achieved by sending women to the majlis? Sending women to these centers is nothing but corruption. We are against this prostitution. We object to such wrongdoings.

The author of The Satanic Verses book which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Qu'ran, and all involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them wherever they find them, so that no one will dare to insult the Islamic sanctions. Whoever is killed on this path will be regarded as a martyr, God willing.

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.

The European powers at that time believed they could change Moslem Asia in the very fundamentals of its political existence, and in their attempt to do so introduced an artificial state system into the Middle East that has made it into a region of countries that have not become nations even today. The basis of political life in the Middle East—religion—was called into question by the Russians, who proposed communism, and by the British, who proposed nationalism or dynastic loyalty, in its place. Khomeini's Iran in the Shi'ite world and the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere in the Sunni world keep that issue alive. The French government, which in the Middle East did allow religion to be the basis of politics—even of its own—championed one sect against the others; and that, too, is an issue kept alive, notably in the communal strife that has ravaged Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s.

On 20 March 1982, on the occasion of the Iranian new year, Khomeini announced that ‘as a special favour’ schoolboys between the ages of 12 and 18 years would be allowed to join the Basij and to fight for their country. Consequently scores of youths volunteered for action and were hastily recruited and provided with ‘Passports to Paradise’, as the admission forms were called. They were then given rudimentary military training, of a week or so, by the Pasdaran, and sent to the front where many of them ‘martyred’ themselves.

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.

Aku ingin bertanya gembirakah kau di sana? Melihat wilayah faqihmu pegangan ulama gilakan kuasa Fuqaha kau maksudkan bukan ulama buatan sekarang Yang mengerti sedikit hadis, hukum dan ayat al-Qur'an. Sikap melampau: mereka terpenjara dalam mazhab Taasub sangat kepada Ali, mereka lupa akan Muhammad.

When anyone studies a little or pays a little attention to the rules of Islamic government, Islamic politics, Islamic society and Islamic economy he will realize that Islam is a very political religion. Anyone who will say that religion is separate from politics is a fool; he does not know Islam or politics.

Much of the public was convinced that the CIA was capable and willing to do so. Thus began the famous 444-day American hostage crisis. Americans who knew little of the events of 1953 were mystified; Iranians were not. The specter of coup had come to haunt U.S.-Iranian relations. Similarly, on March 5, 1981, when more than 100,000 gathered at Tehran University to commemorate Mossadeq’s death and call for the establishment of a democratic rather than an Islamic republic, Hojjat al-Islam Ali Khamenie—Khomeini’s future successor—declared ominously: “We are not liberals, like Allende, willing to be snuffed out by the CIA.

Ironically, even as Khomeini empowered some women, he also found ways of oppressing their entire gender. The regime replaced the shah’s secular law with an Islamic law, which allowed men to marry up to four wives, to divorce them whenever the husbands wished, and to retain custody of children. The law put the value of a woman’s life at half of that of a man’s life, and the value of her testimony at half that of a man’s testimony. Thus women in Iran became watchdogs and scapegoats, both the foot soldiers of the new regime and its victims. Newly empowered, they were also newly oppressed. Theirs was a paradoxical plight—and at the time, no one could have foreseen how it would one day make women a force of enormous change in Iran.

When Libya fought against the Italian occupation, all the Arabs supported the Libyan mujahideen. We Arabs never occupied any country. Well, we occupied Andalusia unjustly, and they drove us out, but since then, we Arabs have not occupied any country. It is our countries that are occupied. Palestine is occupied, Iraq is occupied, and as for the UAE islands... It is not in the best interest of the Arabs for hostility to develop between them and Iran, Turkey, or any of these nations. By no means is it in our interest to turn Iran against us. If there really is a problem, we should decide here to refer this issue to the international court of Justice. This is the proper venue for the resolution of such problems. We should decide to refer the issue of the disputed UAE islands to the International Court of Justice, and we should accept whatever it rules. One time you say this is occupied Arab land, and then you say... This is not clear, and it causes confusion. 80% of the people of the Gulf are Iranians. The ruling families are Arab, but the rest are Iranian. The entire people is Iranian. This is a mess. Iran cannot be avoided. Iran is a Muslim neighbour, and it is not in our interes to become enemies. What is the reason for the invasion and destruction of Iraq, and for killing of one million Iraqis? Let our American friends answer this question: Why Iraq? What is the reason? Is Bin Laden an Iraqi? No he is not. Were those who attacked New York Iraqis? No, they were not. were those who attacked the Pentagon Iraqis? No, they were not. Were there WMDs in Iraq? No, there were not. Even if iraq did have WMDs - Pakistan and India have nuclear bombs, and so do China, Russia, Britain, France and America. Should all these countries be destroyed? Fine, let's destroy all the countries that have WMDs. Along comes a foreign power, occupies an Arab country, and hangs its president, and we all sit on the sidelines, laughing. Why didn't they investigate the hanging of Saddam Hussein? How can a POW be hanged - a president of an Arab country and a member of the Arab League no less! I'm not talking about the policies of Saddam Hussein, or the disagreements we had with him. We all had poitlical disagreements with him and we have such disagreements among ourselves here. We share nothing, beyond this hall. Why won't there be an investigation into the killing of Saddam Hussein? An entire Arab leadership was executed by hanging, yet we sit on the sidelines. Why? Any one of you might be next. Yes. America fought alongside Saddam Hussein against Khomeini. He was their friend. Cheney was a friend of Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld, the US Defense Secretary at the time Iraq was destroyed, was a close friend of Saddam Hussein. Ultimately, they sold him out and hanged him. You are friends of America - let's say that ''we'' are, not ''you'' - but one of these days, America may hang us. Brother 'Amr Musa has an idea which he is enthusiastic. He mentioned it in his report. He says that the Arabs have the right to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes, and that there should be an Arab nuclear program. The Arabs have this right. They even have the right to have the right to have a nuclear program for other... But Allah prevails... But who are those Arabs whom you say should have united nuclear program? We are the enemies of one another, I'm sad to say. We all hate one another, we deceive one another, we gloat at the misfortune of one another, and we conspire against one another. Our intelligence agencies conspire against one another, instead of defending us against the enemy. We are the enemies of one another, and an Arab's enemy is another Arab's friend.

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. . . .

Don’t you get it, Claire? Khomeini’s thugs have the entire embassy. They have the vaults. They have the files. They know who I am, and they’re going to want information I can give them. Right now they’re taking a roll call of every employee. When they find we’re missing, they’re going to look up our address. If it’s been destroyed, they’re going to put a gun to the head of Liz Swift. If she doesn’t give us up, they’re going to kill her in front of everyone else. Then they’re going to ask Mike Metrinko. If he doesn’t give us up, they’re going to kill him. Then they’re going to turn to John Limbert. And they’re going to keep killing people until someone breaks. I don’t know who it will be. But someone’s going to give them our address, and then they’re coming for us.

The Islamic revolution in Iran is a positive development. At the same time, the Islamic revolution of Afghanistan, sprung exclusively from spiritual roots, dealt a heavy blow to the communist regime in the former Soviet Union. In face of that revolution, the red Soviet empire had to concede that it is incapable, in spite of its military superiority, to defeat the Mujaheddin, whose main weapons were their right and their spiritual strength. Another quite new situation appeared as a consequence of the Islamic revolution in Iran, that destroyed the Zionist rule in that country and shook its foundations in that part of the world. Khomeini's letter to Gorbachev, in which he was inviting the latter to convert to Islam, had great symbolic power! What is new again is the movement of Islamic rebirth and the continuous decay of the strength of the colonial government bodies directed from afar by Israel in many Islamic countries." "The Islamic system has remained stable in Iran even after the death of Khomeini and the change in the person of the leader and of the leadership group the only one to remain stable in the entire Islamic world. On the contrary, the demise of the Shah meant at the same time the collapse of his regime, his artificial form of government, and his army. All that went to the dust-bin of history. The same fate awaits the other regimes that prevail in the muslim world. Israel knows that very well. She tries desperately to cause the wheel of history to stand still. However, any strike against Iran or against the growing Islamic movements, will cause the anger of the muslim masses to grow, and the fire of the Islamic revolution to ignite. Nobody will be able to suppress that revolution.

From the very start, when the Islamists attempted to impose their laws against women, there were massive demonstrations, with hundreds of thousands of women pouring into the streets of Tehran protesting against the new laws. When Khomeini announced the imposition of the veil, there were protests in which women took to the streets with the slogans: “Freedom is neither Eastern nor Western; it is global” and “Down with the reactionaries! Tyranny in any form is condemned!” Soon the protests spread, leading to a memorable demonstration in front of the Ministry of Justice, in which an eight-point manifesto was issued. Among other things, the manifesto called for gender equality in all domains of public and private life as well as for the guarantee of fundamental freedoms for both men and women. It also demanded that “the decision over women’s clothing, which is determined by custom and the exigencies of geographical location, be left to women.” Women

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.

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.

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.

The Iran/Contra cover-up The major elements of the Iran/Contra story were well known long before the 1986 exposures, apart from one fact: that the sale of arms to Iran via Israel and the illegal Contra war run out of Ollie North’s White House office were connected. The shipment of arms to Iran through Israel didn’t begin in 1985, when the congressional inquiry and the special prosecutor pick up the story. It began almost immediately after the fall of the Shah in 1979. By 1982, it was public knowledge that Israel was providing a large part of the arms for Iran—you could read it on the front page of the New York Times. In February 1982, the main Israeli figures whose names later appeared in the Iran/Contra hearings appeared on BBC television [the British Broadcasting Company, Britain’s national broadcasting service] and described how they had helped organize an arms flow to the Khomeini regime. In October 1982, the Israeli ambassador to the US stated publicly that Israel was sending arms to the Khomeini regime, “with the cooperation of the United States…at almost the highest level.” The high Israeli officials involved also gave the reasons: to establish links with elements of the military in Iran who might overthrow the regime, restoring the arrangements that prevailed under the Shah—standard operating procedure. As for the Contra war, the basic facts of the illegal North-CIA operations were known by 1985 (over a year before the story broke, when a US supply plane was shot down and a US agent, Eugene Hasenfus, was captured). The media simply chose to look the other way. So what finally generated the Iran/Contra scandal? A moment came when it was just impossible to suppress it any longer. When Hasenfus was shot down in Nicaragua while flying arms to the Contras for the CIA, and the Lebanese press reported that the US National Security Adviser was handing out Bibles and chocolate cakes in Teheran, the story just couldn’t be kept under wraps. After that, the connection between the two well-known stories emerged. We then move to the next phase: damage control. That’s what the follow-up was about. For more on all of this, see my Fateful Triangle (1983), Turning the Tide (1985), and Culture of Terrorism (1987).

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.

Again Khomeini expresses this divide between the West and traditional Islam: “Don’t listen to those who speak of democracy. They all are against Islam. They want to take the nation away from its mission. We will break all the poison pens of those who speak of nationalism, democracy, and such things.” The jihadists rampaging in Syria and Iraq agree, which is why their goal is to restore the caliphate under which Islam dominated the region for centuries.

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.

A man can have sexual pleasure from a child as young as a baby. However, he should not penetrate vaginally, but sodomising the child is acceptable. If a man does penetrate and damage the child then, he should be responsible for her subsistence all her life. This girl will not count as one of his four permanent wives and the man will not be eligible to marry the girl’s sister… It is better for a girl to marry at such a time when she would begin menstruation at her husband’s house, rather than her father’s home. Any father marrying his daughter so young will have a permanent place in heaven.

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.

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.

There were crudely drawn pictures of Christ and Peter bearing the partial inscription: “Peter pray Christ Jesus for the holy….” The remainder of the inscription was missing.82 These inscriptions, written in the middle of a second-century pagan cemetery in Rome, would have been the ancient world equivalent of Isis graffiti on the White House today, or a cross drawn on the Shrine of Khomeini in Teheran.

As Christopher Davidson sets forth in his recent book, Shadow Wars, the United States and Britain continued to aid and abet Iran, even more intensely after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, in the physical extermination of Iran’s left-wing. As Davidson explains, in 1983 “the CIA and MI6 jointly began to pass on information to the Tehran regime about Iranian communists and other leftists. Going far further than the Shah ever had, Khomeini made over a thousand arrests and executed several leaders of the Tudeh Party. As James Bill describes, this was regarded in the West as successfully ‘completing the dismantling of the Iranian left,’ even though the CIA and MI6 had long been aware of the Islamic Republic’s propensity for executing political prisoners without trial.”13

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.

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.

Khomeini espoused a militant religious doctrine rejecting not only the Middle Eastern political order, but also the contemporary international system since both perpetuated an unjust order imposed on the ‘oppressed’ Muslims by the ‘oppressive’ great powers. It was bound to be replaced by an Islamic world order in which the territorial nation-state would be transcended by the broader entity of the umma (or the universal Muslim community); and since Iran was the only country where the ‘Government of God’ had been established, it had the sacred obligation to serve as the core of the umma and a springboard for the worldwide dissemination of Islam’s holy message. As he put it: ‘We will export our revolution throughout the world … until the calls “there is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God” are echoed all over the world.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.)

Foucault’s enthusiastic reception of Khomeini was over-determined by his own distaste for the political and economic systems – industrial capitalism and the bureaucratic nation state – created by the Atlantic West. (Foucault in this sense followed Montesquieu in using Iran to pursue an internal critique of the West.) Earlier that year of the revolution in Iran, he had told a Zen Buddhist priest that Western thought was in crisis. Foucault was hostile to Communism, which had attracted many of his fellow intellectuals in France. But he was equally contemptuous of the capitalist West:

Khomeini gives permanent and non-permanent marriages equal status and includes no moral distinction between the two.

In all 6,236 verses of the Quran, there is not a single verse calling on Muslims to silence blasphemers by force. Not in 1989, when Khomeini called on believers to kill Salman Rushdie, not in 1992, when the Egyptian intellectual Farag Foda was shot in Egypt, and still not in 2011.

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.

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,

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.

When Salman Rushdie became the victim of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, the writer V. S. Naipaul refused to support him, on the grounds that the fatwa was, after all, only an extreme form of literary criticism.

That was the first time I experienced the desperate orgiastic pleasure of this form of public mourning: it was the one place where people mingled and touched bodies and shared emotions without restraint or guilt. There was a wild, sexually flavored frenzy in the air. Later, when I saw a slogan by Khomeini saying that the Islamic Republic survives through its mourning ceremonies, I could testify to its truth.

Khomeini discussed the offer of money with his associates. When they were through talking, Khomeini walked back over to Gregory, and asked, “If I were to take your money, what’s the catch and will I have to do anything in return?” “There’s no catch and you don’t have to do anything in return. All I want is for you lead your people in the way you want to without interference from the West and it’ll show your friends in the Middle East that the United States and its allies are nothing but paper tigers. Eventually, your friends in the region will overthrow western-backed leaders in your region and then all of you can wipe out Israel with help from all of your Muslim brothers.

a demand was made of the United States to return the Shah. When it didn’t happen, followers of Khomeini stormed the United States Embassy and took hostages. The United States President, Jimmy Carter, blustered that the country wouldn’t yield to blackmail, but when he attempted to send in a rescue operation, the mission failed, ending in the deaths of eight Americans and the destruction of two helicopters. The whole episode made the United States look weak. Gregory Evans’ plans were right on track until Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, decided to invade Iran for no apparent reason, then the Shah died, and Algeria offered to be the mediator between the Iranians and the Americans. The hostages were released after being held for four hundred and forty-four days and the new American President, Ronald Reagan, got all the credit for it; which irritated Gregory, because he didn’t think the American people would’ve voted for him if Carter hadn’t been such a nincompoop. Gregory decided he would have to eventually start interfering in American elections so he could get the result he desired.

Here was a head of state ordering the execution of the private citizens of foreign countries for writing and publishing a work of fiction. A grotesque regard for the forms of legality had accompanied previous outbreaks of state terrorism. Even Stalin forced his victims to confess at show trials so that when he murdered them, he did so with a kangaroo court’s approval. No such concern with keeping up appearances inhibited Khomeini. On 14 February 1989, he said that the faithful must kill Rushdie and his publishers and ‘execute them quickly, wherever they may find them, so that no one will dare insult Islam again. Whoever is killed in this path will be regarded as a martyr.’ Just in case zealous assassins doubted that they would receive eternal life in paradise along with the services of seventy-two virgins, an Iranian foundation offered the earthly reward of $3 million.

Beyond the nonnegotiables of rule by the ulama and the enactment of Islamic law, Khomeini had never given much thought to what an Islamic state should look like. He once famously answered a question about his economic policies by declaring that “economics is for donkeys.” Later he observed in his dour way that “we did not make a revolution to slash the price of watermelon.” Khomeini, in short, was a classic big-picture man. To him, the details of governance mattered little, if at all. Still, his lieutenants had a country to run. Many borrowed ideas from the copious works of Sunni fundamentalist thinkers in Pakistan and the Arab world to give shape to the Islamic Republic. The state that Khomeini built would be an intolerant theocracy in which Islamic law was narrowly interpreted and implemented to limit individual and minority rights and erase all Western influences on society and culture.

Iran is the only country in the Middle East where a former head of state has stepped down from power at the end of his constitutionally mandated term of office and continues to live peacefully in his own home. The undeniable and serious flaws in their country’s electoral process have not prevented Iranians from learning about democratic practices and internalizing democracy-friendly values. Indeed, the debate over democracy has been near the heart of Iranian politics for a decade now. The years since the early 1990s have also been a time of intense discussions about religious reform in Iran. A group of Shia intellectuals, including some clerics, have questioned the authoritarian bent of Khomeini’s velayat-e faqih and argued for both limiting the powers of Iran’s clerical leaders and reconciling religion with democracy.

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.

a democratic election in Saudi Arabia would bring to power a militant Islamic government more hostile than Khomeini’s Iran.

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.

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.

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.

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

India was the first country to ban The Satanic Verses- which was proscribed without following India's own stipulated due process in such matters, banned before it entered the country by a weak Congress government led by Rajiv Gandhi, in a desperate, unsuccessful bid for Muslim votes.

Sit down and drink some tea; as that will annoy America.

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.

Iran asserts that Bahrain, though across the Gulf, is a “lost province”—a claim made both by the shah and subsequently by the Islamic Republic. In 1981, two years after Khomeini took power, Iran backed a failed coup. Another coup in Bahrain was averted in 1996. Despite the fact that Bahrain had been ruled by the Al Khalifa family since 1783, Iran renewed its claims to the kingdom starting in 2007. Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani declared that Bahrain was an “Iranian province separated from Iran as a result of colonialism.

There was a very brief period, between the time the Shah left on January 16, 1979, and Khomeini’s return to Iran on February 1, when one of the nationalist leaders, Dr. Shahpour Bakhtiar, had become the prime minister. Bakhtiar was perhaps the most democratic-minded and farsighted of the opposition leaders of that time, who, rather than rallying to his side, had fought against him and joined up with Khomeini. He had immediately disbanded Iran’s secret police and set the political prisoners free. In rejecting Bakhtiar and helping to replace the Pahlavi dynasty with a far more reactionary and despotic regime, both the Iranian people and the intellectual elites had shown at best a serious error in judgment. I remember at the time that Bijan’s was one lone voice in support of Bakhtiar, while all others, including mine, were only demanding destruction of the old, without much thought to the consequences.

The isolation swelled and became overpowering. Anna pulled

Turn in the Old Testament to the book of Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39.” Birjandi then proceeded to walk them through a series of prophecies he said was widely known as the War of Gog and Magog. They revealed an apocalyptic showdown against Israel and the Jewish people that would be led by a nation called Magog. “There are quite a few clues that make it clear the nation referred to as Magog is modern-day Russia,” Birjandi said, “including the writings of Flavius Josephus, a Roman historian. But what’s critical for us to understand is Ezekiel 38:5. What is the first country mentioned that will form an alliance against Israel?” “Persia,” Ibrahim said. “Exactly,” Birjandi confirmed. “The ancient prophecies speak of a Russian-Iranian alliance sometime in the future. To many scholars, this has seemed very odd, given that for most of the last several thousand years, the Russians and we Iranians have never had such an alliance. Indeed, the leaders of these countries have hated each other. Until 1943, the Russians occupied parts of northern Iran. Under Khomeini, we prayed for Allah to bring judgment upon the heathen, godless, atheist Communists in the Kremlin. But then what happened? We suffered through eight years of the war with Iraq. We had lots of oil money but desperately needed new weapons. The Soviet Union imploded,

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.

So do you believe there is an afterlife?’ I asked him. ‘Yes, I think so. I hope so. You know why I hope this?’ He paused and looked me in the eye, waiting. I shook my head. ‘Because I want Khomeini to suffer. I want to believe he is suffering now, for what he did to the Iranian people, all the people he killed and tortured and drove away from their homes. All the lives he has ruined.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.