TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061289/06128900.016

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                                                                                WORLD, Page 36

IRAN

Sword of a Relentless Revolution


Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini: 1900-1989


    He came to symbolize everything the West found
incomprehensible and baffling about the East: his intense,
ascetic spirituality and air of otherworldly detachment; his
medieval, theocratic mind-set, which drew its parallels and
precedents from the Islamic world of the 7th century; the
mystical certitude that he spoke in the name of God, his country
and Muslims everywhere.

    Yet when Tehran Radio announced early this week that the
Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's revolutionary zealot, was
dead at 89, millions of his countrymen mourned the loss. They
did so even though the movement he led plunged them into a
devastating war with Iraq and left a legacy of turbulence at
home and terrorism abroad. To his people, the patriarch with the
baleful dark eyes and white beard had been the heart and sword
of their revolution, the icon of implacable opposition -- first
to the dictatorship of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and then to
the U.S., which the Ayatullah relentlessly denounced as the
Great Satan.

    He translated his hatred of America into acts of terrorism
and defiance that helped undermine one U.S. presidency and led
a second into scandal. His followers held 52 Americans captive
in the U.S. embassy in Tehran from November 1979 to January
1981, thus dealing a severe blow to the re-election chances of
Jimmy Carter. Then, in what began as an effort to secure the
release of American hostages held in Lebanon, the Reagan
Administration became enmeshed in the Iran-contra affair, its
gravest foreign policy blunder.

    Khomeini vowed to pursue the conflict with Iraq to the
"frontiers of martyrdom," and sent an estimated 900,000
Iranians, many of them not yet teenagers, beyond that frontier.
But in August 1988, the loss of key positions forced Tehran to
accept a United Nations-sponsored cease-fire in the eight-year
war. It was, said the Ayatullah, a decision "more deadly than
drinking poison."

    Tehran's utter isolation in the world of nations had become
apparent just two weeks before the cease-fire decision, when a
U.S. frigate mistakenly shot down an Iranian jetliner with 290
people aboard: international response was notably muted. In the
following months, leading Iranian politicians such as
Parliamentary Speaker Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 54,
attempted to soften their country's radical image. But Khomeini
would have none of it. Last February he prompted a worldwide
outcry when he demanded the death of Salman Rushdie, the
Indian-born, British author of The Satanic Verses, a book many
regard as blasphemous to Islam. "It is incumbent on every Muslim
to do everything possible to send him to hell," declared the
Imam. An angry Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Iran,
and many Western ambassadors were temporarily recalled from
Tehran.

    Khomeini's reassertion of radical Islamic rejectionism soon
claimed his appointed successor, Ayatullah Ali Montazeri, 65,
as a victim. Montazeri had harshly criticized the war with Iraq
and did not endorse the killing of Rushdie. In late March he was
forced to resign.

    How was it possible for an obscure religious fanatic to
lead one of the great revolutionary upheavals of this century?
To begin with, the time was ripe. The Shah had pushed his feudal
and devout country into the modern, secular world too far and
too fast, using torture and execution to suppress dissent. In
addition, Khomeini's place in the world of Shi`ite theology gave
him a platform. Unlike Sunni Muslims, members of Islam's other,
much larger branch, Shi`ites believe in an intermediary between
God and man. In Shi`ism's first centuries, this role of mediator
was played by the Twelve Imams, who were thought to be the
rightful successors to the Prophet Muhammad and who combined
religious and secular authority. Most Shi`ites continue to
believe that the Twelfth Imam, who disappeared in A.D. 940, will
one day emerge from hiding to establish a purified Islamic
state. Some Iranians hailed Khomeini as an Imam qualified to be
the deputy for the Shi`ite messiah.

    Khomeini was educated as a scholar in Qum, the holy city
where he worked as a teacher, married and reared a family of
six children. An excellent instructor, he was fascinated by the
Greek philosophers, especially Plato, whose Republic provided
the Ayatullah with a model for his own concept of the ideal
state, in which the philosopher-king was replaced by the Islamic
theologian.

    Khomeini's long rise to power began with a series of
confrontations with the regime of the Shah. In 1962 he led a
general strike of the clergy to protest reforms allowing
witnesses in court to swear by any "divine book," instead of the
Koran alone. By the spring of 1963 he was under house arrest for
telling huge crowds at Qum that just a "flick of the finger"
could sweep away the Shah. Soon after his release a few months
later, Khomeini was arrested again, this time for fomenting
riots against a modernization program that included land reform.
He was imprisoned for half a year, then exiled to Turkey. He
soon moved to the Iraqi city of An Najaf, one of Shi`ism's
holiest shrines. There for 14 years he taught, meditated and
taped messages of hate against the Shah that were distributed
on cassettes to mosques back in Iran.

    Then the Shah's government made the crucial mistake of
asking Iraq to expel Khomeini. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein
complied, thereby earning Khomeini's abiding hostility. In
October 1978 the Ayatullah went to France and settled in
Neauphle-le-Chateau, a Paris suburb, where for the first time
he enjoyed the full glare of Western press attention. Shortly
after his arrival, the continuing massive street demonstrations
and battles between the Iranian soldiers and protesters turned
the tide against the regime and led, within three months, to the
Shah's exile. In February 1979 Khomeini made his triumphant
return to Iran, where ecstatic million-strong crowds greeted
him.

    Khomeini's ascent to power worked a remarkable change in a
man who had once seemed a gentle, if extraordinarily zealous,
cleric. During the upheaval that toppled the Shah, Khomeini
urged his followers to remain nonviolent. In part, this was a
shrewd wish to avoid harsh military reprisals, but his caution
also reflected Khomeini's temperament at that time. Abolhassan
Banisadr, whom Khomeini ousted as President in 1981, notes that
in the final weeks of Khomeini's exile the Ayatullah "would not
even kill a fly." Yet after Khomeini became Iran's ruler, he
exhorted his countrymen to kill, burn and destroy.

    Khomeini and his followers attempted to stifle every
vestige of opposition to the imposition of a Muslim theocracy.
In so doing they set standards for brutality and injustice that
at least equaled -- and probably surpassed -- the worst excesses
of the Shah's regime. A clergy-dominated security system soon
rivaled SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, in terror and
bloodthirstiness.

    As the military underwent repeated purges and came under
the influence of the clerics, its force was swiftly applied to
suppress ethnic minorities that had supported the revolution in
hopes of gaining greater cultural and political autonomy. The
excesses led to nearly 10,000 executions -- some put the actual
figure as high as 20,000 -- and tens of thousands of arrests.
This provoked a campaign of assassination by dissident Islamic
guerrillas that eliminated hundreds of top members of the
Ayatullah's regime.

    While he was consolidating his revolution at home, Khomeini
was seeking to extend it to other nations. Iraq attacked Iran
across the Shatt al-Arab in September 1980 after Khomeini
called for an uprising of Iraqi Shi`ites and fomented skirmishes
along the border. Iranian forces blunted the Iraqi offensive,
and two months after the war began, the conflict was largely
stalemated. After years of fighting, Tehran lost all hope of
victory when Iraq stopped an Iranian drive for the port city of
Basra in early 1987; a year later, Iraq began the offensive that
eventually brought Iran to the peace table. The fighting
reportedly cost both countries an estimated $500 billion. More
than 900,000 Iranian lives were lost; 300,000 Iraqis died during
the war.

    Khomeini's ability to hold together the squabbling factions
that produced Iran's revolution was one of his major
achievements. After first setting the direction of the nation
through proclamations and statements, Khomeini left it to his
followers to forge specific policies. Still, he remained the
pivotal figure of Iranian politics, even toward the end, when
his various illnesses made it impossible for him to follow
events closely. The dismissal of Montazeri, in the opinion of
many experts, put increased power in the hands of the pragmatic
Rafsanjani, who is also Commander in Chief of the Iranian armed
forces. In the final months of Khomeini's life, the spotlight
also turned on his son, Ahmed Khomeini, 43, who has lately been
increasingly visible in public life. In his zeal and rigid
ideology, Ahmed appears to be very much his father's son.

    For whoever succeeds the Ayatullah, many fruits of the
revolution will remain bitter. Unbending militance has turned
Iran into an international pariah, and most Muslims have
resisted Khomeini's call for the spread of Islamic
fundamentalism. It is possible, though, to compare his role with
that of the 20th century's other great revolutionaries. Like the
Soviet Union's Vladimir Lenin, he fomented a revolution from
distant exile, then returned to try to bend it to his will. Like
India's Mohandas Gandhi, he mobilized spiritual forces for
political ends. Like China's Mao Zedong, he attempted to push
beyond nationalism to ideological and cultural revolution,
believing that by destroying the old order, he could create the
conditions for the emergence of a utopia. As it turned out,
however, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini could destroy but he could
not build, and his legacy is a country in chaos.