Ayatollah Khomeini & The Iranian Revolution

By Author: Hafiz Ikram Ullah
Total Articles: 1
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Twelver Shi’ism became the majority religion in Iran (classical Persia) from the 1600s, but this posted an ironic dilemma for its clerics. Historically, Shi’ism represented the oppressed, not the powerful; and doctrinally, Shi’ism considered that all governments would inevitably be corrupt until the hidden Ima returned to redeem humanity. Either way, politics was seen as “dirty business,” and political activism was thought to be futile.

Yet, equally logically, these same beliefs fostered a strong, independent religious hierarchy. In fact, this trend was accentuated in the eighteenth century, when a brief Sunni Afghan occupation of Iran forced Iranian Shi’i scholars to flee to Ottoman-ruled Iraq. There, in the cities of Najaf and Karbala, near the tombs of Ali and Husayn, senior clerics called Ayatollahs lived and studied. Even after Shi’i recovered the Iranian throne, most Ayatollahs remained in Iraq and continued to operate well beyond the reach of the Iranian state.

Taken together, these factors help to explain the ability of the Iranian ulama (religious scholars) to act independently of and in ...
... cooperation to the monarchy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1921, a brigadier-general overthrew the ruling Iranian dynasty, and with the blessing of the traditionalist clergy, he crowned himself king in December 1925. In succeeding years, his artificially created Pahlavi dynasty (so named for its mythological pre-Islamic resonances) used the clergy as a foil against modernists, who demanded a more democratic system of government. The clerics disliked his pro-Western policies and monarchial pretensions, but acquiesced in the arrangement, preferring Pahlavi rule to the nightmare of a communist regime (a real fear, given the long border Iran shared with the Soviet Union).

However, by the 1960s, Iran’s human-rights abuses and its overly conciliatory policies toward the United States let to anti-government demonstrations, involving both clerics and liberal elements. Ayatollah Khomeini emerged as the regime’s most outspoken critic, and he was arrested after government forces attacked his seminary in Qom. Thousands died in rioting against his imprisonment. In 1964, an unrepentant Khomeini was exiled first to Iraq and then to France, from where he continued his campaign of denunciation.

Finally, in 1978, a wide coalition of secularist and religious intellectuals, trade unionists, communists, and women’s groups forced the Shah to leave Iran. But when clerics established a fully-fledged “Islamic republic” in 1979, many participants in the struggle against the Shah felt cheated. Not only were they not represented in the new government, but the new regime employed the same security machinery and committed the same atrocities as the Shah did, in order to silence all opposition.

Ayatollah Khomeini

Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-1989) claimed that it was the duty of religious scholars to bring about an Islamic state and to assume legislative, executive and judicial positions within it. This particular form of government was to be referred to as “Rule of the Jurisprudent”. The highest authority was to be a religious scholar who held absolute executive power, and who was qualified to hold this office as the basis of unrivaled knowledge of religious law. He was meant to have such a high level of moral excellence that he was, in fact, untainted by any major sin. There can be little doubt that when Ayatollah Khomeini took over as the religious leader of Iran after the Islamic Revolution, he was ruling in precisely this capacity.

Khomeini based his ideas of governance by scholars on Islamic precedents, including the hadith, which said: “The scholars of my community are like the prophets before me.” Khomeini shared the idea that virtuous leadership creates a virtuous society with other Islamists. However, unlike most other Islamists of the twentieth century, he also stressed the symbolism of class and economic exploitation, which resonated with Marxist opponents of the Shah. As he put it: “If the ulama … were to implement God’s ordinances …. The people would no longer be hungry and wretched, and the laws of Islam would no longer be in abeyance.”

Author Bio: Hafiz Ikram Ullah is an Islamic scholar, researcher & an Egyptian online Quran teacher. He holds a Master's degree in Islamic jurisprudence.