Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah

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Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini

Born on c. 1900 (Khomein, Persia)
Died on June 3, 1989 (Tehran, Iran)

Religious leader of Iran
Politician

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was the leader of the Islamic revolution in Iran. He came to power in 1979 in a violent storm of religious fervor. Muslims in Iran and throughout the Middle East were attracted to his rejection of Western-influenced modernization and his emphasis on Islamic tradition. (Western influences came from Western countries such as Britain, France, Canada, and the United States.) But his leadership was in many ways detrimental to Iran: he mismanaged the country's economy, prolonged a bitter and bloody war with Iraq that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iranians, and slowed down the development of the country by many years. He was reviled by many leaders in the West, yet his form of Islamic rule had a great impact on the region and changed the balance of power in the Middle East forever. When he died in 1989 he was hailed by many as a martyr, and he has retained a god-like status among many of his followers.

"Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim. Those who say this are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all."

A childhood dominated by religion

Sayyid Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini was born around 1900. His first name, Ruhollah, means "The Spirit of God," and is a common name in the Shiite branch of Islam. Islam is the religion of the Muslims, and Shiites are members of the branch of Islam that regard Ali, one of the Prophet Muhammad's sons, as the Prophet's legitimate successor. Most Shiites live in Iran.

Khomeini was born in a poor and rural area of Persia (which changed its name to Iran in 1935), about 180 miles southwest of Tehran, the country's capital. He was the youngest of six children. His father, Mustapha Musavi, was the mullah (religious leader) of several towns, including that of Khomein—the birthplace from which the child took his name. Khomeini descended from a long line of religious leaders: his grandfather and brother were both ayatollahs, high-ranking Shiite religious and political leaders who are regarded as authorities on religious law. Most of his childhood was spent discussing religion or reading the Koran, the holy book of Islam. His mother, Hajar, also came from an important religious family. She was the daughter of Ayatollah Mirza Ahmad, a famous religious scholar from Najaf, Iraq, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam.

When Khomeini was just a few months old, his father was brutally murdered and his mother, a deeply religious woman, was left to care for all six children. Tragically, she died when Khomeini was just fifteen years old, after which his brothers and sisters were left to care for him. At the age of nineteen he was sent to Arak, in central Persia, to study the Koran under the famous Ayatollah Haeri, one of Islam's most important theologians, or religious thinkers, at the time. Khomeini was a very diligent student who excelled in ethics and philosophy. His hard work gained him a place at one of the leading centers of Islamic study in Qom, the holiest city in Persia and the spiritual capital of Shiite Islam. People soon started to take notice of the young student, for his preaching was very political and his dislike of and intolerance for non-Muslims and foreigners was intense. Although Khomeini was never described as a brilliant speaker, the passion with which he spoke inspired people to rally around him. When he rose through the ranks to become a teacher himself, hundreds of students would cram into his classroom to hear his famous lectures on solving his country's problems through religious means.

Political agitation

In 1941 the recently renamed Iran was ruled by a monarchy. The Iranian equivalent of the king, Reza Shah, had just abdicated, or resigned, in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919–1980). The religious leaders of Iran had little tolerance for the royal family, as they regarded the royal lifestyle as decadent and their relationships with Western countries, especially the United States, as a form of treason. At the same time, the shah, as the Iranian leader was called, was trying to modernize Iran and believed that the way to do this was to put less emphasis on religion. The shah thought that, instead of sitting in classrooms reading the Koran, children should be learning the skills that would help them obtain jobs. Khomeini accused the shah of being un-Islamic, cruel, and corrupt. The religious leader and the shah first clashed publicly after the shah held a referendum (proposal put up for public vote) that included women's right to vote. The mullahs were strongly opposed to women's rights, and Khomeini seized on the opportunity to declare that these reforms were simply part of an American plan to rule Iran. His argument would prove to be quite persuasive to those who disliked Western influences in their country.

Sharia and Women's Rights in Islam

Sharia law is the code of law derived from the Koran and from the teachings and examples of Mohammed, the prophet of Islam. Sharia is only applicable to Muslims, and under Islamic law there is no separation of church and state. The law is very harsh. For instance, those who steal can be sentenced to having their hands cut off. Those who commit rape are sentenced to death by stoning. Sharia allows men to have four permanent wives and as many temporary wives as they desire. Fathers have full custody over their children. After the father dies, custody of children reverts to the male relatives on the father's side. If a couple divorces, the mother has no right to see her children. If a woman wishes to travel, she must first get permission from her husband.

After the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini expanded the boundaries of Sharia through a more fundamentalist, or deeply conservative, interpretation. Women were not allowed to hold senior positions, such as those of judges or lawyers, and they were forced to cover themselves from head to toe. Birth control was forbidden. The strictest use of Sharia in the 2000s is practiced in Saudi Arabia, but most majority-Muslim countries follow some form of Islamic law within their national law. In early-twenty-first-century Iran, Sharia does not limit all rights for women: almost half of the students attending universities are women; there are many women in the national legislature; and there are successful birth control programs around the country.

In 1944 Khomeini wrote his first political text, demanding that the Iranian government be Islamicized, or reconstructed to conform more closely with Islamic religious law, or Sharia. The type of Iranian society that Khomeini wished to bring about was one where women covered themselves from head to toe in black gowns and head scarves, and where people were not allowed to gamble, drink alcohol, watch Western films, or buy Western products. He also desired to purge Iran of all of its non-Islamic elements, including members of other religious faiths, such as Jews and Christians. To bring about this revolution, however, he would have to use modern means.

Khomeini declared himself on the side of the poor and oppressed in Iran. Hundreds and then thousands flocked to hear him speak. He also continued to educate himself in all areas of Islamic religion and law. Sometime during the 1950s he became an ayatollah and gathered around him a group of devoted followers. His popularity soon came to the attention of the authorities, and the shah, fearing instability, immediately sent troops and secret police to his seminary to arrest him. Khomeini's followers were outraged and staged violent protests in Tehran, but the protests were brutally suppressed and many people were thrown into prison. In 1963 Khomeini himself was arrested and forced into exile. He spent most of the next thirteen years in Najaf, the Shiite spiritual capital in neighboring Iraq, where he built a devoted and increasingly powerful following. He taped his own religious teachings and smuggled them into Iran, and gave many television and radio interviews. He officially denounced the Iranian monarchy with such slogans as "Death to the Shah," and declared he would never cooperate with the monarch again. After declaring war on the shah, he vowed to remove him from power. In 1977 Khomeini's eldest son, Sayyed Mostafa, died suddenly in Najaf. Khomeini believed that the shah's secret police had crossed the border and murdered him as a warning sign to Khomeini. His anger only grew more intense.

The Iranian revolution

The shah of Iran was in charge of one of the most powerful armies in the Middle East and was respected in many capitals throughout the world, from London to Washington. But the protests against him that had erupted after the exile of Khomeini only grew more intense. The shah had failed to spread wealth evenly across the country, and the gap between the rich and the poor was immense. Unemployment was high, and poverty was widespread. Large-scale protests against the shah started to erupt all over the country, and by 1978 the shah could no longer send out his army to suppress the demonstrators. There were now simply too many of them. By this time Khomeini had moved to Neauphle-le-Chateau, France, where he gained global attention from the publication of his speeches. He had firmly secured his position as opposition leader to the shah. The shah came under mounting pressure to step down, and finally, on January 16, 1979, he fled to Cairo, Egypt, on a special jet, leaving many of his possessions behind.

After two weeks of intense fighting and power struggles inside Iran, Khomeini boarded a plane, wearing his famous black turban and long grey beard, and landed at the Tehran airport, where he was met by hundreds of thousands of his cheering followers. From this point onward, such was his power that he was never seriously challenged from within Iran's borders. In March 1979 Iran changed from being a hereditary monarchy to an Islamic republic. A new constitution was drawn up to give ultimate powers to a national religious leader, Khomeini, for his lifetime. Khomeini commanded the army, he directed foreign policy, and he had the power to get rid of the elected president. In short, he was all-powerful. Khomeini's first prime minister was Mehdi Bazargan (1905–1995), a seventy-two-year-old moderate. Bazargan only ruled for eight months, as differences of opinion between the secular (non-religious) and religious elements of the ruling elites became too difficult to manage. Khomeini, who was a master at dealing with people, never took sides with any faction, in order to remain popular. But he could also be very brutal, as when he exacted vengeance on those who had been loyal to the shah. Nearly one thousand of the shah's officials were executed when Khomeini took power, and by the mid-1990s it was estimated that nearly five thousand people had been killed, with forty-five thousand more thrown into prison by the Khomeini regime.

The U.S. hostage crisis and war with Iraq

The Islamic revolution took a violent turn in 1979 when the U.S. embassy in Iran was overtaken by a group of Iranian militants, who took hostage the entire U.S. staff. Their demands were simple: they wanted the shah, who was receiving medical treatment in the United States, returned to Iran to face trial. Khomeini backed the students' actions, but his prime minister, Bazargan, resigned in disapproval as panic spread over what action the U.S. government might take. Embassy workers were held hostage for 444 days and only released when Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter (1924–; served 1977–1981) as U.S. president in January 1981. Following the 1979 revolution and the fear that Khomeini inspired in Western countries, Iran was perceived throughout the world as a threat to peace and stability.

No country was more threatened by the rise of an Islamic fundamentalist government in Iran than neighboring Iraq. In September 1980 Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (1937–; see entry), the secular leader of Iraq, sent his armies across the border and into Iran in an attempt to topple the Khomeini regime. The world largely supported Saddam Hussein, who was expected to defeat the Iranian religious conservatives. But the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) did not go as expected. The large Iranian army fought for two bloody years, until Iraqi forces were pushed back into Iraq. The war cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides. Instead of rebuilding his damaged country, however, Khomeini made a great error: he decided to invade Iraq. This decision prolonged the war for another six years and cost almost one million Iranian and Iraqi lives. It also nearly destroyed the Iranian economy. The war was one of the most expensive since World War II (1939–45; war in which Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and their allies defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan), costing an estimated $400 billion and creating 1.5 million refugees.

At the same time Iranian authorities were struggling with ideological disagreements within their ranks over religious policies, particularly the predominance of religious law over civilian law. Khomeini did not intervene, but it was clear that he stood in favor of religious law. By 1988 Khomeini realized that the war with Iraq had ruined the country's economy and earned Iran even greater hostility from the United States. In a surprising reversal, Khomeini accepted a United Nations (UN; an international organization founded in 1945 and made up of most of the countries of the world) Security Council call for a cease-fire. In a speech, he acknowledged that the acceptance of the UN contradicted his preachings about never giving in to the demands of the West.

After the war Khomeini became very ill and appeared less and less in public. He was reportedly suffering from cancer of the liver. He still managed to shock the world from his deathbed, however, when he issued a fatwa (a statement of religious law issued by an Islamic cleric) ordering that all Muslims hunt down and kill author Salman Rushdie (1947–), whose book The Satanic Verses Khomeini considered blasphemous (profane and disrespectful). Rushdie was forced into hiding in London for several years. Khomeini's last important decision was to order a review of his 1979 constitution that had concentrated power in the hands of the executive president. He wanted new rules drafted for the selection of a new president, but his wishes were not carried out.

After only eleven days in the hospital, following an operation to stop internal bleeding, Khomeini died on June 3, 1989. Authorities were not supposed to reveal his burial location, but news of the site was leaked and a crowd of over one million gathered around it. A mob of thousands of young religious men broke into the funeral procession and damaged his coffin. The authorities were forced to carry out a second funeral, in which Khomeini was interred in a steel casket that was surrounded by hundreds of guards. Many in contemporary Iranian society consider Khomeini a martyr. His wife, Khadija, and four children survive him, as does the Islamic government that he founded. However, many of Iran's problems have continued. Iran has remained a government that is shunned by many Western countries, even as it is admired by those who would bring Islamic revolution to their own land.