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Chapter 9 Khomeini and the Constitution of the Rule of God in Contemporary

When launching his revolutionary movement against the Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in the 1970s, Ayatollah Sayyed Ruhollāh Khomeini assumed the of Imam, This was totally unprecedented in the history of the Shiʿa who had restricted the title to the holy the last of whom was believed to have gone into in the ninth/third century to reappear only at the End of Time as the . The undisputed leader of the Islamic revolu- tion and founder and charismatic leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran from 1979 to 1989, he set the direction of post-revolutionary developments in the two decades after his death. Imam Khomeini thus became the bearer of Shiʿite into a new historical phase of its life as a world religion. At the time of the Islamic revolution in 1979, he was already an old man. His Islamic revolutionary rhetoric was of course directed against the last Shah and the United States, but his formation predated the advent of both the last Shah and the United States on the Iranian scene, as did the preoccupations that made him a revolutionary when he was already an aging Grand Ayatollah (Sign of God).1 Shiʿism had by the beginning of the nineteenth century devel- oped an independent hierocracy that constituted one of the two powers in Iran’s authority structure, the other power being —the state under the Shah.2 This was in marked contrast to , and also to the first two and half centuries of Shiʿism in Iran under the Safavid (1501–1722). In the twentieth century, state-building, secularization, and modernization greatly weakened the Shiʿite hierocracy but did not impair its independence from the state. What Khomeini succeeded in doing in the 1970s was mobilizing the militant elements within the beleaguered hierocracy for revolution against monarchy. Unlike the younger generation, Khomeini was not motivated by any obsession with the United States, even though he inimitably expressed the view of younger Iranians during the revolution by calling it the Great Satan. He was moved first to protest in the early 1960s and then to revolutionary action in the 1970s in order to preserve the Shiʿite tradition which had nourished him

1 This is the literal meaning of ‘āyatollāh al-ʿozma’, the title of the foremost authori- ties in Shi‛ite law who are followed by the laity as ‘sources of emulation’ (marājeʿ-e ). 2 See Chapter 9.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004326279_011 188 Chapter 9 and he now saw as threatened with extinction. What Khomeini was taking on was thus no less than the whole twentieth-century idea of modernization that had become entrenched in the political culture of Iran since the Constitutional Revolution (1906–11). He could only do so by a revolutionary extension of the hierocratic authority of Shiʿite jurists as the “general deputies” of the Hidden Imam into the mandate of one among them to rule.3 Born in 1902, Sayyed Ruhollāh was an orphan raised by his uncle and older brother during Iran’s Constitutional Revolution. Although his father had been a cleric, he did not belong to any of the elite clerical . Shiʿite reli- gious leaders appeared in the forefront of the first popular protests in 1905 and 1906 but were quickly divided during that revolution. One of them, Shaykh Fazlollah Nuri, propounded the idea of “shariʿa-based constitutionalism” (mashruta-ye mashruʿa) and led a traditionalist movement against the Majles (Iranian parliament) in 1907–8. Khomeini considered the intellectuals and reformist bureaucrats in the first decade of the twentieth century had taken unfair advantage of the Shiʿite leaders who mobilized the masses and forced the Shah to grant a constitution, but were then excluded from power, in Nuri’s case indeed executed, after the establishment of constitutional government. Khomeini undoubtedly shared this view. He was therefore a great admirer of Shaykh Fazlollah Nuri, who was lionized after the Islamic revolution as the far- sighted champion of Islam against the West.4 The policies of centralization and secularization under the builder of Iran’s modern state, Reza , Minister of War and Prime Minister since 1921, and thereafter Pahlavi (1925–41), were opposed by a few clerics in the 1920s and 1930s, but this opposition remained ineffective. The of Reza Shah encompassed Khomeini’s formative years. Khomeini was atypical in his studies and chose to specialize in mystical philosophy, which was highly sus- pect in the legalistic scholarly community of . While teaching mystical philosophy to a small number of students, he also began teaching courses in ethics for a much larger audience in the 1930s. The popularity of these lec- tures made the police apprehensive.5 Khomeini never forgot the loss of clerical power that resulted from secularization and the modernization of the state

3 The notion of ‘general deputyship’ (niyābat-e ʿāmma) of the Hidden Imam referred to col- lective hierocratic authority in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. Following Khomeini’s ideological revolution in Shiʿism, it has been replaced in the discourse of the Islamic Republic of Iran by near-equivalent terms, val-yi amr, or vali-ye faqih, which I have rendered as ‘theocratic ’. (Arjomand 2009). 4 Arjomand 1988:148–49. 5 Algar 1988.