The Coming Iranian Revolution (Abbas Milani, 3/03/26, NY Times)
The people of Iran wanted a revolution based on the idea of modern citizenship and a social contract, to bring democracy, freedom, independence and a republic, even an Islamic one but without clerical rule. Ayatollah Khomeini promised those ideas, giving Iranians and the Western powers what they were desperate to hear. In the end, what he orchestrated was a counterrevolution.
In a suburb of Paris, in the months before the overthrow of the shah, the ayatollah gave scores of interviews. He concealed his political ambition and suggested he would ultimately step back from governance, though in past writings he often espoused rule by the clergy. He even wrote a letter to President Jimmy Carter, asking him to defang the Iranian military and promising to keep Iran free of Soviet domination and the country’s oil on the markets. But all along, he was keen on clerical despotism and, as it soon became apparent, harbored deep resentments against the United States.
In another indication of his counterrevolutionary mode, many people in predominantly Shiite Iran believed that a reformed conception of Shiism was needed to make it amenable to modernity. But Ayatollah Khomeini, from his first major book in the 1940s and later as the supreme Shiite religious authority, insisted on keeping traditional rituals and dogmas, thus quashing the idea of modernizing Shiite Islam.
The romance of revolution, ignorance about Ayatollah Khomeini’s past writings and his pose as a defender of a liberal democratic polity in the months before the shah’s overthrow made the bait and switch work, albeit briefly. Iranians from all walks of life, Western leaders and many prominent intellectuals saw him as the flag bearer of Iran’s democratic aspirations.
Now Iran just needs to return to the traditional Shi’a wait for the messiah, like the West.