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The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution

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Ruhollah Khomeini was a mullah born in a poverty-stricken village in the Iranian uplands in the last century. Nothing in his childhood or youth would have indicated that one day he would play a major international role, hold America hostage and fire the first shots in what Samuel Huntington has described as " the war of civilisations." Millions of Americans watched their diplomats held hostage and blindfolded in Tehran and daily threatened with execution. The American television public also became familiar with the dour-faced image of Khomeini, the radical mullah who incited mobs of Iranian fanatics to fever pitch. But few Americans understood why Khomeini was able to practice the medieval policy of holding hostages in the final decades of the Twentieth Century.Or what made him tick? This biography, first published over a decade ago and later re-edited, is the best account I have seen of Khomeini's life and politics. Written in an easy flowing and yet very powerful narrative prose, this biography is consistently fair to Khomeini, letting him tell us his side of the story, without being complacent when it comes to exposing and denouncing the crimes he and his regimes committed against the people of Iran and other peoples. There are moments in this fascinating biography that Khomeini comes almost close to sainthood: for example when he speaks out for the downtrodden against a despotic Shah. But there are other moments when we see the ayatollah as a real-life monster : for example when he visits the bullet-strewn corpses of six military officers who have been shot by his henchmen without trial. The ayatollah caresses his white beard and thanks Allah for alllowing him to witness " This beautiful scene." ( sic.) The writer, basing himself mostly on interviews and other primary sources, brings us the film of Khomeini's life in a way that is both instructive and entertaining. We see young Khomeini courting his bride-to-be and preparing for his wedding with all the gaucherie of a village youth. We see him locked in theological disputes with the religious grandees of his days. We see him sit himself down at an audience with the Shah, thus breaking the protocol which insisted that " commoners" should stand while His Imperial Majesty received them. Then we see Khomeini ordering the assassination of intellectuals with a nod of his turbaned head or putting his seal to a " fatwa" for the despatch of thousands of adolescents to the killing fields of the Iran-Iraq war. As an additional bonus the books offers translations of two of Khomeini's poems. ( Yes, he was a poet, too!) A careful reading of the poems reveals the late ayatollah as a jumble of contradictions, a restless soul which , operating at the extremes, could be both saintly and monstrous. One of the best political books I have read in years. A READER IN KUWAIT

This book is one of the best examples of the art of biography that I have come across in years.
The writer knows his subject deeply and is also gifted with a flowing prose that is easy to follow.
We learn of the ayatollah's sad childhood, when he was known as "badqadam" ( ill-omened) because his father had been killed in a brawl shortly after his birth.
Khomeini tried to pattern his life on that of Islam's Prophet Mohammad, who had also been an orphan.
Like Mohammad he was forced into exile.
And like Mohammad he returned home in triumph to found a new state.
But unlike Mohammad, who had shown mercy to his worst enemies, Khomeini decided to take revenge, often against innocent individuals whose only crime had been their position within the Iranian administration.
Khomeini seized power in an Iran that, though certainly not free and prosperous by WSestern standards, was the freest and mostpropserous of all Muslim countries. But when he died 10 years later, Iran was one of the poorest and most oppressed nations. By one estimate over 1.2 million Iranians died during Khomeini's reign, including those who fell in the eight-year long war against Iraq.
Khomeini is also the father of modern Islamic terrorirsm that later reached its worst manifestations in the Palestinian suicide-bombers and the Saudi- Egyptian Al Qaeda group.
This book is an absolute must by all those who wish to understand radical Islam and the threat that it poses, in diddferent forms, to the civilized world.
A.Keame, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

In 1979 Time Magazine put Ruhollah Khomeini on its cover as " Man of the Year".
The Shah had left Iran, a broken man and was being chased out of the United States, where he was being treated for cancer. President Jimmy Carter was trying to curry favor with Khomeini, an obscure mullah who had suddenly become master of Iran.
Carter even wrote a letter to Khomeini- " from one man of faith to another man of faith"!
Carter's National Security Council was putting out papers that proposed " strong support" for Khomeini and urged the multiplication of his model in other Islamic countries.
A CIA memorandum had described Khomeini as " a kind of philosopher king", more interested in " society's moral well-being than in the exercise of power."
American Iranologists, including Professor Richard Cottam, were praising Khomeini to the skies as " the Gandhi of Islam".
In hindsight it is a pity that Amir Taheri's fascinating biography of the ayatollah was not available at that time so that the people of Iran, and the world outside, would know exactly who they were dealing with. But, if I understand from the autor's background, he , too, was not familiar with the ayatollah's life until after the revolution.
This book shows the art of biography at its best.
It is based on extensive research, including first-hand interviews and documents.
But what is specially interesting is Taheri's cool analysis of political Islam and its practical consequences.
The author writes with the ease and detachment of a novelist but takes meticulous care to back every assertion with evidence and authority.
The portrait of Khomeini as a child and a young man is of special interest insofar as its reveals the bleakness of life in a small Iranian town in the early years of the last century.
Of all the books written about the ayatollah and his revolution, this is by far the best. A pleasure to read and an object lesson in the strange twists and turns of history.

Khomeini was certainly a monster, and not a saint as his followers suggest. Sadly, the US realised that a bit too late.

A READER IN LONDON

When a writer sets out to pen the biography of a well known and controversial figure, maintaining objectivity is of paramount importance. The author, Amir Taheri, remains objective in writing the biography of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,who, more than a decade after his death, continues to provoke strong feelings in millions of people worldwide. Taheri's superb research and his easy flowing writing style captivate the reader's interest from the beginning to the end. This book is a must read for anyone wishing to gain a better understanding of Iran today and where she may be heading in the future.

As a reader of biographies, I have always been surprised by the ease with which most writers either fall in love with their subject or use their pens to demolish it.
Here is one biography in which the writer, an Iranian journalist, manages to stay strictly objective. This does not mean that the author has any sympathy with Khomeini's special brand of Islamic politics. He does not. If anything, Taheri is a Westernized Iranian who would feel more at home in a Western liberal democracy than in any Islamic republic. But , to his credit, he has managed to see the world throgh the eyes of Khomeini.
He shows how Khomeini, who became an orphan when his father was killed in a land dispute, nurtured his resentment into a blazing fire of hatred that many decades later produced a bloodbath in Iran.
Hatred was also the basic strcture of the system that Khomeini built: hatred of women, hatred of the educated, hatred of the rich, and hatred of anyone who looked and thought differently.
Those who wish to understand how religion can be used for the most murdrous of enterprises, had better read this book. The experience is sobering. It is also a good read. W.Vederer

When I first began in depth research and writing on the Middle East and Islam in 2000, there were few if any mentions anywhere on the Internet concerning Kitman, the Islamic religious practice of lying in order to advance the coming of the universal Islamic empire, and the ensuing Islamic vision of end times.

But Taheri, the secular editor-in-chief of Iran's leading Kayhan daily until he fled after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution, very candidly describes the tactic of deliberate duplicity on page 110 of this meticulous biography. He does so, moreover, in explaining Khomeini's personal deviousness as regarding some key religious figures during prior to and during the reign of the last Shah of Iran.

Khomeini, from at least as early as 1949, cultivated opposing religious leaders in his attempt to garner as much influence as possible.

Similarly, on page 174, Taheri describes the equivalent practice of taqieh (which he calls "dissimulation"), a tradition of lying "not only allowed but even recommended in Shi'ite tradition"--once again, to advance the interests of Islam while protecting its avid prosecutors.

In this context, Taheri also rightly explains that Iran was not an easy or willing target of Islam. Shi'ism, he reports, "is largely a product of the Safavid era (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries)." But it can be traced to Iran's 7th century conquest by Muslim Arabs, whom it took a difficult 15 years to suppress the "ramshackle empire the Sassanids had left behind." But even then, most Iranians "refused to become Muslims."

They agreed to convert only much later, after the Muslim oppressors had "succeeded in creating an organization capable of exacting jeziyah, the head tax for non-Muslims." Only then, when, poor Persian plateau peasants couldn't pay, were they forced to give their verbal "profession of faith"--as the only way to avoid both the tax, and the third, deadly and final alternative.

This book not only explains the devious and deadly designs of Khomeini, but also the intricacies of Islam's early weaknesses within the Persian environment, and the explanations for much of the political and religious mistrust of more recent centuries.

Also appearing here are many of the other key Shi'ite families, such as the Bani-Sadr's.

To be sure, there are some faults with this account, but on the whole, they are minor. Taheri is an honest scribe, whose involved biography gives an important, even critical, history of the country's current regime--complete with its numerous, murderous, and otherwise grotesque, warts.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

This scholarly biography of the late Ayatollah Khomeini portrays a world that is both far and near to us in the West.
It is far because it is based on values, traditions, practices and common memories that challenge, if not actually violate what we cherish most.
It is so near because today there are more than 25 million Muslims in Western Europe and North America who share many of Khomeini's beliefs, sentiments and prejudices.
Taheri, an Iranian author and scholar, has not limited his book to telling the story of just one man. For him, Khomeini's biography is an excuse, or an opportunity if you prefer, to depict the traditional Islamic society, warts and all.
I see that some reviewers have described the book as " a pleasure to read". In a sense, it may be. But I found it more of a chilling read. PLB. Paris, France

Read it as history or just as the story of a man and a nation. Khomeini appears as a shorthand word for the most dramatic experience that Iran has had in its contemporary history- an experience which would need millions of words to explain. The bleak society that produced Khomeini is depicted with mastery. This is a book that gives you an insight nto the deepest recesses of the Iranian soul and helps you understand the convulsions that have shaken the Muslim world in the poast two decades.

More than just a biography, this is the story of a people, the Iranian people who have experienced one of the darkest phases of their long history.
The book is based on extensive research and written in a language that is both liveley and erudite.
I recommend it to all those interested in biography, hisory and politics.
Amelia

I am best described as a 9/10 moron. To be blunt, the horrific events of the following day completely stunned me. I had no idea that the threat of Islamic nihilism was that serious. Yes, there might be a few terrorists running around---but our police agencies presumably had things mostly under control. Sadly, few knew that the ideological virus of political correctness had severely limited their effectiveness. Amir Taheri wrote this book in 1985. He reveals the Ayatollah Khomeini as something of a con man who clearly despised the values of Western Civilization. Instituting democracy in Iran was the furthest thing from his mind. The Ayatollah considered women to be second class citizens and a hard line interpretation of Islam was to dominate Iran. Lying was deemed totally acceptable if it accomplished these goals. Non-Muslims were considered to be scum of the Earth not deserving of the truth. The religious fanatic Ayatollah Khomeini, as had Adolph Hitler some 30-40 years earlier, played the useful idiots of the West and Iran for fools. These "elites" seemingly enjoyed being deceived, and the religious totalitarian tyrant was more then happy to oblige. Khomeini also did not hesitate to stab them in back once he gained power. Many of them were among the first to be slaughtered.

The Shah of Iran was not a paragon of liberal democratic values. He admittedly needed to be gently shoved to the side. Unfortunately, the Iranians jumped from the proverbial frying pan into the flames. A cautious evolution of the political institutions was required---but instead Iran experienced a reactionary Islamic revolution. Is this book outdated? Not in the least. History is merely repeating itself. Amir Taheri's 22 year old work will help you to more fully understand today's harsh realities.

David Thomson
Flares into Darkness