Reading Revolutionary Iran: The Worldview of the Islamic Republic's Religio-Political Elite 9783111026183, 9783111018102

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Ze’ev Maghen Reading Revolutionary Iran

Studies on Modern Orient

Volume 46

Ze’ev Maghen

Reading Revolutionary Iran The Worldview of the Islamic Republic’s Religio-Political Elite

ISBN 978-3-11-101810-2 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-102618-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-102622-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022951409 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: kalender / iStock / Getty Images Plus Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

To the Blue-Eyed Hippie Who taught me to be different To the Barrel-Chested Botanist Who resides in my soul forever To the Kingly Visage and the Queen of Sheba Who gave me the greatest of gifts

Contents Acknowledgements

IX

Note regarding transliteration Preface

X

XI

Introduction

1

Part One: Misreading the Islamic Republic Chapter One: Misconstruing the Muslim World

25

Chapter Two: Underestimating Revolutionary Iran Chapter Three: Confusing the Nature of the Conflict

94 140

Chapter Four: Shiʿite Islam and the Struggle for Democracy Chapter Five: Problems of Emphasis and Portrayal

173

224

Chapter Six: Islam, Nationalism and the Battle for the Iranian Soul

241 372

Chapter Seven: Shiʿism – Problems of Perception and Presentation

Part Two: Reading the Islamic Republic Chapter One: Shiʿite Sacred Time – The Origins of the Conflict

395

Chapter Two: The Shiʿite Academy – From the Marginalization of ʿalī to the Rise of the Ulama 467 Chapter Three: A Shiʿite Commonwealth – The Safavids and Beyond Chapter Four: Ayatollah Khomeini and the Rise of Revolutionary Shiʿism 525

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Chapter Five: After Khomeini – Divergent Paths in the Islamic 601 Republic Chapter Six: Whither Iran? Successes, Failures, Challenges Chapter Seven: Unity or Truth? The Sunni-Shiʿi Schism Conclusion: The Islamic Republic of Iran Select Bibliography Index of Persons

659 661

646

615 620

Acknowledgements Heartfelt thanks are due to Adam Silverstein and Meir Litvak for their consistent encouragement. Hadar Harbi of the Bar-Ilan University Library was unstinting in her assistance, procuring much needed secondary sources in a flash. Sophie Wagenhofer, Katharina Zühlke and Torsten Wollina of De Gruyter guided this project to its conclusion, for which I am most grateful. It is customary for authors to thank their spouses and offspring for affording them time off from family duties in order to pursue research and writing. Most of this book was researched and written during the Covid-19 crisis: my children were all over me (which fact accounts for any merit the following pages possess). My beloved wife, Dr. Anita Horesh-Maghen, is and always will be my sacred qibla.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-001

Note regarding transliteration Transliteration in this volume presented several challenges, primarily due to the overlap between Arabic and Persian usage. In the interests of simplicity (and feasibility), the method adopted distinguishes between (1) Arabic terms employed in what may be described as an “Arabic context” (i. e., words or names appearing in Arabic texts or phrases, or spoken in an Arabic-speaking milieu), which are transliterated according to standard academic practice, and (2) Persian terms, including terms originating from Arabic but utilized in a “Persian context” (i. e., appearing in Persian texts or phrases), which are transliterated phonetically, that is, in a manner designed to reproduce as closely as possible the present-day pronunciation in Iran (the letters ‫ ﺫ‬, ‫ ﺯ‬, ‫ ﺽ‬and ‫ ﻅ‬are thus all rendered in such sections by a “z”; the letters ‫ ﺱ‬and ‫ ﺹ‬are both transliterated therein as “s”; the letters ‫ ﺕ‬and ‫ ﻁ‬are both transliterated as “t”; the letters ‫ ﺡ‬and ‫ ﻩ‬are both transliterated as “h”; ʿayns and alifs are not distinguished; kasras are rendered with an “e” and ḍamma’s with an “o”; etc.). The premier exception concerns the letter ‫ ﻕ‬: though in the mouths of Persian speakers it sounds, in many cases, almost like a ‫( ﻍ‬gh), it is here nevertheless rendered consistently as “q” (qorban, enqelab, feqh). Long vowels are not marked for Persian (even though they are pronounced even longer than their Arabic counterparts). In some cases, consistency was so elusive that even the same word is transliterated differently depending on time and place (Ḥusayn, Hosayn, Saddam Hussein). Whenever possible, I have indulged my belief that readers should be exposed to the kasre-ye ezafeh that liaises the first with the last name (or nisba) in Persian – so “Hasan-e Rouhani” and “Makarem-e Shirazi.” Certain ubiquitous Arabic terms have been spared diacriticals (ulama, hadith). In some instances, I have preferred conventional English spellings (e. g., “Ayatollah” rather than “Ayat Allāh,” “Soroush” instead of “Sorush,” “Muhammad” and not “Muḥammad,” “Khomeini” rather than “Khomayni” or “Khumaynī”).

Preface The purpose of this study is to open a window onto the mindset of the class of Muslim legal scholars in charge of the Iranian state since the Islamic Revolution of 1979: their frames of reference, underlying assumptions, intellectual perspectives and sources of inspiration; their affinities and antipathies, motivations and aspirations, and ancient (and more contemporary) role models; and their outlooks on the divine, morality, history, modernity, their country, their enemies, and the world at large. It seeks to delineate, in a word – a word that betrays the somewhat disparaging attitude of the contemporary West to the notion of heritage – their “baggage.” Needless to say, such an ambitious (some might say: presumptuous, even quixotic) undertaking can succeed, if at all, only by offering a series of glimpses, vignettes, morsels and samples by way of meager introduction – an introduction that, it is hoped, will stimulate others to probe more deeply into various aspects of this almost unimaginably complex and amplitudinous subject.¹ Of course, a necessary premise of such research is that one can indeed speak of a collection of sentiments shared by most or all Iranian Islamist clerics – what we take the considerable risk of calling their common “worldview” or “mindset” – and since this is no longer an uncontroversial assumption, we will spend some time further on attempting to demonstrate its legitimacy. We shall not, for the most part, proceed chronologically. Rather, like Theseus and Hercules seeking paths of ingress to the underworld, we will descend from a variety of embarkation points – for the most part comprising significant issues that have arisen in our time along the fault-line between the Muslim world and the secular Occident – as far down into the depths of Iranian-Shiʿite clerical consciousness as we are able to go, given the limits of the writer, who is not an Iranian Shiʿite but an Israeli Jew, and the reader, who may well be an educated “layperson” rather than a Middle East or Iran specialist. While this topical, “au courant” approach recommended itself as more effective and interesting, nevertheless, the study does not ignore the historic procession of persons and events and the evolution of ideas and doctrines that together forged the faith community of today and the worldview of its professional custodians. On the contrary: it lays heavy stress on the contributions of the past to the present, appealing throughout to the veridical and legendary narratives that, so we shall maintain, inform the Weltan-

 Of course, the ground for probing the writings and speeches of contemporary Iranian-Shiʿite politically oriented clerics has been prepared, directly and indirectly, by hundreds of scholars researching in a wide variety of relevant fields over many decades. Their work is acknowledged and built upon in the text, notes and bibliography of this volume. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-002

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schauung of the governing clerics of the Islamic Republic more profoundly than any other factor. This latter claim is no longer the statement-of-the-obvious-bordering-on-tautology that it once was in intellectual circles: an ever-widening gamut of “post-modern” ideologies and methodologies have in recent decades not only problematized, but in a plethora of fields and disciplines actually anathematized, the common sense notion that a community’s shared historical experiences play a central role in forging the present-day perspectives held in common by members of that community – whether its cultural and political elite or its rank and file. This regrettable trend forces a great many first-rate researchers to preemptively apologize for their straightforward approach to historical scholarship and to the value of such scholarship for assessing events and phenomena in the here and now. To cite one instance among an endless array, in the preface to Yann Richard’s seminal Shiʿite Islam (Cambridge, 1995), the editor of the series and “founding father of twentieth century Sociology,” Charles Tilly, felt the need to devote an entire paragraph to justifying historical analysis that examin[es] the ways that social action at a given point in time lays down residues that limit the possibilities of subsequent social action…Social analysts have trouble seeing that history matters precisely because social interaction takes place in well-defined times and places, and occurs within constraints offered by those times and places, producing social relations and artifacts that are themselves located in space-time and whose existence and distribution constrain subsequent social interaction…²

This is longwinded acadamese for “the past influences the present.” The “anti-Orientalist” or “anti-essentialist” approach that forced Tilly to engage in such apologia, though long since enshrined as a virtual catechism in many branches of the academy, is – to the present author’s mind – profoundly detrimental to any attempt to comprehend the mentalit(ies) of the seminary-educated jurists who play the central role in steering the post-revolutionary Iranian regime and supervise the education/indoctrination of its society. Among its many other disadvantages, this mode of analysis – heavy on political and social theory and light on textual citations and historical references – flies flagrantly in the face of these clergymen’s own fiercely held self-perception. Arguably more than the exponents of any other religious culture, Shiʿite clerics see themselves as the inheritors of an ancient tradition that they are duty bound to maintain alive, render relevant and even superimpose upon the quotidian reality of their flocks. It would be difficult to envision a more condescending, patronizing

 Yann Richard, Shiʿite Islam (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), p. vii.

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and (worst of all) thoroughly misleading method of investigation than that which would dismiss or neglect this most central component of collective Shiʿite identity as, at the very least, one of several crucial tools for the elucidation of the worldview harbored by the torchbearers of Khomeinism. Indeed, such blatant disregard for the emphatic self-definition of the Muslim divines – the smug assumption that we know better than they what drives them and what informs their outlooks on existence – represents nothing less than the height of…Orientalism. Since the ruling Shiʿite ecclesiastics draw unceasingly upon the vast reservoir that is their religious tradition (far more so, for instance, than do American, European or even Israeli leaders), readers desirous of understanding “where the ayatollahs are coming from” – as well, indeed, as where they may be going – cannot afford to remain ignorant of the contents of that tradition. These newly empowered religious doctors are, of course, also Iranians, and Iranians, “because of the magnificence of their past, are overloaded by history.”³ The protracted careers of both creed and country, of both Shiʿism and Iran, are then the keys to the consciousness of Islamic Republican leaders. As Najam Haider reminds his readership in the simplest of terms: “memories matter.”⁴ None of this is to suggest that the Muslim scholar-jurists of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Iran act as mere avatars of classical paragons, incarnations of eternal principles, servile administrators of time-worn precepts or passive receptacles of cumulative historical experience. Au contraire! Few attitudes are more distinctly characteristic of contemporary Shiʿism than the emphatically “activist” stance of the ulama (clerics) – and especially the high-ranking legal scholars among them known as mujtahidūn – vis a vis the sacred corpus of their religious

 Yann Richard, Iran: A Social and Political History since the Qajars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), loc. 8363 – 4. (Or, as Nietzsche would have it: “saturated with history”). This statement must be qualified: whereas the wearers of turban and ’aba have more or less consistently accessed their classical religious sources, their recourse to Iranian national lore has been more uneven. On top of their fundamental reticence to deal in or publicize what is quintessential jāhilī (pagan barbaric) material – a sentiment exacerbated by the secularizing use to which nationalist themes were put under the Pahlavis – it must also be remembered that the clerics, together with their lay constituents (indeed, all Iranians), were largely ignorant of the lion’s share of pre-Islamic history until the turn of the twentieth century (as we shall see below). Moreover, like latter-day Islamist activists everywhere – Sunni no less than Shiʿi – Iran’s post-revolutionary clerics look back even on the purportedly Islamic dynasties that ruled their country with a jaundiced eye, and rarely hold them up as positive exempla. Still, in the face of all these ideological obstacles, the Persian speaking ulama are profoundly Iranian, and quite consciously so. More on this important subject later.  Najam Haider, Shiʿite Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 51.

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tradition.⁵ This creative and aggressive, even individualistic and progressive, approach, sometimes styled feqh-e puya or “the searching jurisprudence,” conceives of the present-day specialist in the law as the initiating intellectual force that acts upon the manifold classical sources, deploying, sifting, marshaling and manipulating them toward a given desideratum.⁶ But, of course, those classical sources are, for that very reason, an indispensable component of the overall equation. And far from some amorphous, passive and utterly malleable substratum upon which any  This approach, generally known as ijtihād, is considered by most of its present-day Shiʿi practitioners – with or without justification – as a unique hallmark of their sect. “Many Shiʿis have come to view ijtihād as the distinctive doctrine of Shiʿism, as that which sets it apart from Sunnism and renders it more dynamic and suited to the modern world” (L. Clarke [ed.], Shiʿite Heritage: Essays on Classical and Modern Traditions [Birmingham: Global Publications, 2001], p. 201). Sunni jurisprudential sources make use of the term, but since it is generally connected in their eyes with the more latitudinous ijtihād al-raʾy of the Ḥanafite school, it has come in for major criticism by Sunnis themselves and has to a considerable extent been neutered (even among Ḥanafite scholars). The method of qiyās or “analogy” continued to play a role in the deliberations of Sunni jurists, but has been largely rejected by their Shiʿite counterparts, who have characterized it at one and the same time as religiously reckless and as an escape from the intellectual adventure known as istinbāṭ or “derivation.” The criticism by Shiʿi scholars of additional Sunni sub-methodologies of ijtihād such as istiḥsān (choosing the closest ruling to truth and justice), istiṣlāḥ (giving one interest precedence over others) and taʾawwul (allowing independent reasoning to trump explicit precepts), allows Shiʿite jurists to present themselves as simultaneously the more conservative and the more intellectually liberated camp. It should be remembered that Shiʿism can claim the mantle of ijtihād only during those periods of its history when the Uṣūlī, as opposed to the Akhbārī, brand of jurisprudence prevailed (as we shall see below). It should also be noted that (a) Sunnism never really “closed the door” on ijtihād, and (b) the first half of the twentieth and, after a “fundamentalist” backlash, the first two decades of the twenty-first century, have seen a revival of aspects of ijtihād in Sunni religio-legal circles. Finally, it should not be forgotten that even in the medieval period, Sunni exponents took advantage of the phenomenon of the absolute authority of the Shiʿite imams in the eyes of their followers to tar specifically Shiʿism with the brush of taqlīd, the antithesis of ijtihād.  The concept of feqh-e puya is not a stranger to controversy in the world of the howzeh or Shiʿite seminary: some have cautioned against the potential for abuse inherent in such a “flexible” or “open ended” method that might even be used to “Islamize” various modern secular institutions. In general, however, this “activist” approach to jurisprudence is condoned and even encouraged today by Shiʿism’s legal luminaries, and assigned (not without justification) an ancient vintage. Ayatollah Khomeini himself expressed his approval of feqh-e puya on many occasions, with the caveat that it must arise from sincere and pious motivations and remain within proper bounds. The more fundamental technique of ijtihād (exertion of independent powers of judgment) – of which feqh-e puya is in some ways a mere re-statement – is accepted across the board by Iranian Shiʿite clerics, and is considered by many of them, with some exaggeration, as one of the unique characteristics of their sect of Islam. The term feqh-e sonnati or “traditional jurisprudence” is sometimes employed to offset feqh-e puya and is portrayed as the preferred method of the “hardline,” “conservative” or “principlist” clerics of the Islamic Republic. But the breakdown is by no means so neat.

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quality or set of qualities may be imposed at will, the ancient tradition is highly developed and therefore considerably resistant: its content and contours place limits on the enterprise of future interpreters, providing an intricate, if sometimes flexible, framework for their efforts. Indeed, we might (and in ensuing chapters we will) go further than this and assert that the classical sources of Shiʿism – like those of many another religious tradition – are possessed of a “transitive” potency, that is, that they exert a strong and often decisive influence over the intellectual and political enterprises of their latter-day legatees. It could be argued, in short, that the interaction between two such equally compelling forces – the early tradition and its later exponents – has made for nothing less than an epic struggle throughout Shiʿite history, in which during certain periods, or according to the outlooks of certain legal or philosophical schools, one element or the other has had the upper hand.⁷ But for now, let us be satisfied with a more moderate characterization of the two-way relationship between the faith’s foundational narratives (on the one hand) and the contemporary exponents thereof (on the other), perhaps best illustrated by paraphrasing a metaphor once employed by a medieval Muslim savant for a different purpose: the leading Shiʿite sages of our time, we might say, are the physicians, while the faith’s literary-legalhistorical canon is the pharmacy. ⁸ Neither can do its work without the other. Given such a “symbiotic” relationship, it should be stating the obvious to claim that familiarity with the inventory of this “pharmacy” constitutes an indispensable prerequisite for any examination of the thought of post-revolutionary Iran’s political and intellectual leadership. Without such a familiarity, not only the erudite references and abstruse allusions of this class of thinkers, but the fundamental purport of almost anything they say and write (or do) will be largely unintelligible to the

 We cannot really pinpoint the end of Mircea Eliade’s “sacred time” or the beginning of the era of the mutaʾakhkhirūn (“later ones,” used here in a more general – and not purely jurisprudential – sense), among other reasons because an ever-evolving continuum connects the two periods. But there is a canonized Shiʿite golden age, concluding with the occultation of the twelfth imam or soon thereafter, and at the other pole, we are focused on the religious leaders and thinkers that founded and now preside over the Khomeinist regime. In this sense we can instructively speak of a dichotomy between “the ancient tradition” and “its latter-day exponents.”  In its original context this comparison – antumu l-aṭibbāʾ wa naḥnu l-ṣayādila (“You are the doctors and we are the pharmacists”) – was adduced to describe the relationship between the practitioners of fiqh or jurisprudence, on the one hand, and the transmitters of hadith or reports concerning the deeds and statements of the Prophet Muḥammad and his followers/descendants, on the other – a relationship which is itself highly significant for the subject of this study and which we will discuss at some length further on (cited in Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari, Elhami az Shaykh al-Taʾefe in Majmuʿe-ye athar-e Ostad Shahid Motahhari [Qom: Entesharat-e Sadra, 1387], vol. 20, p. 132).

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Western reader. Unlike Karl Marx, who famously complained that “the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living;”⁹ and unlike Isa Sadeq, Education Minister and President of Tehran University under the first Pahlavi Shah, who lamented that “the Iranian nation limps under the unnecessary burdens of the past;”¹⁰ in contradistinction to all such “atomistic” sentiments, the ayatollahs and hojjatoleslams of today’s Islamic Republic are profoundly, inextricably and happily engaged with the history and literature of their creed (and – though to a lesser extent – of their country). They communicate with one another, and with their millions of followers (and detractors), from deep inside that history and literature.’ This crucial relevance of the national and especially religious past is compounded by another, related phenomenon. There would have been no Islamic Revolution in Iran had there not first occurred a revolution in Iranian Islam. Shiʿism had to be transformed: from a force for quietism, fatalism, conservatism and insularity, in which the main focus was on ritual, remembrance and (in the case of the upper echelons of its clerical class) legal casuistry, to a force for activism, militancy, engagement and change, in which the main focus was on grander and more current moral, social and political issues. That this transformation did in fact take place – at least on certain levels and within particular circles for a short amount of time during the modern period – was the result of internal and external developments. Internally, major shifts in madraseh/fiqh methodology championed by influential scholar-jurists from Vahed-e Behbehani (d. 1791) to Hosayn-e Borujerdi (d. 1962), helped orient the faith in a more engagé direction.¹¹ Externally, and of more immediate relevance, the impact of modern Western worldviews and movements on twentieth century Iranian intellectuals such as Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Ali-ye Shariʿati, Mahmud-e Taleqani, Abo l-Hasan Bani Sadr and (many would claim) Ayatollah

 Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” originally published in Die Revolution (New York: 1852), p. 1.  Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 63.  As we shall see below, the re-orientations effected by these and other luminaries at different points in Shiʿite intellectual history are far from easy to characterize and involve not a few paradoxes. Vahed-e Bebehani’s decisive contribution to the victory of the Uṣūlī school of fiqh, for instance, inaugurated two mutually contradictory trends: one that increased the relevance of Islamic law to life, and another that decreased it. Similarly, Ayatollah Borujerdi was a force for both quietism and activism (we shall elaborate on both of these points in Part Two). It should also be remembered that intellectual developments within the walls of the howzeh represent only one of many internal or domestic social, cultural, economic and political processes that together contributed to the general transformation under scrutiny here, but a fuller discussion of these processes and their interrelationships is beyond the scope of this (and probably any) volume.

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Khomeini himself, generated eclectic ideologies that combined Islamic heritage with European innovation, or clothed the latter in the garb of the former.¹² The newness of such hybrids, and the inner tension they embodied – to say nothing of the panaceas they promised – generated much energy and enthusiasm among the educated portions of the populace throughout the 1960s and 70s. Many educated Iranians saw in these acts of cultural amalgamation a praiseworthy mixture of rebelliousness and loyalty, boldness and balance, reason and revelation. The excitement produced, and ideas introduced, by these East-meets-West solutions – including the very notion of revolution itself, and the exhilaration accompanying it – were indispensable elements in the mass uprising that dethroned Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and established the Islamic Republic (the very name of which screams “dialectic”). The decade of the nineteen-sixties with its youthful, liberationist ferment fused with the century of the six-hundreds with its antique, evergreen religious ardor, to engender an upheaval unprecedented in modern times in terms of its scope and results. Ideological compounds, however, are highly unstable and extremely difficult to maintain. In the years and decades since 1979 the various syntheses of tradition and modernity that helped bring about the Khomeinist revolution have for the most part broken down, or been broken down, into their component parts. What had been a mounting revolution in Shiʿism rapidly retreated in favor of what looked more and more like a revolution for Shiʿism. The “old time religion” has increasingly re-asserted itself in both popular and official discourse. The regime’s new-fangled, post-revolutionary holidays have gradually lost their luster, while the ancient commemorations that crowd the Shiʿite calendar are arguably better attended now than ever. The anti-clericalism of the likes of Ali Shariʿati and the Freedom Movement has been supplanted by a full-fledged cleritocracy, not so much in the sense that Muslim religious scholars occupy most political offices – their presence in government bodies has actually decreased in recent decades – as in the sense that hundreds of televised turban-wearers treat the country as if it were their personal classroom.¹³ In the actual classrooms – those of the ma-

 “For us Islam does not mean performing the rituals,” explained “religious-democratic” activist Mehdi-ye Bazargan. “For us Islam is a progressive ideology of struggle to satisfy the material and spiritual needs of society” (Farhang Rajaee, Islamism and Modernism: The Changing Discourse in Iran [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007], p. 142). Of course, the impact of Western ideas on Iranian intellectuals, politicians and even clerics precedes all of these figures and goes back at least to the nineteenth century. We will cover aspects of this impact later in the book.  Spewing vitriol on clerics has always been a national pastime in Iran, a pastime which survived the Khomeinist revolution and in some senses was exacerbated by it. Nevertheless, such vituperation lives side by side with a profound, traditional veneration for the clergy, one of many para-

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drasehs/howzehs – a reversion of sorts (or at least a stubborn continuity) is visible: tens of thousands of seminary students in Qom and elsewhere currently follow much the same curriculum, listen to much the same lectures, and tackle many of the same texts with the help of many of the same methods that their predecessors did over a century ago, almost as if the revolution had never taken place.¹⁴ Khomeinist pan-Islamic ecumenism has, to a considerable extent (and especially since the “Arab Spring” of 2011), relapsed into parochial Shiʿite retrenchment.¹⁵ The economic and political radicalism of the early years has been systematically toned down, not to say uprooted, since the arrival on the scene of the more pragmatically-oriented and capitalistically-minded Rafsanjani and Khameneʾi, as president and Supreme Leader respectively. Fāṭima, the Prophet Muḥammad’s daughter, “no longer stands for protest, defiance and justice,” as she did with such powerful effect during the immediate pre- and post-revolutionary years, “but for chastity, piety and submission.”¹⁶ Ḥusayn as Che Guevara, the guerilla activist, has certainly not disappeared from view, but Ḥusayn as Jesus, the sacrificial lamb, is making a major comeback. The sublimated chiliasm of Islamist radicalism, utopian socialism and exportation of the revolution has given way to manifestations of the traditional Shiʿite messianism of mahdī and miracle. Nearly three decades ago Yann Richard could already write: More than fifteen years after the advent of the Iranian Islamic Republic, which explicitly claimed Shiʿite Islam as its principle, one may be surprised by the absence of any original thought aroused by that new type of revolution. An event claims to introduce the divine world into history, but Shiʿite thinkers have not put forward any new theology to give it sense: the clerics continue to repeat, comment on and expand the texts of the past, refute the errors and justify the choices of the present. With Khomeyni gone, any innovatory discourse would doubtless be badly received in a Community henceforward more concerned

doxes of Iranian Muslim life that we will attempt to elucidate further on in this volume. Although there are fewer and fewer clerics running for office in recent times, post-revolutionary Iran is still a “cleritocracy” in the political sense, as the most important and influential governmental posts remain firmly in clerical hands.  The Supreme leader’s own attempts to insert the works of no less a revolutionary luminary than Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari into the howzeh curriculum have met with considerable resistance.  This, of course, has as much to do with the massive increase in regional inter-sectarian strife since the Arab Spring – upon which more later – as it does with internal Iranian Shiʿite developments.  Ziba Mir Hosseini, “Islam, Women and Civil Rights: The Religious Debate in Iran of the 1990s,” in Sarah Ansari and Vanessa Martin (eds.), Women, Religion and Culture in Iran (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 172.

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with orthodoxy than with revolution…This stark return of the religious has inspired more invective and sarcasm than calm reflection among westerners.¹⁷

Nothing illustrates this “failure of the liberal Islamist narrative”¹⁸ more than the fate of the many “lay” individuals and organizations who purveyed that narrative: The Freedom Movement, The People’s Mujahedin, Ali-ye Shariʿati, Abo l-Hasan Bani Sadr, Mehdi-ye Bazargan, Ebrahim-e Yazdi, Sadeq-e Qotbzadeh and a host of others, who were rapidly marginalized and/or actively persecuted by a post-revolutionary inquisition that early on turned the word “eclectic” (elteqati) into a synonym for “heretical.”¹⁹ Instead of the spearhead of a creative, “progressive,” open-ended

 Richard, Shiʿite Islam, p. 212. Ervand Abrahamian noticed that as the years wore on, more and more speakers at official Islamic Republican events would sprinkle their rhetoric with the terms enshallah (in shāʾa llāh) meaning “if God wills” (Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], p. 86).  Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 793.  The Iranian Freedom Movement (nehzat-e azadi-ye Iran) was a more religiously oriented offshoot of Mohammad Mosaddeq’s largely secularist National Front (jebhe-ye melli). The People’s Mojahedin (mojahedin-e khalq) was and is an Islamic-Socialist guerilla organization. Ali-ye Shariʿati (d. 1977) was the most famous and influential theorist of revolutionary Shiʿism. Mehdi-ye Bazargan (d. 1995) was a scholar and activist who co-founded the above-mentioned Freedom Movement and became the first post-revolutionary prime minister, but resigned over the hostage crisis and was shunted aside by the regime. Abu l-Hasan Bani Sadr was the first president of the Islamic Republic who, in the wake of a falling out with the Khomeinists, was forced to flee to Paris, where he still resides. Ebrahim-e Yazdi, a surgeon practicing in Texas, served in various posts hard on the heels of the 1979 revolution but (like Bazargan and Bani Sadr) objected to the hostage taking at the American embassy and left his position to become the chairman of the (decreasingly influential) Freedom Movement until his death in 2017. Sadeq-e Qotbzadeh was a close aide to Khomeini who soured on Islamic Republican Party policies and was executed in 1982 on (probably trumped up) charges of conspiring with foreign intelligence agencies to carry out a coup. Some of these figures and groups will be discussed at greater length below. Many clerics may be added to the list of “eclectic” thinkers who sought a “progressive” or more democratic form of Islam and as a result became objects of delegitimization campaigns and even incarceration: Ayatollah Shariʿatmadari, Ayatollah Montazeri, Mohammad Mojtahed-e Shabestari, Ayatollah Karroubi, Hojjatoleslam Khatami, even Ayatollah Rafsanjani near the end of his life. Not a few lay reformists of later years (e. g., Abd al-Karim Soroush, Akbar-e Ganji, Mir Hosayn-e Musavi, Saʿid-e Hajjarian) suffered a similar fate. All of these thinkers and leaders at one point or another fell afoul of an official regime line that was becoming more cautious and traditional in the religious sphere as it waxed increasingly dictatorial in the political sphere. Somewhat ironically, the pre-revolutionary predecessors of these men – the Shariʿatis, Yazdis, Bani Sadrs and Bazargans – implacable foes of the monarchy though they were, may be said to have unwittingly participated in the Pahlavi project of reforming, modernizing, diluting, de-clericalizing and redirecting Shiʿism. One might argue that this “cooperation” was one of the factors that tainted the (to some extent Khomeinist) notion of a progressive and etatist Islam, and led to the present situation in the Islamic Republic which is characterized by

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brand of Shiʿism that these ill-starred activists had envisioned, the present-day Iranian regime has become more of a protector and cultivator of the conventional, “orthodox” (and folk) Shiʿism of yesteryear – souped up though it may be by the latest technology.²⁰ This “regression” from revolutionary to traditional religion has profoundly disappointed many, both inside and outside of Iran, including not a few dyed-in-thewool Khomeinists.²¹ But it is a fact nevertheless (and may well have been inevitaa certain reversion to the separation of church and state (so despised by Khomeini). One might further assert that the Islamic Republican regime has become, as a result, somewhat more of a caretaker than a purveyor of the church. However, the fact that clerics still run the show, and preside over a nationwide education-indoctrination project, undeniably mitigates this thesis.  One might almost say that what was once a religious vehicle for secular content – the Islamic modernism of the ante-revolutionary period – has increasingly been replaced, since 1979, by a secular vehicle for religious content – a sort of creeping “Qajarization” of post-revolutionary Iran. But this would be going too far, given the fact that clerics (still) administer the country, and play a central and largely unmediated role in advancing religious agendas at home and abroad. As we shall argue elsewhere in this volume, including in its conclusion, in today’s official Islamic Republic the relationship between tradition and modernity is less characterized by attempts to blend or integrate these two opposites than by attempts to create a division of labor and a system of checks and balances between them. Note also that while “orthodox” and “folk” religion do not always see eye-to-eye (though they generally manage to find modi Vivendi), here we are offsetting both strains to the spectrum of innovative ideologies that seek to infuse Shiʿism with modern Western philosophies and institutions.  Some see in this phenomenon a retreat from what Morteza Motahhari had styled “enlightened” (rowshanfekri) Islam to what he had decried as the “obscurantist” (tarik andishi) version (Morteza Motahhari, Qiyam va enqelab-e mahdi az didga-he falsafe-ye tarikh, in Majmuʿe-ye athar-e Ostad Shahid Motahhari [Tehran: Entesharat-e Sadra, n.d.], vol. 24, p. 419). In truth, we cannot know how Ayatollah Motahhari, who was assassinated in 1979, would react to the developments we have been describing. He certainly supported the trend that he saw as rowshanfekri, but on the other hand, he had little tolerance for the extreme liberties taken with Islamic tradition by members of the “progressive” camp – for whom (Motahhari argued) Islam was often more of a means than an end – and he famously disassociated from Ali-ye Shariʿati for that reason. One of those disappointed by this post-revolutionary de-sophistication is Columbia University’s Hamid Dabashi, who had been highly pleased to see the Iranian Shiʿite intelligentsia, having adopted anti-colonial nationalism and third world socialism, “leave its endogamous clericalism behind and meet the challenges of its contemporary history face to face” – only to watch it relapse into a situation in which once again “Shiʿi clerics presided over a dead and deadening Shiʿi scholasticism” (Hamid Dabashi, Shiʿism: A Religion of Protest [Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2011], pp. 298 – 299). Another mourner of the dying modern Islamic love-affair, or at least engagement, with Western liberalism is Khaled Abou al-Fadl: “Puritans and moderates are opposite poles that are both products of modernity and that also respond to modernity. Both orientations react to modernity, the one by rejecting it and the other by embracing it. There are some orientations in Islam that do not seem to be touched by modernity and do not respond to it, such as the conservatives or traditionalists, but I do not believe that they are significant in shaping the future of Islam. I believe that the future of Islam

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ble), and as such demands to an even greater extent of those who would penetrate the mindset of Iran’s present-day religio-political elite a thoroughgoing familiarity with the hoary heritage that is this class’s bread and butter. The present study will, therefore, take the long view, arguing – against the prevailing outlook in contemporary academia – that events and ideas from the distant past continue to play a powerful role in the present-day attitudes and decision-making of Iran’s leaders, indeed, influence them today more than ever before. Thus, the ensuing pages (especially in Part Two) will involve quite a few forays into the medieval annals of Iran and of Shiʿism – the country’s official religion for the last five hundred years – not in the form of superficial, “executive summaries” but in the form of relatively detailed and occasionally even anecdotal chronicles of major milestones in the historical careers of both. Why the warning about “anecdotal” material? Because good stories are, at one and the same time, most likely to be remembered and most likely to be invalidated. Nothing sticks in the minds of the masses (and the elite) down the many generations like a piquant tale or dramatic plot, and nothing attracts the critical, not to say lethal, attention of scholars like the same. Historians have cast serious doubt on the traditional account of (for instance) Sassanian monarch Khosroe Anushirvan’s many achievements, and have called into question much that comprises the standard biographies of figures such as the Prophet Muḥammad and the Imam ʿAlī. But almost everyone in Iran knows the time-honored versions of these biographies, and virtually no-one is aware of their more critically-based replacements. The staying power of the former may be attributed not just to the ignorance, inertia or piety of the public, nor even primarily to the veteran status of a narrative that has been for ages inextricably embedded in the foundations of communal myth, but perhaps first and foremost to the simple fact that the original tale is better. As Jalal Al-e Ahmad, one of Iran’s most celebrated twentieth-century authors, put it when comparing the theory of evolution to the story of creation: “Be-

will be shaped either by the puritans or the moderates” (Khaled Abou al-Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists, cited in Richard Bulliet, “Islamic Reformation or ’Big Crunch’? A Review Essay, Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 8 [2009], p. 15). Richard Bulliet comments that “Abou al-Fadl almost casually dismisses the conservative and traditionalist approaches that engage probably most of the world’s Muslims at the present moment” (Bulliet, Islamic Reformation, p. 15). These approaches certainly engage, mutatis mutandis, a considerable number of clerical and lay Iranians today. Finally, it is possible to see in the post-revolutionary reversion to tradition yet another swing in the ever-oscillating pendulum between Uṣūlism and Akhbārism, this time in the direction of the latter. This is an important but highly complex question, aspects of which will be touched upon below at appropriate junctures.

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tween the two, I like the story. Why? Because it is poetry. And the basis for poetry…”²² For the same reason, a yarn describing fifteen minutes in the life of the Iranian champion Rostam, the Safavid sovereign Abbas the Great, or the eighth Shiʿite imam’s sister Fāṭima the Immaculate will almost invariably take up more space in the memories of the vast majority of the Persian-speaking populace than the entire, centuries-long reign of the Parthian dynasty, or the more recent Hundred Years’ War between the alternately ruling “Black Sheep” and “White Sheep” tribes.²³ As Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameneʾi put it, referring to the third Shiʿite imam Ḥusayn’s martyrdom on the plain of Karbala in 680 CE: “In our entire fourteen hundred year-long history, it was this half-day that influenced us the most…Between our eight years’ war [against Iraq] and Imam Ḥusayn’s eight hour struggle [against the Umayyad army], we all know which was the more resplendent.”²⁴ Similarly, although Western historical research has long since shifted its emphasis away from the age-old preoccupation with the “trumpets and drums” exploits of heroes and aristocrats and toward the social and economic history of more “ordinary” folk, those same ordinary folk – as well as their more educated compatriots or co-religionists – stubbornly persist in celebrating and transmitting onward the former, while remaining for the most part blissfully unaware of the latter. And while learned, Ladurie-esque explications of the administrative apparatus, bureaucratic machinery or peasant economy of a particular pre-modern regime may tell us much, the overwhelming majority of subjects or citizens of that regime’s successor states simply couldn’t care less about such questions.²⁵ Anecdotal material concerning real or legendary paragons is even more relevant when seeking to penetrate the worldview of Muslim religious doctors and lay believers, because for these – to generalize grossly in what we hope is nevertheless an informative fashion – the cumulative, unidirectional, chronological procession of history is of less importance than individual, seminal incidents that loom large enough to be perceived as virtually anachronic. As with the Qurʿan itself – a docu-

 Cited in Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 301.  These historical events and dynasties will be surveyed below.  ʿAli Hosayni-ye Khameneʾi, Jehad-e farhangi: Dar Bayan-e Rahbar-e Moʿazzam-e Enqelab (Tehran: Daneshgah-e Emam Sadeq, 1391), p. 146. Note the Supreme Leader’s reference to “our entire 1400 year-long history”: “our” history is Islamic, not Iranian, history.  Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s The Peasants of Languedoc, first published in 1966, was a seminal classic of this new genre of “total” social-economic-administrative history. Coincidentally, Ladurie was an early critic of Khomeinism. A handful of academic specialists may be excepted from the blanket stipulation to which this note is appended.

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ment with few temporal markers the traditional exegesis of which often rejects the necessity of diachronicity²⁶ – Islamic time is often, as it were, flattened out into horizontal space, and this space, for its part, is overshadowed by outstanding incidents and personalities that ascend and expand to dominate its landscape. The very notion of linear history, for that matter, has never fully established itself in Islamic consciousness (or in that of many other traditional societies), counterbalanced as it has always been by more cyclical, static or essentialist conceptions of existence that do not entail a potent sense of increasing distance from formative events or prominent figures. The proximity of those events or figures is, rather, maintained at all costs.²⁷ Among Muslim jurists, for instance, the particular location of feted predecessors along an historical timeline is often immaterial: such prominent scholastics hailing from diverse periods are treated in many ways as contemporaries of one another, as if they were sitting around the same “heterotopic” mosque pillar engaged in discussion and argumentation.²⁸ The political, social or economic circumstances prevailing in a given era or at a given location (or the personal circumstances of individual biography) are all but ignored in the context of the vigorous, trans-temporal “conversation” in which these diverse intellectual virtuosos are envisioned to partake. Here, too, then, the realities of history – political, social, economic or otherwise – are not particularly relevant. For all the above reasons, the scientific accuracy and proportional presentation of historical material is often inversely related to the extent of its presence in the collective consciousness of society, and the foci of academic investigations into the centuries-long career of a national or religious community are generally unreflective of the interests or concerns of that community’s latter-day members, which are far more focused on folklore and hagiography. This does not mean that scholarship devoted to unearthing wie es eigentlich gewesen (“what really happened”) is unnecessary for, or even inimical to, our ability to understand the mental-emotional make-up of communities or their leaders in the present. Far from it. The components that go into forging the mature mindset of individuals and collectives are perhaps – so many have come to believe, at least since Freud and Jung – more often those that are forgotten than those that are remembered. The events

 This denial of diachronicity in tafsīr may be seen, inter alia, in the option of performing taqdīm wa taʾkhīr, that is, the reversal of the order of verses in a given passage so as to make more sense out of the plot.  Even on the daily level, Mohammad Reza Shah could remark that before his father became king “we Iranians never really bothered about time” (Milani, The Shah, p. 31). All top officials under Reza Shah reportedly fixed their watches ten minutes ahead of time to match that of their sovereign.  Following Michel Foucault’s usage of “heterotopia” as a place, as it were, out of space and time.

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and processes that transpired in our past have all contributed to forging our personalities, whether we are consciously aware of them or not.²⁹ In Adam Bede George Eliot muses: So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother’s bosom or rode on our father’s back in childhood. Doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot, but it is gone forever from our imagination.³⁰

In this sense rigorous historical research that debunks long-established myths and presents a more veracious account of that which occurred in by-gone eras functions as a sort of psychoanalysis that probes even deeper into what has formed the pre-conceptions and predilections of a given human association. If so, a compromise is in order: a delineation of the history/tradition of a people or religion that includes both (a) pithy and even sensationalist narratives that may be partly or wholly apocryphal, and (b) interwoven through these, a tolerably accurate portrayal of the actual procession of events, based on the findings of critical research. A final caveat is in order regarding those findings. The history of Iranian civilization is almost inconceivably long, multifarious, vicissitudinous and elusive, and all but the first adjective may be applied, without undue exaggeration, to the career and doctrines of Shiʿism. That which is concealed often exceeds that which is revealed in the archives of each subject, and political, ideological and theological controversy, past and present, serves to cloud our perception of countless phenomena that might otherwise be (relatively) clear. As Roy Mottahedeh puts it: “Any consensus on the meaning of the Iranian past has been torn up by the deeply felt disagreement among Iranians over the meaning of the Iranian present.”³¹

 This is how I understand, for instance, Rahim Shayegan’s reference to “those intellectual structures and cultural practices that might have been carried down from the Achaemenid to the Sassanian periods, without us having to assume the Sassanians were cognizant of them, or even applied themselves in emulating the ways of their historical predecessors” (Rahim Shayegan, “Persianism: Or Achaemenid Reminiscences in the Iranian and Iranicate World(s) of Antiquity,” in Rolf Strootman and Miguel John Versluys [eds.], Persianism in Antiquity [Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2017], p. 402).  George Eliot, Adam Bede (London: Penguin Books, n.d.), p. 215.  Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 9. This is a straightforward and therefore efficacious expression of the “problem of representation” so central to the (by contrast) painfully convoluted discussions of post-modern academia. Abbas Milani, speaking of an event that took place not in some distant past but only decades ago, writes: “There are completely conflicting reports on what actually happened on August 19 [1953, when prime minister Mohammad-e Mosaddeq was overthrown in a coup]. Each narrative is shaped either by the real or perceived interests of the narrator or by the

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The sheer breadth of diverse sub-specialisms cooperating (or not cooperating) to produce even an opaque picture of the realities of any given period in Iranian history is so daunting that one respected author has called the entire field “a mirage.”³² Scholarship on both subjects – Iran and Shiʿism – has ever been contentious and is, of course, constantly moving forward. Although the present writer does not subscribe to the increasingly widespread academic credo (applied even to the liberal arts) that might be formulated “latest is best” – that is, the notion that the theories proffered by earlier luminaries of the field have necessarily been superseded and rendered obsolete by more recent, “cutting edge” research – there is no question that new discoveries and re-conceptualizations tendered by up-and-coming students of the discipline regularly enhance our knowledge. It is therefore important to note that in our various discussions of aspects of Iranian and Shiʿite history – especially given their relative brevity and specific purpose, viz., to provide background for this volume’s particular focus on the worldview of the post-revolutionary clerical leaders – we make no pretense at taking account of the many polemics, or keeping abreast of the never-ending flood of novel contributions, that make this field (like many others) so challenging and unwieldy. Today’s scholarship tends to contest, to deconstruct, even to autopsy: arguably healthier for our knowledge of the genuine unfolding of events, it is often deadly to a flowing, coherent retelling. The necessity to maintain readability means that we will be unable to acknowledge, let alone engage with, all the relevant research that regularly calls into question elements of the overarching account. We have tried to cut a path down the middle of the competing theses that analyze – literally, “pull apart” – that account in a plethora of directions. When possible, we have addressed ourselves to dissenting positions and other complicating factors in the notes.³³ There is one more factor that contributes, perhaps more than all the others combined, to the urgent necessity of plunging down into the historical and philosophical core of Iranian Shi’ism (as opposed to making do with what has become the par-for-the-course “executive summary” format). What the Islamic Republic helped the Assad regime do successfully in Syria – suppress a country-wide uprising through mass slaughter on a national scale – will not work in Iran. If frustra-

historically and linguistically determined prism through which they perceive and articulate the event” (The Shah, p. 185).  Khodadad Rezakhani, Reorienting the Sassanians: East Iran in Late Antiquity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), loc. 203.  There are, of course, many excellent histories of Iran and studies of Shiʿism focusing on different dimensions and periods, many of which we have relied upon in what follows. Suggestions for further reading will be provided in the bibliography.

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tion with the denial of freedoms, the influence of modern individualism, the encroachment of neo-Westernization, economic frustration and the progress of technology all combine in order to ignite Persian youth, change will become inevitable. At that point, Iranian state law enforcement, wherever one locates it on the spectrum between the legitimate preservation of law and order and out-and-out, brutal repression, will stand at a crossroads between two paths, both of them ultimately leading to the same destination. One path involves an easing up of restrictions and the facilitation of more freedom in Iranian society. The other involves a series of increasingly bloody crackdowns, crackdowns that will fail and indeed boomerang in the short or long run, and thereby set the stage for…an easing up of restrictions and the facilitation of more freedom in Iranian society. When that happens, willynilly, and the glue holding the post-revolutionary polity together becomes perforce less “official” and more cultural, the role of religion in furnishing an enduring raison d’etre for the Iranian state will be enhanced by an order of magnitude. Indeed, of all the other ideological elements informing the character and trajectory of Iranian society in our time, including nationalism, only religion – specifically Shi’ite Islam – has a chance of fending off the onslaught of Americanized globalization that is rapidly replacing the multicolored and variegated Persian carpet that our world once was with a shiny, monochromatic mat. Thus, now more than ever, the virtually fathomless spiritual, theological, cultural and historical wellspring that irrigated and propagated Khomeinism – no less, and in some ways even more, than the ideology of Khomeinism itself – deserves our utmost attention. The subject matter of this book will thus include a heavy concentration, in what some would characterize (and castigate) as fine “essentialist” and “Orientalist” fashion, on the medieval and modern antecedents of revolutionary Shi’ism. It is difficult to write objectively about the worldview informing a regime that openly advocates, and relentlessly strives for, the annihilation of the writer’s own country. It is even more difficult to bring out the positive and powerful sides of an ideology the purveyors of which brook little if any dissent at home, increasingly pulverizing manifestations thereof with an iron fist. Like socialism and communism in its day, Khomeinism, for all its interest and (to this author’s mind) compelling aspects, must be judged in the end by the results it produces in reality. That is the ultimate litmus test. Any doctrine that fails to conquer the hearts of the human beings whose lives it presumes to order and direct – even after having initially succeeded in doing so – and can therefore maintain its authoritative position only by means of brute, lethal force, is a doctrine that both should not, and will not, survive and remain relevant in the long run. Even in such a case, however, said doctrine deserves to be studied, whether as a positive example or a cautionary tale or both. The Islamic Republic was, is and may well continue to be (in one form or an-

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other) a sui generis and fascinating phenomenon, worthy of our intellectual attention. Ze’ev Maghen Bar-Ilan University Erev Rosh HaShanah, 5783

Introduction Taking Khomeinism Seriously From ancient times Iranians have described their country as kanun-e-jahan, “The Center of the Universe,” a notion originally rooted in a sense of Aryan ethnic superiority (“Iran” means “land of the Aryans”) and soon buttressed by the grandeur associated with history’s first world empire (the Persian Achaemenid dynasty, 551– 333 BCE). Today Iran is once again living up to this ambitious epithet, having metamorphosed in the space of a single generation from a minor third-world player and truckling U. S. pawn into one of the premier initiative-takers on the geo-political scene and a major focal point of international anxiety.¹ Few subjects have been more frequently and urgently discussed in the political, diplomatic, military, intelligence, academic, intellectual and journalistic circles of East and West during recent decades than the looming challenge posed on a variety of fronts by the Islamic Republic of Iran, not just as a variable in a set of geo-strategic calculations, but as one of the primary epicenters of what is fast becoming the worldwide kulturkampf between religion and secularism, tradition and modernism, conservatism and progressivism. Yet despite the intense interest engendered by this unique and enigmatic polity, and despite the thousands of articles and books published to date that purport to elucidate aspects of its inner workings, non-Iranians (and many Iranians themselves) remain baffled by the state that Khomeini built. Part of the reason that this one-of-a-kind political entity remains a riddle has to do with the focus of most essays and monographs on the subject. Erudite and insightful enough in the areas they choose to investigate, these studies rather consistently skirt what we will argue is the central fact of the post-revolutionary Iranian state: that it is, at bottom, run by and for Shiʿite religion, and that in order genuinely to comprehend the workings of this state one must assiduously plumb

 In the last two decades of his reign, Mohamad Reza Shah did, admittedly, make noises about Iranian geo-political independence, non-alignment and aspirations to super-power-dom. With the help of the country’s quadrupling oil revenues, he even took several successful steps in the direction of these goals, including maintaining cordial relations with the Soviet Union, doling out loans to developing (and some industrialized) states, and interfering in regional conflicts. He even began, in the mid-1960s, to level “presumptuous,” condescending critiques of the defects marring modern Western culture. All this having been said, the king well knew who propped up his throne, and his fascination with, and adoration of, all things American well through the end of his reign is widely attested. Those around him were no different in this regard. More on the subject below. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-003

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the depths of that religion. If the truth of this assertion sounds obvious to many readers, it is far less so in the world of the academy or in that of the various Western intelligence organizations: political and social scientists, geo-strategic analysts, Middle East specialists and even veteran Iran observers give comparatively little airtime to the Shiʿite Muslim kernel of the current Iranian theocracy, and even less time to the copious teachings of its many exponents. Indeed, they are apt to dismiss those who would assert the centrality of this component as naïve, and their assessments as simplistic or “outmoded.” An immense amount has been written about other, unquestionably significant facets of the modern and contemporary Iranian experience: the country’s pre-and post-revolutionary history (e. g., Yann Richard’s highly insightful Iran: A Social and Political History since the Qajars and Abbas Amanat’s truly monumental Iran: A Modern History); Iran’s encounter with Europe and the resultant domestic struggle for political emancipation (e. g., Mehrzad Boroujerdi’s Iranian Intellectuals and the West, Ali Gheissari and Vali Nasr’s Democracy in Iran, Ramin Jahanbegloo’s Between Tradition and Modernity); the internal rivalries, foreign policy and international relations of the Pahlavi and Khomeinist states (e. g., Amin Saikal’s Iran Rising, Thomas Juneau and Sam Razavi’s Iranian Foreign Policy since 2001, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam’s Iran in World Politics); sociological, anthropological, cultural, economic and literary studies of twentieth and twenty-first century Iranian society (the path-breaking works of Ervand Abrahamian, Peter Chelkowski, Homa Katouzian, Roy Mottahedeh, Hamid Dabashi, Reza Zia Ebrahimi and a host of others); and a wealth of research focusing on the opposition to the “regime of the ayatollahs,” both inside and outside of Iran. While all these sub-areas of the discipline have been and continue to be adequately covered, the thought of those who brought about what is arguably the most thoroughgoing political-cultural revolution in the post-industrial age; the writings, sermons, lectures, speeches, letters and autobiographies of the clerics (and laypeople) who forged one of Islamic history’s – and perhaps human history’s – only genuine theocracies (and that, in the teeth of the modernist juggernaut); the Weltanschauung of the towering figures who currently steer the ship of the IranianIslamic state (through particularly stormy waters) – all of this has been given rather short shrift by Middle East specialists and even Iranologists. Note, as one instance among many of this unbalanced approach, the scores of papers and even full-length monographs devoted to Abdol-Karim-e Soroush, the Iranian modernist thinker and critic of Khomeinism and Shiʿism – now in exile – while next to nothing has been written, for example, on the philosophy of the recently deceased “hard-line” conservative cleric and head of the Qom seminary system Ayatollah

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3

Mesbah-e Yazdi, and very little about that of Supreme Leader Khameneʾi himself ² – though the latter have been in every sense far more influential than the former.³ Another salient illustration of this curious order of priorities is Lloyd Ridgeon’s (ed.) Iranian Intellectuals: 1997 – 2007, in which the thought of only one cleric – Khameneʾi himself – is lightly touched upon, while the remaining chapters focus primarily on liberal Iranian filmmakers, many of them living abroad. (In other words, though religious figures like Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas were considered the premier intellectuals of their age, and revolutionaries like Plekhanov, Marx, Lenin and Trotsky the premier intellectuals of theirs, Iran’s religious revolutionaries – so we discover in the aforementioned volume and a great many others – inexplicably do not qualify as intellectuals at all). Hamid Dabashi, for his part, in his 2011 Shiʿism: A Religion of Protest, gives more time to movie directors like Mohsen-e Makhmalbaf and Abbas-e Kiarostami than to all the Shiʿite clerics who ever lived combined, including those directly responsible for turning Shiʿism into…a religion of protest. While luminaries of the discipline like Sayyid Amir Arjomand, Hamid Enayat, Roy Mottahedeh, Meir Litvak, Shaul Shaked, Moojan Momen, Heinz Halm, Yann Richard, Andrew Newman, Robert Gleave, Martin Kramer, Juan Cole and Seyyed Hosayn Nasr⁴ – to name just a small few – have elucidated significant aspects of the transformation of Iranian Shiʿism in modern times and especially over the past half-century, none of these authors has delved deeply into the manifold opera of the men (and, to a far lesser extent, women) who effected this transformation. Ayatollah Mohammad Hosayn-e Tabatabaʾi (d. 1981) exercised an enormous influence over developments in Iranian Shiʿism during the Pahlavi period – practically all the Iranian revolutionaries were either his students or cite him extensively – yet his work has not merited a single scholarly treatise in a European language.

 An important exception is Karim Sadjapour, Reading Khameneʾi: The Worldview of Iran’s most Powerful Leader (Washington D. C.: Carnegie Endowment, 2009). Yvette Hovsepian-Bearce has recently rendered a major contribution with her Out of the Mouth of the Leader: The Political Ideology of Ayatollah Khameneʾi (London: Routledge, 2017).  Even darling of the liberals former president Mohammad-e Khatami essentially dissociated himself from Soroush’s ideas. Mosen-e Kadivar, Mohammad Mojtahed-e Shabestari and Saʿid-e Hajjarian similarly receive inordinate amounts of attention from Western researchers, including Iranian emigres. Farhang Rajaee’s excellent study of Iranian Islamist thinkers – which also tackles these three philosophers – includes a brief but edifying introduction to some of Mesbah-e Yazdi’s ideas (Islam and Modernism, pp. 172– 180). Even when it comes to figures lauded by the Islamic Republic, there is more scholarly interest in the secular likes of Ahmad Fardid than in clerical proponents of Khomeinism, whether before or after the revolution.  Nasr, on top of his weighty contributions to scholarship on Islam in general and Shiʿism in particular, was for some time Queen Farah Diba’s advisor on religious matters.

4

Introduction

The same is true of Ayatollah Borujerdi, preeminent marjaʿ of the Shiʿite world at mid-century, or his predecessor Ayatollah Haʾeri-ye Yazdi, founder of the Howzehye Elmiyeh seminary system (Farhang Rajaee has made a dent with short but edifying synopses of each man’s life and work in Islam and Modernism: The Changing Discourse in Iran). Ayatollah Khomeini’s own writings and speeches extend to some twenty-five hefty tomes; to date, however, surprisingly little has been published by established Western scholars on the “Imam’s” ideas and attitudes, and much of what has been essayed has drawn heavily on a single-volume compilation of lectures translated by Hamid Algar a year after the revolution. (Some exceptions are Arshin Adib Moghaddam [ed.], A Critical Introduction to Khomeini [2014]; Baqer Moin, who in his masterful Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah [1999], certainly went beyond the revolutionary leader’s career to touch on aspects of his ideology; Vanessa Martin, who wrote her informative Creating an Islamic State: Khomeini and the Making of a New Iran a year later, though the present writer does not subscribe to her emphasis on Khomeini’s purported Western sources of inspiration; and of course Ervand Abrahamian’s Khomeinism [1993] which, however, systematically denies the revolutionary ayatollah’s religiously-oriented motivations, as we shall see below. Once again Rajaee may be said to have kicked matters off with Islamic Values and Worldview: Khomeyni on Man, the State and International Politics [1983], together with Michael Fischer’s chapter on “Khomeini: Four Levels of Understanding” in John Esposito’s Voices of Resurgent Islam [1983]). The oeuvre of Khomeini’s star pupil, Ayatollah Morteza-e Motahhari – whose teachings were in many ways even more instrumental than those of his master in forging central aspects of post-revolutionary Iranian state and society⁵ – runs to upwards of twenty thousand pages. Yet from the time of his assassination in 1979 down to the present, a lone monograph examining elements of this luminary’s polemic against communism, and another (desktop published) work explicating his take on millenarianism, appear to comprise the whole of the discipline’s book-length treatments of Motahhari (Mahmud Davari, The Political Thought of Ayatullah Murteza Mutahhari and Behruz Moham-

 Supreme leader Khameneʾi – in his capacity of guide to the nation’s preachers and teachers – invariably places Motahhari’s extensive oeuvre at the top of his recommended reading list. See, e. g., Khameneʾi, Jehad-e farhangi, p. 92. The works of Ayatollah Beheshti (assassinated in June, 1981) are usually a distant second, and sometimes those of Mohammad Javad-e Bahonar (assassinated in August, 1981) are tacked on. Ayatollah Khomeini’s writings are rarely mentioned in this regard.

Taking Khomeinism Seriously

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madi and Blake Williams, Ayatollah Motahhari on Mahdism).⁶ Ali Shariʿati has fared slightly better – primarily because he has been for some time construed as an opposition figure to the Islamic Republic – with many articles and two in depth studies (one by Ali Rahnema and the other by Dustin Byrd with Seyed Javad Miri) devoted to his thought. But he is the exception to the rule (Ayatollah Beheshti, another important revolutionary theoretician, has been the subject of several unpublished masters theses). The beliefs and ideas of additional prominent religio-political figures in preand post-revolutionary Iran, such as Ayatollahs Naʿini, Tehrani, Fazlollah-e Nuri, Lankarani, Golpayegani, Milani, Khonsari, Araki, Taleqani, Rabbani-ye Amleshi, Meshkini, Taskhiri, Falsafi, Sobhani, Makarem-e Shirazi, Behjat, Azari-ye Qomi, Javadi-ye Amoli, (the disgraced and demoted) Shariʿatmadari, Raʾisi (current president of the republic), Jannati (current chairman of the Guardian Council) and a host of others have failed to provoke all together more than a handful of articles in (or out of ) peer-reviewed journals. Even Ayatollahs Montazeri and Rafsanjani, despite the interest these two have generated in the West due to their identification with the Green Movement and the Reformist camp in the twilight of their careers, have been largely ignored. The former cleric, who literally “wrote the book” on the Government of the Guardian Jurist and produced a mammoth and highly revealing memoir, had to wait forty years until 2019 for two post-mortem monographs (by Sussan Siavoshi and Ulrich von Schwerin). Rafsanjani, the eminence grise and kingmaker of the Islamic Republic for almost the entirety of its existence (and a relatively prolific author as well) has, to this author’s knowledge, received no sustained academic attention whatsoever. An even greater neglect is evident with regard to lower ranking clerics (Hojatoleslams), many of whom have played, and continue to play, major roles in the creation, maintenance and transformation of the official ethos, and socialization and indoctrination systems, of the Islamic Republic. Not least of these last is the former president, Hassan-e Rouhani, whose ruminations and disquisitions have not been subjected to any serious scrutiny. This overall lacuna in the scholarly literature is all the more gaping in connection with a regime that is run by the Shiʿite-Muslim version of Plato’s (or Mencius’s) philosopher king: unlike the majority of politicians in the contemporary West, the most powerful figures in today’s Iran are in almost all cases seminary graduates who have spent decades parsing abstruse texts and engaging in complex argumentation, and who have penned their own fair share of legal, hermeneutical and/or

 Hamid Dabashi in Theology of Discontent and Farhang Rajaee in Islamism and Modernism have both touched on aspects of Motahhari’s thought. There are unquestionably other authors who have referenced this prodigy in their studies to one extent or another.

6

Introduction

theological-philosophical works. From the opposite angle, it should be stressed that these religious scholars, unlike most of their predecessors, and unlike their more academic and secular counterparts at the universities, are sequestered neither in mosque nor in ivory tower. Their thought, in other words, goes a long way toward shaping their society (even when it functions as a foil or an object of protest), and thus deserves doubly to be investigated and elucidated. Of course, no single volume could do more than begin to remedy this neglect. The present work represents only the barest of introductions – for the writer no less than for the reader – to the vast genre of oral and written teachings produced by the scholar-leaders of the Islamic Republic (“reading” the ayatollahs today, and for some decades now, has also meant listening to and watching these luminaries in a variety of audio-visual formats, and this development is reflected heavily in the sources we have consulted). Our approach to this virtually boundless subject is anything but systematic: we have attempted no rigorous classification of exponents and their outlooks, no outline (beyond those interspersed in brief historical excursuses found in some chapter introductions) of the complex master-disciple network spanning generations and transcending borders, no probing biographical investigations of the clerics and other religious thinkers we cite, and no in-depth examinations of their individual bibliographies. Our method has been topical, and our purpose to provide general impressions with the help of relevant excerpts from the religious treatises, literary works and publicism of the purveyors of Iranian-Islamist doctrine, each of whom interprets that doctrine in his or (occasionally) her own way. Though the author does not hesitate to advance theories and suggest conclusions of his own, the technique throughout is more inductive than deductive: the reader is presented with a large amount of (sometimes processed, sometimes “raw”) primary source material, and is encouraged to construct his or her own overarching theories of the Iranian-Islamist phenomenon accordingly. Our aim throughout has been to take the founders and leaders of the Islamic Republic seriously as intellectuals, and to expose the educated reader to their variegated but related worldviews – worldviews that are in many ways antithetical to those that inform the Zeitgeist of the present-day West, and thereby throw up a potent challenge of which it behooves us to be aware. An underlying premise of the book, which runs counter to what many Iran watchers aver, is that despite the undeniably serious difficulties currently facing the Islamic Republican regime, the Iranian Shiʿi revolutionary clerical establishment still packs a powerful philosophical-ideological (and not just military-repressive) punch, both at home and abroad. It is further contended that once the worldview(s) of these thinker-administrators is (are) comprehended in greater depth, not only will the chasm separating these exponents’ outlooks from those of their Western counterparts be thrown into serious relief, but – counterintuitively, perhaps – a certain number of unex-

Taking Khomeinism Seriously

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pected common denominators that could potentially bridge that chasm will be brought to the fore, as well. The book begins by attempting to point out many of the misconceptions that inform our Western (popular and scholarly) perceptions of Islam and Iran, those rooted in plain ignorance no less than those arising out of neo-conservative hostility, pro-regime apologetics or (what we will argue are) distorting “post-modern” methodologies. This section – almost half of the book – is a key component of our overall investigation, both because the illusions occluding our view of the Islamic Republic are (we assert) often piled so high and deep as to leave little more than a hazy silhouette to go on, and also because setting the record straight on many a contentious issue of this sort is the most appropriate framework for elucidating the positive positions of the revolutionary clerics. These last may well represent the premier critics of Western civilization in existence today, and their ideologies may therefore be best comprehended when placed in dialogue with, and in polemic against, the worldviews of that civilization (which in their own turn are often most profoundly understood when offset by their presentday Islamist nemeses). As noted above, it is not all contention: unforeseen meeting points and congruities emerge, as well, when the activist Shiʿite clerics are placed in the same virtual room with their occidental counterweights. Much of the primary source material combed by the author has been deployed in this first section: we are already, in other words, “reading revolutionary Iran” – as a corrective to misreading it. The benefits of an honest, agenda-less account of the Islamic Republic and the “philosophy” that undergirds this modern political anomaly should be self-evident, and that is what has been essayed in this book. “Agenda-less,” however, is not the same as “detached.” The goal of the research that produced this book is to gain an understanding of the mindset of the Shi’ite mujtahids (high ranking scholar-jurists) who rule Iran and/or engage in the attempted socio-ideological engineering of Iranian society. While we cannot fulfill the Sufi demand that “He who would know a thing must become that thing,” still, in order to understand a phenomenon accurately and in sufficient depth, a certain degree of sympathy is absolutely essential. One cannot, for instance, grasp on any significant level the emotional or intellectual impact that a given belief or institution has on adherents to a particular religious system without attempting at least to experience that impact vicariously. A portrayal of the Ashura – the lengthy and multifaceted commemoration of the martyrdom of the Imam Ḥusayn – that merely describes (or more likely alludes briefly to, in sound-bite fashion) the various rituals performed by the Shiʿite participants, misses the most important aspect of the whole affair: the enormously powerful effect of those rituals on the hearts and minds of the believers. The only way to approach an understanding of that dimension is to “sympathize,” lit-

8

Introduction

erally to “suffer together with,” the people one is studying, if only temporarily and from a distance. Similarly, terse references to the madraseh curriculum or some aspect of jurisprudential (fiqh) methodology cannot afford anything close to a genuine comprehension of the scintillating, exhilarating, incendiary intellectual experience that is the text-based battle royale taking place daily between the walls of the Shiʿite seminaries. One must engage in it – or at least simulate the engagement in it – to get close to the reality in question. Finally, without attempting to arrogate to oneself, even just temporarily, the points of view of the Iranian-Khomeinist clerics, and especially the passion that accompanies those points of view, the propellant force that created and sustains the Islamic Republic, and allows it to project its influence far and wide, will remain a mystery. Contrary to popular belief, then, sympathy does not necessarily detract from objectivity or a striving for truth; sympathy can often, in fact, facilitate these important goals. “Detached” scrutiny of phenomena, especially phenomena that are inseparable from the human passions, is incapable of presenting those phenomena accurately, but rather skews them beyond recognition, painting a cold and lifeless picture of living, burning phenomena. In the pages that follow, then – after striving to confute much of the conventional and even professional wisdom about the nature of the Iranian regime and its first citizens – we shall engage in a protracted presentation of ideas that do not necessarily tally with our own, in a tone that – though not “apologetic” (in the usual sense of the term) – does attempt to “speak for” the Iranian Shiʿite ulama (not all of whom, of course, may be characterized today as Khomeinist). We shall endeavor, in short, to present to the reader “The World according to the Ayatollahs,” offsetting the outlooks of these clerical ideologues to those pervasive in the contemporary West, and attempting to clarify regarding those outlooks much that biased Western punditry and scholarship has fogged over or distorted. Having done our best in Part One to “clear the mind of cant” (Samuel Johnson’s phrase) and set the philosophical stage negatively, we proceed, in the third quarter of the book, to trace in a more positive manner the complex, intertwined, sometimes esoteric and always fascinating developments spanning Shiʿism’s fourteen hundred year career that have contributed to the evolution of this sect’s doctrine and collective consciousness – developments that, in their final phase, would set the stage for the upheaval of 1979. As argued above in the preface, an analysis of the outlooks of today’s Iranian-Shiʿite scholar-jurists/opinion-makers/politicians that does not delve deeply into the historical-philosophical-spiritual-intellectual content of the relevant traditions – content that is nothing less than the water in which these contemporary thinkers swim and the air that they breathe – is a

Taking Khomeinism Seriously

9

superficial analysis (and such are not lacking today). No amount of “essentialismbashing” will dissuade us from pursuing this objective. The final quarter of the book plumbs and analyzes the immediately pertinent primary sources: the vast Persian – and, to a smaller extent, Arabic – oeuvre of the seminary students-become-power brokers who (still) hold sway over state and society in today’s Iran (this reservoir is drawn upon extensively, as we noted above, in the first and second sections of the book as well). The discussion here is broken down, roughly, into sub-categories: the cleric-intellectuals’ attitudes to theology, democracy, nationalism, women and gender, America and the West, Israel and the Jews, Sunni Muslims, and other important topics. Though the considerable differences between camps and individual positions are respected and emphasized, that which, we believe, unites the members of the Iranian cleritocracy on these issues is also stressed. While at bottom this is an intellectual history, some attempt is made to place the ideas of the different exponents within the context of surrounding national, international, historical, social and/or political realities, and the (positive and negative) societal responses these ideas have evoked are also not ignored. Still, too much can be, and often has been, made of such surrounding factors. Marx, Gramsci, Foucault and their ilk have so far succeeded in re-focusing our lens on surrounding socio-economic conditions as the progenitors of intellectual-ideological processes, that little room is left for imagining the possibility of more independent or insular thought systems The Shiʿite theological seminary is not called a howzeh – an “enclosure” – for nothing. Though like academic institutions everywhere issues of financial support or the politics of the period have ever tugged at the abas of administrators and impacted upon the consciousness of students and teachers, there is nevertheless a strong “extra-territoriality” about the Shiʿite community of learning that allows it to conduct its bookish business all but oblivious to mundane affairs, as it were on a different plain. Al-Muḥaqqiq al-Thānī (“The Second Researcher,” d. 1533) can praise, and lament the fate of, al-Shahīd al-Awwal (“The First Martyr,” d. 1384) for his ultimate sacrifice in history, while at the same time landing blows on his juristic positions in the arena of fiqh; Mohammad Kazem-e Khorasani (d. 1911) and Mirza Hosayn-e Naʿini (d. 1936) worked together more or less harmoniously to promote constitutionalism, while simultaneously engaged in a fierce battle over questions of uṣūl across the pages of the professional literature. Even the passage of time is often irrelevant to the seminary (as we noted above in the preface): latter-day scholars engage in both written and oral “debate” with long dead predecessors who are, as it were, no less actively in attendance than their contemporary interlocutors. Mohammad Hasan-e Najafi in the nineteenth Christian century can dispute with Shaykh Bahaʾi of the seventeenth century with the help of al-Muḥaqqiq al-Ḥillī of the thirteenth century, and may be re-

10

Introduction

butted by Morteza-e Ansari – Najafi’s younger contemporary and his successor as “Universal Source of Emulation” (marja-e taqlid-e tam) – with the assistance of Vahed-e Behbehani from the eighteenth century who in turn adduces Shaykh Ṣadūq of the tenth century. These vigorous, trans-temporal palavers often take place with little or no reference to surrounding history or society, or put another way, primarily with reference to the scholar-jurists own internal history and society. Just as Muslim jihadist martyrs are “not considered dead, but rather alive, sustained by their Lord” (Q. 3: 169), and just as the memory of Ḥusayn and the imams is preserved (and the final imam perceived as still present), so Muslim scholars of previous generations are related to naturally by their intellectual descendants, in the literature and in the seminaries, as somehow “among us,” and are made to engage vigorously in the juristic or theological wrestling match together with their latter-day successors. Period markers are virtually non-existent in these timeless debates, and the same present tense is generally employed for all participants, regardless of what era they hail from (“X says…but Y says…whereas I say…”). And although some of these propositions, parries and ripostes were influenced by political events or social conditions outside the walls of the seminary, a great many of them took place in something akin to splendid isolation (which is a major reason for what is often described as the impracticality, even other-worldliness, of their legal conclusions). Even after modern-day activists – from Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and the clerical supporters of constitutionalism to Mohammad-e Mosaddeq, Navvab-e Safavi and especially Ali Shariʿati and Ayatollah Khomeini – managed to draw a goodly number of ulama out of their relative isolation and into the realm of political and social life, one still has to balance the aloofness of the seminarians against their involvement. You can take the mullah out of the madraseh – and this, it is becoming increasingly clear, only temporarily – but you can’t take the madraseh out of the mullah. Today, many of Iran’s senior and junior Shiʿite clerics have again withdrawn into the seminaries, but this does not mean that they have given up on the Khomeinist project of bringing Islam to bear on politics and society. It means, rather, that they have come to the conclusion, after forty years of post-revolutionary experience, that rather than venturing out into the wilderness of the secular realm and – as it were – overextending their lines of supply, it is better for them to remain plugged directly into their fundamental power-source, while striving to draw the surrounding “secular” realm ever closer to the domain of the howzeh. Pace Marx, Gramsci, Foucault and the post-modernists, then, it is at least as important – in the Iranian-Shiʿite case – to investigate the influence flowing outward from the inner world of the ayatollahs, hojjatoleslams and talebeh (seminary students), as it is to investigate the opposite. In the pages that follow, we have done our best to accompany the clerics as they negotiate the space be-

Filling in the Gap

11

tween their intellectual-spiritual headquarters and the Iranian, Middle Eastern and international realm outside. In some cases, the author has expanded and elaborated considerably upon the messages purveyed by the clerical thinkers under scrutiny, or upon the fundamental philosophical-ideological assumptions undergirding those messages, in an attempt to parse for the reader the “shorthand” often employed by these luminaries when addressing audiences that share their universe of discourse (Iranians or Shiʿites in general, madraseh students in particular). In other instances, we have done little more than cull and translate relevant passages, in the belief that their authors speak for themselves better than anyone could summarize or epitomize them. In a word, the creators and leaders of the Islamic Republic are given a voice in these pages. With Yann Richard, we “listen with wariness to what the ayatollahs have to say – but we listen.”⁷

Filling in the Gap Though not a single line of what follows could have been written without the education ex nihilo afforded the present writer by the eminent scholars of the Middle Eastern, Islamic or Iranian field (a select bibliography of whose works is appended to the book), still, very few studies penned by these scholars venture into the territory covered by the present volume. Titles that sound like they might – e. g., Michael Axworthy, A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Elvira Corboz, Guardians of Shiʿism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Anoushiravan Ehteshami and Mahjoob Zweiri, Iran and the Rise of its Neo-Conservatives (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); or Ray Takeyh, Guardians of the Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) – do not. Axworthy’s study, though purporting to cover the country’s intellectual history down to 2009, devotes no more than a paragraph to Khomeini’s thought and not a word to Khamenei’s ideology (to say nothing of their clerical colleagues, like Motahhari, Taleqani or Beheshti, who are not even mentioned); Corboz studies the structure of clerical patronage systems, focuses entirely on the Iraqi-based Ayatollah Khoʾi, and discusses no aspect of his religious worldview; and Ehteshami/Zweiri and Takeyh lean heavily to the side of electoral politics. Of the twenty-two chapters in Rainer Brunner and Werner Ende’s (eds.) edifying The Twelver Shia in Modern Times (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2001), only five are dedicated to issues Iranian, and these almost never quote their subjects. Laurence Louer’s Shiʿism and Politics in the Middle

 Richard, Shiʿite Islam, p. xiii.

12

Introduction

East (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), though informative and insightful, nevertheless adduces not a single statement by a Shiʿite cleric. Several scholarly works do complement aspects of the present book, for instance Linda S. Walbridge (ed.), The Most Learned of the Shiʿa: The Institution of the Marjaʿ Taqlid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). This is a compilation of essays by top scholars on the ideas of important Shiʿite personages from the late medieval through the post-revolutionary period. It includes a probing, textualbased chapter by Hamid Mavani on Khomeini’s proofs for al-wilāya l-muṭlaqa (the Absolute Guardianship of the Jurist), and a helpful introduction to and translation of Morteza Motahhari’s essay “The Fundamental Problem of the Clerical Establishment.” It also discusses the careers of several of the precursors of the latterday “Sources of Emulation.” Though this work is illuminating and has contributed to my own, it differs from Reading the Iranian Revolution in several respects. For one thing, it devotes much attention to Shaykhism and Babism, the pre-Bahaʾi “heretical” offshoots of uṣūlī Shiʿism, as well as to two Iraqi-Arab scholars. It also limits itself to the ultra-famous few amongst the large pool of intellectually influential Iranian-Shiʿite clerics, and it was written over two decades ago. Another edited volume that has contributed directly to my research is L. Clarke (ed.), Shiʿite Heritage: Essays on Classical and Modern Traditions (Binghamton: Global Publications, 2001). This is a mix between analyses of developments in Shiʿism over history by renowned experts such as Nikki Keddie, David Pinault, Devin Stewart and Christopher Melchert, and translations of excerpts from essays penned by important clerical thinkers including Ayatollahs Mesbah-e Yazdi, Tashkiri, Mohaqqeq-Damad and Shabestari (all but one, it should be noted, associated with the reformist camp). The current volume attempts a more holistic overview than these concentrated discussions, but unquestionably owes a debt to works of this sort. Mehran Kamrava’s Iran’s Intellectual Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) is somewhat more up to date and does a good job of examining the thought of several “hardline” clerics. Eva Rakel’s Power, Islam and Political Elite in Iran, though dated, is a balanced guide to the ideologies of Iranian political factions; Boroujerdi and Rahimkhani’s Post-Revolutionary Iran: A Political Handbook is rich in detail and far more than a mere “handbook”; and Sadeghi-Boroujerdi’s Religion and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran is quite helpful in navigating the Iranian clerical approaches to the confrontation with modernity. Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (New York: New York University Press, 1993, republished in paperback in 2005 by Transaction Books) is, of course, the classic survey of the subject. Though it covers the major thinkers – Khomeini, Taleqani, Motahhari, Bazargan, etc. – its approach is highly sociological and heavily Saidian (two things the present book is emphatically not). While benefiting from Dabashi’s

We of Little Faith

13

analyses, we have endeavored to go beyond them. Matthew Pierce’s comparatively recent Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shiʿism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016) is a well-researched introduction to these medieval figures, and parallels certain aspects of my chapter on Shiʿite “sacred time.” Helpful, as well, has been Seyyed Hossein Nasr et al (eds.), Expectation of the Millennium: Shiʿism in History and its predecessor volume Shiʿism: Doctrines, Thought and Spirituality (both published by SUNY Press, 1988 and 1989 – though the latter work, despite having been supervised by one of the greats, suffers from an excess of editorial slovenliness). In 2017 Yvette Hovsepian-Bearce published her The Political Ideology of Ayatollah Khameneʾi, in which she culls from hundreds of the Supreme Leader’s speeches and furnishes a panoramic window on the political thought of this powerful figure (this work was preceded by Kamal Sadjadpour, Reading Khamenei: The Worldview of Iran’s Most Powerful Leader). In 2021 Meir Litvak weighed in with – as usual – an assiduously researched study of contemporary Shiʿite exponents’ attitudes to their perceived adversaries: Know Thine Enemy: Evolving Attitudes toward “Others” in Modern Shiʿi Thought and Practice. Despite the extraordinary debt this writer owes to these authors and their myriad colleagues, it is hoped that the sui generis approach adopted in the present study, and the previously untapped primary source material adduced therein, will render this book useful to students of the subject.

We of Little Faith Of the many and deeply embedded fallacies that prevent the Western educated elite from arriving at an accurate conception of the present-day Iranian phenomenon – many of them products of understandable ignorance, many more the result of faulty or even mendacious expositions purporting to alleviate such ignorance – perhaps the most longstanding and stubborn involves the widespread claim (in some circles it has for some time enjoyed the status of an unchallengeable axiom) that the Islamic revolution of 1979 was not, in truth, Islamic. This approach has it that most of the proponents of, and participants in, that revolution were not genuinely motivated by religiously-based ideas and sentiments, but rather primarily by economic, social, political, national, ethnic, tribal or other interests and considerations (albeit in some cases, concede the purveyors of this thesis, clothed in the garb of belief ). This argument in its various forms will come under scrutiny in various parts of the present book.⁸ Here, however, in this preamble, we should

 We have no intention of denying that the initial motivation of many Iranian revolutionaries was

14

Introduction

at least remark upon recent developments in the Middle East that shed light upon the extent to which not just Iran, but indeed the greater share of the Muslim world today, is falling increasingly under the influence of Islamic and Islamist ideology, and on how the conventional analysis has once again, and in the self-same fashion, managed to side-step this central propelling factor. Following the approach to such subjects popular among many circles of academics, journalists, politicians and intelligence officers for decades now, the escalating incidence of domestic unrest, civil war, inter-state tension and mutually hostile trans-national alliances witnessed by the Middle East in the wake of the mislabeled “Arab Spring” (al-rabiʿ al-ʿarabī) has been attributed to every cause save the religious one. The diehard secular-modernist taboo on taking religion seriously has led pundits and specialists of diverse stripes, both non-Muslim and Muslim, to proffer a variety of characterizations of today’s freshly drawn intra-Islamic battle-lines (to say nothing of Islam’s so-called “bloody borders” with the remainder of humanity) that are almost always of a political, social, economic, nationalist or tribal-ethnic – anything but faith-based – nature. It has taken over a decade of almost incessant bloodshed; over a decade of impassioned asseverations on the part of the combatants themselves regarding their own genuine drives; over a decade of mounting evidence piled so high that only the incurably tendentious could fail to perceive it – for the expert commentators to finally come around to the glaring truth, indeed to what would have been, under other intellectual and ideological circumstances, a patently obvious “no brainer”: that the currently emerging constellation of forces in the Arab-Muslim world is, more than anything else, a function of rival religious persuasions. Even now, reporters and anchor-people across the length and breadth of the Arab and non-Arab media can barely hide their distaste when, backs against the wall, so to speak, they are belatedly forced to admit that (for instance) the Iraqi government – despite explicit promises made in writing to their U. S. “ally” – has for quite some time now placed its territory at the disposal of the Iranian military as a conduit for arms dispatched almost daily to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and the Lebanese Hezbollah, and that it has done so for one primary reason: because all of these actors are Shiʿites. ⁹ The preeminent factor that has led

not purely Islamist; indeed, in many cases it was not Islamist at all. But, as will be seen, the lion’s share of the multifarious forces that overthrew the Shah rapidly coalesced around the persona of Ayatollah Khomeini and the idea of an Islamic Republic, if not specifically around the notion of “the Guardianship of the Jurist” (velayat-e faqih).  The complex intra-Iraqi rivalry between Sadrists, followers of Ayatollah Sistani and many other influential factions – some of whom are more inclined and some less inclined to accept Iranian influence in the country – is beyond the scope of our discussion. It is this author’s decided opinion, however, that despite the current resentment of Islamic Republican interference on the part of

We of Little Faith

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these three states and one powerful militia to cooperate with one another and with the Houthi-dominated government of Yemen; that common denominator which has drawn them to each other for mutual support, despite the many conflicting interests that could easily have driven a wedge between them; that impetus that has seen and will most probably continue to see them struggle shoulder to shoulder against a confederate Sunni enemy (in the face of the many benefits that would of a surety accrue to each of these actors from détente with this last) – the underlying motivation in all this is first and foremost the credal one. These forces work together, at bottom, because of the solidarity engendered by common Shiʿite theological convictions and a shared sense of history and destiny, and they form alliances to fight against al-Qaʿida, The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Turkey (as well as the proxies of these last), ultimately due to the antagonism ingrained in the consciousness of both sides by mutually exclusive belief systems. This, of course, does not mean that all or even most of the individual members of each religious camp are motivated on a consistent basis by theological notions or classical grudges; the various Sunni and Shiʿi populations in the Middle East long ago hardened, in most cases, into separate social communities almost akin to ethnic groups. Nevertheless, the original impetus for the formation of these separate demographic entities, the raison d’etre that has maintained them down to the present, and the fuel that feeds the fire of sectarian strife that rages between them to a greater degree now than ever before in Islamic history – is faith. Cringe as they might, the “enlightened” – that is, the modernized, secularized and Westernized – Arab political scientists interviewed in diverse media forums are no longer able to deny the fact that what is currently engulfing (especially the Arabic-speak-

even many Iraqi Shiʿites (especially the Sadrists), in the long run Iraqi-Iranian cooperation will increase rather than decrease. Though the Alawite minority that has governed Syria for decades under the leadership of the Asad family is an offshoot of the Shiʿite mother-sect traditionally condemned by the latter, it has been moving closer to mainstream Shiʿism for some time, and as the Sunni-Shiʿi struggle has heated up, has clearly chosen to ally with the Shiʿite side. The “orthodox” Shiʿites, for their part – being a severely outnumbered minority in the Muslim world – are happy to welcome the Alawite prodigal son, as it were, back into the fold, and have even done so officially on several occasions since the latter third of the twentieth century. There are those among the Alawite leadership who would prefer that the group adopt a more generic, neutral identity as Muslims plain and simple, and thereby avoid getting mixed up in the Sunni-Shiʿi conflict, but they do not appear to be carrying the day. Especially since Iran provided crucial assistance to the Alawites in their brutal battle against ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, most influential Alawites are increasingly leaning toward Shiʿism, with even the moderates in this matter issuing statements to the effect that “We are Muslims who harbor a particular affection for the Prophet’s household” – read: Shiʿites.

16

Introduction

ing parts of ) the “Abode of Islam” is none other than an unprecedentedly fierce sīra ṭāʾifī, a “sectarian struggle.” The reticence to recognize religious belief as the – or even a – central factor in affairs of state and society is no less stubborn in the specific case of Iran. Even among those (and they may well be in the minority) who are willing to allot a significant role to ideology in the transformative events that rocked and remade this country during the second half of the twentieth century and culminated in the revolution of 1979, the ideology of choice has rarely been religion. Indeed, one gets the general impression (an accurate survey would be unfeasible) that since the ascent of Khomeinism the academy has produced more scholarly treatments of Iranian nationalism – the worldview that the revolutionary clerics sought to replace – than of Iranian Islamism – the worldview with which they sought to replace it. Ali Ansari decrees: Nationalism is the determining ideology of modern Iran…there can be little doubt that ’nationalism’ in all of its manifestations has been the ideological reference point to which all competing ideologies have ultimately had to adhere, and within which most have been subsumed…four groups can be distinguished in modern Iran: secular nationalists, religious nationalists, the left and the dynastic nationalists. ¹⁰

The confidence – not to say dismissiveness – with which Ansari asserts that the substratum in item two on the list is not religion but nationalism, has become par for the course. It is engendered, in part, by the Iranian cleritocracy’s seeming acceptance of “Islam in one country,” and by the ayatollahs’ purported pandering to resurgent nationalist sentiment since the turn of the millennium. Lewis Namier wrote, “Religion is a sixteenth century word for nationalism.”¹¹ For Ansari and a great many others, religion is a twenty-first century word for nationalism (or, at the very least, a twenty first century tool of nationalism). Meir Litvak correctly points out that the post-World War II “disdain toward various aspects of nationalism led scholars to reject its authenticity and regard it as a false consciousness.”¹² As it  Ansari, Politics of Nationalism, pp. 1– 2. Emphasis in the original. One should draw a subtle but significant distinction between Ansari’s “religious nationalism,” which gives the latter term pride of place and envisions a process whereby Iranian nationalism is facilitated by, even disguised as, religion, and the same alloy as conceived by, e. g., Meir Litvak, in whose scenario it is not so much nationalism that manipulates religion toward its own ends, but vice versa. A third option that is rarely taken seriously is that the leaders of post-revolutionary Iran might be simultaneously religious and nationalist, in both cases out of genuine conviction.  Cited in Alok Yadav, Before the Empire of English: Literature, Provinciality and Nationalism in Eighteenth Century Britain (New York: Palgrave, 2004), p. 8.  Meir Litvak (ed.), Constructing Nationalism in Iran: From the Qajars to the Islamic Republic (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 2.

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turns out, however, there is one type of ideology that evokes even greater disdain among writers on Iran than that of nationalism: faith. And unlike nationalism – Anthony Smith’s (and Emile Durkheim’s) “secular religion” – Shiʿite Islam has the added disadvantage of being an object of perplexity and/or indifference for many of the (almost invariably) less-than-religious political scientists who tackle the Islamic Republic. There is an old joke about a fellow who lost a kopeck, and is looking for it under a street-lamp. A friend asks where he lost the coin, and upon receiving the answer “on the other side of the street,” presses: “Then why are you looking for it over here?” Answer: “Because this is where the light is brightest” (or, as Abraham Maslow put the same point: “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail”).¹³ We must beware the pitfall of focusing our lens upon the more familiar, and then justifying this by declaring that the less familiar is in fact the more familiar in disguise. While there is no doubt that Iranianism constitutes one ingredient in the revolutionary ayatollahs’ and hojjatoleslams’ identity (or, from a more cynical perspective, one weapon in their arsenal), and while the ranking clerics of the regime are generally proud of the historic Persian contribution to Islam, nevertheless, the emphasis on nationalism at the expense of religion in the study of post-revolutionary Iran is, to this writer’s mind, misguided and misleading: we discuss aspects of this question at length in Chapter Six of Part One. If, then, we are willing to view religion as religion, and not nationalism in disguise, then the question presents itself: how has religious affiliation come to play such a central role in the internecine conflicts currently ripping apart and rearranging the Arab and Muslim world? It was, after all, not always thus during the modern period: for much of the twentieth century, for instance, factors such as competing territorial nationalisms; the centripetal pull of pan-Arabism; socialism versus capitalism and cold war alignments; oil and water issues; the personal charisma or caprice of this or that dictator – these and other like factors made for partnerships and coalitions that thoroughly transcended confessional boundaries. Accustomed to such an order of things and (unfortunately) allowing experience to be their guide, policy makers both inside and outside the Middle East (including the U. S., Europe and Israel) have continued, through the turn of the twenty-first century and in many cases up until the present moment, to downplay the significance of religious affiliation when rendering their assessments of the state of the region or engaging in crucial decision making (the American fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan furnishing only two – albeit particularly horrific – examples). These

 A. H. Maslow, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 15.

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Introduction

assessors and decision-makers have failed to keep up with the times: the Muslim world has changed – not, as the modernization theorists invariably predicted, in the direction of greater secularization, but rather hurtling headlong in the diametrically opposite direction – and the manner in which we confront that world must metamorphose accordingly. (In Iran as well, side by side with the rise of what we might term “protest secularism” in the wake of the Khomeinist takeover, a Shi’ite revivalism is clearly in evidence, as we shall see in a later chapter). No less important, the seminal impulse and principal propellent of this unprecedented sea-change has a name: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Though it has long been out of fashion in many academic and intellectual circles to ascribe major historical transformations primarily to the influence of human agency and initiative – let alone to the impact of the actions of a single individual or cadre of individuals – the events set in motion by “the Imam” and his comrades (and their followers and harbingers), and the astounding victory that they achieved (not just in toppling one of the strongest monarchies of the day, but in uniting mosque and state for the first time in over a millennium), inspired millions in the Muslim world to reconnect to their faith.¹⁴ Some did so because Khomeini had raised Islam up: when such an incomparably successful anti-imperialist hero preaches the return to Allah and the Qurʿan, he is naturally listened to. Others did so because Islam had raised Khomeini up: the Iranian Revolution made clear to all (and Khomeini himself continually stressed the point) that the religion brought by Muḥammad was the most potent political force available to the Muslims of the world, without the exploitation of which the Shah would still be ruling Iran. Activists of every stripe were thus encouraged to take up the standard of religion, as the most potent weapon available. But whatever the motivation for this colossal socio-ideological transformation, the phenomenon of Khomeinism jump-started a process of individual and collective re-Islamization throughout the Middle East and beyond so momentous and unprecedented that many a sermonizer found no other way to contextualize it than by alluding to a watershed moment in early Islamic history (the conquest of Mecca) celebrated by the Qurʿan:

 “The world can see that since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran,” explained (on quite a few occasions) Supreme Leader Khameneʾi, “Muslim nations in every part of the world are confidently taking actions to restore their identity and culture” (cited by Hovsepian, Political Ideology, p. 300).

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When the help of God (naṣru llāh) and the victory come, and you see the people [re‐] entering God’s religion in their multitudes, drove after drove, then celebrate the praises of your Lord… (Q. 110: 1– 3).¹⁵

But this astounding success came at a price. What can without exaggeration be described as the near wholesale return of Middle Eastern states and societies to Islamic life over the past four decades has had at least one consequence unintended and apparently unforeseen by Khomeini and his comrades-in-arms: the exacerbation of Sunni-Shiʿi animosity far beyond the boiling point (Khomeini was, to a certain extent, a pan-Islamist who sought to unite the two Muslim sects under a common anti-imperialist banner). The more serious and knowledgeable Muslims became about their faith, the more they viewed other Muslims who adhered to alternate versions of that faith as heretics; and the more activist they became – the necessity for activism on behalf of the true faith being Khomeini’s most vociferous and resounding message – the more they were motivated to do something about such “heresy.” Concomitantly, as religious belief came increasingly to the fore, it upstaged other bases of group loyalty – national, tribal, ethnic, political, ideological, etc. – and began attracting Iraqi Shiʿites to Iranian Shiʿites more than to Iraqi Sunnis, and tying Iraqi Sunnis to Syrian Sunnis more than to Iraqi Shiʿites. God, since the ouster of the Shah, has increasingly outshone country (and tribe, and camp, and party, and…) as a focus of collective allegiance in the contemporary Middle East. Undoubtedly, all of this was and is fraught with considerable danger for Shiʿism itself. At the same time that the rise of the Islamic Republic empowered Shiʿite populations throughout the Middle East, it also galvanized – both by positive example and negative provocation – their Wahhabi-Salafi,¹⁶ and even their more traditional and moderate, Sunni enemies, amplifying the antagonism between the two Muslim camps sevenfold. In this sense, the Shiʿite-inspired fin de siècle Islamic awakening may be said to have backfired against the Shiʿites, who make up only

 In the seventh century CE they entered; in the twentieth century they re-entered. In some cases Islamization processes had already been underway for decades, such as in Egypt and Pakistan, but were given additional impetus by Khomeinism, and thus the Iranian revolution may be said to have “jump-started” rather than “inaugurated” the Islamist movement.  “Wahhabism,” whose adherents do not use that term but style themselves muwaḥḥidūn or “unifiers,” was inaugurated by Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb in the late eighteenth century CE, and is the uncompromising brand of Islam upon which Saudi Arabia was founded. It has influenced Muslims in other countries, as well, and not solely due to Riyadh’s significant financial backing for propaganda efforts. Salafism is a general term for a set of ideologies, constructed since the turn of the twentieth century, that advocate a return to the pure Islam of the salaf al-ṣāliḥ, the incomparably pious first generations of Islam.

20

Introduction

some eleven percent of the international Muslim population (as opposed to their Sunni rivals, who constitute about eighty-seven percent).¹⁷ On the other hand, developments in the wake of the Iranian revolution have seen the Shiʿite faction climb up from its longstanding status of cowed minority not only to a level of political parity with Sunnism (at least within the borders of what is generally known as the Middle East),¹⁸ but even to a position of leadership and relative strength. Indeed, the increase in rancour between Sunnis and Shiʿis often plays into the hands of the premier Shiʿite power, Iran: wary Shiʿites, heirs to a long history of persecution and caught in a hailstorm of daily more bitter fitna (civil strife) with their Sunni neighbors, look increasingly to the Islamic Republic as their patron and protector, a phenomenon the Iranians can easily exploit. At the same time, eminently unfazed by the paradox, Tehran seizes the opportunity presented by the cresting wave of Sunni-Shiʿi contention to pose as the preeminent force for pan-Islamic unity (inter alia by leading a reanimated campaign against Israel, a consensus cause among Muslims of all stripes). Tehran has thereby gained the sympathy and support of at least some frightened moderate Sunnis, as well (as happened in the case of ISIS, for the crushing of which Sunni and Shiʿite forces united). Whether Iran ultimately gains or loses from the sectarian struggle it has unleashed, the intensification of the Sunni-Shiʿi contest, and the translation thereof into open intra-Muslim warfare on a regional scale, is testimony to the profound influence exerted by the Khomeinist revolution, and on a more general level, to the increasingly essential role played by the Islamic religion in Middle Eastern politics as a result of that revolution. Both the Islamic world as a whole and Shiʿite Islam specifically may be said to have risen phoenix-like out of the ashes of history in the

 The remaining two percent consist of minority Sunni sects, like the Aḥmadiyya, and minority Shiʿite sects, like the Ismāʿīlīs.  It is important to remember that at least within the narrow definition of the term “Middle East” – roughly the area between (and inclusive of ) Egypt and Iran – the Shiʿite population is nearly on a par with its Sunni counterpart. It is only when we factor in countries like Indonesia (with some two hundred and twenty-five million Muslims, more than any other polity on earth), China (approximately eighty million Muslims – the Chinese refuse to do a census), the former Soviet Southern republics (the various “stans”) and north and central Africa that the ratio between Sunnis and Shiʿites gets so lopsided. This is significant, among other reasons, because the Middle East is the heartland of Islam – Iran, Iraq, Syria and Egypt no less so (and in terms of the growth and flowering of Islamic civilization, in many ways more so) than Arabia itself.

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wake of the Khomeinist movement, and neither the Middle East nor the international arena will ever be the same for it.¹⁹

 Of course, the pre-Khomeinist influence of Islamist thinkers and organizations like Hassan alBanna, Abu l-Aʿla al-Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb, Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani, Musa al-Sadr and dozens of others cannot be denied. But none of these has achieved anything close to what Khomeini has.

Part One: Misreading the Islamic Republic

Chapter One: Misconstruing the Muslim World At least a century-and-a-half of probing, often brilliant scholarship has enlightened European and American readers about diverse aspects of the Islamic religion, the Muslim world, the country of Iran and the religion of Shiʿism. There are, in addition, many excellent studies of various aspects of the post-revolutionary Iranian regime that have been published over the decades since the Pahlavi Shah was overthrown, without recourse to which no portion of the present work could have been written. All this notwithstanding, it will be our contention in this chapter (and beyond) that regrettable trends on the left and right in academia¹ – as well as in media, politics, literature and other fields – have considerably skewed our perception of Iranian-Islamist ideology and the state and society that that ideology has created. These trends have, indeed, in many cases led educated Westerners away from any interest whatsoever in, or ability to garner genuine information about, the thought of Iran’s contemporary religio-political leadership. In the ensuing pages we attempt an in-depth examination of the assumptions, prejudices and problematic methodologies that have served (so we claim) to hide from us the true face of the founders and leaders of the Islamic Republic.

The Post-Modern Left: Second-Guessing the Muslim World The author of this book is what Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi would call a “pestiferous essentialist.”² In other words, he is guilty of that most heinous of contemporary academic thought crimes: the belief that the historical-literary tradition of a national or religious community can serve as a useful guide to comprehending significant elements of that community’s present-day character and outlook (he is by definition also guilty of the concomitant – and no less “criminal” – conviction that we can speak about such an all-embracing character and outlook in the first place). In 1978 another Columbia University professor, Edward Said, published his seminal attack on the West’s investigation and presentation of the East, entitled Orientalism. A founding classic of post-colonial theory, the book argued that European and American scholars of Islam were alternately witting and unwitting

 With all the requisite caveats having been delivered concerning the amplitude and overall problematic nature of such terms, we can still speak about “left” and “right” in today’s academic world.  Hamid Dabashi, Iran: A People Interrupted (New York: The New Press, 2007), p. 268 and passim. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-004

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Chapter One: Misconstruing the Muslim World

agents of Western Imperialism;³ that their research was characterized by a racist and/or romanticized outlook on the peoples of the Middle East; and (most importantly for our purposes) that by focusing their efforts primarily on the elucidation of medieval Islamic sacred texts, and by extrapolating from those texts onto the modern condition of the Muslim world, they promoted the “essentialist” or “cultural determinist” notion that members of the Islamic umma (nation of believers), wherever or whenever they lived, could be comprehended either as simplistic embodiments of their classical religious tradition – “the word made flesh,” as it were – or as disappointing failures to live up to or exemplify the same. As much as the arguments contained within its covers, the spirit of the times gave wings to Said’s book, which – riding the whirlwind of post-modernist revisionism and mating with a vast array of research and pedagogical disciplines in a very short time – soon came to dominate the discourse of academic and intellectual circles everywhere. By the late 1980s Said had become, to borrow his own description/condemnation of the status achieved by Edward William Lane upon the publication of his Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians in 1836, “an authority whose use was an imperative for anyone writing or thinking about the Orient.”⁴ Orientalism’s theses, ironically enough, assumed the rank of those very idées reçues (accepted axioms, received wisdom) the pernicious influence of which

 A year earlier Reza Baraheni had already written: “Orientology is the cultural superstructure for colonialism. The typical Orientalist generally worked under the auspices of his government; in the United States the Orientalist-social scientist, succeeding and integrating the Orientalist, is an adviser to the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department, the think tanks of the big corporations. A few exceptions aside, these scientists are at the service of imperialist exploitation of all the peoples of the East. We cannot adopt and successfully use their theories and practices” (Crowned Cannibals, p. 29). Said’s blanket assessment of the motivations and ramifications of Western scholarship on the Middle East has been challenged by many. Columbia University’s Richard Bulliet writes: “Was my Orientalism devoted, as Edward Said would maintain a decade later, to denigrating non-Europeans as ʻothers,’ justifying imperialism and wallowing in exoticism? I don’t believe so. It was simply a projection of what I knew upon a medieval historical society that I wished to know better. Consequently, while I recognize that some individuals certainly did pursue Said’s model of Orientalism in their careers, I refuse to cede him the narrative of my own life as an Orientalist. Americans of my generation who wandered into the study of societies and cultures other than their own have their own life stories to tell” (Richard Bulliet, Methodists and Muslims: My Life as an Orientalist [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020], p. 12). He also writes that “many Orientalists who served imperial purposes did so by choice, not axiomatically. To believe otherwise is to strip them of historical agency, just as it disserves historical reality by ignoring the innumerable Orientalists whose lives had nothing at all to do with Western imperialism” (Bulliet, Methodists and Muslims, p. 37).  Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Classics Press, 1995), p. 23.

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upon both scholarship and the popular imagination is so roundly lamented in its own pages.⁵ Said set out to provide a corrective – closer to an admonition than a solution – to a series of related problems that (so he claims) have consistently afflicted the Western study of the Middle East and the Muslim world. That the members of a given academic discipline should regularly examine and endeavor to improve their field, critically evaluating not only its methodologies and conclusions but its underlying assumptions and paradigms as well is, of course, by all standards a desideratum, indeed, an imperative. That such fundamental self-examination has been the exception rather than the rule in many areas of research is, of course, regrettable, and Said deserves praise for prodding that vast array of scholars whose work may be wholly or partially subsumed under the rubric of (what used to be called) “Orientalism” to challenge the postulates enshrined by their learned predecessors and liberate themselves from the shackles of the “formidable mechanism of omnicompetent definitions [that] presents itself as the only one having suitable validity for your discussion.”⁶ Nor can it be denied that Orientalism, widely regarded as its author’s magnum opus, can boast a pervasive scattering of stimulating insights concerning specific components of the larger questions it raises, such as Said’s welcome censure of the all too common employment by authors of general designations – names of regions, peoples, civilizations, religions – “as if they were proper nouns, with adjectives attached and verbs streaming forth, as if they referred to persons and not to Platonic ideas.”⁷ Said exposes the sometimes subtle, sometimes crude racist stereotyping that characterized the work of not a few of the founding fathers of the discipline of Middle East studies, and shows how such attitudes facilitated, and were facilitated by, the European imperialist encroachment on Arab and Muslim territory. He calls into question the conventional premise (already contested by important post-modernist writers from Antonio Gramsci onward) that human relations in history can be neatly classified under the categories of distinct and enduring cultures, nations, faiths and the like, opposing to it the underlying philosophical-epistemological principle that “human reality is constantly being made and unmade, and…anything like a stable essence is constantly under threat.”⁸ Moreover, Said’s skills as a professional literary theorist are brought to bear with often brilliant results on the genre of travel writing that formed a significant auxiliary to the properly  There are many cogent critiques of aspects of Orientalism, but we are going to concentrate here on what we perceive to be heretofore ignored or under-treated problems.  Said, Orientalism, p. 156.  Said, Orientalism, p. 277.  Said, Orientalism, p. 333.

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Chapter One: Misconstruing the Muslim World

academic pursuit of Orientalism. He deftly teases out from such narratives, inter alia, the sense of disappointment experienced by these adventurers when the cultures of the lands they traversed turned out not to correspond to the quaint image of the same arising out of a centuries-old classical literary canon they had been perusing since grade school, as well as the largely unconscious efforts of those authors to remake the former so as to jibe nevertheless with the latter (think nineteenth and even twentieth century Baghdad seen through the glasses of the Arabian Nights). All of the above merits having been admitted, however, the preponderance of Orientalism’s arguments are almost unprecedentedly spurious, deceptive and harmful (when they are not utterly superfluous), and the overall effect of Said’s book on the profession of Middle East and Islamic studies – and in more general terms on the ability of researchers in a wide variety of fields to fathom the very “other” so often evoked by Said and his hangers on – has been nothing short of catastrophic. No one book – indeed, no series or (though it may smack of runaway hyperbole) even genre of books – has succeeded in doing more damage to inter-cultural understanding, has erected higher conceptual barriers between religions and civilizations, and has, in particular, obscured the reality of the Islamic Middle East from the eyes of the secular modern West to a greater degree than Edward Said’s chef d’oeuvre and the myriad, fawning volumes written in its wake and under its influence down to the present day. The enormous harm wrought by this latter-day catechism (for this is the status it has assumed among many of the discipline’s practitioners) justifies far more than the passing treatment we are able to afford it in the following pages. But we are, at any rate – as shall soon become clear – concerned for our purposes above all with one particular element of Said’s unfortunately Copernican essay. For this reason we shall also avoid rehearsing the by now well-known and largely apposite critiques of Orientalism found in works published by some of the discipline’s greatest minds, to wit: that the author deliberately passed over the German strain of Middle East scholarship; that he lumped all Orientalists together and often caricatured their views; and that Said (in the formulation of Bernard Lewis), who himself was no expert on Arabic or Islam, gave carte blanche to an entire generation of budding academics to neglect the arduous struggle to master Arabic, Persian and/or Turkish: for if the classical literature of the Muslim world was a worthless tool for understanding that world – nay, was even detrimental to such an understanding – then why bother spending long hard years learning the languages in which it was written? Leaving the above critiques aside, then, Orientalism’s principal shortcoming involves a chronic pendular oscillation within Said’s major arguments between an unduly veridic element – assertions and assessments so unequivocally true that they are no more than redundant statements of the obvious verging on tautol-

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ogies – and a thoroughly specious element – claims, and extrapolations from those claims, that either turn reality into full-blown fiction, or leave out essential context that would present that reality in an entirely different light. Perhaps the most unsubtle example of such a combination, within the same thesis, of the self-evident and the disingenuous, is the relentless “j’accuse” that threads through and informs the entire volume, surfacing and resurfacing in a variety of guises and formulations. Said impeached the scholars of Europe and (later) America for the crime of investigating the “Orient” in general, and the Islamic Middle East in particular, in an intellectual-ideological atmosphere suffused with ethno-centric notions of Western cultural superiority (notions that were themselves integrally connected with the fact of increasing Western hegemony over Muslim lands in the modern period). Such a worldview led these experts to take a “subject-object” approach, examining the people and societies of the Orient as specimens under a microscope, with Europe invariably located “firmly in the privileged center” of the international scene “as main observer.”⁹ From this vantage point of all-powerful viewer, the Western researcher – so Said argued – gazed out at a landscape that decreased in resolution as it increased in distance, and foreign lands and peoples finally dissolved from their perspective into a vast, uniform soup of abstraction and platitude, “the generality assigned to the orient.”¹⁰ And the symbiosis, Said stresses, is not to be ignored: just as European political-military imperialism, that is, the expanding territorial conquests of (primarily) Britain and France at the expense of “the Abode of Islam” from the eighteenth century onward, paved the way for the condescending outlook and method of the academic Orientalist, so the Orientalist himself was ever complicit in providing the conceptual underpinnings and requisite knowledge for that same imperialist project to proceed. Champions of European paternalism and expansion like the Lords Curzon, Cromer and Balfour (to name but a few) derived from the scholarly Orientalist enterprise, Said claims, a justificatory creed that was “clear, precise and easy to grasp. There are Westerners and there are Orientals. The former dominates; the latter must be dominated…”¹¹ The (as it were) Janus-faced quality of this thesis manifests itself, on the one hand, in the inordinately obvious nature of the phenomenon described: that the militarily mightier and economically and technologically superior modern West harboured, as a rule, what we are wont to call today “ethno-centric” views of the human communities they were busy subjugating; that those views resulted, among other things, in an “objectifying,” “generalizing,” “idealizing,” “romanticiz Said, Orientalism, p. 117.  Said, Orientalism, p. 103.  Said, Orientalism, p. 37. Quite a few of these imperialist lords participated in the academic study of the region themselves, often with highly edifying results.

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ing” and just plain racist outlook on non-Western communities; and that European power and European knowledge structures evolved in symbiotic relationship with one another and nourished and cultivated each other. All of these “insights” for which Said has been praised to the skies for decades, refer of course to developments that are, to put it in vulgar parlance, “news to no one.” Every educated Westerner (and Easterner) was aware of this international “lay of the land,” of the balance of power and of cultural forces that had unmistakably favored the Occident ever since (let us say) the treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca in 1774, in which the Ottoman Empire capitulated in humiliating fashion to the Tzar. And no such educated and thinking person would feel the need – as Said does – to elaborate repeatedly on the tautological inference arising out of these circumstances and the cognizance thereof, scil., that [T]he essential relationship [between West and East], on political, cultural, and even religious grounds, was seen – in the West, which is what concerns us here – to be one between a strong and a weak partner.¹²

Any mildly well-read adult living even a hundred years before the publication of Orientalism was also apprised of the overall European attitude that naturally derived from the fact of Western military and economic domination, and from the pervasive awareness of that fact: a generalized outlook on the non-Western “other,” increasing in vagueness in direct ratio to the distance from the ethno-center, “widening horizons with Europe firmly in the privileged center as main observer.”¹³ Every Englishman, Frenchman, German and even American familiar with the world around them at the time was conversant with the manner in which most of the academicians, politicians and generals in Europe and the New World looked upon the “lesser races” peopling the planet, and every one of them was informed concerning the belief harbored by these scholars and leaders (a belief to which they themselves almost certainly subscribed) in what Rudyard Kipling did not scruple to call the “white man’s burden” to bring those Eastern and Southern unfortunates up out of their dark primitiveness and into the light long since discovered by the modern West. All of this was well known – whether it was approved of or not – if not to every literate human being, then at least to the rank of literati and cognoscenti who would have been capable of tackling a book like Said’s. Not having “discovered” anything but what had already become common knowledge over a century earlier, Said can thus at most be credited with wagging his finger at the purveyors and consumers of the Orientalist outlook and preaching that that out Said, Orientalism, p. 40. Similar statements are found throughout the work.  Said, Orientalism, p. 117.

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look is immoral – a conclusion that most Middle East and Islam specialists had already reached decades before Said urged it upon them. His “exposé” on this score, in short, is utterly superfluous. One reason that Western intellectuals of the past century were so well apprised of the inequalities and prejudices that informed Orientalist scholarship and Orientalist foreign policy is because these attitudes were quite simply everywhere in flagrant evidence, were indeed impossible to miss. But the other reason why Said’s intricately worked out conclusions really represent nothing more than the most elementary, even a priori assumptions maintained by all but the most ignorant individuals, is more basic. It is because virtually every conquering culture in the history of humankind has acted toward the societies that it has subdued in the self-same manner that the powerful and “progressive” West did during the modern period in its encounter with the weak and “backward” East. The representatives of every dominant polity since as far back as anyone can remember envisioned – as Said “reveals” British High Commissioner of Egypt Lord Cromer to have done – “a seat of power in [their own land], and radiating out from it towards [the “occupied” regions] a great embracing machine, sustaining the central authority yet commanded by it.”¹⁴ Expansionist entities have rarely done anything but emphatically assert their cultural superiority over those nations upon whose territory they have encroached – whether as a justification of conquest, or as a sincerely held belief, or both – and Said’s restatement of the European-American “argument” for the imperialist enterprise would be accurate no matter what historic civilizations are inserted in place of those he puts in the dock: There are Westerners and there are Orientals. The former dominate; the latter must be dominated, which usually means having their land occupied, their internal affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another Western power.¹⁵

Have international relations ever worked on a different principle than this one? Have the victors ever treated or regarded the vanquished in another fashion? Thus did the Achaemenid Persians perceive their far-flung subject countries and peoples, thus did Rome look down from its civilized apogee upon what it saw as the surrounding barbaric darkness, and – for that matter – in the self-same manner did Islam envision and explicitly describe throughout the length and breadth of its classical literature the vast swath of populations and cultures over which its empires held sway (and even over which they did not yet hold sway) – a point to

 Said, Orientalism, p. 44.  Said, Orientalism, p. 36.

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which Said alludes only once throughout the nearly four hundred pages of Orientalism, in a single terse, non-judgmental sentence.¹⁶ All of these empire-building civilizations saw their respective “others” as inferior on almost every level, and “dignified simple conquest with an idea.”¹⁷ Nor need we confine this endemic human intellectual tendency to the strong or the conquering. The Jews, from their national birth into the bonds of servitude and throughout centuries of powerlessness and subjugation to just about everyone, never for a moment lost their sense of superiority over the nations of the world, never once ceased lumping the rest of the people on the planet into a vast, undifferentiated heap (goyim – “gentiles”) and consigning them to no good end as a reward for their incurable ignorance and immorality. We need not look to power relations to explain the ubiquitous phenomenon of conceiving the “other” in simplistic, superficial and demeaning terms: we need merely look to human nature. The most rudimentary and intrinsic workings of psychology and epistemology are at work here, workings that no one needed Said to elucidate for them. (The same may be said for quite a few of the author’s related claims, perhaps most significant among them the point he urges upon the reader time and again in a variety of guises, to wit, that each generation of Orientalist scholarship further condensed, solidified, defined and circumscribed the discipline and thereby increasingly restricted the room for intellectual maneuver, hemming in researchers within ever contracting walls. Orientalism, he says, “is better grasped as a set of constraints and limitations of thought than it is simply as a positive doctrine.”¹⁸ As if there exists, or has ever existed, a body of learning, or body of doctrine, which does not or did not proceed along the same consistently narrowing path until it reached its own – as it were – insidādu bābi l-ijtihād [closure of the gates of independent reasoning]). That this (central) element of his thesis was not quite earth-shattering was not entirely lost on Said. And so he admits, in various formulations, that “men have always divided the world into regions having either real or imagined distinction from each other”;¹⁹ that “human societies, at least the more advanced cultures (sic!), have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism and eth-

 “During its political and military heyday from the eighth century to the sixteenth, Islam dominated both East and West.” Said, Orientalism, p. 205.  Said, Orientalism, p. 216.  Said, Orientalism, p. 42. Here, as well, Said himself prefaces this statement with the admission – that wholly undermines its importance – that “any set of durable notions” has the same limiting effect he subsequently assigns to Orientalism.  Said, Orientalism, p. 39.

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nocentrism for dealing with ‘other’ cultures”;²⁰ that “cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these other cultures not as they are but as, for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be”;²¹ and that “there is nothing especially controversial or reprehensible about such domestications of the exotic: they take place between all cultures, certainly, and between all men.”²² Said’s few attempts to explain why, if this is the case, modern Western imperialism and Orientalism come in for an entire book’s worth of exceptional analysis and unique condemnation are weak beyond words, fizzling out in most cases in mid-sentence, and in the end the author is forced to justify his entire endeavor by shifting the focus (for several seconds) away from his ever-present target – the sinister Orientalists – and onto the question of collective human behavior in general, about which he muses dreamily: Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences humanly? By surviving the consequences humanly, I mean to ask whether there is any way of avoiding the hostility expressed by the division, say, of men into “us” (Westerners) and “they” (Orientals)? For such divisions are generalities whose use historically and actually has been to press the importance of the distinction between some men and other men, usually towards not especially admirable ends.²³

Western imperialists and their purported scholarly helpmeets are thus guilty of joining the rest of mankind throughout every period in history in performing the instinctual human operations of distinguishing, preferring, generalizing, demonizing and the like. Once more: not exactly a pathbreaking thesis. In his Afterword to the 1995 printing of Orientalism Said again showcases his sui generis penchant for mixing statements of the self-evident with bursts of beauty pageant idealism, explaining that his aim in writing the book had been “not so much to dissipate difference itself – for who can deny the constitutive role of national as well as cultural differences in the relations between human beings – but to challenge the notion that difference implies hostility.”²⁴ So much for the overly obvious aspect of Orientalism’s arguments on this score. At the same time, as we asserted above, Said somehow manages to make numerous statements about the nature and extent of Western scholarship’s “subjugation” of the Middle East that are as far from obvious as can be imagined: for they     

Said, Said, Said, Said, Said,

Orientalism, Orientalism, Orientalism, Orientalism, Orientalism,

p. 204. p. 67. p. 60. p. 45. p. 352.

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are either wildly exaggerated or thoroughly divorced from reality (and as he accuses the subject of his work – Orientalists – of doing, Said affords such statements an air of veracity merely by repeating them ad nauseum, no evidence required). Such, for instance, are his thoroughly untenable claims to the effect that scholars of the Middle East have merely told the West what it wanted to hear about the Islamic world, that “what the Orientalist does is to confirm the Orient in his readers’ eyes.”²⁵ Only an English literature professor like Said, who has read but the tiniest fraction of the “Orientalist” literature he sets out to condemn, could make a statement like that about the greats of the field, from Snouck-Hurgronje and Ignaz Goldziher to H. A. R. Gibb and Bernard Lewis, all of whom opened the eyes of their reading public to a vastly different Middle East and Islam than the one they thought they knew. And indeed, another egregiously misleading aspect of Orientalism involves the supposedly celebrated students of the Middle East the author chooses to parse and pillory who are, in many cases, celebrated (if at all) by the public at large as opposed to the academy. Those who were highly admired by their specialist peers, and were neglected by Said, were often inconvenient for his thesis. Perhaps the greatest scholar of Iranian literature and culture ever produced by the West, Edward Granville “English” Browne (d. 1926), was a dedicated and vociferous anti-imperialist. Few phenomena are more ironic – and more inimical to our efforts to understand Muslim civilization – than the simultaneous emergence in the latter third of the twentieth century of Saidian anti-Orientalism, on the one hand, and the burgeoning mega-trend commonly (and correctly) known as Islamic Fundamentalism, on the other. During the very decades in which medieval Islamic religious works have become more important as motivators of individual and collective Muslim behavior than ever before in the history of the faith – a product of many factors, not least of which is the computer-generated “information revolution” that puts the vast canonical oeuvre of Islam at almost every Muslim’s fingertips²⁶ – the Saidian

 Said, Orientalism, p. 65.  Other factors that may be adduced to explain, or at least characterize, the modern Muslim return to the text include (1) the “back to basics” orientation of late eighteenth-century Arabian Wahhabism, a source-heavy, literalist reaction to centuries of Sufi-dominated Islam in which esoterica had upstaged traditional knowledge and the Elder (pir) or Guide (murshid) served as spiritual-intellectual proxy for his largely illiterate following; (2) the revival at Egypt’s al-Azhar seminary, also in the latter third of the eighteenth century, of the study of hadith (acts and statements of the Prophet Muḥammad), and the diffusion of this trend far and wide on the part of graduates; (3) the belated introduction of printing in the modern Middle East (held up for three centuries after Guttenberg by a conservative and fearful Ottoman Empire); and (4) the “generation gap” created by the post-World War incursion of secularism into Muslim lands, as a result of which young people currently returning to the Islamic fold who are unable to consult their non-observant and

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juggernaut, with its unrelenting campaign against “essentialism,” has succeeded in drastically curtailing the serious study at Western institutions of those very same religious works, or, where this has not happened, in rigorously divorcing such pursuits from efforts to comprehend the contemporary Muslim world. At the precise historical moment when the majority of Muslims became disillusioned with the imported panaceas of liberalism, constitutionalism, socialism, communism, fascism, nationalism and the like, and began gravitating toward the conclusion that “Islam is the solution” (al-islāmu huwa l-ḥall) and that they must return to their religious roots and sacred sources and take their sustenance and inspiration from these – then and there the Saidian campaign got underway to hoodwink American and European scholars into believing that it was unnecessary and illegitimate, not to say downright “colonialist,” to employ those same literary hearths of Islamic civilization as lamps with which to illuminate the collective consciousness of latter-day Muslims. It became, indeed, a veritable heresy to speak of such a collective Muslim consciousness at all: in the spirit of Jean François Lyotard’s “incredulity towards meta-narratives” and Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruction of the subject”²⁷ one was henceforward permitted to describe only the parts of the Muslim phenomenon, never the whole, as if the immense power of the Islamic idea in history had not imbued the multifarious communities that it conquered over the ages with any spiritual or philosophical common denominators whatsoever. Hundreds of millions of Muslims in our day and age claim to have achieved an unprecedented level of spiritual affinity and ideological homogeneity with their fellow believers based on an ever-deepening encounter with their shared religioliterary heritage. But the myriad disciples of Edward Said, displaying a Western paternalistic condescension unmatched by even the most incorrigible Orientalist on their blacklists, dismiss this claim out of hand. Following Foucault, they scour history to discover not continuity but discontinuity. As today’s Muslims metamorphose into the world’s largest and most devoted textual community and “people of the book” (ahl al-kitāb), post-modern, post-Saidian academia obstinately declines to recognize the people, and categorically refuses to read the book. The “atomistic” attitude of contemporary Western scholarship to the Islamic macrocosm naturally extends to components thereof, and there is thus no question that the pretension of the present volume to elucidate the “worldview” of Iran’s clerical ruling class – and to do so, moreover, primarily with the help of Shiʿitereligiously ignorant parents on questions of ritual, theology or sacred history, turn for answers to the texts of the medieval canon, increasingly available in print and now on the Internet.  Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. xxiv; see, e. g., Jacques Derrida, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Press, 1991), p. ix.

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Muslim literary sources, ancient and modern – will immediately run afoul of those who are duty bound to “contest” the very possibility of a common confessional, professional, national or any other kind of mindset; who militate against the “reification” or “privileging” of imaginary “constructs” like “Iran” (or “Islam” or even “ayatollah”); and who of course disparage all attempts to sketch the lineaments of a latter-day communal ethos by plumbing the depths of an historical-textual tradition. And yet that is exactly what we shall try to do in the ensuing pages, because pace the convoluted protestations of post-modern theorists and Said-smitten Middle East specialists, there in fact is an Iranian-Shiʿite-Revolutionary “grand narrative” (and if it is a “construct,” then it is an indigenous construct). It is a narrative made up of elements accumulated over time, in a process of doctrinal and historiographical evolution traceable through the numerous written works left behind by those most deeply involved therein, from Shaykh Mufīd in the tenth century to Morteza Motahhari in the twentieth – works that are studied assiduously by the Iranian-Shiʿite students at the madrasehs and howzas. And it is, therefore, a narrative that takes up the lion’s share of space in the psyches of the religious sages who run today’s Islamic Republic, thereby also ensuring a general (though certainly not a thoroughgoing) unity of outlook among them. This narrative consequently represents a principal factor in the determination of the nature and policies of the Iranian regime. Each ayatollah – or marjaʿ al-taqlīd (“Focus of Emulation,” Grand Ayatollah), or Hojjatoleslam (“Proof of Islam,” the rank just below Ayatollah), or cleric of any other class, or seminary student – is obviously an individual in his own right, whose personality has been formed, and whose positions on various issues continue to be informed, by a unique set of life experiences (to say nothing of genes), and there is certainly no question that differences of opinion and even sharp disputes are par for the course among the members of the Iranian-Shiʿite clerical class (in the winter of 2020 a major quarrel broke out between the current head of the Qom seminary system [howze-ye ʿelmiyeh] Ayatollah Shaykh Mohammad-e Yazdi, and the grandson of one of his venerated predecessors in the job, Ayatollah Alavi-ye Borujerdi. Insults flew in all directions – including mutual deprecation of the rival’s scholarly output and teaching prowess – and dozens of their acolytes were swept up in the feud, the flames of which have not died down as of this writing).²⁸ What is more, the Shiʿite tradition whence these scholars have in all periods derived their intellectual and spiritual sustenance, is itself far from monolithic, and encompasses – even just within the literary corpus of the “orthodox” Twelvers or Imāmiyya (as opposed to the “heterodox” Zaydiyya, Ismāʿīliyya, Nuṣayriyya,

 “Daʿva sar marjaʿiyyat yek rohani-ye no-andish bala gereft,” Tabnak, 22/06/2020.

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etc.) – a broad spectrum of perspectives, beliefs and ideas that interact together in what approximates more of an oscillating tension than a consolidated creed. Still, there are enough seminal stories and overarching tenets in common to tie that tradition together and render it, in its totality, an infinitely more powerful force than the specific egos and particular predilections of its latter-day exponents. This centripetal, unifying force is what allows us – nay, requires of us – to undertake an examination of what we unapologetically insist upon calling, in the face of today’s Saidian orthodoxy, “the worldview” of the Iranian Islamist clerics.

Epigones Edward Said was a prophet: he pioneered a major paradigm shift that affected (primarily for ill) a host of disciplines, chief among them Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. But every prophet has his priests, those zealous followers who, unequipped or unmotivated to go where their predecessors have not, revel in the role of service to the recently established cult. Steeping themselves in the catechisms and liturgy of the new gospel, these missionaries of their master speak in one voice and utilize a set vocabulary, as they go about interpreting the principles of the faith and applying them far and wide to any and all realities they can get within their sights. Said has thousands of these. His post-modern, post-colonial approach has engendered more methodological mimicry – and spawned more concocted sub-fields (“historical sociology,” “cultural theory,” “identity studies” and the like) – than any intellectual fashion in recent memory, and has done a great deal to aid and abet the creeping conquest of the humanities by the social sciences (a regrettable development in the eyes of the present author). Said’s apostles are easy to spot, not least of all because of their unrelieved addiction to jargon, a cluster of high-sounding, largely hollow terms they carry around in their satchels and sprinkle liberally throughout most everything they write. This is compounded by their undying eagerness to assimilate and enshrine the latest – for the most part not particularly creative or useful – neologisms put about by their terminology-obsessed academic peers, to say nothing of their endless, dizzying campaign to suppress and replace potentially “hurtful” terms, such as “Chief Executive Officer” which runs the risk of offending “Indigenous People” (who used to be called “Native Americans” who used to be called Indians). Virtually no paragraph goes by in the compositions of these self-important authors without the appearance of the de rigueur (and usually Foucauldian) “alterity,” “connectivity,” “signifiers,” “inscription,” “appropriation,” “meta-narrative,” “intersectionality,” “post-structural,” “interrogating…,” “hegemonic,” “the poetics of…,” “pre-semiotic,” “hybridity,” “subaltern” and, of course, the never absent, always indispensable, and somehow eternally

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in vogue “other” (still in scare quotes after all these years), as style – if one can indeed call it that – is made to sit in for substance. Almost every notion in these largely redundant works is “problematized,” “subverted” or “contested” (one author opened his recently published monograph by stating that “History in Iran is contested.” Of course, Iranian history is “contested,” as the present writer – together with countless others before him – stressed in the preface to this volume. For that matter, history in every country and community the world over is “contested”: another truism unearthed by Saidians. It is the inordinately repetitive use of the neologism, however – which grants the user membership status in “the club” – that grates most).²⁹ Almost every collective entity is conceived as either “imagined” or “constructed” (and therefore must be “deconstructed”), almost every community’s heritage becomes a “narrative” retroactively fabricated or distorted for the purpose of enshrining certain outlooks. Family, clan, tribe, nation, creed – all a mirage, if not a conspiracy. At the same time that Saidians are busily engaged making nothing out of something, they are occupied with making something out of nothing. A host of abjectly ordinary words and concepts are somehow rendered profound, not to say radical, by the simple expedient of italicizing them (“…the larger questions that these and other themes pose can certainly lead to yet further trajectories of rethinking….”).³⁰ Concepts that are obvious to children are wrapped up in layers of impenetrable verbiage and made to seem like momentous discoveries (political scientist and Middle East specialist Amin Saikal, seeking to set the stage in the introduction to his recent Iran Rising, enlightens us with the help of a colleague’s thesis: “Richard Davis states that revolution is ʻthe overthrow of an existing regime’”).³¹ Decades have been frittered away by these fiercely fashion-conscious academics in endless, circular debates over which methodological approaches to their subject matter are legitimate, which illegitimate, and which downright criminal. The

 Ali M. Ansari, Iran, Islam and Democracy: The Politics of Managing Change (London: Chatham House, 2006), p. 24. Ansari, one of the field’s preeminent scholars, is the last person who needs to be vouchsafed such “status.” Yet he entitles the fourth chapter of his Politics of Nationalism “The Age of Contestation.” One seeks refuge in vain.  Kamran Scot Aghaie and Afshin Marashi, Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), p. xiv.  Amin Saikal, Iran Rising: The Survival and Future of the Islamic Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 21. The present author recalls reading a ninety-some page article in a Social Science journal that contained nomenclature entirely new to him and referenced hundreds of previous studies, surveys and laboratory experiments, the earth-shattering conclusion of which was …that loneliness leads to depression. Saeid Golkar cites, with a straight face, “A study focusing on the city of Tabriz confirm[ing] that women favoring a traditional lifestyle consider wearing the veil far more positively than women who embrace more modern lifestyles” [Golkar, “Cultural Heterogeneity…”, p. 7]).

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first third or half of many an article is wasted on such periphrastic deliberation, as catechized or frightened authors pay the requisite homage to the obligatory theorists and their theories (not for nothing did Eva Brann, former dean and longest serving tutor at St. John’s College, baldly declare: “Methodology is the death of thought”).³² Traditional types of research, analysis and exposition – including those epitomized by the great names, whose painstaking and path-breaking work has illuminated entire branches of knowledge – are scorned by novices at the beginning of their careers as “under-theorized.” Such a fault certainly cannot be laid at the door of the latter, the reader of whose compositions is rarely rewarded with a single new fact or even insight. Underneath the mounds of egregiously unattractive diction and syntax some semblance of meaning may albeit be here or there entombed, but the pretentious and convoluted – and somehow at the same time metallic and sterile – formulations repel the “uninitiated” reader and open up a vast distance and dissonance between the portrayal and the phenomenon being portrayed: The position of these “marginal men” as socio-cultural intermediaries and interlocutors between the newly crystallizing domain of modern-urban politics and the rapidly disintegrating world of agrarian-traditional life made them ideal as political vanguards able to use an ethnolinguistic language to mobilize their marginalized social-national compatriots – consisting of the newly urbanized underclass, the socially insecure town dwellers, and an increasingly frustrated peasantry – into popular movements challenging the ascendant urban bourgeois-aristocratic industrial elites.³³

This attempt to describe nationalism is, to put it mildly, unhelpful, not only because its high flown acadamese removes it by several leagues from the object of its analysis (no nationalist worth his colors ever spoke about the cause that animated him in anything remotely resembling such terms), but because its neo-Marxistic claims

 Uttered by Professor (Ms.) Bran in the presence of the author and his colleagues at a seminar in Jerusalem in 2008. As one relevant instance among thousands, virtually no discussion of Iranian nationalism (or any other kind of nationalism) in recent decades takes place without the inevitable cow-towing to Benedict Anderson and his “imagined political communities.” Of late some furtive “resistance” has begun, as the academic revisionist pendulum swings back yet again and a small cadre of researchers have started (gradually and with all due caution and deference) to “reinstate” the notion of nation. This is done, in most cases, not by bold intellectual self-assertion – the Weberian charismatic “my predecessors said…but I say…” – but rather passively, hesitantly and indirectly by noting that “more and more scholars are [rehabilitating the concept of the historical national unit],” thus unabashedly employing the rhetoric of fashion: “This fall, everyone is wearing… The wide brimmed hat is coming back…”  Saikal, Iran Rising, p. 7.

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expropriate the propellant forces behind nationalist movements from their rightful owners and attribute them to abstract, impersonal forces (no nationalist deserving of the name can be said to have been consciously or unconsciously motivated by, or even seen him or herself as taking part in, any of the above-delineated “processes”).³⁴ World renowned Persian-Turkish poet and mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273) recounts, in a hauntingly beautiful passage of his Masnavi, how the Prophet Moses (Musa payghambar) was once wandering through the desert alone at night, when he discerned the glow of a campfire behind a sand dune. Moving closer and hiding behind a cactus, he gave ear to the words of a chupan, a simple shepherd, who was warming himself by the flames and raising his voice in prayer: Ay khoda va ay ela, to kojaʾi ta shavam man chakerat, charoqat duzam konam shaneh sarat, dastakat busam bemalam payakat… “Oh Lord, O God! Wherefore art thou, that I may serve thee? That I may darn your socks, and comb your locks, kiss your gentle hands and massage your tired feet, and when sleep-time comes, prepare your bedding, tuck you in, and sing you a lullaby.” At this point Moses could bear it no longer. He burst out from behind the cactus and bellowed: “May your mouth be filled up with dust – all this talk of yours is pure heresy!” And the Holy Apostle went on to explain to the poor shepherd – in the terminology that was common among the Muslim theologians and metaphysicians of Rumi’s time – how “One must never speak of the ethereal, Omnipresent Ipseity in such simple human terms! God is not physical, He is not corporeal! None of the events that impinge upon tangible phenomena in any way affect His majestic beatitude, and none of the characteristics attributable to concrete entities can be ascribed to His ineffable luminosity. He has no feet, He has no hands, He does not sit, He does not stand, He experiences no joy or sadness or anger…and He certainly does not lie down at the end of the day and go to sleep on His pillow to the tune of your wretched lullabies!” The lowly shepherd, duly chastised by the great prophet, hung his head in shame and swore that he would never again commit such a serious transgression. Moses continued on his way, and was soon accosted by the Creator Himself, who was enraged: To baraye vasl kardan amadi, nay baraaye fasl kardan amadi!– “You were sent in order to bring Me closer to My creatures, not in order to drive a wedge between them and Me!”

 Claiming that we “scientists” know better about what motivates mass collectives made up of hundreds of thousands if not millions of diverse individuals than those individuals themselves is highly problematic, besides being incorrigibly condescending (and, again, “Orientalist”). In short, the assertions made by participants in a given movement matter, and are – I would argue – the best “lead” we have. In our search for understanding, we should start from there.

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It is important to write about human beings in a manner that at least remotely resembles the language and discourse of human beings. The fact that no Third World demonstrator ever shouted “Down with the Subject!” or “Relief for the Subaltern!” actually does matter. If the goal of research and exposition is to convey to the readership, to the extent possible, the reality of unfamiliar phenomena – and the writer of these lines is convinced that it is – then descriptions the diction and formulation of which are thoroughly foreign to those phenomena distance us by parasangs from that reality.³⁵ To refrain from employing the nouveau style and nomenclature, and to utilize terms and categories instinctively understood by all educated people without “problematizing” and dissecting them, unquestionably leaves today’s writer open to accusations of over-simplification, superficiality, naiveté and ignorance (to say nothing of the crimes of Orientalism or imperialism), but defiantly doing so nevertheless is unquestionably worth it. Because the abstruse terminology employed by post-modern and post-colonial scholarship is not just befuddling – it is nothing short of colonialist. ³⁶ That even Iranian researchers, residents of the country as well as émigrés, so often feel compelled to plumb the academic output of a foreign, Western, “hegemonic” culture for the essential nomenclature and full gamut of conceptual frameworks required to elucidate their own culture – this is not only Orientalism at its worst, it is even, in a certain sense, what the Iranian-Islamist “nativists” would condemn as fokolism or keravatism.³⁷ To bring Heidegger, Locke, Foucault, Geertz, Barthes, Stoler, Rabinow, James, Rorty, Baudrillard, Ricoeur, Popper and Kant – to name just a few of the most popular choices – to bear as the premier aides in the study of the Islamic Revolution and Republic is quite a state-

 Certainly the present writer is as infected by academese as most of his colleagues, and would not claim to practice one hundred percent of what he preaches in this regard. But there are degrees. Moreover, in succeeding chapters we will increasingly allow the discourse and style of the subjects of our study to take over.  That is, it entails a complete surrender to Western ideas. Of course concepts like “West” or “East” have been problematized, even by Said himself. But while there is no question that these designations are nothing if not nebulous and non-exacting (a fact of which everybody who uses them is instinctually aware and for which allowances are just as instinctually made), still, we must communicate.  From French faux colis, “fake collars,” the term was applied to those who valued all things European over their counterparts in indigenous Iranian-Islamic culture. Keravat, also from the French, means “neck-tie,” the wearing of which became a post-revolutionary shibboleth distinguishing vabasteh (“dependent” [on foreigners]) from loyal, independent and “committed” Iranian Shiʿites. Today’s keravati is yesterday’s fokoli. Of course, the Pahlavis themselves regularly used the accusation of collaboration with the communist and capitalist powers against dissidents, most notoriously in the Ettelaʾat article of January 7, 1978.

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ment (when was the last time an American or European scholar writing about an American or European topic adduced – let alone based an entire study upon – the philosophy of Bahr al-Ulum, Morteza Ansari, Yusef Saneʿi or Ayatollah Beheshti, or even the theories of an Iranian or Muslim sociologist, anthropologist or political scientist?).³⁸ For that matter, even studying post-revolutionary, and pre-revolutionary, Iran primarily in terms of the ways and modes in which its society can come to terms with modernity (a favorite subject of this class of scholars) may itself be viewed as the height of what the Khomeinists like to call vabastegi or farangi-maʾabi – a clinging dependence on non-Iranian or non-Muslim (primarily European) ideas. Although there is, of course, no reason why scholars of Iranian origin, or of any other origin, need accept the premises of Khomeinism or care at all about what upsets the “Imam’s” followers (or religious Muslims in general), the irony of investigating an ideology that is based on a thoroughgoing rejection of the default recourse to Western criteria, with the help of a default recourse to Western criteria, is quite thick. Could not this academic trend be construed, with some justification, as a new, up-to-date version of what Jalal Al-e Ahmad called “the sense of inferiority in the face of Western progress (pishraft-e farangi)” already evident amongst the intellectuals of the Qajar period?³⁹ Could it not be seen as an affirmation of what Malkom Khan and so many of his intellectual contemporaries unabashedly advocated, to wit: “Iran’s wholesale capitulation to Western values”?⁴⁰ There is some truth to what Ramin Jahanbegloo, echoing many others, has stated to the effect that “the position of all anti-moderns in Iran is ultimately modern.”⁴¹ But first of all, there is only some truth to this claim: although unquestion Michel Foucault should be, to some extent, excepted from this list, as he made a rather thorough and often penetrating study of important aspects of the Iranian revolution, a study that took the religio-ideological side of that event quite seriously. We shall occasionally have recourse to his insights in this volume, relying almost exclusively for these on Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson’s probing Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), even though this work takes Foucault to task for his “naïve” outlook on Khomeinism.  Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Dar Khedmat va Khiyanat-e Rowshanfekran (Tehran: n.p., n.d.), vol. 2, p. 154. To be fair, Al-e Ahmad himself often made use of Western yardsticks and ideas, and indeed translated into Persian works by Camus, Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Ionesco, Gide and others. Inconsistency, however, or even hypocrisy, does not necessarily invalidate criticism.  Fereydoon Adamiyyat’s characterization, cited in Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse, p. 62.  Ramin Jahanbegloo (ed.), Iran between Tradition and Modernity (Lanham: Lexingtom Books, 2004), p. xi. Richard Bulliet put it better: “As Westernization increases, the thought of becoming completely Westernized becomes increasingly revolting in the minds of precisely those Middle Easterners who are most involved in the Westernizing process. To a varying extent, Westernization has become a pernicious habit in the opinion of cosmopolitan, Western-educated Middle Eastern-

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ably influenced in countless ways by ideas, events and transformations in the “outside world,” there has been much more continuity and independence inside the walls of the pre- and post-revolutionary howzeh (Shiʿite seminary) than is generally acknowledged. And although the famous Fardid-Soroush debates of the 1980s – in which these two Iranian uber-intellectuals played avatars to Heidegger and Popper respectively⁴² – had their impact in certain circles, the irony of Fardid’s increasingly virulent castigation of “Westitis” whilst himself deep in thrall to a Western thinker (albeit a “renegade” one) did not go unnoticed. A goodly number of upper-class Iranians had, albeit, become quite “cosmopolitan” (which meant Western) by the final decade of the Shah’s rule, but most influential participants in the 1979 revolution had never heard of the Vienna Circle, read Franz Fanon (or Kierkegaard, or Sartre, or Heidegger) or graduated from the Sorbonne. And if an Ayatollah Motahhari had ingested pretty much everything Marx and Lenin and dozens of other modern European thinkers had written, he came not to praise but to bury. There is nothing to preclude activists and intellectuals from using the tools of, or even being motivated by, modernity in order to seek egress from modernity (not unlike the manner in which Abu l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī [d. 936 CE] exploited Muʿtazilite methodology to undermine Muʿtazilism, and Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī [d. 1111] wielded philosophical weapons to mitigate the influence of philosophy). Though everything human beings experience remains in their consciousness, we are still possessed of a sufficient amount of agency to decide which impressions should inspire emulation and which resistance. The means, even the impetus, to combat modernity may in fact be borrowed from modernity, and the end result may indeed be “a revolutionary ideology without a definite association to Western conceptual commitments to history.”⁴³ The late Hojjatoleslam va’l-Moslemin Najafiye Ruhani:

ers” (Bulliet, Methodists and Muslims, p. 86). This observation rings true for movements from the highly Hellenized Maccabees who fought Hellenism on down. “Earlier generations,” adds Bulliet, “did not see the negative aspects of Western culture because they were blinded by the brilliance of its achievements. Only when these achievements have come to be taken for granted can a more complete view of Western culture emerge, a view that takes in faults as well as successes” (Bulliet, Methodists and Muslims, p. 87).  Ahmad Fardid (d. 1994) was a professor at Tehran University who had studied in Europe and, together with his student Reza Davari-ye Ardakani, was the thinker largely responsible for introducing Heidegger’s ideas to Iran. Abd al-Karim Soroush may be said to have done the same for Karl Popper.  Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 61– 62.

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We read in a hadith of [the sixth Shiʿite] Imam [Jaʿfar] al-Ṣādiq, narrated in The Sufficient of [Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb al‐] Kulaynī, that the accursed dynasty of Umayyad caliphs instituted the teaching of monotheism (tawḥīd) but not the teaching of polytheism (shirk). They forbad the teaching of unbelief – what could be better? On the face of it, this is the epitome of piety. In reality, however, it is the highroad to infidelity. This Umayyad educational curriculum (barname-ye omuzesh va parvaresh) produced several generations of Muslims who were utterly ignorant about the nature of the heresies that surrounded them and sought ingress into their consciousnesses and culture. Bereft of antibodies (padtanha) with which to fight off the pernicious influence of these foreign ideologies, they either succumbed heart and soul [to that influence], or what is perhaps worse, they formed syntheses (syntez) of those ideologies and Islam, in such a fashion that no one knew where the one began and the other ended. We in the Islamic Republic must not repeat the mistake – or the deliberate conspiracy – of the Banū Umayya. We must teach both: religion and irreligion, so that our young people will know the difference between them, and be able to recognize [sinful] innovation, immorality and heresy for what they are. We must not shield the up-and-coming generation from modern doctrines and philosophies, lest they become vulnerable to the tricks (hoqqe bazi-ha) of those who present unbelief as belief, who dress up falsehood as truth. I was riding in my car some time ago listening to the radio, and here was this professor talking about “humanism this” and “humanism that.” Then he threw in a few verses from the Noble Qurʿan, as if they made what he had said up to that point licit (estehlal kard), as if these two things were compatible – as if they were the same thing.⁴⁴

Modernity is indeed made use of by today’s Iranian Islamists – largely for the purpose of subverting modernity. The question is thus not whether, or how many, Khomeinist thinkers season their discourse with Western-derived notions. The question is: what is their ultimate objective in doing so? The charismatic, creative and highly influential revolutionary theoretician Dr. Ali Shariʿati (d. 1977) – charged Ayatollah Motahhari – “exploited Islam to achieve modern goals” such as a classless society, individual liberties, humanist values, and the like (“Once you have made the World an end, and Faith a means,” explains the demon Screwtape to his apprentice the fiend Wormwood in C. S. Lewis’ classic, “you have almost won your man”).⁴⁵ Ayatollah Khomeini, on the other hand, “exploited modernity to achieve Islamic goals.”⁴⁶ Laura Secor is correct in stating that Shariʿati’s “special genius was to deliver a modern, revolutionary creed to religious Iranians not as

 Panel Interview, rebroadcast on IRIB 5, 29/01/2021.  C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, conclusion of letter seven.  Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 24, p. 167. Motahhari does not mention either thinker by name, but in context his intent is clear. This dichotomy of priorities is known in traditional terms as din baroye donya ya donya baroye din.

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Western dogma but as their deepest birthright.”⁴⁷ But it was, in the end, just such sleight of hand that led to the parting of ways between this powerful preacher and the founders of the Islamic Republic. Khomeini’s “exploitation of modernity to achieve Islamic goals,” on the other hand, involves, among other processes, participating in the modernist and post-modernist trend of casting off Western modernity in the name of Eastern cultural authenticity. Even today, therefore, when large numbers of Iranian youth turn their backs on Khomeinism per se and drift toward American and European ideologies and lifestyles, the ultimate result may well be – as it was in 1978 – 9 – specifically a revulsion for, and backlash against, the cultural hegemony of the West, and a return to “nativist” authenticity. In other words, pace Jahanbegloo and many others, it may be that more than modernity is latent in Islamism, Islamism is latent in modernity. The conception of modernity as sole or premier touchstone for all and sundry is based on the notion of its unavoidability, its inexorability: “there is no turning back the clock.” Modernity is construed as the fundamental, inescapable reality of our time, the “is” so insistent that it has become an “ought.” “Nothing old can survive forever,” proclaims the London-based oppositionist newspaper Kayhan, sounding every bit like a nineteenth century scientific messianist. “It must willynilly make way for the new.”⁴⁸ But save for the constant forward march of technology (which admittedly impacts on many other areas of human endeavor), there is very little ineluctable or irrefragable about modernity, a proposition to which Ayatollah Khomeini’s star pupil, Ayatollah Motahhari, devoted an entire compelling volume entitled Islam and the Exigencies of the Time: There is no defensible reason why just because electricity has replaced the oil lamp and the airplane has ousted the mule, we must perforce alter the legal-moral statutes related to these devices, such as those [which govern] buying, selling, travelling, overreaching, guaranteeing, commissioning and the like; just as the fact that parents and children and spouses of previous generations rode on mules while the mothers, fathers, children, husbands and wives of our

 Laura Secor, Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran (New York: Riverhead Books, 2016), p. 12. Secor goes on to characterize the ideologies introduced or insinuated into the intra-Iranian dialogue by Shariʿati as “the two great atheistic doctrines of his day: Marxism and existentialism” (Secor, Children of Paradise, p. 12). Shariʿati’s philosophy, which drew on sources ranging from Marx, Gurvitch, Sartre and Fanon to Massignon, Corbin, Naʿini and Kasravi, is not, of course, reducible to black and white categories – among other reasons because his mercurial personality and feverish brain did not lend themselves to sterile consistency (his passion led him to “embrace opposites” [Secor, Children of Paradise, p. 12]) – and the debate concerning this great thinker’s inspirations and intentions still rages. Secor is also largely right in saying that the Khomeinists rode the power unleashed by Shariʿati “like a wild bronco they would eventually put down” (Secor, Children of Paradise, p. 47).  “Ancheh keh khavar-e miyaneh niyaz darad payman-e novin ast,” Kayhan-e Landan, 14/07/2021.

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time fly in airplanes, should not lead one to aver that the rights of parents over children or of children over parents, or the duties of spouses to one another, must of a necessity be overhauled in this day and age…They say, “You cannot hold onto such antiquated notions in the age of electricity and the airplane! This is 1346! (= 1968 – Z. M.). You are old-fashioned! You must keep up with the times!” These are the slogans of weak thinkers. What relevance does the progression of time or mechanization have to the moral sphere?⁴⁹

“We Muslims,” wrote the editors of Dars-haʾi az Maktab-e Islam (“Lessons from the School of Islam”) already in the 1960s, “cannot unfortunately forego the advances of Western science and technology, but we certainly do not need the West’s morality, worldview, social norms and lifestyle.”⁵⁰ Ayatollah Motahhari asserts that the “Father of Islamic Modernism” and indefatigable anti-imperialist, Jamal alDin al-Afghani al-Asadobadi, urged his fellow Muslims to adopt the industrial methods of Europe, but to shun that continent’s general outlook on existence.⁵¹ Whether or not this was true of Jamal al-Din, it was certainly true of Motahhari. A major component of the Islamic Revolution in Iran involved calling into question the inevitability and moral necessity of many if not most dimensions of modern life and ideology. Scholars who are wedded in the Catholic sense to the Fukuyama-esque notion of Western liberal democracy (or feminism, or individualism, or humanism, or even the idea of freedom)⁵² as the be-all-and-end-all – who are not willing, at least, to “problematize” the moral supremacy of the modern in a whole gamut of fields – are, we would argue, ill-equipped to inform us about the motivations and ideologies of those who have done just that. Indeed, given the many recent “reversals” in the direction of traditional ideas that are the lot of a wide gamut of states and societies, including the United States – the overturning of Roe v. Wade being one powerful example – such blind worshippers of modernization theory

 Morteza Motahhari, Eslam va moqtaziyat-e zaman in Majmue-ye Athar, vol. 21, pp. 2 and 5.  Dars-haʾi az maktab-e eslam (Teachings from the School of Islam), no. 10 (1341), cited in Ali-ye Davani, Nehzat-e ruhaniyun-e Iran (Tehran: Markaz-e Asnad-e Enqelab-e Eslami, 1388), vol. 3, p. 65.  Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 24, p. 34.  Freedom – azadi – is one of the most frequently deployed slogans in the Islamic Republic: Supreme Leader Khameneʾi and a host of other authorities regularly address themselves to the “Muslim and other freedom-loving nations of the world”; the Shahyad monument in central Tehran was renamed the “Freedom Monument” after the revolution; and the revolutionaries cried esteqlal, azadi, jomhuri-ye eslami – “Independence, Freedom, an Islamic Republic!” Still and all, it is safe to say that most Americans or Europeans – whose ideas about freedom are often described by the ayatollahs as ebahiyyat or “libertinism” – would take issue with the version of this concept acceptable to the majority of Muslim clerics. Humanism is, in the eyes of many Iranian Islamists, the sin of tafarʿon, “behaving like Pharaoh,” the Nietzschean Man par excellence who perceives nothing to be above himself. “Take a lesson from the fate of those who said: ʻWho is mightier than us? (Q. 41: 15)’” urged ʿAlī in the Nahj al-balāgha (Sermon 107, p. 219).

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may be ill-equipped to inform us about the inner workings and trajectories of most of the planet’s polities, Eastern or Western. How useful are attempts to parse Middle Eastern, Iranian or Islamic phenomena with the help of a Western theoretical toolkit, even when doing so does not necessarily imply value judgments? Was Ayatollah Khomeini’s insistence that the interests of the Islamic Republic outweigh even explicit Qurʿanic precepts really “semi-Schmittian”?⁵³ Is there no more effective, accurate, less colonialist and less Orientalist way of describing this stance? After all, the vast web of scriptural, traditional, exegetical, jurisprudential, theological, philosophical, spiritual, mystical, historical, cultural, and even personal, national and ethnic components that coalesced (or conflicted, or collided, or reacted with one-another) in order to produce Khomeini’s ultimate position on this pivotal subject – all of these were as far from the knowledge, experience and theorizing of the Nazi Carl Schmitt as the earth is from the sky. Are there no Shiʿite or at least Muslim theories that could serve as the analogy or touchstone here? True, by referencing Schmitt the author renders Khomeini more accessible to Western audiences, or at least to the political philosophers among them. Or does he? Perhaps the analogy is so poor, so stretched, so specious, that it actually misleads more than it informs? Perhaps rather than seeking to bring Khomeini into the conceptual context of Western readership, scholars should seek to bring Western readership into the conceptual context of Khomeini? We tackle aspects of this question below, in Chapter Five. For now, it is enough to quote the famous French student of Islam, Maxime Rodinson: To understand the social world and its dynamics, it is more worthwhile to have closely studied a society, a series of events or a complex of concrete phenomena than to have spent months or years on achieving a good understanding of [Hegel’s] Phenomenology of Spirit. ⁵⁴

A Question of Proportionality It cannot be denied that besides Fardid/Davari and Soroush, other participants in the Islamic revolutionary enterprise made use of the ideas of Western thinkers, and in some cases still (and even increasingly) do so today. However, several important points should be noted in this regard:

 Kamran Matin, “International Relations in the Making of Political Islam: Interrogating Khomeini’s ʻIslamic Government,” Journal of International Relations and Development 2013 (16), p. 18.  Cited in Afary and Anderson, Foucault, p. 135. Rodinson’s barb was directed at Foucault, who, however, did not really deserve it, having devoted – unlike many others – considerable effort to studying important aspects of Shiʿite Islam and Iranian society.

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(a) As time goes by this predilection functions more and more as a shibboleth, distinguishing the loyal and disloyal opposition – on the one hand – from the strong supporters of velayat-e faqih (the Guardianship of the Jurist) on the other, the latter more or less successfully resisting the temptation to “go with the international (i. e., Western) flow”; (b) Whereas present-day Iranian dissidents who marshal American or European philosophers in their essays and speeches tend to dress up modernist/post-modernist concepts in Islamic garb, the more revolutionarily “committed” clerics and laypeople who do the same – and there aren’t many – tend, on the contrary, to dress up Islamic concepts in modernist/post-modernist garb; (c) Those mojtaheds (and others) who currently control the levers of power in Iran and whose writings and sermons nevertheless contain frequent allusions to Western thinkers or notions – and their numbers, as we noted, are quite small – are attempting, as we pointed out above, to eliminate their intellectual adversaries with their own weapons (without falling under the spell of those adversaries, as many a Muʿtazila of old had arguably done); and finally (d) Analogizing indigenous to foreign phenomena – in general, comparing beliefs or occurrences hailing from different civilizational milieus – is certainly not without its benefits, and is a natural enough technique for widely-read Iranian Islamist clerics (of which there are more than is generally imagined). The issue, rather, is one of balance and emphasis: occasionally resorting to outside allusions during an overwhelmingly “authentic” disquisition is one thing. Allowing non-Muslim (and, lest anyone try to cast this propensity as universal “open-mindedness,” almost invariably European or American) thinkers to dominate the discourse, set the terms of debate, supply the nomenclature and constitute the ultimate benchmark – this is nothing less than “Westomania,” and indeed, when it has been encountered among one-time revolutionaries (such as Soroush or Ganji)⁵⁵ they have been rather summarily ejected from the fold. This attitude is not new

 Akbar-e Ganji, Iranian journalist and longtime dissident and gadfly, parted ways with the revolution already in the late 1990s, a divorce that was finalized at the turn of the millennium by his six-year imprisonment for unearthing state secrets concerning the 1998 “chain murders” of opposition figures. He has been called “the Solzhenitsyn of Iran,” a characterization which to this writer’s mind – having read The Gulag Archipelago and Tarikkhane-ye ashbah – is overblown (in the latter work Ganji references Solzhenitsyn rather often). A better candidate for such a comparison might be Reza Baraheni, poet, literary critic, prisoner and author of (among other indictments of the Pahlavi repression machine) The Crowned Cannibals. But this latter work, though powerfully and perceptively written, is prone to exaggeration, generalization and even fabrication. It may be instructively offset by Andrew Cooper’s The Fall of Heaven (New York: Henry Holt, 2016), which, while assiduously researched and quite riveting, often overcompensates in the opposite direction.

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to Islamic history or thought (or, for that matter, to that of other religions): when the brand of medieval Muslim thinkers known as Muʿtazilites were perceived as having gone too far in their philhellenism and having set up Aristotelian methods as the gold standard for any legitimate method of cogitation or theological system, they were suppressed by the Sunni establishment (and even the Shiʿa took a step back).⁵⁶ Religion (or culture, or nationhood) is like an atom: there are electrons swirling around its perimeter that are relatively ephemeral and can be jettisoned, or augmented by (or traded for) electrons from other atoms without affecting the all-essential core. But the latter – the far more solid and substantial nucleus – is off limits, so long as the faith and its adherents (or the nation and its members) wish to retain their collective identity.⁵⁷ Hamid Dabashi is right to caution against the “false and falsifying binary” so often posited between sacred and secular, East and West, Sunni and Shiʿi.⁵⁸ All religions, cultures, civilizations, schools of thought and the like are porous, penumbrous, shifting and overlapping to one degree or another. But it is a long way from that admission to the virulent enmity borne by the post-modern left for any and all forms of exclusivism, or even – for that matter – for any and all descriptions or acknowledgments of exclusivism. Universalism, yes. Individualism, yes. But whatever falls between these two poles, any collective that dares distinguish between “us” and “them,” is anathema. For Dabashi et al, the “sectarian, divisive, factional and nativist” is, by definition, evil and belongs to the past – and the acceptance of the existence of these sentiments by researchers reflects an egregious lack of sophistication – while “the transnational, polyvocal, worldly and cosmopolitan” is, by definition, good and the wave of the future – and the blurring of borders required to recognize such is the task of the worthy scholar. Homi Bhabha’s “international culture, based…on the inscription and articulation of hybridity”

 Shiʿism’s love-hate relationship with Muʿtazilism is quite complex, and the reasons why the former “stepped back” – or continued to keep its distance – from the latter involve other factors as well. More on this below. From its side, Muʿtazilism might be said to have leaned, at the outset, more in the direction of “ʿUthmānī” (i. e., strongly anti-Shiʿi) Sunnism, but to have gradually shed this aspect and adopted certain Shiʿi-oriented positions (and attracted important Shiʿi exponents). At times Sunni authors have virtually conflated Shiʿism with Muʿtazilism, for instance in the title of Taqī al-Dīn b. Taymiyya’s Minhāj al-sunna al-nabawiyya fī naqd kalām al-shīʿa al-qadariyya (though the last term appears at first glance to denote “predestinarians,” it has almost always been employed – as it is here – to indicate the opposite, that is, those who believe in free will, i. e., the Muʿtazilites). The most recent and probably best exposition of this vicissitudinous and multifaceted relationship is Najam Haider’s Shiʿi Islam: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).  Here, again, is the present author’s “essentialism” on flagrant display.  Dabashi, Shiʿism, passim.

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is humanity’s panacea, and it is the undeclared goal of academia to foster it, inter alia by showing at every possible juncture that it is inevitable, that, indeed, it is already upon us (or perhaps better: that it has always been the human condition, when the matter is properly understood).⁵⁹ As Ali Mirsepassi preaches, the “interdependence of [the world’s] cultural, economic and political realities at the global level” renders “any construction of an Iranian society based on a nativist discourse an inherently self-defeating project.”⁶⁰ Mehrzad Boroujerdi speaks of “the seductive lure of nativism” and censures the Islamist discourse – which he calls “Orientalism in reverse” after Syrian critic Sadik al-Azm – for “uncritically embrac[ing] Orientalism’s assumption of a fundamental ontological difference separating the natures, peoples and cultures of the orient and the occident.”⁶¹ For Dabashi, Mirsepassi, Boroujerdi and so many others, both in regard to scholarly assessments of political-cultural movements – e. g., the “simplistic, essentialist and colonialist” analyses and “sectarian reductionism” of Vali Nasr – as well as in regard to those political-cultural movements themselves – e. g., the Khomeinist struggle for Shiʿite Muslim self-determination and the recovery of a clearly demarcated religio-cultural identity⁶² – the notion of the circumscribed collective is conceived as the enemy of moral and intellectual progressivism.⁶³ Thus does so-called “post-colonial” academia take up again the white man’s burden: they will teach these miscreant, parochial Islamists (or even just traditional Muslims) to put away their reactionary ideas of confessional exclusivism and wholeheartedly adopt Kantian universalism, whatever the price. And they will teach their fellow academic researchers not to dare recognize distinctly bordered religio-cultural entities, on pain of disbarment. Ayatollah Khomeini, and millions of his co-religionists throughout history, continually asserted, and still assert today: “We are Shiʿites, they are Sunnis; there are religious Muslims, and there are infidels.” Shaykh Qaraḍāwī, and millions of his co-religionists throughout history, continually asserted, and still assert today: “We are Sunnis, they are Shiʿites; there are religious Muslims, and there are infidels.” Vali Nasr listens, verifies, and explicates accordingly:

 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 38. Emphasis in the original.  Ali Mirsepassi, Political Islam, Iran and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 46.  Boroujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals, pp. 11– 12.  See, e. g., Dabashi, Shiʿism, pp. 280 – 281.  Dabashi, Shiʿism, p. 299.

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“There are Sunnis, and there are Shiʿites; there are religious Muslims, and there are infidels.” Hamid Dabashi declares: “Vali Nasr is a colonialist.”⁶⁴ Neither Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Saʿid Tabatabaʾi-e Hakim, nor pretty much any other Iranian cleric today takes Heidegger or Hobsbawm or Arendt or Barthes into account when choosing what to do next. Why then do we need to resort to these Western authors in order to understand these non-Western religious thinkers? Perhaps Heidegger’s – or Baudrillard’s, or Gramsci’s, or Geertz’s, or Rawls’ – rank unfamiliarity with Shiʿism and Iran disqualifies them as effective theorists or analysts (or tools for theorists or analysts) of the Islamic Republican revolutionary phenomenon? Or at least: might not a “homegrown” thinker, classical, pre-modern or contemporary, be more helpful in this regard? Unless, of course, it is not the creators and maintainers of the Islamic Republic that most scholars are interested in understanding, after all, but only those (like Soroush and Ganji) who seek to remold that socio-political entity in the image of the modernday West. Even when the formulations of post-modern scholarship are not so off-putting and the methodology employed not so opaque, the “new research” that constantly seeks to force itself upon any and all who would think about a subject such as the one we have taken up, often spreads cloudiness where there was once clarity. A never-ending revisionism, characterized less and less by the unearthing of new primary information and more and more by “re-conceptualizations” of already extant material (or angle rotation on the same), does its best to undermine the coherence achieved by earlier generations of serious scholars, who committed the crime of combining diligent investigation with common sense and a straightforward literary style to paint edifying pictures of the past and present. It was once a commonplace, for instance, to speak of “the decline and fall” of various polities, but at least in the field of Middle East studies, such an approach has become anathema (inter alia for political reasons, because the notion, for example, of the “decline of the Ottoman Empire” purportedly functions as a post facto justification for Western Imperialism). Along the way the very existence of the dynasty or state under scrutiny is also challenged – as part of the overall post-modern enterprise of “subject fragmentation” – usually with the help of a minor chronological tweak that blurs the fine line between one ruling family and the next, or with the assistance of a painfully obvious “revelation” to the effect that the center did not really con Vali Nasr’s The Shiʿite Revival is a largely balanced and informative book, which is more than can be said for much of Dabashi’s oeuvre (by which we mean to say that though the latter contains many highly erudite and edifying tomes, the author’s clear and unmistakable agendas are interspersed throughout, especially in his later work – something one doubts Dabashi himself would deny).

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trol more than a certain amount of territory, and even that only through deals with local potentates, etc. etc. Many of today’s academics – and not just the self-proclaimed post-modern or post-colonial ones – already speak derisively and dismissively of “decline studies,” an approach which is now passé – because they say it is. What exactly happened to those vast political entities that are no longer with us if they did not in fact “decline” – how and when and whither they disappeared – is the type of annoying common-sense question asked only by those not sufficiently up to date on “the state of the field.” This plague has not passed over Iranian studies, though they were spared for a time. Of late an increasing number of scholarly efforts in this discipline have fallen prey to the noxious tendencies outlined above. Such works set out to focus on particular aspects of the Iranian internal or international experience, but in most cases end up focusing on nothing at all, losing themselves in a vast, meandering labyrinth of abstruse phraseology that smacks of sophistication solely because it is unintelligible. These studies are particularly unequipped to convey the genuine Iranian-Shiʿite religious experience, among other reasons because the lay participants in that experience, as well as the clerical exponents thereof, swim in an entirely different sea of discourse than these long-winded and deliberately obscure authors. (When the latter write, as they often do, about those contemporary Iranian intellectuals who have themselves been infected by the post-modern bug, such as Messrs. Shabestari, Jahanbegloo or Sorush, the discordance between scholar and subject is albeit less acute, but the unhelpfulness to the reader is compounded). In the remainder of this volume, as has been the case up to this point, we will not be beholden to, or even for the most part acknowledge, so-called “cutting edge” modes of investigation that are, in our eyes, not only unfruitful but productive of ignorance and misconception. Roxanne Varzi’s Warring Souls: Youth, Media and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran; Hamid Dabashi’s Iran: A People Interrupted; Haggai Ram’s spluttering Iranophobia; Janet Afary’s Iran’s Constitutional Revolution; Farzin Vahdat’s God and Juggernaut: Iran’s Intellectual Encounter with Modernity; and Ali Mirsepassi’s Intellectual Discourses and Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran are several examples among a great many of promising studies that fail to deliver in this sense, waylaid by their own conceptual underpinnings, bogged down by their authors’ dense rhetoric, long on theory and short on content. Kamran Scot Aghaie and Afshin Marashi’s edited volume Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity is uneven in this regard, quite a few chapters managing to enlighten despite the book’s emphatic post-colonial and “culturalist” framework. Woven throughout the introduction to the latter work, however, is the typical assumption so rife in today’s academic circles, an outlook indebted to the notion of “technological determinism” (and perhaps ultimately to Darwinian evolution) and

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ironically reminiscent of the very “modernization theory” that the new generation of social science researchers takes such pride in having debunked: that the chronologically latest intellectual approach in a given research discipline is unquestionably the best and most sophisticated – the progression being unidirectional and irreversible – and that all investigators and writers are duty bound, if not to accept the parameters of the newest “cutting edge” techniques, then at least to “engage” with them. The methods that preceded the current or up-and-coming ones are by definition primitive, are, as it were, jāhiliyya (the pre-Islamic period of ignorance), and any author who clings to them is a naïve Philistine practicing a reactionary “defensive retrenchment.”⁶⁵ We read over and over: “It is no longer acceptable to speak of…” and “scholars have advanced beyond the notion that…” – as if there were a vote taken, or a party line that we all must toe. We read: “X scholarly approach has been superseded” or Y theory is now outmoded“ – that is, out of fashion (much like certain traditional or religious styles of life, which, their practitioners were and still are condescendingly told, have been surpassed). This pervasive and obstinate perception-bordering-on-axiom was tackled in the more general realm by the aforementioned effort of Ayatollah Motahhari, Islam and the Imperatives of Our Time (Eslam va Moqtaziyat-e Zaman). Motahhari argues from a variety of angles the cogent, all-but-obvious point that whereas scientific advancement is an immutable reality, the inexorable procession over history from inferior metaphysical worldviews, moral outlooks, forms of government or epistemological conceptions to superior ones, is in no way necessary or guaranteed. We would merely add that the same holds true for academic research methods and conclusions. It should also be noted, finally, that there is yet another reason why the postmodern left is not our best source of information about Iranian-Islamist thought. Though Michel Foucault and others were quite enamoured of the Islamic Revolution at first, among other reasons because it was an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist (and anti-materialist) project par excellence, still, it soon became clear that the society Islamists seek to create does not jibe with the notions of liberalism, egalitarianism and universalism (or for that matter anti-capitalism) so dear to the left. Islamism, they discovered to their chagrin, is “socially retrogressive.” Thus Khomeinism – and even the non-Khomeinist Shiʿism that still thrives today at Qom and elsewhere – is now perceived as the enemy, and Iranian (and Western) intellectuals harboring a post-modern or left-leaning outlook have, for the most part, ceased probing the thought of the revolutionary ayatollahs for edifying material (if they ever started).

 Aghaie and Marashi, Rethinking, p. 4.

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Academic scholarship of this is loathe to re-examine its own catechitical premises. It proceeds, for instance, from the “obvious” notion that movement in the direction of more individual freedoms is a desideratum – an assumption taken for granted almost across-the-board in countless Western scholarly forums to such a degree that anyone questioning it would be met with either quizzical looks or extreme vituperation. Not only publicism and punditry, but even a great many peerreviewed articles and books on various aspects of the Islamic Republic, are undergirded by this spoken or unspoken axiom, and therefore include unqualified statements concerning (for instance) “a marked improvement in the status of women,” “progress in the direction of minority rights,” “the hope for a greater openness to Western institutions,” “the dream of undiluted democracy,” and the like. The possibility that a considerable proportion of the Iranian-Shiʿite population may view (or may have viewed in the past) the changes in the status of women or minorities or the greater willingness to absorb Western norms or freedoms referred to and valanced positively by these authors as, in fact, negatives – which is a large part of the reason why there was an Islamic revolution in 1979 – clearly matters not to these writers. Because even for a great many supposedly “objective” researchers, such premises regarding the proper direction humanity should take – namely, toward increasing individualism, political participation, gender equality, freedom of speech and conscience, etc. – are quite simply articles of faith (which is why such authors can construct, for example, after every Iranian parliamentary election in which the osulgarayan or “conservatives” prevail over the eslah-talaban or “reformers,” fascinating oxymoronic sentences like: “The Extremists Win the Majority of Seats in the Iranian Parliament”). More than this: because of the aggressive and, for the most part, one-sided candidate vetting that precedes each election in the Islamic Republic, suppose we grant that even though a large proportion of the Iranian population does in fact support what the West calls women’s and minority rights, or press freedoms, these people cannot make their voices heard by voting in representatives who will fight for those principles. In that case, another fundamental question arises: if we as writers on Iran aspire to objectivity, and if we claim to be striving for an understanding of the ideas and attitudes that animated the Islamic Revolution and still animate the Islamic Republic, have we the right to write based on the unquestioned assumption that the will of the people will out? That democracy is the greatest, most indisputable good? That what the majority wants, the majority should always get? Ayatollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi, and even, in the end, reformist figures like Ayatollah Karroubi and Ayatollah Mohaqqeq-e Damad, would all take exception to this premise – as did Plato (and as does the U. S. Supreme Court). The assumptions and agendas that plague left-leaning,

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post-modern scholarship render it, for the most part, unhelpful to our project of fathoming the worldview of Iran’s ruling jurists.

The Neo-Conservative Right: Mission Civilisatrice If the post-modern left can be saddled with much of the blame for keeping the West ignorant of the vast and colorful world that is the Islamic religious and textual tradition – and thereby preventing us from genuinely comprehending what makes the revolutionary Iranian cleritocracy tick – the neo-conservative right bears an even greater responsibility for this lacuna. The Middle East scholar most closely identified with this camp, the otherwise perspicacious Daniel Pipes, writes in his “You Need Beethoven to Modernize”: Fully reaping the benefits of Western creativity requires an immersion in the Western culture that produced it…Western music proves this point with special clarity, precisely because it is so irrelevant to modernization. Playing the Kreuzer Sonata adds nothing to one’s GDP; enjoying an operetta does not enhance one’s force projection. And yet, to be fully modern means mastering Western music; competence at Western music, in fact, closely parallels a country’s wealth and power, as the experiences of two civilizations, Muslim and Japanese, show. Muslim reluctance to accept Western music foreshadows a general difficulty with modernity; Japanese mastery of every style from classical to jazz helps explain everything from a strong yen to institutional stability.⁶⁶

Well, the yen is no longer so strong – the Iranian rial, which has weathered decades of crippling sanctions (and survived Trump’s re-imposition and intensification thereof ), actually looks like a better bet for the future⁶⁷ – but the central thrust of Pipes’ argument relies on the old imperialist (and neo-imperialist) saw that the West is indubitably superior to the Muslim world, and that Western leaders are duty bound to save the Middle East from savagery like Sir Francis Cromarty and Phileas Fogg rescuing the Parsee woman from suttee in Jules Verne’s Around

 Daniel Pipes, “You Need Beethoven to Modernize,” Middle East Quarterly, September 1998.  For an examination of Japan’s economic decline and poor prospects for recovery, see the New York Times series entitled “The Great Deflation,” beginning with Martin Fackler, “Japan goes from Dynamic to Disheartened,” 10.16.10. Despite regular assessments claiming that Iran’s economy is in a shambles – Michael Ledeen has been calling it “an economic basket case” for decades (e. g. https:// www.aei.org/articles/the-hollow-regime/. Last accessed 04/08/2019) – and despite forty some years of crippling sanctions and the resultant runaway inflation, the country is poised in many ways to become a major economic mover and shaker in the region, perhaps even on the world scene. The wide-ranging economic treaty with China of 2020, all its potential negative ramifications for Iran notwithstanding, was a coup of sorts in this direction.

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the World in Eighty Days. Pipes’ premise is that European and American ideas, values and institutions represent the pinnacle of perfection in every imaginable sphere of human endeavor, and that it behooves all other societies and cultures to imitate Western ways as best they can – lest they be lost. As Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder and unbridled secularizer of modern Turkey, put the matter: “There is only one civilization in the world, and that civilization is Western.”⁶⁸ Pipes is far from alone (and Iranians have been herded into concert halls in order to “civilize” them at least since the late nineteenth century). Renowned Middle East expert and public intellectual Fouad Ajami (d. 2014), for instance, and highly regarded Iran specialist Abbas Milani, both epitomize the same imperturbably West-centric approach that – rarely if ever bothering to critique the ideological positions of Islamism itself (let alone those of modernism) – merely takes as a given that the yardstick by which the worth of all ideas and institutions must be measured is the worldview of the secular West. Pretending to objective scholarship, neither Ajami nor Milani, in their The Myth of the Great Satan, is averse to modifying phrases like “fundamentalist beliefs” or “Khomeini’s thought” with adjectives like “hare-brained,” “criminal,” “zany,” “murderous,” “obscurantist,” “terroristic,” “backward,” and the like. Ajami divides up today’s Islamic world between the good: “those Muslims who are keen to protect the rule of reason and the gains of modernity,” and the evil: “those [Muslims] determined to deny the Islamic world its place in the modern international order of states.” His self-described mission is to help bring about the victory of “those Muslims who accept the canon, and the discipline, of modernism” over “those who don’t.” He champions “the values that animate a decent, modern society” against the Islamist “masters of terror and their foot soldiers [who] have made it increasingly difficult to integrate the world of Islam into modernity.” In all of this the possibility that the equation “modern = good” might be contestable in some or many or even most of its aspects – that in the eyes of an exponentially increasing number of millions around the globe a goodly portion of the “gains of modernity” in fact represent dangerous and dev-

 Gerecht, p. 105. One could do worse in this connection than to quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn speaking at Harvard’s commencement exercises: “The persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of the globe should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick” (cited in Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 306).

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astating losses – none of these “alternative” modes of thought are even given the time of day, let alone grappled with or granted legitimacy, in Ajami’s analytical diatribes. The author’s subjective preferences are put forward as objective axioms. The second author, Milani, who ironically bemoans the “dearth of impartial scholarly inquiry and knowledge” about Iran in the West,⁶⁹ engages throughout The Myth of the Great Satan in such vituperative polemic against the Islamic Republic that barely a single paragraph can be found anywhere in this work which does not contain manipulated facts, agenda-ridden argumentation or even pure invention. Milani is not beneath “revealing” to his readership the very “scoop” that Iran-bashing Internet bloggers have been discovering and re-discovering ad nauseum for several decades now, viz., that Shiʿism classically advocates the employment of taqiyya or “prudent dissimulation,” or in other words, that it is a religion of liars (Sunnis, it should be noted, have developed a similar institution, known as taysīr).⁷⁰ “Profound” analysis of this sort leads Milani, by-and-by, to produce pearls like the following: Of the many problems plaguing U.S.-Iranian relations in the last thirty years, the most elemental problem is the one most easily overlooked or ignored: the United States plays by the normal rules and logic of diplomacy, while the clerical regime plays by its own idiosyncratic rules.⁷¹

Milani goes on to counterpose “the Iranian regime’s self-serving rules of conduct” to the diplomatic methodology practiced by the United States, which (we are evidently intended to conclude) is not at all “self-serving” but wholly altruistic. “Normal,” “legal,” “logical” and “moral” foreign policy is that practiced by the contemporary Western powers, and is distinguished by its forthrightness, rationality, disinterestedness and universal benevolence, whereas (in Milani’s schema) the approach to international relations endemic to the world’s Muslim or at least Islamist states – and presumably to all other polities throughout history whose modes of operation were informed by traditional religious or otherwise non-modern or nonWestern outlooks – is characterized by deviousness, insanity (somehow combined

 Milani and Ajami, Myth, p. 92.  As a young cleric several months prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Ayatollah (then Hojjatoleslam) Makarem-e Shirazi penned an edifying essay on the precept of taqiyya, in which he convincingly portrayed the universality of the underlying principle informing this precept. See “Chehre-ye taqiyye dar revayat-e eslami,” https://makarem.ir/main.aspx?lid=0&typeinfo=1. Last accessed 07/08/2018.  Milani and Ajami, Myth, p. 115.

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with calculated realpolitik) and unadulterated self-interest. America plays fair; Iran plays dirty. It need not be thus for eternity, however. Like Ajami and Pipes, Milani looks forward to a day when, by dint of regime change, Iran will “join the world as a rational and reasonable member of the global community.”⁷² Here, three types of subjective assumptions masquerading as objective determinations converge: (1) that “rational and reasonable” behavior is behavior grounded in modern Western values; (2) that the vast majority of the planet’s polities – “the world” – share those same modern Western values; and (3) if the majority of the world’s states or societies orient themselves in a certain way, then all others are duty bound to follow suit, on pain of being stigmatized as pariahs. Milani has not always engaged in such crude, low-level propaganda. He is, indeed, one of the past masters of the field of Iranian studies, and when one compares the above joint effort with Ajami to his more serious contributions one is left with a feeling of Dr Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. Over two decades ago Milani wrote what is arguably his most important work, The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Mage, 2000). This biography of the emblematic prime minister during Iran’s “White Revolution” and “Great Civilization” period (the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen seventies) radiates sensitivity, maturity, sophistication, profundity, empathy, erudition, authority and even – at least in most areas – balance and objectivity. Milani has thoroughly researched his subject, and succeeded in “getting into Hoveyda’s head” and reconstructing the mise en scene and Zeitgeist in which this ill-starred lackey of the Shah lived and worked. Few if any figures in twentieth century Iranian history can be used so well as a bridge spanning the twilight of the Qajar dynasty, the enormous transformations under the Pahlavis pere et fils, and the era of the revolutionary cleritocracy following the revolution. And Milani does indeed exploit his subject with great aplomb in order to connect these periods, tracing in thick lines, at the outset, the genealogical and political lineage of the Hoveyda family back to Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (reigned 1848 – 96) and beyond, and, at the other chronological extreme, describing in vivid and moving detail, in a preamble and in the conclusion, the “prison days” and (genuinely) tear-jerking denouement of Amir Abbas, who was condemned without much ado by Khomeini’s “hanging judge,” Ayatollah Khalkhali, and executed by revolutionary firing squad.⁷³

 Milani and Ajami, Myth, p. 116.  According to some reports Hoveyda did not even make it to the firing squad, but was shot in the back of the head hard on the heels of his sentencing by gun-toting clerical zealot Hadi-ye Ghiffari (now a “reformist”). Ghiffari’s father, a well known Ayatollah, died in a SAVAK prison in 1974.

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The intervening Pahlavi half-century is obviously the main focus of the book, and it is here that we imbibe from this well-versed and highly eloquent author, not only a great deal about the career and psychology of Hoveyda himself and about the machinations and vicissitudes of the Iranian political scene from the 1950s to the 1970s, but more importantly, about the genuine, underlying motivations that led the Islamic revolutionaries to turn Iran upside down (the subtitle’s “riddle of the Iranian revolution”). But herein lies the rub. For we gain this latter knowledge not because Milani sought to impart it to us – he appears to know shockingly little about the true motivations of the Iranian revolutionaries⁷⁴ and, indeed, never even discusses the subject – but specifically because he did not seek to impart such knowledge to us. This requires a moment’s explanation. From the earliest stages of the Iranian revolution, Shiʿite Islamists formed a significant element within the overall forces for change, and eventually they became the dominant wing and decisive factor in the overthrow of the monarchy, and the guiding light in the establishment of the subsequent republic. Everything about Amir Abbas Hoveyda makes him the quintessential symbol of the worldview that the Islamists abhorred, and of the societal trends that sickened and infuriated them and eventually provoked them to unprecedented action. Even long before his own birth, Hoveyda’s great-grandfather Nasser al-Salteneh “was a courtier whose secular ideas had earned him the nickname of ‘Kofri’ (the Infidel),”⁷⁵ and the Prime Minister’s own childhood – spent almost entirely outside of Iran due to his father’s diplomatic assignments – was virtually bereft of Islamic rituals or prayers.⁷⁶ He attended the Lycée Française in Beirut, the curriculum of which was “deeply and decidedly secular,”⁷⁷ and devoured the books on the school’s recommended reading list, his favorites being the works of Voltaire – the most influential nemesis of religion in the modern period – as well as Andre Gide’s paganesque and hedonistic prose-poem Les Nourritures Terrestres (“The Fruits of the Earth”) with its motto: “I no longer believe in sin.”⁷⁸ Like the second Pahlavi Shah himself, whose father sent him to Le Rosey School for Boys in Switzerland, Hoveyda’s education was neither Iranian nor Islamic in character, as Milani stresses:

 This, despite – or perhaps because of – having been a militant Maoist himself until 1975.  Abbas Milani, The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Washington, D. C.: Image Publishers, 2009), p. 41. Abu l-Hasan Bani Sadr, who developed a genuine affection for Hoveyda, wrote that “his problem was that he had no religious faith at all” (Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 201).  Milani, Persian Sphinx, p. 47.  Milani, Persian Sphinx, p. 50.  Milani, Persian Sphinx, 56.

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…the culture and language that resonated inside him, the ultimate source of his cultural capital, the poems that spoke to, and of, his desire and despair, the linguistic tropes that shaped his discourse were all primarily European in origin.⁷⁹

Hoveyda’s upbringing contained all the ingredients necessary to produce that well known type that had been the butt of Iranian satire ever since the onset of that country’s encounter with the modern West: the fokoli (lit. “collar wearer”), who “knows nothing other than how to adequately mimic strangers” and who “at a mere whiff of the European air, had come to denigrate all that was Persian.”⁸⁰ Though Milani argues that Hoveyda’s “fokolism” was mitigated – he never overtly disparaged Iranian national culture and as Prime Minister often paid lip service to its uniqueness and even grandeur – the impact on this pillar of Pahlavism of having spent twenty-one of the first twenty-four years of his life outside of his homeland was profound and would never wane (even as he sat in the revolutionary jail cell awaiting execution, he comforted himself by reading European literature).⁸¹ His intellectual circle, after he returned to Iran and as he rose in the political ranks, revolved around figures like highly talented but virulently anti-Islamic authors Sadeq-e Hedayat and Sadeq-e Chubak (for both of whom see below, Part Two), the latter of which – rabidly anti-religious, as we said, in his own right – characterized Hoveyda as a “militant atheist.”⁸² Even while in office, this prime minister would talk to his closest friends about his “Nietzschean disdain for all organized religion.”⁸³ Hoveyda was probably not a closet Bahaʾi (though he was a descendent of overt Bahaʾis), but he was unquestionably an active member of the faramush khaneh (the Freemason Lodge) like so many who moved in his circles in Iran at the time (including, evidently, the king himself ).⁸⁴ Milani describes how Hoveyda and the Shah would converse almost entirely in French or English, and writes that “they were both exiles in their own country, at home only in a Europe of their own imagination.”⁸⁵ A photograph reproduced by Milani encapsulates the ethos that prevailed within the social and political set surrounding Hoveyda: at a dinner party, sprawled on chairs and on the floor, dressed in the latest Western

 Milani, Persian Sphinx, 61.  Milani, Persian Sphinx, pp. 164 and 67.  Milani, Persian Sphinx, p. 22.  Milani, Persian Sphinx, p. 93.  Milani, Persian Sphinx, p. 207.  Milani, Persian Sphinx, pp. 115 – 116. Yann Richard describes Hoveyda as a Bahaʾi (Shiʿite Islam, p. 75).  Milani, Persian Sphinx, p. 175. Many other important anti-Islamic figures of the mid-twentieth century, such as preeminent fiction writer Sadeq-e Hedayat or iconoclastic poet Nima Yushij, were products of foreign (mostly French) educations.

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fashion, the men and women falling over and embracing one another, the scene is one of carefree European aristocratic dandies at play.⁸⁶ In Guiseppe Lampedusa’s The Leopard the pre-Risorgiomento Sicilian upperclass wines, dines, jokes and dances behind the high walls of its estates and mansions, but through the windows in the evening cannot help but observe with a deep shudder the campfires of the peasant rebels glowing atop the surrounding mountains: these sybaritic aristocrats were living on borrowed time, and they knew it. Amir Abbas Hoveyda, on the other hand – and his upper crust, Westernized friends and political and intellectual peers – were living on borrowed time, but did not know it. Indeed, they noticed next to nothing. They suffered no anxiety as they waltzed nonchalantly down the corridors of power and through the parlor rooms of pleasure, thoroughly oblivious (or indifferent) to the fact that a yawning chasm separated their comportment and Weltanschauung from that of the vast majority of their countrymen. Most of them remained altogether clueless up until the end (and even beyond the end, as exiles after the revolution) regarding the reality that, in the eyes of most Iranian citizens, practically everything they did and stood for was anathema, an abomination, a hideous betrayal (the more bitter because so unconscionably blithe) of centuries of hallowed and beloved tradition. Hoveyda and his cronies, and Mohammad Reza Shah and his yes-men, may not have trampled religious sentiments and institutions underfoot as roughly and deliberately as the previous Pahlavi king had done with his proverbial army boots during the nineteen-twenties and thirties. But there is something more horrific still to the traditional mindset than the intentional desecration of the holy, and that thing – though it may sound strange at first – is the unintentional desecration of the holy. When a fanatical free-thinker purposely spits upon or strives to uproot the time-honored norms and rituals of a given faith, he is by virtue of his witting assault confirming the very centrality of those norms and rituals to the society of his day: the activist heretic takes aim at tradition because tradition is such a powerful force in the lives of those around him, and he shoots skillfully at his target

 Milani, Persian Sphinx, p. 145. Reza Baraheni crashed a party thrown by the Shah’s older sister, Princess Shams, where at a certain point “we are all jammed into a smaller hall, where we sit and watch an adult movie. It is a cheap film, a mediocre sexist extravaganza in which men trample on women and girl-children, and in several cases rape them” (Crowned Cannibals, p. 94). Soraya, Mohammad Reza’s second wife, had already complained about such films that she had been forced to watch at the royal palace (Buchan, Days of God, p. 35). Hosayn Ala, prime minister and court minister in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen sixties, advised the Shah to put an end to “parties of gambling and silly games and striptease” (Milani, The Shah, p. 216). Assadollah Alam’s revelations in this regard in his diary are well known.

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because he himself is, at least in most cases, steeped in that tradition (having been raised in it) no less than its proponents and defenders. Moreover, a grudging respect may be harbored by these last for their impious persecutors, who share their universe of discourse and who are undeniably animated by a form of idealism (albeit “satanic” idealism). The specifically unwitting offenses against religion committed by the playboy politicians surrounding the second Pahlavi monarch can boast none of these “saving graces.” Their transgressions were perpetrated far more often out of ignorance than out of knowledge. Unlike, say, the “Russelian” reformers Kasravi, Davari or Akhundzadeh (on whom see below), Hoveyda and company were for the most part extremely unversed in Shiʿism, whether as a theology or as a rhythm of life. (So was the Shah: on one occasion, during a 1967 visit to the holy city of Qom, he reassured the assembled mojtaheds and talebeh that “every night before going to bed I say my prayers.”⁸⁷ This so-called “Custodian of the Faith” never once attended Friday prayers or fasted during Ramadan, but was known to be fond of a nightcap. The Pahlavi sovereign’s conspicuous affection for his German shepherd Beno – whom he frequently nuzzled and went so far as to feed from his own plate despite the fact that this animal, and especially its saliva, are considered the pinnacle of ritual uncleanness by Islamic law – was yet another sign of this wanton and scandalous obliviousness).⁸⁸ The essential inadvertence of their violations of Islamic values and regulations, on the personal and policy levels, evinced the appalling marginalization of religion in these elite circles: far from being seen as a force to be reckoned with, Islam was barely seen at all. In the space of a mere generation – and the rapidity of the transformation made it all the more insulting and frightening – what had been for centuries the pillar and pivot of Iranian life was jettisoned so wholly by these modern men and women that in their eyes secularism was the norm to be taken for granted and the still-devout majority of the country’s millions of inhabitants constituted the strange, the freakish, the extreme,

 Cited in Aghaie, Martyrs, p. 64. Of course, Muslim prayers are said five times daily and certainly not before bed. The king was referencing what he knew of Christian worship, perhaps from a book or movie. On another occasion, when the same Shah was “shown on Iranian television…praying in the mosque along with another Moslem king, he bent whenever he was supposed to get up, and got up whenever he was supposed to bend. In fact, he watched through the corners of his eyes to follow the other king, whose movements proved too fast to follow. In desperation, he turned around to his minions, something which a Moslem is not supposed to do at such times. The minions were as helpless as the Shah, and he gave up praying” (Baraheni, Crowned Cannibals, p. 103). Even if we eschew cynicism and take at face value the king’s claims in Mission for My Country to the effect that he “started to recite the Moslem daily prayers…and said them with real fervor and conviction” in his teenage years abroad (p. 62), decades of neglecting this ritual had left their mark.  Milani, The Shah, p. 8. Nor was the Shah a tee-totaler (Milani, The Shah, p. 303).

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the radical. Worse than all this: the fact that Hoveyda et al were so distant from their Shiʿite Muslim heritage as to be, for the most part, blissfully unaware that their ideas and actions represented for the believing sector of the public nothing less than a full-blown socio-spiritual cataclysm – this fact, this abject unfamiliarity with even the most basic values of Islam, brought home to the clerics and their supporters just how deeply the positivist program of the Western Enlightenment had succeeded in eroding the citadel of their creed. In the eyes of religion, ignorance and indifference are even greater foes than antagonism and persecution. Milani’s “exposé” of Hoveyda’s thoroughgoing detachment from his own religio-national roots would be most edifying, especially given the second half of the biography’s subtitle (probably added for marketing purposes): Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution. For as we have been arguing, it was just such “cluelessness” on the part of Iran’s Westernized ruling elite that, more than any other factor, ignited that revolution and provided the fuel to keep it going until victory. By portraying in such vivid colors Prime Minister Hoveyda’s thoroughgoing alienation from his own Shiʿite-Iranian cultural heritage, Milani has thus indeed gone a very long way – exactly as promised in his subtitle – toward solving the “riddle” of the Iranian revolution. The problem is that Milani is utterly unaware that he has done so. The author of this erudite study is as incorrigibly unconscious as his own biographee of the tremendous ramifications of a ruling class that abandons in the space of little more than a generation virtually every value and institution that its subject society has held dear from time immemorial. Hoveyda’s lifelong dissociation from his folk and its faith provide Milani with innumerable opportunities – literally hundreds of them – to at least remark upon the larger significance of such a phenomenon for the march of late twentieth century Iranian history; to devote a sentence or two to the problematic aspects of such a massive cultural-ideological rupture between a people and its politicians; to note if only in passing the poisonous effect of Hoveyda and company’s merry desecration of Shiʿite Islam’s most precious and inviolate ḥurumāt (sanctities) on the teeming masses of conservative citizens and their clerical leaders who had yet to yield to “enlightenment.” But Milani never says a word. He remains consistently quiet on the subject so boldly announced by his subtitle and never even mentions – to say nothing of discussing in depth – the clear and direct cause-and-effect connection between what Hoveyda symbolized and what may be described, without too much exaggeration, as the spontaneous uprising of an entire nation in 1978 – 9. At no point throughout this lengthy and otherwise thorough work does the author even attempt to explicate the relevance to the Khomeinist revolution of the appointment by the Shah of an atheistic freemason to run the government of a deeply devout Muslim country for well over a decade. For Milani, though he writes at the turn of the millennium

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with over twenty years of hindsight at his disposal, the Westernizing trajectory is still so natural, the Europeanized outlook and way of living still so presupposed, the fashions and methods of the New World still so instinctively accepted as the sole proper path upon which all mankind must tread, that he finds in Hoveyda’s behavior and attitudes nothing whatsoever extraordinary or portentous, nothing, indeed, worthy of comment at all. Milani’s silence on the matter is explained not just by the fact that this Stanford professor is no less a victim of “Westitis” than the subject of his research; it is also attributable to the reality that he is no less ignorant than Hoveyda was in his own time of the vast swath of humanity – the overwhelming majority of the Iranian populace – living, as it were “on the other side of the tracks,” a life so wholly dissimilar, indeed, so diametrically antithetical to the “progressive” course of the Shah’s courtiers and their ilk as to render mutual communication between the two camps all but impossible. That this unrelieved nescience is the rule for Milani is proved also by the sole exception in the entire book, in which the author alludes offhand to “the often-overlooked religious forces” that (so he claims) waited passively in the wings and ultimately inherited the revolution from the more active “secular advocates of democracy.” This is not the place to tackle the conventional wisdom according to which the Iranian revolution was “hijacked” by the Islamists after it was well underway, in the way that the Egyptian revolution of 2011 was essentially commandeered in its latter stages by the Muslim Brotherhood. What is remarkable here is that nowhere are those “often overlooked religious forces” more thoroughly overlooked than in this study by Milani that presumes to decipher for the reader “the riddle of the Iranian Revolution.” Three hundred and fifty pages avowedly devoted not just to Hoveyda’s personal history but to the times he lived in, to the Iranian socio-political landscape that formed the backdrop for this pseudo-statesman’s career and led within a short time to national convulsion – and yet nothing whatsoever about the growing political effervescence at the seminaries in Qom, Mashhad, Najaf and elsewhere; nothing about the militant underground leader Navvab-e Safavi and his Fadaʾiyan (except as the assassins of Hoveyda’s predecessor in office); nothing about the proliferating religio-professional associations that were to play such a prominent role in the revolution; nothing of any kind about Shiʿite community, ideology, ritual, law, lore. By failing so completely to fill in these critical sections of the Iranian mosaic, Milani re-commits the crime of abject ignorance perpetrated by the Pahlavi regime and its intellectual hangers-on (and epitomized by Hoveyda), the crime that led more than any other factor to the rise of Khomeinism. The same author’s biography of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, The Shah (2012) is unsurpassed as an analysis of this complex and mostly well-meaning monarch’s personal-political journey. It is a balanced, occasionally sympathetic portrait, de-

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picting the king’s often paralyzing weaknesses but also his truly impressive strengths and undeniably significant achievements, chronicling his rise and fall with an apposite mixture of objectivity and drama. Here, too, however – though it is perhaps more forgivable given the book’s focus – the battered but nevertheless burgeoning religious forces that would ultimately be the monarchy’s undoing are given extremely short shrift. The National Front, Tudeh Party and other politically influential forces at home, and the various relevant government officials and organizations abroad, are fleshed out informatively as a cast of supporting and opposing characters gradually but surely escorting the Shah down his via dolorosa toward doom. But the clerics, the seminaries and the vast traditional segment of society is virtually never discussed.⁸⁹ It is as if Milani, like many Iranologists in our time, is bereft even of 20/20 hindsight. Pipes, Ajami and Milani, prominent though they are, represent only the tip of a vast iceberg of biased punditry posing as academic scholarship. Iran specialists like Amir Taheri (about whom more below), as deeply knowledgeable about the Islamic Republic as he is implacably hostile to it; Alireza Jafarzedeh, whose The Iran Threat sports a “radioactive” green jacket and reiterates many tired and spurious clichés about the dangerous messianism of the Tehran leadership; Patrick Clawson and Michael Rubin, whose attempt to demonstrate the centrality to Iranian society of pre-Islamic Persian culture – though eloquent and informed on many counts – is reminiscent of the Aryanism of Count de Gobineau or the neo-Zoroastrianism of many Pahlavi loyalists, and is geared toward the support of certain obvious policy directions – not all of these authors on the neo-conservative right are “Iran bashers,” but they evince little if any curiosity about, let alone appreciation for, the multifaceted tradition of Shiʿite Islam and the claims advanced and ideas preached by this religion’s latter-day revolutionary variant. Khomeinism is to be destroyed, not studied. Iran, and the rest of the Muslim world, has only one route to salvation, and that route leads Westward. It would therefore be unjust to impute to pure paranoia the repeated accusations leveled by members of Iran’s current leadership at Europe and the United States to the effect that what they were unable to achieve by other means – that is, the elimination of the Islamic Republic – they now seek to realize through “soft power.” “We are under cultural attack by our enemies,” declared Supreme Leader Khameneʾi (hundreds of times).

 The sole exceptions over almost five hundred pages of text are pp. 272– 273 and 291– 296. Ironically, at the top of p. 272, Milani writes: “The left was self-indulgent, believing that the inevitable laws of history would eliminate religion – ’the opiate of the masses’ – and place them as the revolutionary vanguard on history’s pedestal. The Shah and his secret police, on the other hand, were focused on fighting Communists and the National Front and believed the forces of faith to be the best antidote to the spread of the Communist disease.” But Milani’s focus is the same as theirs.

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“This onslaught is one more stage in a hundred years’ war against Islam. It is rooted in the premise that Western civilization is the supreme civilization, and that European culture must reign over the entire world.”⁹⁰ One need not be a Middle East or Iran specialist these days to play the Western supremacist game vis a vis the Muslim world. The same odor of unabashed, unrelieved, Fukuyama-esque conceit wafts up, for instance, from the following passage, written by “Britain’s leading conservative intellectual,” the philosopher Roger Scruton: I will, therefore, spell out in what follows some of the critical features of the Western inheritance which must be understood and defended in our current confrontation. Each of these features marks a point of contrast, and possibly of conflict, with the traditional Islamic vision of society, and each has played a vital part in creating the modern world. Islamist belligerence stems from having found no secure place in that world, and from turning for refuge to precepts and values that are at odds with the Western way of life.⁹¹

Ideas and institutions that do not accord with “the Western way of life” – which is synonymous with “the modern world,” which is synonymous with “the good” – are insalubrious ideas and institutions, which must be done away with without a further thought by any society that wishes to “progress” and gain entry to the prestigious club of “enlightened” nations. That such nineteenth century sentiments, which might easily have been uttered by the arch-imperialist likes of a Lord Cromer or a Lord Curzon, can be repeated in the twenty-first century without so much as a nod to the manifold challenges that have been raised over the intervening generations to this smug assumption of Western moral and intellectual superiority, bespeaks a retreat from rational discourse and an eschewal of objective argument that bodes ill not just for inter-cultural relations, but for thought in general. That the modern secular West, which wielded the trident of scientific advancement, military might and political-philosophical innovation for a mere three hundred of humanity’s six thousand years of history, should be cast without a second thought in the role of ultimate touchstone for all that is virtuous and beneficial – a veritable “seal of the prophets” – whereas Islam, which was the dominant cultural, political, military, technological and intellectual force on the international scene for almost thrice that period, should earn the title of “most retrograde force in the world” – all of this betokens a disheartening degree of short-sightedness and

 Cited in Litvak, “Westoxication,” p. 5.  Roger Scruton, “Islam and the West: Lines of Demarcation,” Azure no. 35, Winter 5769/2009.

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close-mindedness that will bedevil international relations in the near and far future.⁹² The reader may well have been exposed to the following video clip, which has made the rounds of the Internet for several years now. It opens with a kaleidoscope of European artistic and architectural achievements: royal palaces, gothic cathedrals, marble statuary, frescoed walls, well-groomed parks, imposing government buildings, ivy-covered concert halls, sprawling university campuses – slide after slide emerging and fading softly to the lilting strains of Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. “Ah,” we are meant to muse, “here is true culture. Here is civilization at its apogee!” Then, suddenly, the screen goes dark and the music grinds to a hideous halt. Wild chants well up in a foreign tongue as a low, menacing percussion assaults our ears, and soon we perceive large numbers of brown-skinned people marching through a dusty village and beating themselves repeatedly to a trance-inducing rhythm, while others take razor blades to their children’s scalps until the blood flows in streaks down their frightened faces. We are amongst the Shiʿa, a herd of benighted and violent barbarians who engage in a bizarre cult of self-mutilation, and the message of the video is more than clear: here before you is refinement and its antithesis, enlightenment and its nemesis, the sophisticated and progressive versus the savage and primitive – here is the beauty of Europe and the ugliness of Islam. Vive la différence! ⁹³ (The present author, having received the video in question from one of his students, asked his Israeli class on the following day a simple, “demagogic” question:

 Winston Churchill, The River War (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899), p. 250. Of course, the very notion that because the value system of a given “dominant” civilization makes an impression upon and is adopted by large parts of the world population, that value system should thereby merit our validation or elicit our admiration – such a notion represents the pinnacle of deleterious subjectivity, as does the idea that whatever value system came upon the scene most recently in history is the most “advanced” and therefore the best (an outlook that derives primarily from the extrapolation from the theories of evolution and technological determinism onto all other fields of endeavor). Many writers dispense with the need for even these specious forms of argument, and simply proceed on the automatic assumption – held with the tenacity and blindness of a religious belief – that their own society’s current values are self-evidently superior to those of all other societies past or present: freedom is the preeminent virtue, equality the highest social principle, democracy the best form of government, pluralism an absolute good, progress a natural desideratum, etc. The reader is urged to probe him or herself for just such prejudices.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuNWpKShLfY. Last accessed 03/11/2020. The version of the Shiʿite mourning ritual depicted in this video is actually more suitable to that performed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India or Iraq, so in truth we are probably not in Iran, where the ceremonies, although no less passionate and occasionally frenzied, on the whole draw less blood.

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which of the two civilizations portrayed therein was responsible for the murder of six million Jews?). Or perhaps you have seen this: a man wearing a turban and sporting a beard is seated on an inlaid chair high above an audience of worshippers in a mosque. He is swaying, and moaning, and weeping, and beating his chest, and chanting. What is he chanting? The spectator shall never know, not just because he does not understand Arabic (the language of many Shiʿite dirges even in Iran), but because a prankster has laid down an American pop-song to serve as the sound-track for the video, and perfectly timed it so that just when the man with the turban and beard begins to flail his arms and rain down blows upon his own head, and finally throws himself down from his chair onto the floor in a violent frenzy of agonized lamentation and self-flagellation, the rock-and-roll rhythm picks up and accompanies his crazed contortions which have meanwhile infected the crowd at large, and the whole scene, with the upbeat, pumping musical background, leaves one with what one blogger described as “the impression of Saracen slam-dancing. It is a laugh riot.”⁹⁴ Except that both of these videos have callously ripped from their contexts and either painted in ominous colors or reduced to abject ridicule aspects of one of the most profound, evocative, heart-breaking and soul-elevating rituals in Islam: the commemoration of the Martyrdom of Ḥusayn, the Shiʿite equivalent of the Crucifixion of Christ or the Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. It would not matter so much if such glaring ignorance and flagrant insensitivity were confined to a few mischief-makers on the Internet, but in truth this complete lack of interest in the substance of Islamic religion except as the butt of derision or target of propaganda is the dominant trend today in Western journalism, politics, literature, and even portions of Western “academic” research. Like the classic “ugly American,” most of us have no desire to delve very deeply into the unfamiliar: it is easier to glean a superficial snippet here or there, rip it out of its historical-cultural context (about which we haven’t a clue), and exploit it to corroborate our already strongly held anti-Islamic prejudices. One of the underlying messages, or at least unavoidable implications, arising out of the types of West-worship and Islam-bashing that we have cited above, is that there is little to be gained by probing into the religious, philosophical, historical, legal, political and literary traditions of the Muslim world, be they Sunni or Shiʿi. We in the West have nothing to learn from those traditions – since our own norms, mores, art and thought represent the acme of human achievement – and the Muslims, for that matter, have nothing to learn from them either: if they

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY_RzbL7S0I. Last accessed 15/04/2013.

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know what is good for them (aver Pipes, Ajami, Milani, Scruton and company), they will abandon their indigenous, time-honored ideas and institutions, jettison with ne’er a care their hoary, homegrown theology, law, literature and praxis, and head en masse for the nearest opera house (or, more likely, rock concert). When “readings from the Koran and Islamic sermons” increasingly replaced American television shows like Cannon and Police Story on Iranian television in the months leading up to the 1979 revolution, Time magazine commented that “It seems that Iran’s uncertain advance into the 20th century has stumbled again, and the nation has been thrust back into the dark Islamic puritanism of the 18th century.”⁹⁵ Muslims are duty bound, so it would appear, to read the great books of the Western canon, and for almost two hundred years elements of their intellectual elite have been eagerly doing just that. Westerners, on the other hand, are in no way duty bound to read the great books of the Islamic canon – what a peculiar idea! – and from the onset of modernity down to the present day, elements of our intellectual elite have obviously made no serious or sustained effort to do anything of the sort. The journalist Oriana Fallaci once mocked Ayatollah Khomeini for admitting to her in an interview that he did not know the names “Beethoven,” “Bach” and “Rembrandt”; no reporter, Western or Muslim, has ever mocked an American or European leader for admitting in an interview that he did not know the names Saʿdi, Nezami, al-Kulaynī or Muḥammad al-Bāqir.⁹⁶ The late Ayatollah Mesbah-e-Yazdi, a senior cleric and highly influential figure in the Islamic Republic (and purported spiritual advisor to ex-President Ahmadinejad), had read Dante, Locke, Hume, Leo Strauss and even the contemporary American philosopher John Rawls; which well-known minister, presbyter, cardinal, intellectual, politician or statesman in the West has read al-Jubbāʾī, Ibn Sīnā, al-Majlisī or Shaykh Ṣadūq? Indeed, it was not so much ignorance as knowledge of Western ideas – and of what is seen by many Muslim thinkers as the disastrous consequences to which they can and often do lead – that led Islamists to turn for guidance specifically to what Scruton rightly calls those “precepts and values that are at odds with the Western way of life.”⁹⁷

 Cited in Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 385. Cooper emphatically shares the sentiment.  https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/07/archives/an-interview-with-khomeini.html. Last accessed 09/ 04/2019. Abbas Milani opens each chapter of his highly edifying The Shah with a quote from Shakespeare. Andrew Cooper strikes a more authentic note by opening each chapter of his phenomenal The Fall of Heaven with a quote from the Shahnameh. No Western scholar opens his or her chapters with a quote from the Nahj al-balāgha.  See Farzin Vahdat, God and Juggernaut: Iran’s Intellectual Encounter with Modernity (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002), p. 139.

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We are Nothing; They are Everything Perhaps no book written about Iran in recent times has enjoyed more recognition and resonance than Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, and justifiably so: it is a courageous, sophisticated, profoundly human and extremely perceptive collage of post-revolutionary Iranian life pasted together with the help of the author’s personal experiences and especially her singular readings of modern Western literary classics. The most powerful of Nafisi’s constructions in this vein – the one that runs like a thread throughout the work – is her comparison of Humbert’s erasure of Lolita’s individuality and selfhood as he turns her into the object of his lust, to the Islamic Republic’s denial of the idiosyncratic personalities of its citizens and its attempt to recreate them all in the uniform image deemed desirable by revolutionary Islam. “We had,” she writes, “become the figment of someone else’s dream.”⁹⁸ One cannot remain unaffected by the prolonged and visceral suffering of those, like Nafisi and her dowreh or “literary circle” of choice female students, who had been vouchsafed a glimpse of modern Western freedoms under the Shah, and were now forced to live lives of quiet desperation under the watchful eyes of the modesty squads and the cultural censors. But there is another aspect of this book that elicits less sympathy. Nafisi’s love affair with literature is moving and infectious, and it spans a wide array of genres ranging from the American and European modern classics to (although to a far lesser extent) the medieval Persian poetry of Hafez, Rumi, Ferdowsi, et al. There is only one category of written work that she finds utterly worthless, indeed, wholly beneath her notice: the vast corpus of stories, anecdotes, paeans, dirges, drama, poetry, liturgy, exegesis, history, mysticism and philosophy of Shiʿite Islam, the cultural canon of the overwhelming majority of her Iranian fellow citizens. There is a black hole in the middle of Reading Lolita in Tehran (admittedly adumbrated by the title of the book) into which the literary products of an entire religious civilization have been dumped. Nafisi’s only nod to a Shiʿite text throughout the three hundred and fifty pages of her book occurs when she subjects several lines purportedly excerpted from Ayatollah Khomeini’s handbook of legal decisions – some of them taken out of context, others just plain invented – to the sort of hackneyed ridicule employed only by those completely ignorant of the structure and content of religious sources.⁹⁹ Like Oriana Fallaci, Nafisi mocks the Iranian ignorance of Western literature and culture, though she would never do the same vice versa:

 Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 28.  Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran, p. 71.

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Haven’t you heard about the conversation between Mr. Dava’i, our foremost novelist, and the translator of Daisy Miller? One day they were introduced. The novelist says, Your name is familiar – aren’t you the translator of Henry Miller? No, Daisy Miller. Right, didn’t James Joyce write that? No. Henry James. Oh, yes, of course, Henry James. By the way, what’s Henry James doing nowadays? He’s dead – been dead since 1916.¹⁰⁰

In Reading Lolita in Tehran not just the lore, but the ritual, the customs, the norms, the mores, the references, the holidays, the turns of phrase, the rites of passage – in short, the entire social ethos and cultural repertoire of the centuries-old faith into which Nafisi herself was born and which continues to animate the majority of her countrymen down to the present day – is rejected in favor of what she repeatedly implies and sometimes even emphatically declares to be the infinitely superior offerings of occidental modernism.¹⁰¹ During the reign of Reza Shah, just prior to the outbreak of World War II, a senator and future minister of education and culture addressed the freshman class of Tehran University. A taleb, a seminary student, was present and reported: The speaker mounted the rostrum and began: “You must appreciate this state, this government, this civilization! You have come here [to this institution], and if you wish you may study [a long list of diverse scientific disciplines] and specialize in them. That is how matters stand today. But have you any idea what kind of literature we used to read, beforehand?” He had dug up an old volume of incantations and imprecations, one of those handbooks that the snake-charmers and spellbinders would use. He flipped it open to a certain page and asked, “Would you like to know with what we, the people of this country, used to preoccupy ourselves? Then listen: ’Chakari pakari makari…’ This was what our culture had to offer!” Sometime afterward I [that is, the seminary student who had been present at the speech] wrote an article that won an award, and I was invited to the education ministry to receive it. When the minister – the same one who had made the commencement speech not long beforehand – laid eyes on me, he exclaimed: “But – you are an akhund (a cleric)!” I replied, “Yes, I am.” He said, “You wrote this ʻBest Article of the Year’?” I answered, “Yes, I wrote it.”

 Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran, p. 201. See: “Iran has a past,” pp. 364– 365.  The daily references of the Pahlavists, who so often spoke French with one another, were anything but Iranian. Near the end, General Fereydun Jam urged Queen Farah Diba to leave the country: “You don’t want to be Marie Antoinette,” he said. When she proposed staying even after her husband’s departure, the latter chided: “You don’t have to be Joan of Arc” (Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 475). Though Shiʿite literature is nothing if not suffused with material relating to just leaders being abandoned by their constituencies, as Mohammad Reza and family boarded the aircraft to leave the country, Grand Master of Ceremonies Amir Afshar commented: “It needs a Shakespeare to do justice to what the Iranians did to their sovereign” (Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 489).

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We sat down. He continued, “The argument you make in the article – it tallies with the latest theories of psychoanalysis (ravankavi)! I was sure you were either European- or Americaneducated. Tell me, where did the likes of you come up with something like this?!” I told him, “From a hadith. The inspiration for my essay came from the contents of a prophetic tradition.” He was even more surprised. All of a sudden I pounced on him (yek martebeh man beh u ʿatab kardam). I said, “Sir! What was that nonsense that you spouted back then at the university, reciting drivel from such a ridiculous book?! Why do you betray your nation?! Was that the sort of material that was taught in the madrasehs of old?! Was not fine literature taught in those schools of ours? Was not jurisprudence studied, on a level comparable to that in any of your law schools?! Did we not delve deeply into first principles, logic, linguistics, philosophy? Did we not pore over [a long list of Shiʿite luminaries and their challenging works]?! All of this you completely ignored, and instead you told a large audience worth of impressionable young people that in the howzeh we study a bunch of bunk?!”¹⁰²

Azar Nafisi’s thoroughgoing dismissal of the creed and folkways of her grandparents, and her lock, stock and barrel replacement of these with the literature and values of the secular West (together with a superficial sprinkling of Iranian quasi-nationalist productions, from which she quotes once or twice at most, essentially as an afterthought) – this whole outlook makes Nafisi the veritable pin-up girl for everything Ayatollah Khomeini and his disciples preached so vehemently and effectively against: [The Westernizing Iranian upper classes] have separated us from ourselves (ma-ra az khodeman joda kardand). That human courage that should naturally be inside a person and should drive out everything external and proclaim: “I exist, in the face of it all!” (man hastam dar moqabel-e hameh) – they have taken that away from us. Instead, we now say: “I am nothing; they are everything.”¹⁰³ A culture created by others, designed by foreigners, then sold to us in the guise of “true” culture – is an imperialist and bootlicking culture (farhang-e este’mari va angali). This imported culture is more poisonous than anything, more harmful even than the imported weapons turned by these thugs (the Shah and his security services) on their own people.¹⁰⁴

“To witness the collective dispossession of the nurtured tradition and way of life of an entire nation,” advised Reza Baraheni in 1977, “travel to Iran.”¹⁰⁵ “Wherever we

 Motahhari, Athar, vol. 24, pp. 241– 243.  Sahife-ye Emam, 9: 81.  Sahife-ye Emam, 3: 306.  Baraheni, Crowned Cannibals, p. 5. “The Shah,” continues Baraheni, “is carrying out the total annihilation of our art, literature, music and national languages” (Barahani, Crowned Cannibals, p. 5). Not being a practicing Shiʿite himself, the author forgot “religion.”

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look,” the same author commented elsewhere, “we find objects, values and faces from other places, and we ask: Where are our own objects, our own values and faces? Where is our identity? Where are we as human beings?”¹⁰⁶ In a visit during the nineteen-sixties to the Iranian royal court, the British ambassador noticed “the extent to which Westernization had affected the essentially Persian style…a string orchestra played Western music…nothing Persian at all except the rice pilaf at the end of a European dinner.”¹⁰⁷ Already in the first decade of the twentieth century, Ayatollah Fazlollah-e Nuri could fume: These fireworks, receptions of ambassadors, these foreign manners, hurrahs, banners saying Long live! Long live! Long live equality, long live fraternity! Why not write on one of them: Long live the holy law! Long live the Koran! Long live Islam!¹⁰⁸

The sweeping adoption under the Pahlavi Shahs of foreign ideas and institutions at the expense of indigenous ones (and, simultaneously, of Iranian nationalist discourse at the expense of Islam) was the premier ideological cause of the revolution of 1979, the preeminent goal of which was what radical Shiʿite philosopher Ali Shariʿati once called baz gasht beh khish, “the return to ourselves” (and what Hamid Dabashi and many others dismiss, with sneering condescension, as “triumphal nativism”). Ayatollah Mortaza Motahhari described this quest for authenticity and indigenous self-assertion thus: …Islam says something else, as well. It says that personality forfeiture (shakhsiyat bakhtan) is forbidden; that quaking in fear of others is forbidden; that blind imitation of others is forbidden; that self-erasure and assimilation into others is forbidden; that cultural parasitism (tufayligari-ye farhangi) is forbidden; that falling under the bewitchment of foreigners – like a spellbound hare in the face of a snake – is forbidden; that construing the dead donkey of an alien civilization as a prancing stallion is forbidden; that merchandising the deviations and depredations [of the West] as “the Phenomenon of the Century” is forbidden; that the belief that Iranians are duty bound to Westernize (frengi bashand) physically, spiritually, outwardly and inwardly is forbidden; that returning home after four days in Paris to affect a “gh” pronunciation of the letter “r” – so that instead of raftam (“I went”) he says ghaftam – is forbidden.¹⁰⁹

The twentieth century Iranian Westernizers and secularizers had ejected, virtually overnight, an enormous amount of the tradition that for centuries had been held sacred by, and had provided the cultural content and spiritual axis to, the majority

   

Baraheni, Crowned Cannibals, p. 83. Cited in Milani, The Shah, pp. 305 – 306. Cited in Buchan, Days of God, p. 101. Motahhari, 19: 121.

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of Iran’s inhabitants, substituting for it an imported lifestyle that clashed in every way with the time-honored, native (or at least far less recently imported) ideals and praxis of Islam.¹¹⁰ Among modern, European educated Persians [observed a U. S. diplomat in Tehran in 1931] the observance of these many religious holidays is looked upon as but one more example of their undesired heritage from a mullah-ridden past. “We got rid of seven [of these sacred occasions] a year ago,” one official of the Persian Foreign Service said, as he firmly helped himself to a supper of sliced ham, “and the sooner we get rid of most others, the better it will be for everyone.”¹¹¹

Six years earlier, at Reza Shah’s coronation, English writer Vita Sackville-West noted “the looks of dread and hatred” cast by the assembled Iranian dignitaries upon the “crowd of mullahs that shuffled and squatted and pressed” at one side of the hall.¹¹² Such disdain on the part of the new class of enlightened and occidentalized sophisticates for Iranian society’s traditional mainstays would become par for the course. The nationalists, for their part – Azar Nafisi’s uncle Saʿid foremost among them (see below, Chapter Two) – followed the paradoxical path that led through Westernization back to the most extreme form of aboriginal pseudo-authenticity: pre-Islamic Aryanism, which in Muslim eyes is tantamount to a reversion to the jāhiliyya, the Time of Barbarism that preceded the Revelation to Muḥammad. As a result of these excesses, it was only a matter of time before a backlash came that overcompensated in the opposite direction by enshrining everything indigenous and Shiʿite and rejecting everything modern and Western, or sanctifying the continuous accumulation of religious tradition over against what was widely condemned as the artificial atavism of Aryanist nationalism. Azar Nafisi’s wholesale dismissal of her own religious culture and her thoroughgoing enchantment with all that Europe and America have to offer is exemplary of the very attitude against which a large portion of the Iranian people rose some four decades ago. Her seemingly boundless “Westoxication,” and that

 “Much of the protest movement,” wrote Colin Smith of the British Observer in 1978, “seems to be aimed against the growing secularism of a society where, because oil has made possible what the Shah’s father only dreamed of doing, changes that took centuries in Europe have been telescoped into a couple of decades” (cited in Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 335).  Cited from Monica Ringer, Pious Citizens: Reforming Zoroastrianism in India and Iran, in Chehabi, Culture Wars, p. 35. “It was not that the Iranians of 1979 refused to be civilized. It was that they thought Mohammad Reza and his Western allies were destroying a civilization they held dear” (Buchan, Days of God, p. 3).  Milani, The Shah, p. 32.

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of other Iranian citizens and ex-patriots of her ilk, is, more than any other factor, what made the Islamic revolution possible and, indeed, continues to fan its flames down to the present day. The fact that less than twenty years after that revolution this author can present her decided preference for everything European and American as unselfconsciously and unapologetically as if her entire country had not recently mutinied in their millions to demand an end to just this type of cultural toadyism, is symptomatic of the indifference, not to say the ignorance, regularly displayed by Pahlavi throwbacks regarding the genuine issues raised by Khomeini’s movement. Reading Lolita in Tehran is of course also, for all the reasons recounted above – and perhaps understandably so, given the author’s traumatic experiences under the revolutionary regime and the cathartic-therapeutic nature of her exposition – unhelpful as a guide to the religious dimension of the IranianMuslim soul.¹¹³ Of another caliber – and another genre – is Ervand Abrahamian’s by now classic study Khomeinism (1993). Abrahamian, author of the even more classic Iran between Two Revolutions (1982), a socio-political history of the Pahlavi period, is one of the field’s most celebrated Iranologists, and justifiably so. His erudition is vast, his research penetrating, his sources legion, his critiques trenchant. Yet Khomeinism is only one in a long series of monographs of its ilk the highly problematic premises of which render it abjectly unhelpful to those who would fathom the thought of the revolutionary ayatollah and his coterie. The most harmful of these misleading premises, and the one that doubles as the preeminent thesis of the book, is, in a nutshell, that religion was not an important factor in the Islamic revolution, nor even in the worldview of its leader, and has not been so since under the Islamic Republic. Abrahamian shows his colors in this regard very early on when, on page seven of Khomeinism’s Introduction, his prejudice so far gets the better of him that he declares – without providing context or adducing support of any kind – that “[T]he notion that Qom is an ancient scholastic center is an invented tradition.”¹¹⁴  Though she does not sufficiently rectify the problem of ignoring the Shiʿi component of Iranian culture, Fatemeh Keshavarz offers an often trenchant critique of the attitudes on display in Nafisi’s bestseller (Fatemeh Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran [Los Angeles: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007]).  Abrahamian, Khomeinism, p. 7. The context of this declaration is rather strange in itself. At first glance it appears, indeed, to be a total non-sequitur: ”Qom remained conspicuously quiet for much of Reza Shah’s reign – in contrast to other religious centers, such as Mashhad, which periodically burst into open opposition against Reza Shah’s secular reforms. Yahya Dawlatabadi, the historian and politician, wrote that Reza Shah supported [Ayatollah] Haʾeri [‐ye Yazdi] to counter the growth of republicanism, communism, and other forms of radicalism. The notion that Qom is an ancient scholastic center is an invented tradition, and the claim that it was the hotbed of re-

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One hardly knows where to begin in order to refute this wildly counterfactual pronouncement, thrown out by the author in order to buttress his more specific project of diminishing the significance of Islam in the Iranian revolution. It is comparable to claiming that Athens was never a hub of philosophical thinking, or that Kashmir was never a nucleus of Hindu and Buddhist scholarship. Any student of Shiʿism is keenly aware of the major role played by denizens and products of Qom in the development of the Shiʿite sciences, from hadith (tradition) and tafsīr (exegesis) through fiqh (jurisprudence) and kalām (theology). It suffices to cite the onomastic evidence: in Aḥmad b. ʿAlī al-Najāshī’s medieval biographical dictionary of early Shiʿite scholars, for instance, known as Rijāl al-Najāshī, the name “Qummī” appears no less than five hundred times.¹¹⁵ Indeed, as Rasul Jaʿfarian notes, Qom began to lose its status as the worldwide center of Shiʿite learning only in the fourth Islamic century.¹¹⁶ Abrahamian’s transparent attempt to bolster his thesis through a flagrant falsification of history throws his objectivity, not to say his credibility, into doubt at the outset. The remainder of the book consists of a relentless, several-pronged attack on the ideological sincerity and consistency of the Khomeinist movement. The first point to notice in this connection involves the juxtaposition itself of these two qualities, that is, the conditioning of sincerity on consistency. Abrahamian, like many other authors, believes that it is sufficient to demonstrate shifts in the revolutionary ayatollah’s ideological, or even just tactical, stances over the years in order to show him up as a cynical opportunist entirely un-motivated by matters of faith. He accordingly dedicates the first several chapters of the volume to a play-by-play account of the process by which the radical and socialistic-sounding discourse of the early days of the Islamic Republic gradually gave way to a more bourgeois-friendly position that reassured the Islamic Republican Party’s middle-class backers that private property is protected under Islamic law. The fact that human beings, no less than religious traditions, are hugely complex systems containing within themselves a vast amalgam of diverse and even contradictory drives and trajectories, one or another of which will upstage its counterparts at different times and in response to different circumstances – this truism is ignored by Abrahamian and his cohorts, for whom branding the post-revolutionary regime as hypocritical, populist, devious or inconsistent seems to be one of the premier goals of scholarship.

sistance against Reza Shah is self-serving fiction.” Only when one takes into consideration the author’s overall agenda – i. e., to diminish the role of Shiʿism and its clerics in Iranian history and society – does the connection become clear.  Abu l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. ʿAli l-Najāshī, Rijāl al-Najāshī (Baghdad: Sharikat al-Aʿlamī li-l-Maṭbūʿāt, 2010), according to the present author’s count.  Jaʿfarian, Tarikh-e Tashayyo, p. 740.

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Islamic lore is shot through with exhortations, and Islamic law shot through with legislation, designed to protect the poor from exploitation on the part of the wealthy, including praise of poverty, provisions against hoarding, redistributive welfare taxes and much more. At the same time, Muslim tradition harbours a healthy respect for private property rights (it is hard to find an organized religion that doesn’t). That the former aspect would get more airtime at the outset of a popular revolution carried out at least in part in the name of the downtrodden (mostazʿefin), and the latter increasingly reclaim center stage as the inevitable Thermidor set in, is about as natural a phenomenon as history has on offer. Moreover, Abrahamian himself admits¹¹⁷ that Khomeini strove to strike a balance between the radical demands of Parliament and the more conservative outlook of the Guardian Council, eventually institutionalizing for this purpose a happy medium in the form of the Committee for the Identification of the Interests of the Regime (majmaʿ-e tashkhis-e maslahat-e nezam), one of the first acts of which – though the author neglects to mention this – was to uphold a progressive labor law in the face of conservative opposition. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Abrahamian’s thesis – a thesis that is, again, also put forward by a great many of his Iranologist colleagues – is his “exposé” of the Islamic Republican regime’s backpedaling from, or compromising of, its religious principles. As he had striven to portray Khomeinism’s hypocritical shilly-shallying in the matter of economics in the first half of the book, in the second half the emphasis shifts to what the author mocks and decries as another example of hypocrisy: the “interpretation of Islam according to expediency.” Once again the spectacle of a non-religious author – in this case even a non-Muslim author (Abrahamian was born to Armenian Christian parents) – presuming to lecture ayatollahs and hojjatoleslams on what does and does not constitute genuine Shiite Islam, is on display. But more significantly, Khomeinism takes the Islamic Republic to task for representing a rigid, reactionary theocracy – on the one hand – and a highly flexible system that adjusts itself regularly to accommodate circumstances and even the needs of the Iranian citizenry – on the other. Abrahamian tars his subject equally on both mutually exclusive scores, taking to task those who advocate “Islamism in one country” no less than those who continue to seek the “exportation of the revolution”; those who censure Western movies and those who deviate from this strict position and dare to air them; those who opposed birth control and those who made a volte face and promoted it (the pendulum has since swung back again). Both faith-based rule and the pragmatic-based erosion of faith-based rule are the simultaneous butts of his biting criticism. Every post-revolutionary

 Abrahamian, Khomeinism, pp. 56 – 59.

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Iranian policy and its opposite are equally maligned by Abrahamian. Who is the hypocrite now? Perhaps most damning here is the dissonance between the claim reflected in the title of the book, Khomeinism – which naturally leads the reader to expect a probing exposition of the thought of the Father of the Iranian revolution and his cohorts and disciples – and the book’s content, which involves nothing of the sort. Abrahamian’s study boasts not a single quote-bloc excerpted from the writings or speeches of his premier subject and his fellow revolutionaries, treating us at most to sound-bite-size citations strewn here and there. Delving deeply into the “ism” of Khomeini interests this author not a wit. Abject ignorance, deliberate or otherwise, of Iran’s religious culture, whether in its traditional or post-revolutionary guises, is shockingly rife among those claiming to illuminate the Islamic Republic for Western audiences. Amin Saikal, author of Iran Rising (Princeton University Press, 2019), although hailing from Afghanistan and putting himself forward explicitly as a Middle East specialist and Iranologist manages somehow to know neither Persian nor Arabic. He avers that Khomeini’s Islamic system of governance is “presided over by a velayat-e faqih (guardian jurist),” mixing up the term for the office with the term for the individual who fills it (i. e., vali-ye faqih – which might be a minor error if we did not have to do with the central pillar upholding the Islamic Republican regime). He also has Khomeini “elaborate on the suitability of faqih” – by which he apparently intends the suitability of a given faqih (jurist) – for the position of vali-ye faqih. ¹¹⁸ Neither of these bloopers could be committed by anyone possessing even a smattering of Persian or Arabic, two languages a basic (if not profound) knowledge of which is – few would deny – an essential tool for any scholar who would presume to unravel for us the mysteries of the current Iranian regime, to say nothing of an author who has been “researching and writing on Iran for most of the forty years of my academic life” and who – according to colleague and esteemed scholar of Islamism James Piscatori – provides in this volume “the only comprehensive account (!!) of a great twentieth century revolution…with a deeply informed and balanced mastery.”¹¹⁹ Saikal switches the Shiʿite Hidden Imam’s major and minor occultations; avers that “Twelver Shia doctrine was forged primarily in Isfahan following Safavid dynastic rule” (a badly misconstrued oversimplification of a claim evidently encountered in some secondary source or other); and manifests a thoroughgoing

 Saikal, Iran Rising, pp. 47 and 50, respectively.  Saikal, Iran Rising, p. viii and the book’s dust jacket. This study is not only bereft of a “comprehensive account” of the revolution, it can barely boast an account of any kind of that momentous event.

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lack of familiarity with a host of other “Shia Islamic tenants” (sic.).¹²⁰ He writes, unbelievably, that Ayatollah Khomeini was “junior to a number of his peers at the time” (i. e., in the late 1970s) one of whom was “Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri.” How Khomeini managed to be “junior” to one of his two prize students is a great mystery.¹²¹ It is not so much the glaring mistakes that grate, however, as the blithe manner in which those elements considered most important by the people who made and strive to maintain the Islamic Revolution are dismissed as marginal by many of those studying present day Iran, who therefore feel no need whatsoever to bone up on them. Facts be damned, along with primary sources and the languages in which they are written: political and social science theorizing is deemed sufficient. Middle East intelligence analysts, though less infected by the theory bug, are often ignorant to an appalling degree about that which matters most to the subjects of their analyses. Robert Baer states that the Imam Ḥusayn was on his way to Najaf when he was stopped by Umayyad forces (it was Kufa), and on the following page asserts that Ayatollah Khomeini “had spent a lifetime trying to distance himself from popular Shia custom, like Ashura” (the diametric antithesis is true).¹²² Several pages later, as if to highlight his lack of diligence in matters Islamic, Baer describes a preamble to one of the current Supreme Leader’s speeches as being “larded” with quotations from the Koran.¹²³ Further on he claims that Ayatollah Khameneʾi “arrested and executed Ayatollah Montazeri’s son-in-law (Hadi-ye Hashemi),” when in truth it was Ayatollah Khomeini who arrested and executed Montazeri’s son-in-law’s brother (Mehdi-ye Hashemi).¹²⁴ “When he needed to,”  Saikal, Iran Rising, p. 58. The formation of Shiʿite doctrine was, of course, a process that began – and experienced its most significant stages – under the ’Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, many centuries prior to the Safavids. Saikal is probably referring dimly to the rise of Uṣūlism.  Saikal, Iran Rising, pp. 47 and 53. It is true that after the revolution Khomeini occasionally passed on religio-political conundrums to his prize student, whose abilities in the realm of ijtihād he recognized and praised. This is a far cry from the claim that Montazeri was senior to Khomeini in clerical rank.  Baer, The Devil We Know, pp. 38 – 39. Khomeini, like most senior clerics down the centuries, objected to some of the extreme behavior connected with Shiʿite mourning rituals, but to claim that he spent a lifetime trying to distance himself from the Ashura commemorations is a laughable mis-portrayal of reality (already in Khomeini’s first published book, Kashf al-asrār, he vigorously defended the mourning rituals – against the aspersions of Kasravi follower Ali Akbar-e Hakamizadeh and others – and argued that the tears of the pious on such occasions are the very essence of Shiʿism). Baer, it must be said, is highly knowledgeable about Iraqi politics and other important subjects, but like most authors of his ilk, does not believe that a profound level of familiarity with the Islamic religion is a sine qua non of analysis.  Baer, Devil, p. 55.  Baer, Devil, pp. 73 – 74.

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Baer did not scruple to conclude, “Khameneʾi made Joseph Stalin look soft.”¹²⁵ Really? Perhaps no writer on things Iranian has achieved the prominence of Amir Taheri. Editor of Iran’s most popular daily newspaper, Kayhan (“World”) from 1972 until the outbreak of the revolution – a position he owed primarily to his willingness to aggrandize king and prime minister¹²⁶ – Taheri emigrated from his homeland soon after it metamorphosed into the Islamic Republic, and embarked on his blistering international literary campaign to topple the new regime. Taheri is not only a highly readable and engagingly pugnacious publicist blessed with boundless energy and a sense of genuine quest; he is also a storehouse of information about many aspects of pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian society and politics. This fact makes the discovery and debunking of the endless parade of deliberate distortions, runaway generalizations, uncontrolled exaggerations, shameless manipulations, incorrigible simplifications, half- and quarter-truths, cockamamie theories, cheap shots, clichéd characterizations, resounding platitudes and incomparably brazen falsities and fabrications that suffuse every one of his runaway bestsellers an extremely formidable task. Because Taheri takes full advantage of his vast accumulated data-base and his intimate acquaintance with Iranian life in the course of weaving his polemics-masquerading-as-research-studies, the would-be critic must achieve levels of familiarity with the relevant subject matter equal to or surpassing Taheri’s in order to fully expose this uncommonly devious apologist’s rampant fraudulence. Having never lived in Iran, let alone edited one of the country’s widest circulation periodicals, the present writer in no way claims to have attained to such native and professional levels of familiarity, especially not in those areas where the journalistic trade confers expertise. That is why I descry an average of only some two hundred of the misrepresentations, fallacies, inventions and prevarications that crowd each volume within Taheri’s oeuvre: more erudite scholars than myself, possessed of a more profound, insider’s acquaintance with Iranian or Shiʿite culture, history, politics and the like, would without a doubt detect twice that number (and indeed, Taheri has been publicly pilloried for bold-faced dissimulation on more than one occasion by top-seeded Iranologists, chief among them Shaul Bakhash of George Mason University). Taheri’s first-hand knowledge does not extend in all directions, and regarding several disciplines crucial to his argumentation, chief among them the Arabic language and Islamic law and lore, he is ignorant to an appalling degree – none of which stops him from pontificating

 Baer, Devil, p. 74.  Milani, Persian Sphinx, p. 226.

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without cease about such subjects. His material is thus bursting with almost as many scandalous blunders as calculated falsifications. Taheri’s spate of publications in the late 1980s included hugely popular successes, many of them translated into over a dozen languages, such as The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution (1986); Holy Terror: Inside the World of Islamic Terrorism (1987); Nest of Spies: America’s Journey to Disaster in Iran (1989); and The Unknown Life of the Shah (1991). Between this last effort and Taheri’s next book almost two decades would elapse, and one suspects that he was finally lured away from his various other preoccupations (such as vigorously promoting, and later no less vigorously justifying, the American war in Iraq) and back to full-fledged literary activity, more than anything by the riotous persona of Iranian president Mahmud-e Ahmadinejad, whose crude and aggressive style was too easy a target to forego. The Persian Night: Iran under the Khomeinist Revolution (2010) is in many ways Taheri’s most ambitious work, and, at the same time, his most misleading, error-ridden, muck-raking and mendacious production. It is well-nigh incredible that, after being exposed in the full glare of international publicity as a flagrant fabricator in 2006 in the matter of the supposed “Iranian Sumptuary Law” – Taheri claimed in the Canadian National Post that the Islamic Republican Parliament had just legislated a national dress code that distinguished between Muslims and non-Muslims and mandated that Jews wear yellow insignia, Christians red, and Zoroastrians blue, a claim that turned out to be manufactured from whole cloth¹²⁷ – it is, as I say, well-nigh incredible that despite having been caught red-handed and unmasked as the sham artist that he is, The Persian Night evidences no retreat whatsoever in the matter of intentional obfuscation, only a forward march. Taheri apparently came to the conclusion long ago that if enough people can be convinced of the truth of a concocted notion for a long enough period (measured even in weeks or days), the desired ripple effect will be had and the impression created will be largely irreversible regardless of whether the lie is found out afterwards (today we call this phenomenon “fake news”). Or else he simply knows that most Western readers will buy just about anything negative about Iran. Taheri lies through his teeth on practically every page of The Persian Night. He states at one point, in a bizarre attempt to pose as a defender of the very Shiʿism he bashes so relentlessly across the length and breadth of the book, that since the Khomeinist revolution “all of Iran’s grand ayatollahs have been put under house  For the reactions in Israel to this supposed legislation – including a threat by then Interior Minister Avi Dichter that “whoever forces Jews to wear a yellow patch will find himself in a coffin covered by black cloth” – see Raz Tzimt, Iran Mibifnim (Tel-Aviv: Mercaz Alliance Lelimudim Iraniʿim, 2022), p. 8.

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arrest on different occasions.”¹²⁸ If by “all” he means five of these venerated ayat al-ʿozam or marājiʿ al-taqlīd – Ayatollahs Khaqani, Shariat-Madari, Tabatabaʾi-Qomi, Ruhani and Montazeri – who were indeed placed under house arrest at various points, as opposed to the remaining seventeen or so (Golpayegani, Khoʾi, Araki, Javadi-e-Amoli, Lankarani, Makarem-e-Shirazi, Sobhani, Khorasani, Tabrizi, Sadeq-eShirazi, Marʾashi-e-Najafi, Behjat, etc.) all of whom flourished during the period in question but none of whom was ever restricted to home, mosque or any other venue, then I suppose we might accept his assertion.¹²⁹ Revealingly, Taheri had no need to deceive in this case: his point is, after all, to illustrate the extent to which the Khomeinist regime is intolerant of dissent, and the Grand Ayatollahs who managed to maintain their freedom did so either by effusively supporting “the Guardianship of the Jurist” or by keeping their opposition to this vital principle of the revolutionary republic under wraps (or by living in Iraq). The fact that they were not arrested, in other words, shows up no less than the arrests themselves the Iranian government’s unwillingness to brook defiance, and would actually have bolstered the author’s assertion. Taheri, it would seem, emits falsehoods out of sheer lazy habit. In another instance of his chronic counting problem, Taheri gives the Prophet Muḥammad twenty-five wives (on page 21), and twenty-nine wives (on page 115). Again, one imagines that the real number – twelve or thirteen, according to all available sources– would have more than adequately served Taheri’s manifest purpose of painting the founder of Islam as an old lecher. But why go with the real number, when one can double it (especially considering the stiff competition: King David’s eighteen spouses, King Solomon’s seven hundred wives and three hundred consorts, etc.)? On another occasion, Taheri bases one of his rampant pseudo-historical quasi-analyses on “the fact that almost 90 percent of the Koran is built around Jewish tales, with Jewish prophets in leading roles.”¹³⁰ Now, there is no denying that Muslim scripture is heavily influenced by its Jewish predecessor, and that Israelite heroes are repeatedly adduced and discussed in the Qurʿan: Moses’ name, for instance, appears one hundred sixty-one times therein; Muḥammad’s, by comparison, appears only four times (Taheri, for his part, avers that

 Taheri, Persian Night, p. 80. Sometimes Taheri poses as a supporter of Shiʿism against, e. g., Khomeinism. On other occasions he uses Sunni critiques to delegitimize the Shiʿi ulama, then uses the critiques of the latter (e. g., p. 34) to delegitimize Khomeinism. As for his own beliefs: at least on p. 50, he is an out-and-out polytheist.  Arjomand and Brown, Rule of Law, p. 58. “Or so” because there is no completely objective criterion by which to assess who is and who is not a “Grand Ayatollah” or marjaʿ.  Taheri, Persian Night, p. 130.

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“Muḥammad is named only once” in the Qurʿan).¹³¹ But if we make an extremely liberal tabulation of all the verses in the Qurʿan that could remotely be construed as deriving from “Jewish tales” starring “Jewish prophets” – including material that is universal or pan-Semitic like the Creation story; verses that evoke not the biblical but the rabbinic-midrashic or even the apocryphal or pseudopigraphic depictions of a famous figure or event; instances in which contemporary Muslim content is retrojected onto or superimposed upon the original curricula vitae of Pentateuchal and post-Pentateuchal paragons; mere mentions or even just echoes of Judaic precepts or practices (that have nothing to do with “tales” or “prophets” at all); and more in this vein – if we generously cast our net wide enough to catch even all of these multifarious examples of possible Qurʿanic borrowing from “Jewish tales,” we still end up with an absolute maximum number of 1346 verses, out of a total of 6236.¹³² In other words, if 25 percent can be considered “almost 90 percent,” then Taheri is on target.

 Taheri, Persian Night, p. 130.  This number is based on the present author’s meticulous count and recount, employing, again, the most latitudinarian definition possible of “built on Jewish tales,” including passages possibly derived from relatively obscure Rabbinic-Midrashic sources of which no published scholarship on Islamic-Jewish intertexture is aware, let alone that of Taheri. The breakdown of Qurʾanic verses that could in any sense be described thus is as follows: Chapter 2, verses: 29 – 103 (74); 122– 136 (14);173 (1);187 (1); 222– 223 (2); 243 (1);246 – 253 (7); 258 – 260 (3); Chapter 3, verses: 33 – 35 (3); 93 (1); Chapter 4, verses: 23 (1); 47 (1); 153 – 160 (8);163 – 165 (2); Chapter 5, verses: 12– 13 (2); 20 – 26 (7); 44– 45 (2); 70 – 71 (2); 78 (1); Chapter 6, verses: 76 – 90 (15); 137– 140 (4); 142– 146 (5); Chapter 7, verses: 11– 31 (21); 35 (1); 54 (1); 59 – 64 (6); 80 – 93 (14);103 – 155 (53); 159 – 172 (14); 189 (1); Chapter 8, verses: 52– 54 (3); Chapter 9, verses: 30 (1); Chapter 10, verses: 71– 99 (29); Chapter 11, verses: 7 (1); 25 – 49 (25); 69 – 99 (31); Chapter 12, verses: 3 – 101 (100); Chapter 14, verses: 5 – 9 (5); 35 – 41 (7); Chapter 15, verses: 51– 84 (34); Chapter 16, verses 118 – 124 (7); Chapter 17, verses: 1– 8 (8); 101– 104 (5); Chapter 18, verses: 60 – 100 (41); Chapter 19, verses: 41– 57 (17); Chapter 20, verses: 9 – 104 (96); 116 – 128 (13); Chapter 21, verses: 48 (1); 51– 88 (38); 105 – 112 (8); Chapter 22, verses: 42– 44 (3); Chapter 23, verses: 23 – 32 (10); 44– 49 (6); Chapter 25, verses: 31– 37 (7); Chapter 26, verses: 10 – 122 (113); 160 – 191 (32); Chapter 27, verses: 7– 58 (52); Chapter 28, verses: 1– 46 (46); 76 – 82 (7); Chapter 29, verses: 14– 40 (28); Chapter 32, verses: 23 – 24 (2); Chapter 33, verses: 7 (1); 38 – 39 (2); Chapter 34, verses: 10 – 14 (5); Chapter 36, verses: 13 – 32 (20); Chapter 37, verses: 75 – 148 (74); Chapter 38, verses: 15 – 50 (36); 72– 88 (17); Chapter 39, verses: 68 (1); Chapter 40, verses: 5 (1); 23 – 46 (24); 53 (1); Chapter 41, verses: 12 (1); Chapter 43, verses: 26 – 31 (6); 46 – 56 (11); Chapter 44, verses: 16 – 33 (18); Chapter 45, verses: 16 – 17 (2); Chapter 50, verses: 13 (1); 38 (1); Chapter 51, verses: 24– 40 (17); Chapter 53, verses: 36 – 37 (2); 52– 56 (5); Chapter 54, verses: 36 (1); Chapter 57, verses: 26 – 29 (4); Chapter 61, verses: 5 – 6 (2); Chapter 66, verses: 10 – 11 (2); Chapter 69, verses: 9 – 12 (4); Chapter 71, verses: 1– 28 (28); Chapter 73, verses: 15 – 17 (3); Chapter 79, verses: 15 – 26 (12). None of this is to deny that the Qurʾan is profoundly preoccupied with the proverbial “People of the Book” (ahl al-kitāb): Jews are unquestionably a central subject of the Qurʾan, but the Jews addressed and alluded to in approximately half of such cases are those of Muḥam-

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Staying with easily uncovered perjury concerning the Qurʿan, Taheri declares twice – in an attempt to illustrate what he claims to be the progressive apotheosis of the Prophet Muḥammad after his death – that the Qurʿan originally calls not the founder of Islam but the biblical Joseph “the Seal of the Prophets” (khātamu lanbiyāʾ), “a title that was later reserved for Muḥammad himself.”¹³³ Now, no such statement exists anywhere in the Qurʿan. The lone appearance of the term “Seal of the Prophets” in the entire sacred document applies it directly and unambiguously to the Apostle of Allah: “Muḥammad is not the father of any one of your men, but the Messenger of God and the Seal of the Prophets” (Q. 33: 40). The Qurʿan does, however, in a passage elsewhere describe the folly and transgression of a certain bygone community (evidently composed of Jews) that purportedly believed that Joseph was the final prophet: And to you came Joseph in times gone by, with clear signs, but you ceased not to doubt the mission for which he had come. At length, when he died, you said: “Allah will send no Messenger after him” (lan yabʿatha llāhu min baʿdihi rasūlan). Thus does Allah lead astray those who sin and live in doubt (Q. 40: 34).

What the Qurʿan decries, then, as an erroneous and iniquitous belief, Taheri has unabashedly metamorphosed into the Qurʿan’s own original position on the subject! Even when Taheri tells us the truth about issues Islamic, it comes packaged in a boldfaced lie, as in the case of his explanation to the effect that “Contrary to claims by Muslim scholars, it was not Muḥammad who discovered or invented Allah as Supreme Being.”¹³⁴ The deity known as Allah was indeed worshipped in Arabia long before Muḥammad was born – pre-Islamic Arabian religion was generally henotheistic – but no Muslim scholar in history has ever or would ever claim otherwise. Taheri has vanquished a straw man. Returning to Taheri’s most celebrated area of expertise, that is, contemporary Iranian society and politics, the reader is flabbergasted by the unparalleled disregard for any semblance of veracity. Once again playing both sides of the fence (he regularly portrays Khomeinism as irremediably fundamentalist and messianist but in passages immediately following seeks to show it up as a purely secular, leftist movement merely dressed in religious clothing – recalling Abrahamian), Taheri informs his reading audience that “None of the Shah’s opponents, not even Khomeini, ever claimed that Iran [under the Pahlavi Shahs] had abandoned Islam; they

mad’s time, and the subject discussed is their reaction to and relations with the Prophet of Islam and his fledgling faith community.  Taheri, Persian Night, pp. 130 and 22.  Taheri, Persian Night, p. 21.

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couched their criticism of the regime exclusively in nationalist, tiersmondiste [third-worldist] and popular terms.”¹³⁵ His pronunciamento to this effect notwithstanding, here is Ayatollah Khomeini in 1963: To their eminences the most learned sages, the Proofs of Islam and venerated jurists – may their Grace endure and their Word be ever lofty. I thank you for your esteemed telegraph describing the pervasive sorrow and grief that has engulfed the country in the wake of the terrible catastrophe (faje’e-ye ʿazim) that has befallen Islam and the Muslims, and proclaiming your support for the sacred seminary [that had been attacked earlier by the Shah’s forces] and for the legitimate spiritual struggle in which all the Islamic clerics and all the classes of believing Muslims are involved today. It is clear that, given the direction pursued by the tyrannical apparatus (dastgah-he jabber – the Shah’s government), if the Muslims do not pay close heed, watch with extreme vigilance, and devote themselves wholly to the defense of the sacred enclosure surrounding the noble Qurʿan, then it will not be long at all until the impure apparatus goes beyond the subversion of Islam’s essential laws and strikes a blow at the very foundations of the holy religion itself. We have ample evidence that the oppressing regime is poised to do just that: to attack the foundations. The armed attack on the center of learning [in Qom], the aspersions cast on the revered “Foci of Emulation” and other Shiʿite luminaries, the imprisonment and torture of Muslim religious students and the disparagement of the noble Qurʿan and the remaining sacred institutions of our faith, are manifest examples of this trajectory. The legislation of cross-the-board equality of rights between men and women; the abolition of the requirement that voters, the officials they elect and the country’s judges be Muslim and male; the harsh treatment meted out to – and obstacles placed in front of – the pilgrims to Mecca … these are yet more examples of the regime’s “corruption on the earth” (al-fasādu fi l-arḍ) … If we are silent in the face of all this, future generations from now on and forever will perforce fall into error and unbelief.¹³⁶

During the same pre-revolutionary period Khomeini vociferated, in sermon after sermon, letter after letter and communiqué after communiqué that “we are faced today with a dictatorial regime that purposes to undermine the regulations of Islam, one after the other”;¹³⁷ that “the tyrannical apparatus, by means of satanic devices, aims at the complete overthrow of Islam”;¹³⁸ that “this regime is fundamentally opposed to Islam itself and to the existence of the religious class”;¹³⁹ that “you must be aware that your government has paid the five hundred dollar air fare of no less than two thousand Bahaʾis so that they might travel to London and there

    

Taheri, Persian Sphinx, p. 36. Sahife-ye Emam, 1: 220 – 1. Sahife-ye Emam, 1: 218. Sahife-ye Emam, 1: 161. Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 190.

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gather to formulate schemes against the Qurʿan and your prophet”;¹⁴⁰ that “if this regime were not against [Islam], they would not have burned the Qurʿan…and trampled down prayer”;¹⁴¹ and that “this Shah, like his father, is bent on spreading unbelief (bidini-ra ravaj dahad).”¹⁴² There are literally thousands of accusations of this sort attested from the period before and after the revolution, no less from the likes of Ayatollahs Motahhari, Beheshti, Shariʿati, Taleqani and others than from Khomeini himself, and far more indeed than statements that evince alternative ideological bases or motivations (such as nationalism or tiersmondisme). How does such ubiquitously expressed censure of Pahlavi anti-Islamism square with Taheri’s sweeping pronouncement that Khomeini and his fellow revolutionaries “[n] ever claimed that Iran had abandoned Islam” but rather “couched their criticism of the regime exclusively in nationalist, tiersmondiste [third-worldist] and popular terms”? Of course, it doesn’t. Taheri has here, as on so many other occasions, confidently asserted the diametric opposite of the truth. And while there is no question that socialism, populism, anti-imperialism, third-world-ism and even (to a comparatively exiguous extent) nationalism informed elements of the Iranian revolutionary discourse, nevertheless at bottom – pace the position not only of Taheri but of no small number of Iran analysts – the Shah was toppled to a large extent, if not primarily, by and for Islam. As in this latter instance, it is not always easy to know when the disinformation in Taheri’s works is a product of dissimulation, and when it is, rather, a product of pure ignorance. We have seen him, for instance, manufacture more than one “fact” in this magnum opus about the Prophet of Islam, and on page 120 he proclaims with his usual authoritative nonchalance that “one of Muḥammad’s most popular nicknames is Muahhreq, literally ‘Fire-Raiser,’” due, he says, to the (not particularly well-attested) legend that Allah’s apostle could ignite objects with a glance from his glowing visage.¹⁴³ In order to assess this claim, we must first try to ascertain what the actual word was that Taheri managed to bungle and mangle beyond recognition into “Muahhreq,” which is utterly meaningless in Arabic. Was it “al-Muḥriq” or “al-Muḥarriq,” both of which derive from the root ḥ-r-q and might possibly be translated as “Fire-Raiser”? If so then the classical Muslim biographical

 Sahife-ye Emam, 1: 227.  Sahife-ye Emam, 1: 231.  Sahife-ye Emam, 1: 231.  It is always possible that somewhere in the Islamic world at some point in history, even recently, such a tall tale was told among some group of Muslims. Even were such the case – and I have discovered no evidence that it is (no Muslim textual source or individual I know has heard of this legend) – that is an extremely far cry from the claim that “fire-raiser” is “one of Muḥammad’s most popular nicknames.”

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dictionaries ascribe such a cognomen to two pre-Islamic princes alone, Imruʾu lQays and his grandson ʿAmr b. al-Hind, but never to Muḥammad.¹⁴⁴ Or was Taheri aiming perhaps for “al-Murīq,” from the entirely different root r-y-q, which could with some effort be made to signify “the glowing one”? Whatever the case, an electronically assisted survey of Islamo-classical literature and, indeed, of the Arabic Internet as a whole, followed by a modest but relatively representative canvass of present-day Muslim believers (as well as scholars of Islam) hailing from several different regions and countries (including Iran), turns up no mention of, or familiarity with, what Taheri blithely calls “one of Muḥammad’s most popular nicknames.” As is clear from the above, Taheri did not – like the medieval Iranian-Shiʿite poet Mahyar-e Daylami – “learn Arabic in order to insult the Arabs in their own language.” Because Taheri did not learn Arabic at all. So much is obvious from the long list of truly appalling linguistic bloopers that punctuate The Persian Night, the most telling among them resulting from the fact that Persian pronunciation does not distinguish between the Arabic alphabet’s hard aspirated ḥāʾ (‫ )ﺡ‬and soft, almost silent letter hāʾ (‫)ﻩ‬. Persian speakers who know no Arabic are therefore liable to commit serious errors and confuse radically different meanings with one another. Even a smidgen of Semitics would have delivered Taheri from explaining, for instance, that “the name of Abraham, common grandfather of monotheism, means ‘Father of the Wombs’ (ab raham) in Hebrew and Arabic” – as if the raham in the patriarch’s name was spelled with a hard Arabic ḥāʾ (‫ )ﺡ‬or the Hebrew letter het (‫ )ח‬instead of with the soft heh (‫)ה‬¹⁴⁵ (Taheri exploits his spurious etymological exposé to argue that Semitic religion infantilizes its adherents as if they were in the womb). By the same token, even the most elementary familiarity with Arabic language and Muslim lore would have helped him avoid the embarrassment of referring the sobriquet of Islam’s most prolific transmitter of hadith reports, Abu Hurayra, to this Companion of the Prophet’s penchant for being in the company of a kitten named “Little Silken One,” again mixing up the hard ḥāʾ in ḥarīr (“silk”) with the soft hāʾ in hurayra, which is the diminutive of hirr, which just means “cat.” The kitten in question had no name.¹⁴⁶ That myriad Western readers should have to learn about Shiʿite Islam, the vast majority of the sources relevant to which are in Arabic, from an author who does not know that language in the least (but pretends to know it in great depth), goes far toward  See Lisān al-ʿarab, s.v. h.r.q.  Taheri, Persian Night, p. 52. Biblical etymology derives Abraham’s name from av hamon goyim, “the father of many nations.” The true meaning of the Patriarch’s name may be “my father is great.”  Taheri, Persian Night, p. 127.

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explaining the widespread ignorance in the West today concerning the nature of the religious culture that inspires the leaders of the Iranian Islamic Republic. Taheri’s obvious fibs and fumbles are, however, the least harmful of his transgressions, since they are relatively crude and easily exposed (if one has the knowledge and makes the effort). His hypocrisy, as well, is a dead cinch to spot, such as when this pillar of the Shah’s mid-70s single party system – Rastakhiz (“Renaissance”) – which monopolized the political scene and enforced universal membership, castigates the “fascist” Islamic Republic for legitimizing “only one party: the Hezbollah!”¹⁴⁷ Moreover, even most instances of what Taheri intends to be subtly couched sallies against his manifold targets are garish and vulgar to the utmost degree, such as the following paragraph, in which the author associates the centuries-old traditional garb of Shiʿite clerics with, at one and the same time, both fascism and transvestitism (intimating by-the-by that authentic Persians are the only real men): The tenth characteristic of fascism is its love of uniforms, and Khomeinism uses uniforms in a variety of ways…Another feature of the mullahs’ attire is the long, Arab style robe. Unlike the Greeks in ancient times and the Arabs up to the present day, Iranian men never wore robes or skirts. Iranians invented trousers for men more than 2,500 years ago and have always associated the wearing of skirts with femininity.¹⁴⁸

All of these focused, not particularly sophisticated disquisitions, as we said, represent a lesser danger. It is Taheri’s more “diffused” and less pin-pointable propaganda and distortion – the kind that runs like a thread throughout the volume in question, across the length of every line thereof and between the lines as well – that lures the reader into a universe of barely discernable (because utterly pervasive) biased discourse designed to discourage critical thinking and fend off investigation. Taheri’s audience is indoctrinated primarily via the overall atmosphere that he manages so cunningly to create in his works, together with a series of underlying assumptions about Iran and Islam, assumptions that by definition do not invite challenge. Let us briefly examine only two of these assumptions. Taheri (like Isa Sadeq in Iran in his time and Ali Rahnema, Abbas Milani and so many other Iranian oppositionist writers in exile today – see above and below) likes to play the role of rationalist critic of irrational religion. His incessant ridicule and censure of Shiʿite sacred personages – of ʿAlī’s taqiyya (“legalized dissimula-

 Taheri, Persian Night, p. 79. The Shah himself had inveighed against one party systems as befitting only totalitarian communist societies (Milani, The Shah, p. 301).  Taheri, Persian Night, p. 91. The notion that Iranians invented pants comes from an agendaridden reading of Herodotus.

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tion”), of the “bizarre cult of Hussein” (whom Taheri styles the murderous aggressor instead of the hapless victim) and of the laughable shenanigans of the Twelfth Imam (who will reputedly leave his locus of occultation in the Iraqi city of Samarra and somehow emerge out of a well in the Iranian city of Qom in order to rejoin his Shiʿite supporters)¹⁴⁹ – all of this is highly reminiscent of the approach cultivated by the controversial mid-twentieth century Iranian man of letters, Ahmad Kasravi: a strange admixture of Western secular free-thinking and a sanitized, Lutheranlike Sunnism that loses no opportunity to deprecate the colorful unreason and purported violent barbarity of the Shiite cult. The assumption we are drawn into by all this fun-poking at the faith of over one-hundred-and-fifty million Shiite Muslims is that what fails to make sense according to Western-based, logical positivist standards is worthless and dangerous (not to mention hilarious). Connected to this uncritical acceptance of the notion that the values of Western civilization represent the ultimate touchstone of the right and the good, is another assumption that Taheri relies upon and encourages his readers to enshrine: that it is enough to describe the anti-American or anti-European attitudes or actions of a given organization or polity – or, on the flip side, to describe the negative evaluation of that organization or polity by an official Western source of any kind – in order to consign that organization or polity to the netherworld of ontological evil. Because the Iranian regime “finances anti-American groups and parties of both the extreme right and the extreme left in Europe and the Americas”; because for years “Tehran financed and offered shelter to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Marxist movement fighting to overthrow the [American allied] Turkish Republic”; because the Iranian-founded and supported Lebanese Hezbollah has been “officially designated by the State Department in Washington, along with governments in more than two dozen other countries, as ‘terrorist’”; for these reasons, in the author’s eyes, the case is closed. Iran is iniquitous because it opposes the West. Taheri is unwilling to allow, or unable to conceive of, the idea that there are other, possibly legitimate, non- or anti-Western perspectives in the world; that the ethical judgment of the State Department is not tantamount to the ethical judgment of God; that the West does not represent absolute right and its detractors absolute wrong; or that one must at least attempt to demonstrate the moral shortcomings of one’s foe and the moral superiority of “our side” prior to employing these variables as givens in the syllogism: “The West is good; post-revolutionary Iran opposes the West; therefore post-revolutionary Iran is evil.” Were Taheri merely seeking to establish that Iran and the West are at loggerheads, that the Islamic Republic is the inveterate enemy of the U. S. A. and the Western European

 Taheri, Persian Night, pp. 20 – 21 (Ali), 209 (Hussein) and 81 (Hidden Imam).

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powers, his only crime would be wasting the reader’s time by stating the patently obvious. But although he is more often than not platitudinous to an exasperating degree, in this case Taheri is aiming at more than just establishing a tautology. He adheres, rather, to a sort of “neo-Zoroastrian” outlook (which is, admittedly, also essentially an Islamic and general monotheistic outlook) that divides the world into forces of light and forces of darkness, and there is no question in The Persian Night as to which is which. All one need do, according to this dichotomous worldview, in order to condemn “them” in the eyes of one’s readership, is to note the existence of an adversarial relationship between “them” and “us.” Were Taheri alone in this approach among writers on the Iranian or Islamic “other,” the damage would be limited. Unfortunately, he is far from alone. Right wing, neo-conservative, pro-Western scholars and writers have thus teamed up with left wing, post-modern, anti-Western theory-mongers to form a strange coalition that functions together to deny Western audiences anything but the most cursory and superficial glimpse into the immense treasure cavern of stories, sagas, sermons, poems, polemics, allegories, commentaries, jurisprudence, philosophy, mystery, controversy, disputation, tragedy, desolation, transformation and revolution that is the Islamic, and specifically the Iranian-Shiʿite, tradition. And as if this bizarre combination of opposites in service of ignorance were not enough, the Saidians (on the one side) and the Scrutonians (on the other) are joined by a third force that simultaneously nourishes, and derives sustenance from, the other two: the soul-less school of realpolitik. In 1992, renowned French Middle East specialist Olivier Roy published his L’Echec de l’Islam Politique or The Failure of Political Islam to international acclaim. Even if we make allowances for the author’s sometime qualifier to the effect that so-called Islamist regimes can be religiously hollow, this thesis was still wishful thinking. Since the book’s publication Islamic fundamentalist ideology has made enormous strides, rapidly assuming dominance in countries from West Africa to Central Asia and beyond. Pakistan, a nuclear power, could fall to the Islamists anytime. The Taliban have re-taken Afghanistan, while the Ḥizb al-taḥrīr movement – dedicated to the establishment of a world caliphate – conquers hearts and minds throughout the former Southern Soviet republics. Iraq went from nationalist dictatorship to Islamic confessional battleground to Shiʿite homeland in less than seven years, and Turkey’s so called “immutable secularism” is looking more mutable all the time. In Egypt, 86 % of the populace demands that sharīʿa or Islamic law become the sole source of legislation, while the vast majority of Jordan’s once brazenly secular, rock-and-roll-playing radio stations are now dedicated to round-theclock Qurʿan chanting and other Islamic programming. The Gaza Strip has reemerged as a radical Muslim state under Hamas, and Judea and Samaria (“the West Bank”) are not far behind. Hezbollah – “the Party of Allah” – is rapidly en-

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gulfing the Lebanese polity, while, until recently, al-Qaida and ISIS inspired terrorism across the globe (and we have not heard the last of them). Tunisia’s people have ousted their dictator, who was seen as a bulwark against Islamism, and have welcomed back the veteran Islamist Raschid al-Ghannoushi.¹⁵⁰ Yemen is now ruled by a Zaydī-Shiʿi movement, the official government translation of whose motto reads: “Allah is Great; Death to America; Death to Israel; Fuck the Jews; Victory for Islam.” Shiʿite Iran competes with Wahhabi Saudi Arabia in financing, training and inspiring the jihadist organizations that are cowing entire populations into submission and forever changing the face of Asia, Africa and even Europe and South America. More than any of this, the unprecedentedly vast social transformation across the length and breadth of the Muslim world in the direction of exponentially greater religiosity cannot be separated from its political implications, which are and will continue to be profound. The mercurial expansion and astounding successes of Islamism have led this ideology’s exponents to think in epic terms: “The era of Western civilization is at an end,” former President Ahmadinejad pronounced at his pilgrimage to Mecca in 2008. “The era of Islamic dominance is beginning.”¹⁵¹ All of this means that Olivier Roy’s The Failure of Political Islam should long ago have been re-titled The Failure of Western Assessments of Political Islam. But modernization theory dies hard. Not a month goes by without one Middle East expert or another following in Roy’s footsteps and proclaiming from the hilltops that the demise of the Islamist movement is at hand, that it has run its course, shot its bolt, realized its mistake: Thermidor, even full-fledged Restoration, is just around the corner. Even Reuel Marc Gerecht, one of the more astute observers of the Islamic and Iranian scene, is perpetually convinced that the end is nigh: from his 1997 Know Thine Enemy, in which he pronounced confidently that “Iran’s holy war is lost” and explained that “[t]he Iranian revolution, like fundamentalist movements elsewhere, was not a rebirth of spirit and faith…but the tremors of a dying body torn apart by modern life”; to his 2010 “The Bill O-Reilly Fallacy,” in which he reassured his readership that (despite appearances) the West is currently “winning the war for the hearts of everyday Muslims,” and this is thanks to the fact that “modernity is relentless.”¹⁵² The phenomenon of genuine

 Though the tide goes in and out: In the late summer of 2018 the Tunisian government passed a measure making inheritance law egalitarian.  Kayhan, 23/09/2008.  Reuel Marc Gerecht (writing under the pseudonym “Edward Shirley”), Know Thine Enemy: A Spy’s Journey into Revolutionary Iran (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), pp. 21 and 102; Reuel Marc Gerecht, “The Bill O’Reilly Fallacy,” The New Republic, October 2010. Gerecht, whose neo-conservative sympathies exert undue influence on his otherwise highly informed and insight-

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religious belief is so alien and incomprehensible to these authors, and the notion of a viable and even thriving theocracy (not to mention the possibility of a whole collection of these) existing in the midst of our “progressive” age so thoroughly inconceivable to them, that they will perform just about any type of acrobatic legerdemain in order to prevent themselves and others from seeing the colossal transformation unfolding before our eyes. The persistent failure of modern secular scholars to acknowledge the enormous potential of religion qua religion to impact upon and even dictate the course of human affairs continues to blind the West to the realities of the present-day Muslim world. Bred in a society that lives largely by bread alone, the lion’s share of analysts at American and European think tanks, government agencies and institutions of higher learning remain unable or unwilling to engage with the power of the spirit, imprisoned as they are inside their concrete walls of realpolitik. The purveyors of this cynical doctrine, born of an unholy union between Marxist materialism and philosophical epiphenomenalism,¹⁵³ continue to construe developments such as the vast increase in Islamic observance and the exponential proliferation of radical Muslim organizations as a mere mask for the more “rational,” more practical, more material factors that (so they believe) genuinely motivate individuals and collectives: economic ambition, social grievances, coercive instruments, political loyalties, ethnic solidarities, and the like. The Muslim activist may hold his Qurʿan aloft and affirm it as his inspiration and constitution, but the sophisticated, Western-trained, political or social scientist knows better: only the hopelessly naïve would entertain the ludicrous notion that religious fervor or conviction is the actual story here. If rationalist, materialist, not to say nihilist modernity is beating a frantic retreat on battlefronts across the globe, the force that is vanquishing it must be, could only be, an alternate instantiation of itself, masquerading as religion – because nothing else could possibly be real. Ayatollah

ful assessments, is also sure that “at best, the clerics fight a rearguard action” because (as he approvingly quotes Mustafa Kemal, founder of modern Turkey) “There is only one civilization in the world, and that is Western civilization” (Know Thine Enemy, p. 205). In line with this dogmatic faith in Western potency and Islamic impotence, Gerecht regularly characterizes Khomeini’s revolution, and Islamism in general, as themselves primarily Western-inspired phenomena, a position echoed by other writers (such as Ramin Jahanbegloo) and one which the current author certainly understands but will ultimately reject below.  This is a species of Cartesian Dualism that views all states of consciousness and acts of volition as mere by-products of the physical goings-on in the world and/or the electro-mechanical workings of the brain. In historical terms, it translates into the belief, held tenaciously by so many contemporary students of history and the social sciences, that what appear at first glance to be ideologically generated events and trends, invariably turn out, upon further scrutiny, to be reducible to materialistic motives. Things are never what they seem: they are always baser.

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Morteza Motahhari, premier theoretician of the Islamic Revolution (assassinated in 1979 by an Iranian Marxist organization), penned hundreds of pages in defense of human agency and idealism and against the onslaught of dialectical materialist doctrines, of which today’s theories of realpolitik are, in so many respects, mere variants. “In their worldview,” he writes, the engine of history from beginning to end is class warfare; whatever other type of struggle one may encounter, they assure us that it is, in substance and at bottom, a class struggle. There exists no such thing as a genuine ideological conflict (jang-e ʿaqideʾi keh esalat dashteh bashad).¹⁵⁴

Substitute “power struggle” or “market forces” for “class struggle,” and the myopic school of thought described here by Motahhari hardly differs from the “pragmatic,” not to say cynical, approach of most contemporary Western analysts to mass movements and the motivations that underlie them. Elsewhere Motahhari adduces manifold examples to show that the primary motivation of the revolutionaries of 1979 was anything but economic or even political. He reminds his audience – in what is quite a frank admission – that opposition to the regime was the specialty of the Iranian middle classes, while many in the lower classes stayed loyal to the Pahlavis to the end. He adduces the calendar change of the mid-1970s – from the Islamic to the Shahanshahi – which “harboured no economic or political significance whatsoever” but which nevertheless “played a major role in bringing the revolution to a head.”¹⁵⁵ In yet another essay Motahhari rehearses a conversation purportedly held between the two commanders of the Sassanid Iranian and Arab Muslim armies just before the fateful battle of Qādisiyya (636 CE). The former apologizes: “We have not been good neighbors. We knew you Arabs were living by our side in abject poverty. We should have extended material assistance (komak-e maddi), and then you would not have been forced to invade us.” The latter replies: “Yes, our economic conditions were once abominable, but those days are past. We no longer fight to fill our stomachs. We have come to free your slaves from their chains and make you all servants of Allah.”¹⁵⁶ Les clochards ne font pas des revolutions – money doesn’t always talk: sometimes it is silent.

 Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 13, pp. 634– 635.  Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 24, p. 168.  Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 24, pp. 149 – 150.

Chapter Two: Underestimating Revolutionary Iran The Iranian revolution of 1979 was one of the most spectacular victories of spirit over matter in human memory: an absolute monarch who held sway over the largest army, the most savage security service, and the most thriving economy in the Middle East was deposed and banished in a matter of months by millions of his subjects acting in almost synchronized unison under the influence of a handful of fiery intellectuals and a coterie of devout clerics. And yet no sooner had the Shah fled the country and Khomeini returned to take his place, than the scramble began amongst Western analysts of all stripes to expose the more “substantive” factors behind this unprecedented national upheaval. They sought and, of course, they found: true, between 1957 and 1977 the standard of living in Iran had risen some five hundred percent; true, the average wage of skilled workers in the cities had skyrocketed during the same period from $40 a year to $3700 a year; true, Iran’s direct annual revenue from oil production went from forty-five million dollars in 1950 to close to one billion dollars two decades later; true, there was a veritable explosion in the number of schools, hospitals, sports centers, universities and a variety of social services; and true, almost all pre-revolutionary outside observers spoke in consistently positive terms about the economic trajectory of the Pahlavi state. But now, with hindsight, all of these pluses were revealed to have somehow been, in fact, minuses, leading as they purportedly did to tribulations such as “a widening income gap,” “a rise in commercial expectations,” “a flood of imported goods that harmed small shopkeepers,” the de rigueur “burgeoning of the middle class,” and a last minute economic downturn or “J-curve” in 1975 due to the oil glut (followed, as those who advocate this theory invariably fail to note, by a significant upturn at the end of 1977 and throughout most of 1978).¹ These, then, were supposed to be the actual roots of mass resentment. The Iranians, who thought they had taken to the streets in their hundreds of thousands and bared their chests to the bullets of the king’s soldiers in an idealistic struggle against foreign encroachment, domestic despotism and the excesses and emptiness of modern secularism, had in truth, so it turned out, done all these things and rendered all those sacrifices for the sake of a toaster oven or a color television. Now here were motivations Western pragmatists could understand! The truth is that demonstrators protesting wage cuts, runaway inflation, unequal income distribution or the lowering of tariffs do not tend to sacrifice their

 This is to say nothing of the almost complete surrender of Sharif-Emami’s government in 1978 to the economic demands of workers in the oil, banking, telecommunication and other industries. Economically, the protesters had accomplished their goal. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-005

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lives for these causes. Starving people might well brave bayonets; but nobody was starving in Iran in 1978. After the fact Mohammad Reza Shah would characterize his deposition and replacement by Ayatollah Khomeini as “collective suicide on a national scale that took place at the height of prosperity.”² The first part of his comment is debatable; the second part is pure fact. The Iranian people rose up in their millions in what was arguably the first genuine popular revolution in human history – not an assembly of liberal Parisians meeting on a tennis court or several dozen Bolsheviks rushing the Winter Palace, but virtually an entire nation flooding into the streets in hundreds of different cities and towns simultaneously and to a large extent spontaneously – and they did so not primarily for reasons of material loss or gain, but for the sake of an idea (as anyone who participated will readily confirm).³ They had a dream – or, rather, they had several dreams (sometimes conflicting, sometimes complementary) – and the passion, dedication, faith and sacrifice that characterized the struggle to realize those dreams was as far removed from the practical-minded and self-interested sentiments that inform strikes for better pay or rallies for lower taxes as a Shakespearean tragedy is from the Bloomberg Financial Report.⁴ Academia too often, perhaps by its very nature, captures its lively, leaping, frenzied, scampering, gamboling prey, and kills it dead for purposes of dissection. Western academic and intelligence communities showed themselves singularly incapable of coming to grips with the “power of the imponderable.” Though not a soul in either of those institutional frameworks had had an inkling of impending Iranian cataclysm before the fact (and those few intelligence estimates that predicted trouble were looking for it in all the wrong places), in retrospect the tangible and material signs were suddenly all there: the thriving Pahlavi economy, as we saw above, was determined ex post facto to have been in shambles; the Shah’s enormous army, it seems, had suffered from “deep fissures” in the officers corps and “serious structural problems” at the level of rank and file; Samuel Hunting-

 Cited in Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 8.  This is, of course, a statement that cannot be supported other than by the general impression of the author – who has encountered literally hundreds of testimonies in a wide variety of memoirs and other sources – an impression that obviously cannot account for the motivations of countless millions of individuals. The idea on behalf of which they rose up was, albeit, not monolithic, but it was an idea, not an empty stomach.  John Buchan – objective if not cynical about the Islamic Revolution – sums up a moving description of the euphoria surrounding the return of Ayatollah Khomeini on Feb. 1, 1979 with the words: “The boundary between politics and religion, never fixed or set in Iran, had vanished. God, state and people were one” (Days of God, p. 279). Of course such euphoria wore off rather quickly, but it is at least indicative of the genuine motivations and aspirations of most of the participants, which were more “romantic” than practical.

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ton’s “rapid social modernization” was conveniently blamed for precipitating a growing and multifaceted instability during the latter years of the monarchy; the all-purpose scapegoat of “mass migration from rural areas to the cities” was dredged up and saddled with the responsibility for widespread “alienation” and “proletarianization”; and much more in this old and tired vein. Of course, these very same “destabilizing” factors had been present before, during and after 1978 in almost every other Middle Eastern polity and, for that matter, in almost every other developing country in the world – in most cases, indeed, to a far greater degree than in Iran – but none of those countries had experienced a popular religious revolution culminating in the establishment of a theocratic state. This fact should perhaps have given the analysts pause, and lent at least a modicum of support to the proposition that not socio-economic woes but the unique initiative taken and infectious ideology preached by the lay and clerical Shiʿite revolutionary leadership played the essential role in generating the wall-towall insurrection of the Iranian people. But it was not to be thus. “Mens agitat molem,” Virgil had affirmed, convinced that he was stating the obvious: “spirit moves matter.” Molem agitat mens, insist the infinitely more sophisticated neoMarxists and neo-Social Darwinists inhabiting today’s political and social science departments: it’s the economy, stupid. ⁵ But the fuel driving, and rudder steering, humanity’s career at any point in time has never been the economy. Nor has it been the technology, or the demographics, or the politics, or even the raw military might. Rather, ideas, which to the superficial appear a thing so remote from the business of life and the outward interests of men, are in reality the thing on earth which most influences them, and, in the long run, overbears every other influence.⁶

Addressing students at the beginning of the first school year since the victory of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini emphasized: There is no doubt that the greatest and most powerful factor in the maintenance of any community’s identity and very existence is that community’s culture. If its culture is undermined, then no matter how strong that community may be in the realms of economy, politics, indus-

 “Nor was [the Islamic revolution of 1979] about the poor and the downtrodden. Under Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and his father Reza, the country’s population tripled and its revenue rose a thousand-fold. Between 1964 and 1975, Iran was more prosperous and powerful than at any time since the seventeenth century” (Buchan, Days of God, p. 2).  John Stuart Mill, “Bentham” (Albert William Levi [ed.], The Six Great Humanistic Essays of John Stuart Mill [New York: Washington Square Press, 1963]), p. 27. “Religious and psychological motives,” writes Meir Litvak politely, “are not popular among some historians…” (Shiʿi Scholars, p. 131).

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try, technology and the military, it will be an empty, hollow shell (puch o puk o miyan tohi). If the culture of a community becomes the servitor of the culture of its enemies, every other dimension of that community will become their servitor as well, and in the end that community will become a consumer of everything foreign and will forfeit every aspect of its essence. The independence and identity of every community emerges from its cultural independence. Those who believe that a community with a dependent culture can retain its independence in other areas are criminally naïve.⁷

Rome conquered Greece at the point of the sword, but was overwhelmed in short order by the culture of that thoroughly pacified country, Hellenism (Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit).⁸ The same Rome then humbled Palestine in the first century BCE, but was subsequently vanquished by the fledgling faith that had blossomed in that land, Christianity. The Barbarians overran the Romans less than a century later, but were swiftly subjugated by the creed, culture, judicial system and philosophical principles of the fallen empire that Aeneas built. Buddhism spread far and wide, but not by force of arms or economic invasion. The Ghaznavids, the Seljuks, the Mongols, the Tatars, the Ottomans: all these peoples poured in from the Asian steppe and triumphed over the lands of the Middle East by force of arms, but each conqueror in turn found himself submitting to the religion that hailed from that defeated region, Islam. China was conquered repeatedly from the dawn of its history, but its culture dominated its conquerors throughout. The post-biblical Jews were exiled, scattered, persecuted and massacred, the very symbol of powerlessness; yet their ideas helped forge two thirds of human civilization. In 2022, the richest and most powerful country in the world, having spent three hundred million dollars per day for twenty consecutive years on the restoration of the various branches of the Afghan national economy and on the creation of a three-hundred-thousand-strong national army in order to, as it were, protect its investment, was sent ignominiously packing with its tail between its legs by groups of ill-equipped local irregulars wearing turbans, robes and sandals. “In the long run,” wrote Napoleon Bonaparte, “the sword is always defeated by the spirit.”⁹ This is John Stuart Mill’s “lesson given to mankind by every age, and always disregarded.”¹⁰ Cliché though it may be, the pen will ever and anon best the

 Sahife-ye Nur, vol. 15, p. 243. During the closure and purging of the universities, Ayatollah Khomeini would emphasize that most of the college faculty “are in the service of the West and have brainwashed our children. I do not fear economic blockade or military incursion. What I fear is cultural dependence and colonial universities” (cited in Buchan, Days of God, p. 329).  Horace: “Captive Greece took captive her rude conqueror.”  Cited in Review of A Savage War for Peace: Algeria 1954 – 62, https://insurgentsia.com/category/ algeria/. Last accessed 03/08/2020.  Mill, Bentham, p. 17.

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bayonet (and the voucher): “One of Salutati’s letters was worth a troop of horses.” The party in possession of the more powerful idea, and the more powerful means by which to express it, will ultimately prevail. History has never ceased demonstrating the irrefutable veracity of this proposition, and Western pundits and political scientists have never ceased dismissing it as naïve. Not even a full-fledged, country-wide revolution could weaken such experts’ unwavering resolve to belittle the achievements of the human spirit. Ayatollah Khomeini: This great national uprising of our people, this mighty Islamic historical movement of Iran, has only reached the half-way point. Yet it has already accomplished one earth-shattering feat: it has upset the calculations of the various “calculators.” There is no room in the calculations of the materialist calculators (hesabgaran-e-madigara) for the phenomenon of a barehanded nation standing up to powerful forces of oppression equipped with all the latest ordnance and state-of-the-art weaponry – the people utterly defenseless, those they faced armed to the teeth – and emerging victorious. According to the terrestrial logic of the “calculators” such an eventuality is impossible. So now that they see that by the Power of God – a notion which itself confounds all reckoning and draws a red line across materialist philosophies everywhere – now that they see that a people possessing nothing has overcome forces furnished with everything, and now that they realize that this development represents the final, crushing invalidation of the materialist outlook, they grasp at any straw they can (beh dast o pah oftadeʾand) and say: “What has actually happened here? Nothing of any consequence has happened!”¹¹

Khomeini has hit the nail on the head. Western scholarship could not digest what took place in Iran – could not plug it into the equations so meticulously constructed over decades of social and political theorizing – and so its exponents sought to turn something into nothing, to replace “the rising of a people” with “the falling of the price of oil.”¹² Michel Foucault, virtually alone among Western commentators, appreciated early on the enormity of the power being unleashed: As an “Islamic” movement it can set the entire region on fire, overturn the most unstable regimes and disturb the solid. Islam – which is not simply a religion but an entire way of life, an adherence to a history and a civilization – has a good chance of becoming a gigantic powder keg, at the level of hundreds of millions of men.¹³

 Sahife-ye Emam, 7: 159. Similar statements may be found elsewhere, e. g. 12: 190. All translations of this work are the author’s unless otherwise noted.  Khomeini is reputed to have remarked drily: “The Iranian people did not make the Islamic revolution in order to lower the price of watermelons!” (see Michael Axworthy, Revolutionary Iran [London: Penguin Books, 2014], p. 314).  Michel Foucault, “A Powder Keg called Islam,” cited in Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 4. Foucault went on to describe Islamism as “much stronger than [movements]

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Although Foucault would soon come to regret his initial enthusiasm for the Iranian revolution, this fact in no way undermines the correctness of his assessment of the central role and explosive power of Islam in bringing about this momentous event and “altering the global strategic equilibrium.”

Running the Show Shiʿism in power – by which we intend Shiʿite clerics in power – is a tremendous enigma, first and foremost for Shiʿites themselves.¹⁴ Beyond the (paradoxical but durable) antagonism of this minority sect to whomever wields authority – a sentiment sufficiently entrenched that most mujtahidūn (senior clerics) in Shiʿite history kept their distance even from Shiʿite potentates like the Būyids, Safavids and Qajars – there is the simultaneously Christological and modern notion that church and state must be separate. “For years, nay, for centuries,” vociferated Ayatollah Khameneʾi, they have striven to convince us that religion is, and must remain, separate from politics… They even try to trick us: “Religion,” they say, “is too noble to enter the polluted arena of politics!” Indeed: politics bereft of religion will perforce become polluted…¹⁵

Feted dissident Akbar-e Ganji obliges with one among myriad examples of this diehard argument, an argument that dove down underground during the revolution but has resurfaced in recent years with a vengeance in opposition circles: Regimes that claim the mantle of religion and define themselves as religious regimes incur the risk that the conduct of the leaders will be construed as religion, and therefore their mistakes and malfeasances will be perceived by the masses as the failures and shortcomings of religion.¹⁶

Mohammad Reza Shah, in fact, attributed a similar logic to his father, explaining that far from being anti-religious, Reza Shah was “intent upon preventing the cler-

with a Marxist, Leninist or Maoist character” and possessed of infinitely greater potency than the “demand for ʻthe legitimate rights of the Palestinians’” which “hardly stirred the Arab peoples.”  Hamid Dabashi calls this syndrome “the acute anxiety of success” (Shiʿism, p. 313).  Khameneʾi, Jehad-e farhangi, p. 41. When a well-known editor responded to Michel Foucault’s praise of Khomeinism, pointing out that “as to spirituality and politics, we have seen what that gave us,” Foucault replied: “And politics without spirituality, my dear Claude?” (Afary and Anderson, Foucault, p. 91).  Ganji, Tarikkhane-ye ashbah, p. 124.

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ical estate from being polluted by politics.”¹⁷ Of course, many a traditional cleric would, and did, second this sentiment, and many a lay revolutionary activist would advocate for a non-coercive, live-and-let-live Islam. Mehdi-ye Bazargan, frustrated former prime minister of the Islamic Republic, went so far as to proclaim after his resignation – diametrically contradicting one of Islam’s most fundamental precepts, scil., “Commanding the good and forbidding the evil” – that “Muslims are in no way obligated to censure malefactors, nor may they interfere in order to impede the actions of such.”¹⁸ Present day pro-democracy activist Mohammad Ali-ye Abtahi, a cleric himself, regularly complains that the phenomenon of religious scholars occupying key positions and offices in the ruling establishment leads the Iranian populace to blame the clerics – and through the clerics Islam – for the failures of government policies, especially in the economic realm. The Authority of the Jurist, he would seem to be saying, is too dangerous. Better not to risk it.¹⁹ But as problematic as the phenomenon of a Shiʿite cleritocracy unquestionably is for those most directly concerned, it is in some ways even more so for outside, especially Western, observers. This is for many reasons, only two of which we can note here. First, generally speaking, religion out of power is far more attractive than religion in power to such observers, children of secular philosophy that most of them are, whether of the Christian or atheistic variety. Shiʿism in particular, as a faith of the powerless, presented a pretty picture (from the modern Western perspective) on several levels. The separation of church and state – a religion removed from power – beyond being familiar to these analysts, also meant that affiliation with the Shiʿite faith community, acceptance of its orthodox doctrines and compliance with its ritual and legal precepts were, if not voluntary, at least seldom enforced through lethal physical coercion. It also meant a spirit of ecumenism, or at least a relative tolerance of surrounding confessions, inter alia because the Shiʿites, as a weak minority for most of their history, had no choice in the matter. Internally, even more than the dearth of law enforcement arms, the lack of a need to centrally administer an actual polity facilitated an openness to variety. The  Mohammad Reza Shah, Maʾmuriyyat baraye vatanam (Tehran: Ofogh-e Iran, 1350 [Third Edition]), p. 57.  Rahnavard: Name-ye azad andishan-e Iran, no. 36, Summer 1373, p. 54. Bazargan resigned in the same year he was appointed, primarily over the hostage-taking at the American embassy. Like Bani Sadr, Ghotbzadeh, Yazdi and many other disappointed “moderate” Islamists, he went on to preach an eviscerated Islam largely removed from politics, of the sort that was potentially palatable to the West.  That this position flies directly in the face of Khomeini’s mature thought – according to which religion and politics cannot be separated and clerics should do almost anything but remain in mosque and madraseh – would be denied by Abtahi who, like so many “reformists” in post-revolutionary Iran, sees himself as a devoted follower of the “Imam”’s true ideology.

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right to practice individual ijtihād meant that different schools of thought and even different loci of authority, such as a plethora of marājiʿ al-taqlīd or grand ayatollahs, coexisted and, to a considerable extent, granted one another legitimacy. A system free of official bodies and lacking a well-defined hierarchy was the norm (Abbas Amanat calls this phenomenon: “anarchic discipline” and emphasizes “the traditional Shiʿi resistance to institutionalization”).²⁰ The post-revolutionary, Khomeinist assumption of state control over the religious institution – or perhaps better, of religious control over the state institution – saw the increasing circumscription of this pluralistic system in favor of a centralized hierarchy with the vali-ye faqih, the Guardian Jurist, at the top. It is, albeit, difficult to imagine any other form of theocracy: not only are the Islamic and especially Shiʿite historic models of government all essentially autocratic, and not only is the single preeminent marjaʿ a familiar concept to modern Shiʿism, but even on the most practical plane, by virtue of having to run a country, the buck must stop somewhere: a state cannot permit the coexistence of numerous commensurate sources of authority that do not finally reconcile themselves to a single decision, and a religious state cannot permit the coexistence of numerous commensurate sources of religious authority that do not do so. Nevertheless, the transition under the early Islamic Republic from multiple foci of emulation to a single locus of confessional control²¹ was quite jarring for many of the Iranian followers of the ahl al-bayt, despite the unparalleled enthusiasm (and the cult of personality surrounding Khomeini) that accompanied the revolutionary moment. Indeed, Ayatollah Khomeini himself – at least in the immediate aftermath of the revolution – was quite ambivalent about such centralization of authority, especially when it came to circumscribing the freedom of the ulama: The Imam [Khomeini] harbours a theory concerning the clerical institution (ruhaniyat): that it must remain independent [under the Islamic Republic] as it always was independent in the past. The clerics made a revolutionary movement specifically to preserve their independence. The reason the Shiʿite clerical class successfully led several movements and revolutions during the last one hundred years in Iran was this class’s thoroughgoing independence from the governmental apparatuses of the time. Despite the fact that the government has now become an Islamic government, [Ayatollah Khomeini] believes that the clerical institution must continue to be independent and “of the people” (mardomi), and that it should not get mixed up in

 Abbas Amanat, Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shiʿism (London, I. B. Tauris, 2009), p. 149, 154.  One should qualify this portrayal: the structure of religious authority instituted by the Islamic Republic does allow for the continued existence of certain non-state sources of confessional power, especially the various marājiʿ or Foci of Emulation. These on occasion even express criticism of the “official” religious establishment, as well as the government at large, for the most part with impunity. Still, a close watch is kept on them.

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government (amikhte beh dowlat nashavad). He mightily opposes the notion that the [Shiʿite] clerical class should – like the Sunni clerical class – be fully tied to the government (beh towre kolli vabasteh be dowlat shaved), even though that government is Islamic. He opposes the idea that clerics should become part of the government, or be appointed to official posts in the government.²²

Whether this portrayal by Ayatollah Motahhari of his master’s position in early 1979 is accurate or not (and some of Khomeini’s own commentary from the period does evince similar sentiments, as we shall see below), in the ensuing months and years that position would evolve and change, and the cleritocracy would become a fact of post-revolutionary statehood. But again: as disconcerting as this centralizing trend was for some at home, judging by the reactions abroad it was even more traumatic for foreign researchers studying the Middle East and Iran: many of these became increasingly incensed. The pretty picture of Shiʿite pluralism due to Shiʿite powerlessness was now indelibly marred by the exigencies of a religion that ran the show, by the realization of the age-old Shiʿite dream of reuniting sacerdotum et imperium that in the eyes of these Western and émigré academics – because it concentrated spiritual authority and curtailed individual liberties – was nothing less than a nightmare. That the concentration of spiritual authority and the curtailment of individual liberties are in fact what religion in general, and Shiʿism in particular, are all about if and when they become empowered; that such centralization and limitation on freedom is in fact the faith’s ideal – this was lost on those scholars, for whom individual agency is the highest value on the totem pole. Fortunately or unfortunately, their umbrage interested Ayatollah Khomeini – and interests Ayatollah Khameneʾi – not a wit. Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi: A challenge is often raised from outside of the religious realm (i.e., by secular modernists – Z. M.) to the effect that the substantive and distinguishing facet of the human being is his autonomy (ekhtiyar). That is to say, the difference between human beings and the remainder of the animal kingdom consists in the fact that while beasts perforce act according to their instincts, people are autonomous creatures. Now, if religion, by means of a series of rules and regulations, seeks to compel individuals to carry out certain acts or refrain from carrying out certain acts, or to obey the prophet, the imams or the representatives of the imams (nayeb-e imam, i. e., the scholar-jurists – Z. M.), then religion shows itself opposed to that autonomy, and thereby to the very essence of humanity. In other words, religious prescriptions and proscriptions of a necessity rob human beings of their humanity and their freedom. Before attempting a response to this accusation, we should first tackle a philosophical question that underlies it. Ignoring the most obvious paradox – that in the eyes of non-religious

 Motahhari, Majmue-ye Athar, vol. 24, p. 311.

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people who do not believe in the supernatural, the actions of human beings are motivated by instinct to the same extent as the actions of animals – let us note that we have to do here with two realms: that of existence, reality and what is, on the one hand, and that of legislation, values and what ought to be, on the other (takvin va haste-ha va-vaqeʾiyat-ha…tashriʿ vabayad-ha va arzesh-ha). Those who pose the above challenge argue that that which comprehends the former realm is the contemplative intellect (ʿaql-e nazari) and that which comprehends the latter realm is the active intellect (ʿaql-e ʿamali), and that these two are thoroughly independent of one-another. One cannot reach “what ought to be” from “what is” or “what is known”: logic dictates that this route cannot be traversed. Such that for instance one cannot claim that because human beings are the creatures of God – the “is” – therefore they are duty bound to obey His commands – the “must.” This challenge was first posed in this form by David Hume…and has been deployed with great effect since the victory of the Islamic Revolution by its opponents in speech and writing…In response we should stipulate, first, that such a claim involves the claimants in a fundamental contradiction: for they themselves traverse that very same road between “is” and “ought” when they argue that a person is an autonomous creature and therefore s/he must be granted freedom and must not be compelled to obey. …Beyond this, however, all rational thinkers realize the need for human freedom to be conditioned and restrained by laws which must be obeyed. We believe that the best authority (marjaʿ) to legislate those laws is God; they believe that the authority to legislate those laws should be vested in the people themselves. But both agree that in the end, laws must be legislated and the obedience thereto enforced. A polity and society cannot function like the saqīfa (the covered structure in Madina where Muḥammad’s successor was chosen) where every person does as s/he sees fit, and there is no central authority.²³

Another example of the “unpleasantness” engendered in the minds of Westernbased (and Western-taught Iranian) authors by the phenomenon of Shiʿism in Power points up a certain double standard. Asghar Schirazi in 1998 (The Constitution of Iran) and Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar in 2019 (Religious Statecraft), both draw on their impressive erudition to demonstrate – each in his own way – that the ideologies and institutions at the heart of the Islamic Republican regime are extremely malleable. Schirazi shows how the regime’s reigning scholar-jurists have taken advantage of the flexibility afforded by certain Islamic legal principles (especially “enjoining the good and forbidding the evil”) in order to bypass or hollow out a whole host of Islamically-oriented constitutional clauses and subvert a great many religio-revolutionary ideals, as well as to legislate heretofore unimaginable ukases. This was done in order to meet the practical needs, and maneuver through the untold contingencies, that arose after the revolution (not least of which was the Iran-Iraq war). Ayatollahi Tabaar, for his part, demonstrates how  Muhammad Taqi-ye Mesbah-e Yazdi, Porsesh-ha va pasokh-ha (Qom: Markaz-e entesharat-e Moʾassase-ye Amuzeshi va parvareshi-ye Emam Khomeini, 1385), vol. 2, pp. 219 – 222.

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the doctrines and policies of the Islamic Republic were from the very beginning influenced, transformed, and even forged in the first place by the interactions between competing political-ideological camps, by the unexpected train of events, and (perhaps most unexpectedly) by the fluctuating caprices of public opinion. The ayatollahs are portrayed in this latter study as reactive, creative, pliable and cynical. This is not the place (and the present writer is not the scholar) to assess the correctness of these meticulously researched and cogently argued theses. Instead, let us merely recollect (as we have tried above, and will try again below, to show) that the manipulation of sacred sources and exegetical techniques in the direction of desired outcomes is a distinctive trademark of Shiʿi jurisprudence with a long and venerable history – according to its practitioners themselves. For centuries ijtihād has granted Uṣūlī fuqahāʾ the prerogative, nay, veritably charged them with the task, of turning the Muslim law code into putty in pursuit of what they saw as significant objectives. Ever since this fascinating, counterintuitive phenomenon – a legal system that, as it were, regularly undermines itself – was discovered by Middle East specialists, it has been hailed as an enemy of rigidity and petrifaction, a facilitator of adaptability, an instrument of amelioration, and a spur to ingenuity and progress. In Iran today the reformists, both clerics and laypersons, regularly praise “the searching jurisprudence” (feqh-e puya) to the skies and look to it as a means of salvation from the uncompromising policies of rigid, intransigent conservatives (whose method is sometimes called, by contrast, “the traditional jurisprudence,” feqh-e sonnati). Academics studying the Islamic Republic often take the same view. But once this creative and flexible approach is placed between the cross-hairs and reviewed in its capacity as a tool in the hands of the state, of the “deep state,” of the cleritocracy²⁴ – whether under Ayatollah Khomeini or Ayatollah Khameneʾi – it somehow assumes the guise of a cheat or a trick, and those who deploy it are portrayed as tyrants, charlatans, or (alternately) wind-driven leaves. For Ayatollahi Tabaar, the wishy-washiness of Iran’s post-revolutionary leadership, their flexibility in the face of Rousseau’s “general will,” is suddenly a negative. Sapere aude!, he and many other writers enjoin together with Horace, Kant and Foucault: “Dare to think freely!” – as long as you belong to the opposition. Anyone who has occupied a managerial position knows that the willingness to adjust and re-adjust policies, and even compromise principles, in the light of complex, surprising and ever-vicissitudinous realities, is a sine qua non of getting things accomplished, of keeping an enterprise afloat, indeed – in many cases –

 Many have questioned whether the cleritocracy and the “deep state” in today’s Iran are one and the same thing. We take up this topic later in the book.

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of doing the right thing, morally speaking. So much is true a fortiori of running a large country, and all the more so a country being rebuilt from the ground up based on a novel system without a single blueprint to follow. Yes, the revolutionary leaders of Iran, from Khomeini on down, have regularly changed their colors in response to diverse challenges: challenges to their own power as well as to their ongoing, unprecedented project. One would be hard pressed to find a group of successful leaders that hasn’t.²⁵ As for the accusation that Iran’s leaders “play to the gallery,” it should also be remembered in this connection that since the victory of Uṣūlism over Akhbārism some two centuries ago the middle classes, if not the masses, have become the main “employers” of the mujtahidūn (scholar-jurists) – supporting them financially with zakāt, sahm-e emam and other donations – and the latter taking their cue from the former is part and parcel of this longstanding, symbiotic relationship. Today, some forty years after the revolution itself, the religious regime that it put into place, a regime that has survived the consistent predictions of (and not a few attempts at bringing about) its imminent dissolution, nevertheless remains as incredible, inscrutable, indigestible and impossible as ever in the eyes of the Western public in general and Western analysts in particular. This persistent skepticism has of late found a home in a new set of evaluations, the common upshot of which is either that Iran’s Islamic cleritocracy is on its way out, or, indeed, that it has already disappeared, and exists today only in the imagination of a few stubborn ayatollahs. These evaluations include (a) the prevalent claim that (as Reuel Gerecht succinctly puts it) “everyone hates the mullahs,” which implies that the regime remains in place solely through brute force;²⁶ (b) the frequent exposés in the Western press – not entirely devoid of a perverse eroticism – describing young Iranian women wearing miniskirts under their chadors and harping on the trouble that this epidemic of feminine feistiness and juvenescent refractoriness presages for the revolution; (c) the stubborn insistence on characterizing Hosayn-e Musavi’s “Green Movement,” which arose in protest against the allegedly rigged presidential elections of 2009, as a force for secularism, Westernization, and the abolition of

 As we note elsewhere – and as is well known (at least among Iranologists) – Ayatollah Khomeini issued near the end of his life what amounted to a fatwa to the effect that when explicit sharīʿa precepts conflict with the interests of the Islamic Republican regime (maslahat-e nezam), the latter take precedence. That all but makes Ayatollahi Tabaar’s thesis official. One example among many of the flexibility of the clerical regime in the face of changing circumstances is the “flip-flop” in the matter of birth control and “family planning”: first against, then for, now against again.  Various permutations of this statement are either made by the author or attributed to his Iranian interlocutors on no less than fifteen separate pages in Know Thine Enemy alone: see, e. g., pp. 85, 106, 133, 141, 150, 153, 156 and 177.

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theocratic government; and (d) the increasingly pervasive assertion among Middle East specialists and even many Iran-watchers that the Islamic Republic is turning into, or has in point of fact long since become, a military dictatorship, with clerical puppets taking orders from the commanders and ex-commanders of the Basij and/ or Revolutionary Guards. All of these theories partake of the same Western pathology of denial – the same cognitive dissonance so pervasively on display regarding the sustainability of a modern-day theocracy – and each deserves a word.

A. Everyone hates the mullahs Westerners generally imbibe their information about the domestic scene in Iran from Iranians who have cultivated a degree of affinity for the West and a measure of antipathy towards the Islamic Republic. This group includes both Iranian émigrés – academics publishing books, bloggers pounding out blogs, activists giving interviews or just acquaintances letting off steam – as well as the sources whence these émigrés derive their own information, consisting primarily of (a) their own social circle back home, whose members naturally share many of their predilections and opinions; (b) Persian language bloggers, who mostly hail from similar (upper-middle class) class backgrounds and generally see their mandate as offering social and political criticism; and (c) Iranians willing to “betray their country and religion” by participating in foreign polls or calling in to overseas Persian language radio stations like the BBC, “Voice of America” or “Voice of Israel,” all of which are considered (justifiably) to be inveterate enemies of the Islamic Republic.²⁷ It is natural that direct or indirect exposure to voices of this sort will leave Americans and Europeans with the impression that “everybody hates the mullahs,” but even assuming that these few vocal individuals can be taken as representative of entire

 Time intelligence columnist and former CIA case officer Robert Baer discourses instructively on the longstanding phenomenon of self-serving exiles from Middle east countries in general, and from Iran in particular, misleading Western policy makers (The Devil We Know, pp. 16 – 25). Azad-e Moaveni, in Lipstick Jihad, calls her own social circle “most Iranians.” Describing the international nerve center of Shiʿite scholarship and piety, she says: “Qom, a somber, dusty city 120 km south of Tehran, is the Vatican of the Islamic theocracy. Most Iranians – who derisively called it a ʻmullah factory’ – did not bother to visit, and thought of it only as the place where sohan, a buttery brittle of pistachios and saffron, originates. As a child, I thought the name of the city meant gham, the Farsi word for “gloom,” and heard it discussed as the epicenter of clerical evil, the Death Star from which the mullahs plotted their takeover of Iran.” http://www.iranian.com/Books/2005/March/ Moaveni/index.html . Last accessed 06/02/2020. I suppose “most Iranians” loved the Shah, as well, which is why history’s most popular revolution was launched against him.

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demographic categories, such demographic categories themselves represent only a small fraction of the country’s population, mostly concentrated in the well-to-do areas of the capital and several other large cities. A goodly number of Iranians, we would argue, are still devoted on one level or another to Shiʿite Islam – though they may often flout its rules – and harbor a deep respect for members of the religious establishment – though they may simultaneously execrate their clerics (as they were used to do already long before the revolution) as “mosquitoes” (pashe), “free lunchers” (moft khor), “leeches” (zalu) and so on.²⁸ These are the nuances and paradoxes of a genuine, vibrant religious society: only in a frozen, theoretical, on-paper version thereof would the people never sin and always adulate their spiritual leaders. And this is all the more the case when those spiritual leaders double as political leaders. Indeed, one would have to search long and hard to find a polity anywhere in the world in which the greater part of the inhabitants did not harbor serious grievances against the ruling class, whatever its character (theocratic, oligarchic, democratic, etc.). Everybody loves to hate the bosses. The attempt on the part of the Islamic Republican regime to “govern through Islam” and enforce aspects of the Muslim law code coercively has unquestionably grated on much of the Iranian populace, especially since (a) such coercive enforcement had been absent from Iranian society not just during the Pahlavi period but even, in many senses, in the centuries preceding it, and (b) the attempt to foist Islamic legal strictures on Iranians came at a time when increasing exposure via communications technology to an increasingly permissive and secular West set up an increasingly irritating dichotomy. When protests against such coercive enforcement are suppressed with loss of life, as they often are, anger against those who symbolize the shari’ah in the eyes of the public – that is, the ulama – spreads even to religiously committed segments of the populace. All this having been said, Iranian clerics, even those in government and even those on the “principlist” side of the divide, are far from unanimous in supporting such repressive policies, and not all of the Iranian citizenry cannot be said to lump all of the Shi’ite divines together in this regard.

 The popular proverb that becoming a human being (adam shodan) is harder than becoming a mullah – often quoted by ulama themselves – exemplifies this critical outlook on the clerical establishment.

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B. Mini-skirts versus mullahs The eagerness with which detractors of the Islamic Republic pounce on any example of what they perceive as young people in Iran “throwing off the yoke” leads to a similarly distorted view of Iranian social and religious reality.²⁹ Not a week goes by without a mass circulation American or European periodical doing a story on rebellious teenagers or twenty-somethings in Tehran, who cruise the streets in flashy cars and make innuendo at members of the opposite sex, the boys or men thumbing their noses at the repressive clerical regime by wearing their hair long or donning leather pants, the girls or women showing their defiance by smearing on a sheen of rouge just below their designer sunglasses or pushing multicolored kerchiefs back to reveal an enticing centimeter or two of newly coiffed tresses. Behind closed doors (so such investigative reports reveal to us, always with an air of thinly disguised glee), these juvenile mutineers go so far as to remove required Islamic coverings, consume alcoholic beverages, smoke marijuana, snort cocaine, and grope each other’s bodies on makeshift dance floors. Here, we are given to understand, are Iran’s “saving graces,” the enlightened, recalcitrant majority chafing under the suffocating rule of medieval obscurantists, the fulminating volcano that will soon erupt in a blaze of lust-ridden frustration and fury, liberate the country from the chains of dogmatism and dictatorship, and establish a (wild) Western style secular democracy. This “lipstick counterrevolution” will deliver the coup de grace to the regime of the ayatollahs. As lovely a picture as this may seem to some, it is pure fantasy. Even were we to grant that a sizeable proportion of young Iranians aspire to imitate the liberal and materialist lifestyle of their American and European counterparts, the notion held so widely in the West that make-up and mini-skirts spell the beginning of the end for the Islamic government in Iran is off the mark. Revolutionary youth are politicized youth; young people whose primary interests revolve around brandname clothes, pop music, fast cars and fast women – a lifestyle-subculture that Khomeinist hezbollahis refer to as qerti (insipid, dandified, effeminate) – most decidedly do not make counter-revolutions and overthrow totalitarian regimes: they go to the mall. Even if and when they do rise up in one form or another against the current regime, such youth will find it quite difficult to articulate what sort of regime they are rising up for: demanding more democracy – more “Republic” and  The present author has on more than one occasion encountered the surreal spectacle of evangelist Christians and religiously observant Jews at conferences boasting titles like “The Iran Threat” thrilling to lascivious descriptions by oppositionists to the Islamic Republic of what Iranian women supposedly wear under their chadors, cheering on the forces of immodesty without the slightest sense of the irony involved.

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less “Islamic” – is not the same as providing a positive raison d’etre for a state and society (as we shall argue below, democracy is an absence, not a presence, and nationalism lacks the tangible, daily presence required to justify the maintenance of a separate, independent socio-political entity. Islam, despite the blows it has sustained in Iran in recent decades, remains more powerful, for such purposes, than both combined). The regime has been, and will continue to be, able to call on the more religious and conservative segments of the populace to counterbalance the “Western-influenced libertines” who “seek to undermine our sacred law and traditional lifestyle.” As in the West today, the potential reactive power of religious and conservative forces is not to be discounted, especially if the more “progressive” elements are perceived as going too far in their permissiveness and throwing off entirely the “neck rope” (ribqa) of Islam. But at any rate, we do not grant that a significant percentage of Iranian young people seek to abandon their religio-national tradition and metamorphose into carbon copies of their peers in the West. For every Puran, Shahnaz and Jacqueline “partying down” in a North Tehran mansion, there is a Fatemeh, Maʿsumeh and Zaynab saying her prayers in the various municipal or provincial mosques or mourning an Imam at one of the many magnificent tombs scattered across the country. (These latter types – whether of the more zealously committed hezbollahi/arzeshi/basiji ³⁰ variety or simply religious traditionalists – also have more children than their secular counterparts, and they and their offspring are more likely to remain in the country than their liberal-Westernized counterparts who make up the largest proportion by far of the “brain-drain”). The fusion of religion and state since the revolution has admittedly alienated many young people from Shiʿism; but it has successfully indoctrinated no small number, as well.³¹ Iran today may or may

 Though there are nuances that distinguish between them, these three designations refer to segments of the Iranian population that are strongly supportive of the Khomeinist regime.  A salient example of the success of Islamic Republican mass indoctrination in many areas crucial to the regime may be had from the virtually wall-to-wall, national outpouring of grief surrounding the “martyrdom” of Qods commander Qasem-e Solaimani, assassinated by U. S. forces in January, 2020. Solaimani was one of the key figures in what is unquestionably seen by a goodly number of Iranians (just how many and to what extent is a highly complex question) as the repressive machine of the Khomeinist state, as well as the primary culprit in the “squandering” of Iranian human and economic resources in overseas adventures condemned by the widespread slogan: “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon – Sacrifice my soul for Iran!” Nevertheless, by most accounts the mourning for his death was cross-the-board – his funeral was attended by millions – and included citizens from all political and religious persuasions (some anecdotal surveys, none of them statistically reliable, pointed to a preponderance of conservative regime supporters at the funeral; if this was the case, oppositionists must account for the existence and enthusiastic participation of over a million regime supporters). This phenomenon was nothing if not the direct result of years of

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not be “the only Muslim country where people are rapidly moving away from radical Islam,”³² but take the word “radical” out of that sentence and it becomes patently false. One anecdotal indication among many of the quantitative and qualitative increase in levels of ritual observance characterizing the Iranian post-revolutionary population is the proliferation of admonitions – some of them sounding almost desperate – issued by religious spokespeople over the last several decades specifically against excess in the performance of Islamic precepts. Take, for example, the turn-of-the-millennium media campaign against wiswās in wuḍūʾ, that is, “paranoia in matters of purification.” These severe drought years saw a concerted effort by regime exponents to curtail the use of water for ceremonial ablutions when not necessary. Dozens of learned lectures were delivered and endlessly re-broadcasted over the airwaves emphasizing legal opinions that permit prayer sans ritual lavation when (for instance) a believer is in doubt whether s/he has incurred “contamination” (najāsa) or “preclusion” (ḥadath, nawāqiḍu l- wuḍūʾ) of various sorts, or when s/he is in doubt whether s/he did in fact perform the stylized washing procedure at all.³³ In other words, the regime felt the need to step in and restrict the widespread, overly zealous discharge of a religious duty, in this case to protect the diminishing water supply. In recent years (to take another example) high-ranking jurists in Iran have devoted many a sermon – from the pulpit, on radio and television talk shows, in print and on websites – to the ever sorer subject of exaggerated lamentation and visitation rituals (azadari/tatbir, ziyarat). Indeed, while an ac-

media promotion in which Solaimani was built up as a caring, humble, pious, intrepid man of the people, etc. With all their cynicism toward regime propaganda, the Iranians “bought” this representation – partially, no doubt, because it had elements of truth to it – hook, line and sinker. Because Soleimani gained the admiration of his fellow countrymen primarily due to his role in quashing the ISIS threat, the mass solidarity surrounding his personality and demise may also be seen as indicating the perseverance of a strong Shiʿite religious consciousness among the populace.  Jahanbegloo, Iran, p. xvii.  Other televised lessons stressed that many perceived “violators of the state of purification” (nawāqiḍu l-wuḍūʾ) were only considered so by a minority of legal authorities, and the like. Classical fiqh, Shiʿi even more so than Sunni, is stuffed to the gills with such discussions and endless offshoots thereof. There is even an entire literature surrounding masʾale gui, the positing and mounting up of supererogatory strictures – primarily in the realm of purity (ṭahāra) – based on dubious legal constructions. The devil, the waswās or “whisperer” of the final chapter of the Qurʾan, is considered the culprit when a Muslim is overly cautious about (especially) ṭahāra ritual. For purity and Islamic law see Marion Holmes Katz, The Emergence of the Sunni Law of Ritual Purity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), and Z. Maghen, Virtues of the Flesh: Passion and Purity in Early Islamic Jurisprudence (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005). For the particular Shiʿi emphasis on the impurity of infidels, see Z. Maghen, “Strangers and Brothers: The Ritual Status of Unbelievers in Islamic Jurisprudence,” Medieval Encounters 12: 2 (2006).

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curate survey of the subject is impossible, it is this writer’s overall impression that far more ink is spilt and vocal cords exercised by Iranian clerics to combat this ill than its opposite: non-attendance at the Hosayniyyeh or a tapering off of pilgrimages to shrines. (Already over a century ago, Source of Emulation Mirza Hasan-e Shirazi was able to stop an entire nation from smoking with his legal decree against the Tobacco Regie; his fatwa prohibiting flagellation and bloodletting in Ḥusayn’s memory, on the other hand, was an utter failure). Here is the Supreme Leader: I am very sad to say that over the last three or four years we have witnessed the spread of certain practices in the context of the Muḥarram lamentation ceremonies that have been introduced and made popular and fashionable (bab mikonand va ravaj midahand) by ignorant persons – acts that perplex anyone who encounters them. For example, in days of old it was customary among the masses during the days of mourning for Ḥusayn to fasten locks upon their bodies. Of course, after a while the religious luminaries put a stop to this. But today once again, this custom has begun to spread amongst our people… …Of late they have come up with yet another strange, bizarre and unfamiliar innovation (bedʿat-e ʿajib va gharib va na-maʾnus), this time in connection with visits to the sacred sepulchers. From the moment they cross the threshold, they throw themselves prostrate on the ground and drag themselves on their chests all the way to the graves of the immaculate imams, upon whom be peace, slithering like snakes across the floor! You know that the resting places of the People of the House are found all across Iran, Iraq and Arabia, and the great scholars have always gone to pay homage to them. Have you ever heard of one of them doing such a thing!? If such an act were acceptable, recommended or preferred, these great men would have carried it out. But they never did! It is even reported that the late Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi, may God the Exalted be satisfied with him – that tremendous scholar and powerful, profound and intellectual mojtahed – prohibited kissing the thresholds (ʿatabeh-busi) upon ingress, even though this is considered by some to be “recommended” (mostaheb)…and even though to the best of my recollection there are reliable traditions enjoining the kissing of the thresholds. But despite the fact that this act is recommended, [Ayatollah Borujerdi] instructed us to refrain from it (i.e., from even momentarily bending over to kiss the threshold – Z. M.), so that our enemies should not get the impression that we are prostrating ourselves [in front of the graves], and launch a smear campaign against the Shiʿa… …And what of sword-smiting (qameh zadan)? This is also an illicit act…one cannot remain silent in the face of the spread of this mistaken practice. Taking a sword in hand and smacking its sharp blade against one’s forehead – one’s brain! – so that blood pours out! What does such a deed have to do with mourning!?…The hands of the clerics back then were tied. They could not say, “This act is reprehensible” and thereby put a stop to it. But today is a time of Islamic rule and Islamic self-assertion. We cannot allow the ahl al-bayt-adoring citizens of this country – though it be in the name of their love for the Ruler of Time, may our souls be sacrificed for him, or Ḥusayn son of ʿAlī, peace be upon him, or the Commander of the Faithful, prayers and peace be upon him – we cannot allow our citizens to be perceived by the rest of

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the Muslim and non-Muslim inhabitants of the world as a nation of superstitious, barbarous, irrational extremists… Today once again, this custom (i.e., sword-smiting – Z. M.) which is nothing but a sinful innovation, has begun to spread amongst the masses of believers, to such an extent that I feel that I have no choice but to turn to our beloved people and bring this matter to their attention… There was a time when here or there, in one corner or another, a small group of citizens would gather together, and far removed from the view of onlookers, would engage in sword-smiting…this took place in a limited number of private circles. But when all of a sudden several thousand people marching down the streets of Tehran or Qom or the cities of Azerbaijan or Khorasan unsheathe swords and sabers and begin striking their foreheads in unison – this is a spectacle that Imam Ḥusayn does not like…³⁴

No one who has been watching can have failed to notice the exponential increase in the size of the crowds participating in azadari events over the two decades since the turn of the Christian millennium: from thousands, to tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands (far more than gather, for instance, for official state holidays).³⁵

 Khameneʾi, Jehad-e farhangi, pp. 168 – 172. Besides evincing concern with the metastasizing phenomenon of overly zealous azadari, we sense here the age-old insecurity of the Shiʿite minority and the terrible fear that its enemies will use the excesses of the Shiʿa “extremists” (ghulāt) against the more moderate mainstream (including in specific the Wahhabi campaign against the veneration of tombs). There is also the fear of looking ridiculous and uncivilized, which in a different form and context was part of what led Reza Shah, e. g., to ban veil and turban (and azadari).  “The limited research on this matter suggests that Iranian society is still a religious one. A study in 2009, conducted by two Iranian sociologists – Abbas Kazemi and Mehdi Faraji – concluded that in comparison to 1975, four years before the revolution, Iranians are still very religious. The number of Iranians who pray or participate in socio-religious rituals has remained relatively unchanged. The number of people who fast has even increased” (A. R. Eshraqi, “Iranians under the Islamic Regime: More or Less Religious?” Aljazeera, 6 Aug., 2013). Abbas Amanat, who visited his ancestral homeland of Kashan in 2005, notes the traditional nickname of the place – “the Abode of Faith” (dār al-imān) – and marshals evidence to show that “it is not an exaggeration to suggest that the city has remained loyal to its old epithet up to this day.” He leaves open the question whether the many signs of widespread religiosity to be found there represent “old Shiʿi loyalties” alone, or the same mixed with “forced conformity” (Abbas Amanat, Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shiʿism [London: I. B. Tauris, 2009], p. vii). One factor militating for the former conclusion – that increasing popular participation in religious ritual is un-forced – is the very fact that it is increasing: in general, the earlier years after the revolution were those in which coercion was most widely applied in such areas, and such coercion has tapered off since. Another factor is, as just noted, what appears to be the inverse ratio between participation in post-revolutionary Khomeinist rituals, which seems to be on the wane, and participation in more traditional commemorations, which appears to be waxing. These are all, however, admittedly general impressions, the accuracy of all of which is extremely difficult to gauge given the many factors involved and the many obstacles to obtaining reliable information. Studies have been done, some of which show an

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In September of 2022, an estimated five million Iranians – nearly seven percent of the country’s population – left their homes and moved West, many of them for large parts of the journey on foot, in commemoration of the fortieth day following the Imam Husayn’s martyrdom. The Islamic Republican authorities, who are thoroughly in favor of this annual pilgrimage, had no choice but to close the Iran-Iraq border and beseech the Persian population to stay at home.³⁶ Such factors appear to indicate that the numbers of religiously observant citizens of the Islamic Republic are in fact on the ascent.³⁷ Are all the participants in these mass rituals pious Shiʿites? Certainly not. Unlike in much of the modern West, in the Middle East – and in Iran perhaps most of all – religious commitment is not a zero/one binary dichotomy: it is a spectrum, and a sliding one at that. It is extremely important for an understanding of Iranian-Islamic culture to grasp that not only are the numbers of North-Tehran partyincrease and others a decrease in religiosity, but even a sample review of these is beyond the scope of this work.  https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/roads-border-jammed-as-millions-of-iranian-pilgrimshead-to-iraq/2680364. Last accessed 06/10/2022.  This having been said, one cannot deny that there is evidence that militates for the (more widely accepted) opposite conclusion. Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, for instance, cites an Islamic Republican internal regime report according to which “resentment towards the state’s religious symbols is at an all time high,” and another one that laments that the majority of Iranian women “do not strictly follow the official diktats for wearing a veil” (“As Islamism Fades, Iran goes Nationalist,” New York Times, April 3rd, 2019. It should be noted, however, that according to this latter report/ survey – ʿAvamel-e moʾaththar bar ejraʾi shodan-e siyasatha-ye hejab va rahkarha-ye pishro – over half of the women in Iran wear the full length traditional chador, and do so for sincere religious reasons [p. 17], while the rest wear the more minimalist covering [hejab] for a variety of sincere and insincere reasons. These numbers could certainly be read to reflect a different trajectory than the one extracted by Ayatollahi Tabaar). The desire to throw off the yoke of (officially enforced) religion and live lives that resemble those of the Americans and Europeans that Iranian youth observe on the Internet, is a trend that unquestionably exists, and does and will play a major role in forging Iran’s immediate and long-term future. Still, we do not have the tools to gauge its extent in present day Iranian society, nor can we know whether counter-trends will overcome and reverse it (as they have certainly done in the past, more than once). Iran, as we have noted several times, is in the throes of a major and fateful kulturkampf. A final point is key: the falling away from religion of the younger generation is the lot of countries around the globe in recent times: the Islamic Republic has no monopoly on such a trend, which is largely a result of factors such as exposure to Western mores and entertainment via internet and social media. Thus, saddling the fact of the Khomeinist theocracy with primary responsibility for a flight from religion amongst the youth is far too simplistic. Indeed, one might argue that the Islamic Republican regime and its various education and indoctrination programs are at least a major barricade between the Iranian populace and the pull of secularism, or, put another way, that Khomeinism has functioned as a set of “brakes” on a trend toward secularism and libertinism that began as early as the 1960s (or 1920s) and has proceeded apace since that time.

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goers (of which we spoke above) matched and probably surpassed by the numbers of mosque attendees, but no small number of the party-goers themselves will be found the following morning or afternoon at the mosque, praising the Prophet and supplicating his descendants the immaculate Imams (and quite a few of them may well declare their undying love for those same holy figures whilst sprawled out drunk on the floor – or high on opium or Ecstasy – at the soirée the evening before).³⁸ Indeed, as time goes on in the Islamic Republic, religious ceremony and secular partying actually merge in many circles, the aptly named “raveazadari” being a particularly intense example of such “eclecticism.” Ali Reza Eshraqi, an Iranian reformist journalist, describes such nonchalant “hybridity”: This behaviour of course is not limited to wearing lipstick while praying. I know Iranians who break their fast with a glass of wine, people who start fornication with a bismillah- In the name of God, and homosexuals who sport a beard because it is recommended in Islam.³⁹

Two characteristics of Iran’s religious tradition help explain this seemingly curious phenomenon. First, Islam in general has always looked upon itself as dīnu l-yusr, “the religion of ease,” and dīnu l-rukhṣa, “the religion of leniency.”⁴⁰ The classical

 Anyone who has participated in a traditional Cairene post-fast ḥafla during one of the evenings of the holy, solemn month of Ramadan – complete with smorgasbord, raucous music and even belly-dancers – comprehends well what the Apostle of Allah meant when he urged, referring to the oscillation between the contradictory moods of sanctity and levity, that “there is a time for this, and a time for that” (sāʿtān wa sāʿtān – Muslim, Kitāb al-Tawba, 49: 2 [2748]). No less a Muslim personage than the eleventh century thinker Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), according to his own admission, prayed in the mosque during the day and drank significant quantities of wine during the evening. The sliding spectrum of Iranian (and Islamic) religiosity, combined with the many other obstacles facing anyone – let alone a non-Muslim foreigner – who would assess the levels of belief and observance of a nation of some eighty million people, helps explain why otherwise astute authors like Robert Baer can speak of “the veneer of Islam” that cloaks the genuine Iranian ethos on page four of his The Devil We Know, and then complain on page seven that the United States does not “understand Iran for what it is: a country that’s deeply pious…” The extreme complexity of this issue may also account for the same author’s incomprehensible claim a page later that “Iran’s religious parties generally receive only about ten percent of the vote” (Robert Baer, The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower [New York: Crown Publishers, 2008]).  Eshraqi, “Iranians.” Saeid Golkar refers to this phenomenon as “post-modernist hybridity” in an instructive article (file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/Cultural_Heterogeneity_in_Post_Revolutio.pdf ).  Islam as the dīn al-yusr or “religion of ease” is generally opposed by the classical sources to Judaism as the dīn al-ʿuṣr or “religion of hardship.” See M. J. Kister, “On ’concessions’ and conduct: A Study in Early Hadith,” originally published in Studies on the First Century of Islamic Society, ed. G. H. A. Juynboll (Carbondale: South Illinois University Press, 1982) and reprinted in M. J. Kister, Society and Religion from Jāhiliyya to Islam (Aldershot: Variorum, 1990). For a book-length study

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sources of the faith show the Deity on dozens of occasions “relaxing” provisions that He Himself had promulgated but that had proven too arduous for the fledgling Muslim community. “Allah desires to decrease your difficulties,” goes the consistent Qurʿanic refrain, “He does not impose on any soul that which is beyond its ability.”⁴¹ “Allah’s mercy was made manifest,” writes the preeminent historian and scriptural exegete of early Islam, Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, “in that He charged the Muslims with obligations, and then relieved them of the same, not burdening them with more than they could bear.”⁴² This divine predilection for indulgence and concession could even lead the Almighty to perform a volte face in midscriptural revelation. Reacting to the recidivism of a particularly incorrigible apostate – he had converted to Christianity and defected to the Byzantine side – Allah was in the midst of (as it were) hurling down from heaven a furious revelation to the effect that God does not guide the evildoers! The recompense [of such offenders] shall be the curse of God, the angels and all men; under it they will abide for all eternity. Their chastisement shall not be lightened, neither shall they ever be granted a reprieve…

Just at that moment, the apostate came begging to return to the fold, and Allah “immediately abrogated His verdict by revealing [the verse’s counteractive conclusion]: ‘…except for those who repent and mend their ways, for Allah is forgiving, merciful.’”⁴³ The Prophet Muḥammad practiced imitatio dei on this score: his customary response upon being informed of a believer’s anxiety about having committed a ritual infraction was to smile in dismissal or even “laugh so hard that his back molars came into view” (ḍaḥika ḥattā badat nawājidhuhu). His successors the caliphs and (in Shiʿism) the Imams, and later the fuqahāʾ (scholar-jurists) in their turn, followed the example of Allah’s Apostle. They adjusted regulations to suit the people’s needs, created countless loopholes (ḥiyal) for believers to crawl through, allowed a parade of extenuating circumstances to excuse improper behavior, provided simple methods of atonement (and even simpler substitutes for these if they were found to be overly taxing), infused the religion’s judicial profession with a propensity for “looking the other way,” and in general forged a legal, theological, social and cultural

of this phenomenon see Z. Maghen, After Hardship Cometh Ease: The Jews as Backdrop for Muslim Moderation (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006).  A concatenation of Q. 4: 28 and 2: 286.  Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān ʿan tafsīr āy al-Qurʾān (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, n.d.), 4: 428  Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-bayān, 3: 460 – 62.

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system informed by an exceptional degree of flexibility and even deliberate laxity. For centuries much of Islamic law was honored in the breach, and the consistently derelict masses, as long as they testified to the truth of the Muslim creed, were accepted as believing members of the community (and emphatically saw themselves as such). The Iranian revolution hardened some of the softer edges of this “easygoing” system, but for the most part left it intact and softened it even further, taking full advantage in the context of the new theocratic experiment of the extensive room for maneuver, the principle of maṣlaḥa (easing of restrictions in the common interest), the high tolerance for transgression, and the enduring willingness to embrace the transgressor that the system offered.⁴⁴ “Iranian Islam,” to paraphrase Yann Richard, “is closer to humanity than to God.”⁴⁵ To the above should be added a second set of factors that are specific to Shiʿite Islam. Shiʿism centers around a set of venerated sacred personages – the Imams⁴⁶ – who function, along with their other roles, as intermediaries (in both directions) between the believer and his/her Lord, and as intercessors for sinners in this life and at Judgment Day. Perhaps the greatest hadith scholar produced by the Shiʿite sect, Muḥammad Bāqir al-Majlisī (d. 1698), described the twelve imams as …the clear signs by which God shows us the way of truth, and the brilliant lamps by which He illuminates the night as day. Those who follow these Proofs and Guides will be escorted along the right path, whereas those who go astray will perish under the weight of their iniquity… Praised be the pure and immaculate People of the Prophet’s House (ahl al-bayt, i. e. Muḥammad’s daughter Fāṭima and the Imams – Z. M.), who are the conduit through which God pours forth His abundant bounty upon the inhabitants of the world, and who are the agents through which He will save all those who are destined to be saved at the Resurrection…God says: “Anybody who comes to me with even a mustard seed’s worth of love in his heart for one of the Imams, will be immediately ushered into My Garden. They are the chosen ones of creation, through them I deliver those whom I deliver and damn those whom I damn.”⁴⁷

If this sounds a bit like Christianity, that is because Shiʿism is a bit like Christianity – indeed, more than a bit – in this and not a few other respects. From the Shiʿite perspective one might say that God so loved the world that He sent the Prophet Muḥammad and his twelve apostles – the Imams – that whosoever believeth on them shall not perish, but have everlasting life. These “Fourteen Infallible Ones”  No one has shown this better or more thoroughly than Asghar Schirazi in his Constitution of Iran: Politics and the State in the Islamic Republic (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997).  Richard, Shiʿite Islam, p. 149.  The title “Imam” is also applied to prayer leaders, political leaders in the medieval period, and to Ayatollah Khomeini (and some other venerated latter-day clerics), but these usages should not be confused with the Twelve Pure Imams.  Muḥammad Bāqir al-Majlisī, Biḥār al-anwār, chap. 28, p. 1, chap. 27, section 10, hadith 10.

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(with the inclusion of Muḥammad and his daughter Fāṭima) were “formed from the light of Allah’s inner essence,” and it is an axiom of Shiʿism that “God cannot be known but through them.”⁴⁸ It follows that “he who dies without acknowledging the Imam of his time dies the death of an infidel”⁴⁹ and that “No one enters paradise save those who recognize us [i. e., the imams] and those whom we ourselves recognize.”⁵⁰ A Shiʿite Muslim’s “personal relationship” with the charismatic figures of the imams – especially the first (ʿAlī), third (Ḥusayn) and twelfth (the awaited Mahdī or Savior) – is thus the lynchpin of his religiosity, even more so than the prescriptions and proscriptions of the law. “Praise the Lord who has made ardor for ʿAlī and belief in Allah the two roads to salvation,” enthused the Prophet Muḥammad according to a well-known Shiʿite tradition. “No one who loves ʿAlī shall enter Hell, and no one who hates ʿAlī shall enter Heaven.”⁵¹ Faith in this sense taking precedence over works, the infringement of a sharīʿa precept (such as imbibing intoxicants), even when perpetrated repeatedly, need not alienate the believer from his community or his creed. The love he bears the Imam(s) will intercede and redeem him when it really counts, that is, after death, or at the Resurrection: “If the imams intervene on behalf of My creatures, then I [Allah] will forgive them and escort them into Paradise.”⁵² “Go thou,” the Prophet Muḥammad will say to his grandson Ḥusayn on Resurrection Day, “and decline from the flames everyone who has in his lifetime shed but a single tear for thee, everyone who has performed a pilgrimage to thy shrine, everyone who has mourned for thee or written tragic verse for thee, and bear each and all with thee to paradise.”⁵³ “Love for ʿAlī consumes all sins as fire consumes dry wood.”⁵⁴ Ḥusayn’s half-brother ʿAbbās declared in a taʿziyeh passion play that he would have “cornered all the many soldiers of Yazīd and erased the name of that infidel dog from the face of the earth” were it not for the fact that “the Shiʿa are sinners and are in need of Ḥusayn’s martyrdom and intercession.”⁵⁵

 Majlisī, Biḥār, chap. 35, hadith 24.  Kulaynī, Uṣūl, 1: 375.  A hadith of Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq cited by Corbin, Nasr et al (eds.), Shiʿism, p. 180. Also “No one enters the fire save those who deny us and whom we ourselves deny” (Nasr et al [eds.], Shiism, p. 182).  Majlisī, Biḥār, 35.1.25  Majlisī, Biḥār, 27.10. 7: idhā tashaffaʿū bihim ilā khalqī shafaʿtuhum (lit. “if they are asked to intercede on My creature’s behalf…”).  Nasr et al (eds.), Shiʿism, p. 254.  Cited from al-Suyūṭī in Goldziher, Introduction, p. 182.  Chelkowski, Alserat, 152. The notion that Ḥusayn was destined to die, even to die in order to redeem his sinning flock, is widespread in Shiʿite literature. This connects to the question of whether Ḥusayn went knowingly, even deliberately, to his death, a question that would be debated with especial vigor in the twentieth century (see the discussion of the work entitled Shahid-e Javid fur-

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“The members of the Holy Family (ahl al-bayt),” wrote none other than Sunni super-jurist Muḥammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī, “shall be my intercessors on the day of my standing before God, when men shall behold great portents.⁵⁶ A single word from “Fāṭima the Virgin” (Arab. Fāṭima al-batūl, Pers. Fateme-ye bakereh) – also known, like Mary, as “the mother of her Father” (Arab. ummu abīhā, Pers. madar-e pedarash, in both cases because her offspring is conflated with God the Father) – wipes clean a lifetime’s worth of a believer’s misdeeds.⁵⁷ Many a Shiʿite preacher opens his homily by asking God to “increase our reward through the martyrdom of Fāṭima the Resplendent,” some even playing on the phonetic and orthographic resemblance between “Fadak” – the garden oasis claimed by, but denied to, this daughter of the Prophet – and Arabic fadāk, meaning “your ransom”: in both cases, Fāṭima’s sacrifice is our redemption.⁵⁸ “The first thing about which the be-

ther on). Traditions like that according to which the Prophet Muḥammad would dress his two grandsons Ḥasan and Ḥusayn in green and red nightgowns respectively in order to foreshadow that the first would die of poison and the second by the (poisoned) sword, are rife in the sources. (The “penitents” who ostensibly sought revenge for Ḥusayn in 684 CE, are portrayed as being much more interested in purgatorial martyrdom than vengeance – Dakake, Charismatic Community, p. 91). But there is also a great deal of material that militates for the opposing position, scil., that Ḥusayn sought victory and thought he had a chance of achieving it. Shaykh Mufīd and others record traditions to the effect that the third imam, his back against the wall, was even willing to conduct negotiations and pursue a modus Vivendi with the caliph Yazīd, or in other words, that he did not seek death.  Cited in Ayoub, Redemptive Suffering, p. 161. al-Shāfiʿī was the founder of the legal school or madhhab that bears his name. Instances of Sunni appreciation of, even adoration for, the ahl albayt are not rare. al-Shāfiʿī was a student of sixth Shiʿite imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq’s daughter al-Sayyida Nafīsa. He was also a student of founder of the Mālikī madhhab, Mālik b. Anas, who was himself a student of al-Ṣādiq, together with founder of the Ḥanafī madhhab Abū Ḥanīfa. Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, founder of the fourth and final Sunni madhhab, which became known for its fierce anti-Shiʿism, reputedly said: “ʻThe caliphate did not ornament ʿAlī; rather, ʿAlī ornamented the caliphate” (inna ʿaliyyan lam tazinhu l-khilāfatu wa lakinnahu zānahā). The renowned Ḥanbalī scholar and present-day touchstone of Salafi-Jihadism, Taqī al-Dīn b. Taymiyya (d. 1328), praised ʿAlī and confirmed that “the fact that ʿAlī is the first of the People of the House (ahl al-bayt) is universally accepted by the Muslims and is too obviously true to warrant discussion” (Ibn Taymiyya, Majmūʿ alfatāwā [Mecca: Khādim al-Ḥaramayn al-Sharīfayn, n.d.], vol. 4, p. 496).  Fāṭima, the preeminent intercessor for the dead, prays on their behalf perpetually since she is exempt from the onset of menses that prevents prayer (allati lan tara humra qat, ay lan tahdha). Not for nothing did the great Louis Massignon employ the term “hyperdulia” – properly used in connection with the Mother Mary alone – to describe the profound adoration on the part of Shiʿites for Fāṭima.  Aʿẓama ajrakum bi-shahādatihā wa jaʿala l-fadaka fidākum. The “theft” of Fadak – part of the lands taken as booty by Muḥammad from the Jews of Khaybar – by Abū Bakr (who insisted that the Prophet had no heirs and the land should revert to the Muslim community at large) is

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liever will be questioned after death,” the sixth imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq informed his flock, “is his walāya, that is, his love (maḥabba) for us, the imams.”⁵⁹ Henry Corbin writes: The profession of this love [for the imams], of this walāya, takes precedence over all the obligations of the Shariʿa, not only in the sense that it alone authenticates the performance of these obligations, but also because it can compensate for the failure to meet them.⁶⁰

a highly contentious issue down the present, and plays a central part in the Shiʿite narrative of “deprivation” or “oppression” (mazlumiyya).  Cited in M. A. Moezzi, “Le Shiʿisme doctrinal et le fait politique,” in M. Kotobi (ed.), Le Grand Satan et la Tulipe: Iran, une premiere republique (Paris: Institut Superieur de gestion, 1983), p. 71. Walāya, usually translated into Persian as dusti, is the pregnant but elusive term that describes the relationship of loyalty, obedience, trust and (as Henry Corbin emphasized) love that the Shiʿite adherent should ideally experience with the imams in general, and the Twelfth Imam in particular (the fifth imam, Muḥammad al-Bāqir, urged: “Religion is love and love is religion” [Dakake, Charismatic Community, p. 121]).  Henry Corbin, “The Meaning of the Imam for Shiʿi Spirituality,” translated in Nasr, Shiʿism, p. 169. One can accept this claim of Corbin’s without accepting some of the further claims he bases upon it, for instance, that “Nothing could be less legalistic than a religion thus conceived in essence.” Rather, Shiʿism shares its attitude to devotion and salvation with Christianity and its attitude to exegesis and jurisprudence with Judaism. Walāya is often used interchangeably with wilāya, or with an overlap in meaning between them (the denotation of the latter term is closer to “authority,” and it can therefore also be construed as the mirror image of the former: one cultivates walāya to another who is in a position of wilāya). Goldziher, for instance, regularly uses wilāya to mean what Corbin intends here by walāya (and see Haider, Shiʿi Islam, p. 32, n. 2). A good vantage point whence to view the intersection between the two terms is the modern usage velayati/wilāyatī to denote those who support the imams’ supernatural abilities and limitless knowledge (as opposed to the more “moderate” outlook on these sacred figures, advocated in medieval times by the likes of Shaykh Mufīd and al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā, and taken up again in the twentieth century by Shariʿati and company – see the discussion below of tafwīḍ vs. taqṣīr). At a minimum, walāya/wilāya – attaching oneself to the imams – is the sixth pillar of Islam in Shiʿi doctrine (at a maximum it is often described as the bedrock foundation of the faith, and sometimes even replaces the double testimony – the shahādatān – in Shiʿite enumerations of the five pillars of Islam). It entails also its corollary, barā’a, dissociation from the enemies of the ahl al-bayt. A faithful Shiʿi is a mutawallī (one who is possessed of walāya), a designation employed especially by the Shiʿa of Lebanon (for an extensive and informative discussion of walāya, see Dakake, Charismatic Community, pp. 15 – 69 and passim. For possible origins of the term and concept of barā’a, see Dakake, Charismatic Community, pp. 65 – 66). Sunni tradition, on the other hand, adduces a plethora of scriptural verses and hadiths in which walāya/wilāya is a duty owed to God alone, partially as a polemic against the Shiʿi notion of walāya/wilāya to the imam. Though one shouldn’t hang too much on mere phraseology, statements such as “O believers in Ḥusayn son of ʿAlī!” (ay moʾmenin beh Hosayn b. ʿAli) certainly roll off the tongues of Shiʿite preachers more easily than statements like “O believers in Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allah!” would escape the throats of their Sunni counterparts.

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Adam’s Original Sin was forgiven, according to Muslim scripture, when he uttered “the words he had received from his Lord” (Qurʿan 2: 37), those words being, according to a Shiʿite tradition: “Muḥammad, ʿAlī, Fāṭima (and their two sons) Ḥasan and Ḥusayn.” Even the Devil, we are reminded by Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi, will be pardoned at the Eschaton through the good offices of these five.⁶¹ In the meantime, back in this life, the local cleric who, according to (Uṣūlī) Shiʿite doctrine, is the terrestrial representative of the Imam(s), may be repaired to for purposes of “confession” and shorter-term “absolution.” Go, says the mullah essentially, and sin no more.⁶² (This, of course, smacks not just of Christianity but specifically of Catholicism; not for nothing is Iran, with what may instructively be described as its Shiʿite Liberation Theology, prancing through wide open doors all across predominantly Catholic Central and South America). Indeed, the cleric is eminently unnecessary for this procedure, and surprisingly enough (according to Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi), even the imams may be dispensed with when seeking forgiveness “in the short run” (as opposed to at the Resurrection). “God is like a mother,” he explains: She it is who reprimands us as children, punishes us, even turns her back upon us when we behave wrongly. We are banished from her room, from her presence, alone, ashamed, miserable. We turn this way and that seeking solace, assistance, forgiveness and indeed, sustenance – who else, after all, can provide us with food? Who will help us? Who will facilitate our return to our mother’s good graces, to her love, to her incomparable embrace? Then it is that we lift up our eyes and perceive, that although we were cast out from her quarters to the hallway, to the courtyard, or even out of doors – she is there. She is waiting for us. She has never left us. As we read in the Fifth Supplication: “I seek intercession with You from You” (istashfaʿtu bi-ka ilayka). In that moment we realize that she is our only recourse, she and only she our intercessor, our only salvation from her own kindled wrath. We turn to her, run to her, fall into her waiting arms. She warms us, caresses us, comforts us. In a strange but beautiful narration, a report quoting the divine (hadith qudsī), we read that as unimagin-

 Mohammad Taqi-ye Mesbah-e-Yazdi, Jami az zolale-e Kawthar (Tehran: Markaz-e Enteshar-e Moʾassase-ye Amuzesh va Parvaresh-e Emam Khomeini, 1385), p. 116. Biḥār, 27. 11. 1. Maryam allatī aḥṣanat farjahā – Biḥār 35. 1. 12; …http://www.mezan.net/mawsouat/fatima/names/batool. html http://momo.parsiblog.com/Archive67213.htm. Last accessed 11/10/2022. In general Shiʿism propagates a “faith over works” theology that jibes well with Christianity (and Murjiʾism – see Dakake, Charismatic Community, pp. 126 – 139). While there were (and still are) voices of “moderation,” influenced by the Muʿtazilite emphasis on the individual’s ability to improve his lot through good deeds, the almost magical salvific power of walāya may be said to have won out. Still, none of this is to say that Shiʿism past or present does not emphasize the importance of righteous behavior.  The phenomenon of Tehran partiers repairing to a clergyman – or simply praying – for forgiveness and then returning the next night to the party scene might perhaps be compared to the oftencountered images of mafia men, burlesque dancers or heavy metal rock stars – for instance – toting crosses around their necks.

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ably elated as a person is when, on the verge of expiring from thirst in the desert, he espies his entourage approaching with life-giving water, God is infinitely more delighted when He perceives a sinner trudging back to Him from the depths of his debauchery and despair. No matter how far you have departed from His mercy, He is there with you in your exile. No matter how many times you have rebelled against His sacred law, His arms are open to forgive you.⁶³

Prayer, charity and other good deeds “extinguish transgression as water extinguishes fire.”⁶⁴ One can fall and then rise again, time after time. One can engage in the sensual, then the sacred, then the sensual, then the sacred again. In short, the shenanigans of the juvenescent revelers who – to judge by the exuberant reports in the Western press – have all but turned Tehran into the region’s premier party-town, do not signal the collapse of the Islamic Republic. They do not even necessarily signal the collapse of these young people’s own religio-cultural loyalty (to say nothing of their national allegiance, which remains for the most part quite intact).

Through the Looking Glass Most articles about the underground current of febrile sensuality purportedly coursing through the Iranian body politic are accompanied by illustrative photographs, the most ubiquitous genre of which involves variations on the theme of a chador-clad woman with her back to the camera staring through a store window at a manikin wearing a barely knee-length skirt and stylish blouse. The contrast between the two figures could hardly be starker and makes a powerful impression on the reader, as does what we assume to be the wistful look flitting across the covered lady’s face: “Ah, perhaps in another life…” she is musing to herself, the clear pane glass symbolizing the impermeable religious and cultural barrier that stands between her and a liberated, adventurous existence. Well, that is one way to read the picture – the wrong way. The skirt and blouse are, after all, on sale in Tehran, and could we rotate the angle of the camera one hundred and eighty degrees so as to see the female shopper from the front, we would discover that the expression on her face is not wistful, but calculating: she is trying to figure out how far she can bargain down the price of the outfit, because she is going to buy it – and not “in another life,” but in a day or two. She will take it home and wear it in her house in front of her family and especially

 IRIB4, 4/18/2013. Sharh-e Monajat-e khams ʿashare  al-ṣadaqatu tuṭfiʾu l-khaṭīʾata kamā yuṭfiʾu l-māʾu l-nār.

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her husband, and conceal it from other men when walking down the street with the help of her (not necessarily monochromatic and quite possibly designer) chador, the same way that Western women (and men) dress differently in the privacy of their own homes or in the presence of their loved ones than they do on the street or at work (and the same way that women in American or European society are still required by law, even in this “progressive” day and age, to cover up more than men). The modesty lines are drawn differently in Iran and other Muslim countries than they are in most of the non-Muslim world – just as they are (or were until recently) drawn differently in many African tribes than they are in (comparatively prudish) Western communities – but the principle of “different garb for different contexts” is the same everywhere. And it always has been: “Among the Lydians and the Barbarians in general,” writes Herodotus, referring to the peoples of Asia, “it is reckoned a deep disgrace, even to a man, to be seen naked.” “Among the wise maxims laid down by our ancestors,” the same historian quotes Gyges son of Dascylus reproving his wayward master King Candaules, “is this: ‘Let each look upon his own.’”⁶⁵ Iranian Shiʿite consciousness, shot through as it is with the “illuminationist” theosophy of homegrown mystical Neoplatonists from Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi in the twelfth century to Hadi-ye Sabzevari in the nineteenth, harbors what is in modern Western eyes a highly counterintuitive attitude toward beauty: that it should be concealed. Beauty is deeply valued, and like all valuable things, it is not to be left lying about for all and sundry to ogle, covet and paw, but must be secreted from the public eye. The more aesthetically pleasing the entity, the more profoundly it must be hidden, which is why Allah – the unrivaled epitome of loveliness – is conceived as invisible (and why Islam is styled, by its own scripture, the religion of “those who believe in invisibility” – Qurʿan 2: 3 – alladhīna yuʾminūna bi-l-ghayb). The Sufi seeker is vouchsafed a vision of the Divine Beloved only after he achieves gnosis or ʿirfān, the Arabic term (like its Hebrew equivalent, yedaʿ) connoting both intellectual and carnal knowledge. Familiarity is the sine qua non of exposure. Human beings, as the Deity’s vicegerents (khalīfatu llāh), are commanded to follow His lead in this as in every other matter: they may reveal their beauty only to those with whom they are intimate. The chador or full-length female covering in Iran is conceived of not as an attack on beauty, but as a defense thereof. The Western powers are not, at any rate, content to sit idly by on the sidelines and merely comment upon the wanton escapades of Iran’s young and restless. In line with the much-touted policy of “promoting regime change” in Tehran, the ex-

 Herodotus, The Persian Wars (trans. George Rawlinson, Toronto: Random House, 1942), pp. 7– 8.

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ecutive and legislative branches of France, Germany and especially Great Britain and the United States have, as incredible as this may seem, officially adopted a strategy of encouraging this budding libertinism in Iran. The governments of these countries annually allocate many millions of dollars to support Persian speaking satellite television stations “in exile” that do not scruple to beam, among other things, a succession of racy and even lubricious images directly into the Islamic Republic, in what can only be described as an unabashed campaign to seduce Iranians away from their religious lifestyle. The BBC Persian Language Service, when not mocking mullahs or hosting opposition figures (and only opposition figures), specializes in runway fashion shows, punk rock concerts, hiphop videos, “X-treme” sports and – in order to really get under the skin of the revolutionary ayatollahs – the occasional documentary on Bahaʾis (the break-away Shiʿite sect that morphed into a whole new universalist religion and is anathema to the clerics).⁶⁶ The cooking program on the Persian “Voice of France” is not above instructing its Iranian Muslim viewers on how to prepare cochon de lait and serve it up with a fine Chenin Blanc. But the “Voice of America” takes home first prize for most ignoble, tasteless, vulgar, and indubitably bound-to-backfire Persian programming. On the Friday after the Ashura in 2015 – the annual commemoration of the martyrdom of the Imam Ḥusayn – as Shiʿites across Iran and elsewhere gathered in mosques to continue mourning the massacre of the Prophet Muḥammad’s family and listen attentively to impassioned sermons about selflessness, godliness, perseverance, tragedy, purity, chastity, struggle and transcendence, the VOA chose to offer the following mid-day line-up: 11: 00 – Excerpts from a new Broadway Musical; 11: 15 – coverage of an academic conference in Europe on Zoroastrianism (!); 11: 45 – Footage of several Green Movement protesters shouting “Death to Khameneʾi!” during the Ashura march of 2009; 12: 00 – a Florida Spring Break montage (!!); 12: 05 – Iranian exile artist Farshid Amin singing his latest hit-single, Hayf – “Pity for the Land of the Aryans!” – against background pictures of Persepolis (the ancient Achaemenid capital), the grave of King Cyrus (founder of the Achaemenid dynas-

 The BBC Persian Language Service has had a long history of taking sides in Iranian affairs, from Ann Lambton’s propaganda against Reza Shah on the eve of his ouster to what many perceived to be the station’s partiality to Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. The Persian language version of The Independent responded to the death of Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi, one of the premier Sources of Emulation in contemporary Iran, by publishing a satirical piece: https://www.in dependentpersian.com/node/111066/%D8%AF%DB%8C%D8%AF%DA%AF%D8%A7%D9%87/%D9% 85%D8%B5%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%AD-%DB%8C%D8%B2%D8%AF%DB%8C-%D8%AF%D8%B1-% D8%A2%D8%B1%D8%B2%D9%88%DB%8C-%DA%AF%D8%A7%D8%B2-%DA%AF%D8%B1%D9% 81%D8%AA%D9%86-%D9%BE%D8%A7%DB%8C-%D8%AE%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%86%D9%87%E2% 80%8C%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%8C-%D8%B1%D9%81%D8%AA . Last accessed 10/10/2022.

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ty), the ousted Pahlavi Shah, and (recurrently) a buxom young lady with décolletage; and, last but not least, at 12: 15: “a VOA Special Report: The Return of Women’s Roller Derby.” In the context of this final item, Iranian viewers, on one of their most solemn religious occasions, were treated to highlights of a recent “bout” pitting the “Doomsday Bunnies” against the “Slaughter County Roller Vixens”; to an interview with team-captain “Darth Maul Her,” who earned unanimous praise from her subordinates as well as her competitors for being a “bitchin’ ass blocker”; and to a freeze frame of the “roller girls” in circular huddle, with faces to the ground and be-thonged buttocks thrust high in the air. Flipping back and forth between this less than decorous image and the Iranian stations, where tens of thousands of Muslims could be seen assuming a similar posture as they performed their noon-day prayers; then watching a preacher in Isfahan exhort the weeping families of fallen soldiers to bear their bereavement in the exemplary manner in which Ḥusayn’s sister Zaynab had endured the agony of seeing her sons massacred one by one at Karbala, while back on the VOA, opposing Roller Derby team captain “Rogue Hazard” exhorted the members of her squad to “make those smarmy bitches eat floor!” – this surreal juxtaposition went a long way, at least for the present author, toward explaining why Islam and the West are currently experiencing, to put it delicately, “a failure to communicate.” It is difficult, when presented with such shameless attempts to beam “tantalizing” material into Iranian living rooms (and on a somber holy day, to boot), to dismiss as mere paranoia, propaganda or demagoguery Ayatollah Khameneʾi’s warning to the effect that Today the enemy is active on a variety of fronts. One of these fronts is our young people in the schools. These, our dearest young people, our chaste boys and girls, these are the children of our nation. Their pure hearts, pure bodies and pure minds are, as we speak, being filled with lust and impure thoughts by various and sundry forms of filth, by the excitement of the carnal urge, by the broadcast and distribution of erotic images, by the dissemination of videos, film, cassettes and the like depicting unheard-of baseness. They seek to pollute our children’s pure minds and drag them down into moral corruption.⁶⁷

 Khameneʾi, Jehad-e farhangi, pp. 151– 152. Ayatollah Khameneʾi has been raising a hue and cry about the moral decadence emanating from the West and suffusing Iranian Islamic society for six decades. In 1964 he preached to a mosque audience, warning that “[The Iranian nation’s] present leaders noticed that they could not infiltrate society under any circumstances and remove the Qurʾan from the hearts of the people, so the first thing they did was feed the people the perilous poison of Satanic lusts (shahavatha-ye shaytani)…their desire is to corrupt the thoughts of our youth with their poison, with naked and nude pictures of women, and mislead our daughters. They are driving us toward destruction, and they call it “the New Civilization” (tamaddon-e jadid – cited in Hovsepian, Political Ideology, p. 33). Reminiscing about his childhood, Khameneʾi asserted that “the [Pahlavi] authorities of that time did their best to pollute parks and public spaces with

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Yvette Hovsepian-Bearce speaks of the Supreme Leader’s “profound anxiety” concerning the “Western cultural incursion.” He regularly exhorts government officials, intellectuals and others to “give the question of culture priority over all other aspects and projects,” calling it “a war zone” (farhang yek jang ast).⁶⁸ The mullahs, in short, will not be bested by mini-skirts without putting up a serious fight, and they are in possession of more “ammunition” than is generally acknowledged. We address aspects of this question in more depth below.

C. The Greens against the theocracy Westerners were excited in the summer of 2009 by the post-electoral outburst of resentment that brought tens of thousands of Iranian citizens into the streets and looked (for a day or two) like it might snowball into full blown civil war. What quickly became known as the “Green Movement” (jonbesh-e-sabz) was perceived abroad as anti-theocratic – that is, opposed to Khomeini’s pivotal notion of “the Guardianship of the Jurist” (velayat-e-faqih) – and pro-Western. Such a perception should not go unchallenged. The leaders of the Green Movement – former speaker of parliament Ayatollah Mehdi-ye Karroubi, former president of the Republic Hojjatoleslam Mohammad-e Khatami, and especially former prime-minister Mir Hosayn-e Musavi – are in many ways the most radical and uncompromising Khomeinists living in Iran today. Musavi, known by his supporters as mahbub-eemam or “the beloved of the Imam [Khomeini],” stressed in various formulations in every communiqué he issued since the aftermath of the contested elections that the “principle aspiration uniting the many diverse components making up the Green Movement” is the “revival of the luminescence of the days of the Imam” (tajdid-e-nuraniyyat-e-ayam-e-emam) and the “return to the pristine principles of the Islamic Revolution.” Musavi regularly glorified the hostage taking at the American embassy; bragged about having personally torpedoed the “fuel rods for uranium” deal with France that might have ended the nuclear standoff (and which President Ahmadinejad had been on the brink of signing); and “beseech[ed] Allah the Exalted to assist us in keeping our distance from foreign influences and coming closer to

lewdness and corruption. This ʻproject’ was carried out deliberately and systematically; at the time we could only guess that matters were thus, but later on, when we unearthed more evidence and information, it became clear that that was indeed the case. That is, the corruption was planned from the outset as part of the project. Therefore, during our childhood, we could not avail ourselves of such diversions [as parks and playgrounds]” (“Tafrih-e dowran-e talabegi,” https://farsi.khamenei.ir/memory-content?id=3996).  Hovsepian, Political Ideology, p. 181.

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the principles of the hero of Ghadīr (i. e., the Imam ʿAlī).”⁶⁹ “We are neither Americans nor English,” he emphasized to his followers and fellow countrymen. “To date we have not sent any congratulatory cards to the leaders of large polities (a humiliating dig at his political nemesis, Ahmadinejad, who persistently did just this and never received a single response), nor do we in any way hope for their friendship.” (This last is not true: Musavi did appear, on the whole, to hope for improved relations with the West in general, and with the U. S. in particular, under the proper conditions – just not one wit more than Ahmadinejad himself hoped for it, and indeed probably less). Khatami, for his part, lauds Khomeini in the most hyperbolic terms,⁷⁰ and this celebrated advocate of pluralism, tolerance, diversity and the “dialogue of civilizations” shows his true colors in Persian, where he lashes out against “eclectic schools of thought influenced by alien ideas” that “seek to clothe heretical concepts with the outer garment of Islam.” He declares repeatedly and without hesitation that “Islam is the final religion, and as such must at all times and in all places reign supreme over humanity.”⁷¹ Ayatollah Karroubi was one of Khomeini’s right-hand men, and was far closer to the founder of the Islamic Republic than anyone in Ahmadinejad’s cabinet. Considered the “most moderate” of the trio and most closely identified with the reformist camp, this cleric (who married his wife when she was fourteen)⁷² can nevertheless state categorically that “it is incumbent upon us to try and establish cordial and constructive relations with all of the countries in the world – the Big Satan and Little Satan excluded, of course.”⁷³ These men and their supporters famously disparage the ideology of their conservative-fundamentalist opponents as “American Islam.”⁷⁴  See Mousavi communiqués 5, 13, 14, 17 and 16 respectively.  E. g., Mohammad-e Khatami, Bim-e-mowj (Tehran: Islamic Ministry of Culture and Guidence, 1378), pp. 29 and 33. In general, Iranian “reformists” argue with great vigor down to the present day that they are the true disciples of the Father of the Revolution, whereas their rivals in the “conservative” camp have deviated from the “line of the Imam” in myriad ways and indeed, opposed Khomeini from the very beginning. Whether this is true or not is a highly complex, if not unanswerable, question, but it should be noted that when push came to shove in the context of the 2022 assassination attempt on Salman Rushdie, it was the osul-garayan who applauded this long awaited implementation of Khomeini’s decree, whereas the eslah talaban largely maintained an embarrassed silence (or hinted that the assassin was “acting of his own accord” – whatever that means).  Khatami, Bim-e Mowj, pp. 81 and 20.  The phenomenon of child brides was not out of the ordinary even among the more “progressive” clerical families. Reformist Ayatollah Mehdi-ye Karroubi married his wife when she was fourteen. Ayatollah Hashemi-ye Rafsanjani, late, great white hope of Iranian liberals since at least 2009, married off his daughter Faʾezeh when she was sixteen.  Aftab-e-Yazd, 27 Farvardin, 1388.

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Ayatollah Mohammad Musavi-e Bojnurdi, a long time pupil of Khomeini’s from whom he received his ijāza (authorization to engage in ijtihād or independent legal interpretation) and one of the handful of purportedly “progressive” clerics associated with the reform/green movement, has stated categorically that “there is no room for friendly relations with Israel.”⁷⁵ By far the most important clerical figure who backed and provided religious legitimacy for the reform/green movement, the recently deceased “Trotsky” of the Iranian revolution and champion of human and minority rights, Ayatollah Hosayn Ali-ye Montazeri, was once preaching to a delegation of reformist parliamentarians who had come from Tehran to visit him in his Qom abode. He remembers that I first recited for them the noble verse: “Your Lord declared that He will send against [the Children of Israel] forces that will torment them with a great torment until the Day of Resurrection” (Qurʿan, 7: 167). I then explained to them that according to the express stipulation of sacred scripture the Jews of Zionism (yahudiyan-e-sahyonizm) will always be beset by distress and misery, and they shall never experience rest or comfort. Next I cited for them the hadith (tradition) that is recorded in the Biḥār [al-anwār, a seventeenth-century Shiʿite compendium] in which His Excellency [the sixth Imam Jaʿfar] al-Ṣādiq stated thrice that those who will ultimately exterminate the Jews (kasani keh nehayatan yahud ra monqarez mikonand) will be the people of Qom (i. e., the Iranian-Shiʿite clerical leadership).⁷⁶

Thus spoke the “most moderate mullah” and “Focus of Emulation” (marjaʿ-e-taqlid) of the reform/green movement. Ayatollah Montazeri was not only the preeminent disciple, closest advisor and (until several months before the Imam’s death) chosen successor of Ayatollah Khomeini, he was also the author of the definitive work – four hefty Arabic volumes long – on the Islamic legal underpinnings of the Guardianship of the Jurist (Arab. wilāyat al-faqīh, Pers. velayat-e-faqih), the foundational doctrine and pivotal institution of the Iranian revolutionary theocracy. Recently deceased Grand Ayatollah Yusef-e Saneʿi – who replaced Montazeri as reformminded gadfly and indefatigable critic of the regime; whose offices have been repeatedly raided by the basij; and whose marjaʿ status was “revoked” by the Seminary Teacher’s Association – is as dyed-in-the-wool a Khomeinist as they come.⁷⁷ Down to the present day, “reformist”-oriented newspapers laud the incredibly bloody, Iranian-backed Syrian suppression of its “Arab Spring.”⁷⁸

 The osulgarayan for their part have been known to characterize the ideology of their rivals as “Communist Islam.”  Hooman Majd, The Ayatollah’s Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), p. 242.  Montazeri, Khaterat, p. 405.  See, e. g., http://saanei.xyz/?view=01,01,04,445,0. Last accessed 07/05/2020.  E. g., Arman-e Melli, 9/5/22: “Suriye dar yek jang-e baynolmellali piruz shod.”

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The “paradoxes” go the other way, as well. Hojjatoleslam Hadi-ye Ghiffari, one of a breed of rifle-toting clerics at the time of the revolution (foreign publications knew him as “the machine-gun mullah”) who made a pastime out of beating up liberal intellectuals and reportedly executed ex-prime minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda with his personal side-arm even before the condemned man reached the site of the firing squad, could write in 2020 that the purpose of election to office is solely to ensure the fulfillment of the principles of the Islamic revolution; unfortunately, they have no principles left whatsoever, and run for office only in order to sit on the seat of power.

By “they” Ghiffari refers to the so-called hardline “principlist” faction (osulgarayan) – he himself is a card-carrying reformist (eslah talab).⁷⁹ The same may be said of many other Khomeinist radicals of the early years, including bane of the U. S. hostages Maʿsume-ye Ebtekar and even clerical advisor to the hostage-takers Mohammad Musavi-ye Khoeiniha. A large percentage of the Pasdaran-e Enqelab or Revolutionary Guards voted for “reformist” candidate Mohammad-e Khatami, advocate of a domestic easing of restrictions and the “Dialogue of Civilizations.” (One reason that Westerners misconstrue the nature and aims of the Iranian reform camp is the longstanding use of the term “reform” to translate this political faction’s Persian designation: eslah talaban. Although the Protestant “Reformation” saw itself as a campaign to reinstate the original dogmas and values of Christianity, “reform” has come to connote, in contemporary parlance, not so much restoration as innovation, if only because in the era of progress most “reforms” are of a forward-looking bent. Eslah (Arab. iṣlāḥ) actually means something closer to “amelioration,” “correction” or “improvement” – Khatami and Musavi’s eslah talaban are thus more accurately “seekers of improvement” – and in Islam, even Shiʿite Islam, one improves not so much by innovating, which can be considered sinful, but by restoring: restoring the ways of the Salaf al-Ṣāliḥ, the “excellent ancestors,” or in the particular case of the green movement, restoring the original tenets of Khomeinism). The Green Movement, explained Musavi, chose that color “to symbolize our undying love for the resplendent, sagacious, noble and virtuous Family of the

 Arman-e Melli, 21/06/2020. The “hanging judge” of the revolution, Ayatollah Sadeq-e Khalkhali, also became a “reformist.” Another famous “gunslinging” cleric was Hojjatoleslam va l-Moslemin Gholamreza-e Hasani, the Friday prayer leader of Orumiyeh. It was fashionable during and immediately after the revolution even for ayatollahs to speak in public while holding rifles, perhaps the most famous example being Ayatollah Dastghayb of Shiraz. Ayatollah Montazeri was also wont to speak with a weapon by his side.

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Prophet,”⁸⁰ and the slogans chanted by the participants in its demonstrations tally well with this objective. Ya Hosayn, Mir Hosayn! was the most oft repeated of these, a clarion call that seamlessly merged the traditional lament for, and oath of fealty to, Shiʿism’s martyred third Imam Ḥusayn to a declaration of solidarity with the defiant presidential candidate of the same name. The second most common slogan was: “We are not the [timid and treacherous] people of Kufa, that we should allow Ḥusayn to stand alone!”, a reference to the population of that city which, after having sworn to support Ḥusayn’s uprising, was cowed into inaction by an Umayyad strongman.⁸¹ The “default” chant of the Green Movement protesters – Allāhu akbar or “God is great!” – harkens back to the heady days of the 1979 revolution, when millions shouted this affirmation of the creed at night from rooftops across the country. When several groups of demonstrators were filmed calling for an “Iranian Republic” (as opposed to an “Islamic Republic”), Musavi, Khatami and the movement’s grassroots leaders issued an immediate and fierce denouncement, and Karroubi blasted the “foreign imperialist agents who have infiltrated our blessed movement and seek to exploit it for their own ungodly ends.”⁸² The death knell for the “Green Wave” came in December of 2009, when a video showing a mob (whose affiliation was unclear) ripping down and stomping on a picture of Khomeini was repeatedly broadcast on Iranian television. That manifestation of hormat shekani-ye emam or “desecration of the sanctity of the Imam,” despite frantic condemnations by Musavi, Khatami, Karroubi and every other prominent individual associated with the cause, cost the movement much of the popular support it still retained. Although there were unquestionably currents within the “Green Wave” composed of what the regime likes to call “structure-breakers” (sakhtar shekanandegan), that is, those intent on subverting the very foundations of the revolution and the state (and even the Islamic religion), these currents were roundly repudiated by the Green leaders and deputies. The Green Movement cannot, then, be responsibly viewed as a force for secularism, Westernization, détente, or the abolition of theocratic government. To this day, as Mohammad Ayatollahi-Tabaar affirms, “religion remains a forceful channel through which to communicate with, cooperate with, and confront the Islamist government and its divine Leader.”⁸³ At any rate the Green Movement is now, for all intents and purposes, defunct, having lost its popular appeal no less than having been crushed under the heel of

 Musavi, communiqué no. 9. Green is the traditional color of the ahl al-bayt or descendants of Muḥammad through his daughter Fāṭima and son-in-law ʿAlī.  Ma ahl-e Kufeh nistim Hosayn tanha bemanad.  IRIB 2, 14/11/2009.  Ayatollahi Tabaar, Religious Statecraft, p. 303. The emphasis is mine.

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the Iranian government’s Sino-Soviet style jack-boot – dead but not gone (as we shall see).

D. The military against the mullahs The last (or most recent) resort of those Western observers who cannot digest the notion of a viable theocracy in the contemporary world is the claim that Iran is currently, and has been for some time, undergoing a “creeping coup d’etat” by the Pasdaran (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC) and/or paramilitary Basij, as a result of which the clerics will ultimately be (or are already being) shunted aside in favor of the generals. Citing the Basiji background of former President Ahmadinejad; the heavy reliance on enforcement agencies to quell the 2009 postelectoral protests and subsequent unrest; the politicization of the Pasdaran and its growing presence on the economic scene; and the widespread appointment of former commanders and ex-“army mullahs” to sensitive government posts, these analysts assure us that Iran is “moving in the direction of a military dictatorship” (former U. S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates), exchanging (in the yellowish phrase of Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass) a “theocracy for a thugocracy.”⁸⁴ This assessment is as pervasive as it is baseless (the frequency of its reappearance should itself indicate its wrong-headedness: the much touted military take-over has been “just around the corner” and “unfolding as we speak” for over two decades now, not unlike the final touches on the nuclear bomb). Few phenomena are more natural or common than that in countries where security is an abiding concern – to say nothing of countries in which hundreds of thousands of survivors of an incredibly bloody eight-year conflict (the IranIraq war) are now coming of political age – service in the military functions as an important stepping stone to a career in politics, government, even business. The regular army (artesh), the Revolutionary Guard (Pasdaran) and the Basij play central and highly visible roles in the Iranian state, and through universal conscription these institutions permeate all segments of society: it would, indeed, be difficult to find a candidate for office or applicant for a bureaucratic position in Iran today who did not have at least some sort of military background. Nor are we talking about active military men: it is, of course, former guardsmen and Basij officers who are assuming administrative responsibilities, winning parliament seats and landing lucrative positions as directors of quasi-governmental “foundations”

 Gates http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/20/military-in-iran-seen-as-taking-control/ . Last accessed 10/10/2022.

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(bonyadha) or large commercial or industrial concerns. Given this, the purported “coup” cannot in any way be construed as a premeditated, organized or even conscious strategy on the part of the IRGC or the other armed forces; indeed, it is hard to understand what such a description might refer to in the Iranian context. In addition, it is worth noting that candidates for the presidency like Mohammad Baqer Qalibof, Chief of Police and a well-known war hero, or Mohsen-e Rezaʾi, longstanding High Commander of the Revolutionary Guards, both lost spectacularly to Ahmadinejad (in 2005 and 2009 respectively), who was never even in the Guards proper. It is also worth noting that in the most “militarized” government of them all – that of Ahmadinejad himself – a grand total of eighteen out of fortyfive ministers had served in the Revolutionary Guards in the past. ⁸⁵ By contrast, in most Israeli governments one hundred percent of the ministers have served in the IDF, many of them in high-ranking positions.⁸⁶ Yet no one but the crudest propagandist would claim that the State of Israel is run by its army. In the Ahmadinejad administration cabinet ministers were known to hire old army or Basij buddies as advisors, and some of these ministers themselves owe their positions to friendships struck up with the fiery president when he and they were young “idealists” suppressing Kurdish rebellion in Azerbaijan soon after the revolution.⁸⁷ Former top employees of the Islamic Republic’s multiple intelligence apparatuses also regularly make their way onto important government committees and may occasionally influence aspects of domestic or foreign policy. But all of the key decision-making bodies – the Expediency Council, the Guardian Council, the Council of Experts, and of course the office of the Guardian Jurist itself – are staffed overwhelmingly by turban-wearing seminary graduates, who are not about to give up their hard won and doctrinally sanctioned monopoly of power to anyone (least of all to the military, the erstwhile source and mainstay of the Pahlavi dynasty). Indeed, one of the premier reasons for creating two separate fighting forces – the regular army and the Revolutionary Guards – was to diminish the size of each and play them off against one another so that neither became strong enough to challenge Tehran’s new theocracy.⁸⁸

 Tzimt, Iran, n. 178.  This statistic excludes cases in which Jewish ultra-orthodox or Arab parties have ministers in the cabinet.  See Kasra Naji, Ahmadinejad, p. 30.  This method of divida et impera was on display during the student unrest of 1999. Fearful that soldiers in the regular armed forces might join the protesters (as in the revolution of 1979), the authorities sent Pasdaran units to the arsenals of regular army bases to prevent soldiers from getting a hold of weaponry.

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It is true that the overwhelmingly “principlist” Eleventh Parliament (elected Feb. 2020) has been accused by the “reformists” of striving to diminish the role of the president in favor of a “parliamentary-military” regime.⁸⁹ But not only is this accusation somewhat self-contradictory – if focuses simultaneously on the significant presence of former Guardsmen and Basij commanders among the candidates for the 2021 presidential election and on the efforts to declaw the office itself – but even if it holds water, such a move is geared to weaken an element in the democracy, not the theocracy (and note, again, the perennial nature of the phenomenon: why should reformists warn against a transformation that – according to the many pundits who proffer the militarization thesis – had already taken place a decade or two ago?).⁹⁰ And while it is true that some high ranking Shiʿite jurists have been the objects of harassment by security forces in recent years, such targeting invariably takes place on the orders of other, more hard line Shiʿite jurists who are upset about their colleagues’ ties to the reform party. This is an intra-seminary struggle fueled by ideological and political considerations, in which the enforcement organizations play a part analogous to that of the private armies or bands of pahlavans that were deployed in previous centuries by powerful Iranian-Shiʿite religious scholars against their professional rivals in the context of doctrinal or turf disputes.⁹¹ Under the Rouhani administration, the economic activities of the IRGC were significantly curtailed, showing that what many consider the untouchable bulwark of the “deep state” – if not the deep state itself – can actually be reined in by the relatively toothless executive power.⁹² The military apparatus of the Islamic Repub See, e. g., Arman-e Melli, 24/12/2020, p. 7: “Majles riyasat-e jomuri ra tashrifati mikhahad.”  Mehdi Khalaji, for instance, portrays Iran as a military dictatorship with a thin clerical sheen already in 2012 (Mehdi Khalaji, “Supreme Succession: Who will Lead Post-Khameneʾi Iran? Policy Focus no. 17, February 2012). One of several glaring internal contradictions in this document involves Khalaji’s (in and of itself problematic) claim that the IRGC is a potential force for détente with the West that would seek compromise on the nuclear issue were it not for Khameneʾi’s intransigence. This claim is followed by another one, to wit, that Khameneʾi cannot back pedal on his hardline nuclear stance, because if he did so he would “face a major, perhaps unbearable, political crisis” (p. 3, column 2). If the IRGC is essentially for nuclear compromise, while the democratic element of the regime has no real power, and the clerical aristocracy has been neutralized – whence this major political crisis? In the event, of course, Khameneʾi was not intransigent, did in fact back pedal – allowing for the negotiations that led to the JCPOA – and there was no major, or minor, political crisis.  Such as Ayatollah Behbehani and the Uṣūlī-Akhbārī dispute, treated below, in Part Two.  See Machlis, “Islamic Republic,” pp. 14– 17. Ray Takeyh writes in 2021: “There is often speculation that the Guards could simply dispense with the mullahs and set up their own dictatorship. This misses the point that the Guards are not just an army but a deeply ideological entity…” (Last Shah, p. 243).

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lic is, then – notwithstanding all the economic and even political power that it has undeniably amassed – still in the last analysis a tool in the hands of the theocracy. It is, admittedly, a massive and unwieldy tool that (like armies everywhere) has evolved its own ethos and instinct for self-preservation, and it is also unquestionably in de facto control (as are military and administrative apparatuses the world over) of the low-level decision-making processes necessary for the day-to-day functioning of its various branches. But it is the clerical chain of command that matters, that sets the tone, determines the direction, issues the high-level orders and makes all of the significant decisions in the Islamic Republic. And while some of the Pasdaran and Basij top brass have been overheard in recent years advocating a more active political and “cultural” role for their subordinates in the rank and file (read: intimidating reformist candidates, educating citizens about the “right” way to vote, etc.), again: such statements are rarely if ever products of the commanders’ own initiative, but are instead traceable back to this or that particular agenda of Ayatollah Mesbah-e-Yazdi, Ayatollah Jannati, Ayatollah Javadi-ye-Amoli or, most often, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameneʾi himself.⁹³ Khameneʾi is, indeed, the premier culprit in this putative political transformation according to those who advance the “creeping coup d’etat” thesis: he has, they assert, lifted both clerics and layman out of the officers corps of the IRGC – or dipped into the pool of retirees from the same – and placed them in important governmental posts or supported their candidacies for parliament. Here is where the logic becomes truly circular. It is, after all, safe to say that one of Khameneʾi’s chief concerns is shoring up the institution of velayat-e-faqih (the Guardianship of the Jurist, the cornerstone of Iranian theocracy – and his job). And indeed, as we would expect, the appointees picked or candidates backed by the Supreme Leader are almost invariably on record as fierce defenders of that institution against the “impure elements” that supposedly seek to weaken it. In other words, what the proponents of the “military takeover” theory describe as the IRGC-based threat to the continuation of clerical rule, is in fact the diametric antithesis of this: the IRGC-based reinforcement of clerical rule.⁹⁴ The confusion and contradiction informing this diehard assertion is on flagrant display in Robert Baer’s 2008 description of what he maintains was already at the time a twenty-five year-old reality:

 The “role” they are advocating is to ensure that there will never again be a sixth parliament or any challenge to velayat-e-motlaq-e-faqih. See e. g. http://www.aei.org/docLib/20080221_No222770 MEOgAlfoneh.pdf. Last accessed 10/10/2022.  One learns to read between the lines of oppositionist rhetoric no less than that of regime propagandists: what they really mean when they say that the military is suppressing the clerics is that the military is suppressing reform minded or liberal clerics.

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While theology forms a basis for many of Iran’s beliefs and policies, the men who hold the power derive it from the military and security services, even if they are themselves clerics.⁹⁵

These are all minor points. The major point is that the clerical leadership created the Revolutionary Guards and its daughter force, the Basij, and did so for the express purpose of protecting the theocratic system. These military bodies’ entire raison d’etre is to ensure the preservation of the Islamic Republic under the leadership of the Guardian Jurist. Their cadets are raised from infancy – and then further indoctrinated during their military training and service – to venerate the learned doctors of Shiʿism as the receptacles of divine light on earth and guides for life par excellence. Indeed, not only is this immutable principle pounded incessantly into their brains, but part of their job description is to pound the same principle into the brains of others, to inculcate it in the consciousness of the populace at large. As soldiers and as Shiʿite Muslims, the Guards will obey the orders of their “Sources of Emulation” (maraji‘ al-taqlid, the Grand Ayatollahs), and especially the orders of Ayatollah Khameneʾi, their Spiritual Leader and Commander-inChief. No Iranian general in the Islamic Republic could ever compete with the charisma of the clergy, and they have never, to this writer’s knowledge, endeavored to do so: the extreme deference displayed by men in uniform to men of the cloth in revolutionary Iran – and what certainly appears to be the sincere veneration felt by most of the former for the latter – argues in itself against the plausibility of a military takeover. The one exception to this rule was Qasem-e Solaimani, whose charisma and popularity was tremendous: he was perceived as a servant of the ulama, and the perception does not seem to be far from the truth. Ayatollah Khameneʾi has, it is true, made himself undisputed master of the clerical institution, among other methods by virtue of his direct control over the enforcement arms, which he has used to some extent to keep the naturally individualist Shiʿite ulama in line. But a less pluralistic and more centralized religiopolitical elite is not tantamount to the forfeiture by that elite of its power in favor of the military.⁹⁶ Polities, as we have argued (and will continue to argue) throughout this volume, require raisons d’etre to survive and thrive, and the Islamic Republic’s raison d’etre is right there in (the first part of ) its name. If generals run the show the regime’s “why” will be gone, and the regime itself not long after,

 Baer, The Devil We Know, pp. 72– 73.  The theory goes that because Khameneʾi has disempowered high level mujtahids and surrounded himself with lower quality clerical yes-men, he now relies primarily on the military. But Khameneʾi himself, of course, cannot claim the highest of scholarly credentials, and the intellectual decline of leadership is, we would argue, a worldwide phenomenon.

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and the ruling clerics know this. In short, Iran is no more on its way to becoming the next Sudan or Burma than it is on its way to becoming the next Denmark. It is interesting to note that many current studies on Iran cite anecdotal evidence to the effect that average citizens of the country have come to despise Shi’ite clerics (see above, the previous section). Now, if the Islamic Republic has long since slipped out of the hands of the clerics and into the hands of the IRGC, and if this transformation is well-known to all as many authors claim, then wherefore this ever-burgeoning enmity specifically toward clerics, while army men – such as Solaimani – are widely respected, even in reformist circles. Such contradictions point up the weak reasoning involved in the many “military takeover” theses. A country’s enigmatic character should ideally engender a modicum of reticence and restraint among foreign (and even native) students of that country, but in Iran’s case this quality of mystery has had the opposite effect: because so little is known about the Islamic Republic, speculation masquerading as informed commentary runs amok (and increasingly relies on a vast, Internet-based industry of “fake news” sound-bites propagated by the Iranian regime’s apologists and detractors). Moreover, the dearth of reliable data on the “regime of the ayatollahs” allows Western evaluations of Iranian reality to be the more easily skewed by a given investigator’s particular frame of reference or point of view, and especially by his or her personal investment in one type of conclusion or another. A striking instance of this phenomenon – striking because it concerns a subject to which so much importance is attached and so much attention given – involves the seemingly interminable series of appraisals and re-appraisals of the state of Iran’s nuclear program. American, European and Israeli experts have revised their assessments of almost every aspect of this question on a great many occasions and by large orders of magnitude (Mossad’s 2018 intelligence super-coup – in which the entire contents of Iran’s nuclear archives were hauled off and flown to Tel-Aviv – provided the rare exception, although it did not furnish as much new information as expected).⁹⁷ The wildly disparate and fluid nature of these estimates is the result of a  “British now say 2012” (Yisrael HaYom for Feb. 1); “Iran can produce a nuclear bomb by 2005 – IDF” (Jerusalem Post, Aug. 5, 2003); “Iran is only months from bomb technology, says Britain” (Guardian, March 10, 2006); “Mossad: Iran will have nuclear bomb by 2014” (HaʾAretz, 16 June 2009); “Iran could have ability to build nuclear bomb by 2010, study warns” (The Telegraph, Jan. 27, 2009); “Iran atomic bomb possible within six years, says U. S. military” (BBC, Dec. 25 2010); Through the end of the 1990s unclassified assessments based on Iran’s known nuclear infrastructure reflected a technology and production base inadequate to the task of producing nuclear weapons for many years. In April 1984, West German intelligence sources had leaked reports to the press that Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program was so far advanced that it would be capable of producing a bomb “within two years,” but these reports turned out to be greatly exaggerated. Israel and the United States believed in 1992 that Iran would attain a military nuclear capa-

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yawning information gap coupled with a broad spectrum of contradictory motives (it is also, admittedly – and this should certainly not be forgotten – a function of deliberate disinformation, as well as of slow-ups caused by sabotage). On the one hand, Israel and the United States have an interest in convincing the world that an Iranian nuclear weapon is just around the corner, and their dire warnings seem perpetually premature; on the other, an impulse to gloat over Iranian failures and postpone the fearsome confrontation with the inevitable leads elements within both polities to underestimate Iranian nuclear progress (hence the frequency of schadnfreude-ridden newspaper items since about 2008 celebrating the ostensible malfunction of a given number of centrifuges at the Natanz facility – even long before the “Stuxnet” virus wreaked its cyber-havoc – and hence, also, the shortsighted and profoundly embarrassing conclusion of the 2007 U. S. National Intelligence Estimate to the effect that Iran was not, in fact, pursuing a bomb at all). Similar types of agenda-ridden analyses are on display in a wide variety of Iranological subfields. Is the economy of the Islamic Republic thriving or collapsing at any given point in time? That depends on whom you ask. Oppositionists in exile regularly paint the Iranian economy in the darkest possible colors – they have been doing so for some forty years – because this shows that the regime of the mullahs has brought disaster upon the country. Those who advocate “the military option” – bombing Iran’s nuclear installations – describe the Iranian economy as, on the contrary, booming beyond all expectations, because this points up the failure of international economic sanctions to halt Tehran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon, leaving bombardment as the only viable option. Those who are not ready to attack just yet and believe that further sanctions should be imposed must tread a middle path: the Iranian economy, they claim, is albeit “in trouble” – as a result of sanctions to date that have taken their toll (and are therefore demonstrably effective) – but it is, at the same time, “resilient” and has “weathered the storm” – because the sanctions voted so far have been insufficient, and we need to push for more. Moreover, scholars and analysts are divided over the more fundamental question of which economic situation will usher in the counter-revolution. Will Iranians rise up and topple the Islamic Republican regime due to soaring gas prices and

bility within eight to 10 years. In 1995 ACDA Director John Holum testified that Iran could have the bomb by 2003, though by 1997 he testified that Iran could have the bomb by 2005 – 2007. In the mid1990’s the view of the United States government was that Iran was implementing a military nuclear program that could achieve a weapons capability within five years, at the time meaning by the year 2000. As of 1998 the estimate of the US Central Command (CENTCOM) was that Iranian efforts could result in the development of a nuclear device by the middle of the next decade, that is, by the year 2005.

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plummeting subsidies – in short, in anger over a failing economy, as for instance in the disturbances of 2017– 19? Or is it rather – as in the case of the post-war, “Rafsanjanian” economic recovery of the 1990s which facilitated the middle-class ferment that saw the election of Mohammad-e Khatami – specifically a burgeoning economy that most threatens the stability of the Khomeinist regime? So far, neither has been the case, but whatever the Iranian economic situation at a given time, one can be sure that it will be exploited by agenda-ridden writers to their own ends. Similarly in the realm of government: how pluralistic and internally conflicted is the Iranian political scene? Here the same analysts or organizations will often put forth diametrically antithetical answers from week to week. When elements critical of the clerical regime wish to lambast it as an unrelieved autocracy, they assert that the entire Iranian political establishment speaks with one voice, and that that voice belongs to the Supreme Leader (or to the military oligarchy, or to the clandestine Hojjatiyeh society, or what have you). When they wish to portray the Islamic Republic as a madhouse coming apart at the seams, the identical elements painstakingly point up the manifold factions, fractures, schisms, competing camps, profound disagreements and fierce infighting that rend the Iranian government apparatus in pieces (or, put another way, make it something that approaches a democracy). Or regarding the relationship of religion and state: has the Islamic Republic succeeded in bridging the centuries old gap between the two swords of sacerdotum and imperium, between the spiritual exigencies of belief and the temporal requirements of enforcement? Is Shiʿite Islam really the driving force and guiding light of the Iranian revolutionary regime, or is it merely a superficial sheen concealing beneath itself what is, in truth, government based on “realistic” and “pragmatic,” not to say cynical, considerations? Again, detractors speak out of both sides of their mouths. When it is beneficial to their cause to portray Iran as a bastion of dogmatic reaction, savage inquisition, doctrinaire intransigence and medieval torture – to say nothing of messianic apocalypticism – they lay stress on the suffusion of state and society with “backward” Islamic norms: in education, in entertainment, in the justice system, in economic planning, in the military, in domestic and foreign policy. When, on the other hand, the imperative of the hour is to show up the clerical leadership as a band of sanctimonious, power-hungry hypocrites motivated solely by the proverbial bottom line or to relish the cross-the-board frustration or corruption of revolutionary ideals, the emphasis is placed on the utter failure

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of the regime to carry out a far-reaching Islamization of the system.⁹⁸ More on this in a later chapter. Such agenda-driven sophistry is no less hard at work in connection with the issue we have been discussing: the purported waxing of military influence in Iran. Government by tank is easier for the modern secular mind to grasp than government by God, and observers (as well as journalists, academics, intelligence agencies, policy wonks, diplomats and people in general) tend to drift toward facilely understood perceptions that tally with what they already know. Government by tank may also be easier to vilify than government by God, but here we have the familiar toss-up. Army cliques might be corrupt, paternalistic, repressive and dictatorial, but at least their aspirations are “rational” (even self-aggrandizement or megalomania are considered “rational” aspirations), which is more than one can say for an other-worldly clerical oligarchy. Thus, pundits who prefer to revile the Islamic Republic by characterizing it as a violent, arbitrary and totalitarian regime (their numbers are naturally up since the crackdown on the Green Movement) will generally jump on the “military takeover” bandwagon. Those whose penchant is rather for defaming Iran by branding its rulers “a gang of crazy, apocalyptic, messianic, medieval, superstitious madmen” and the like will opt for underlining how powerful and durable the theocracy is. There is rarely any serious research or even reasoned thinking involved in such determinations.⁹⁹ In this way, too, Westerners – not just laypeople but specialists as well – misread present-day Iran.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljSRM6qIFE0. Last accessed 10/10/2022. For the same purpose, much is made of Tehran’s putative cynical abandonment of (for instance) the Muslim Uighurs in their conflict with the Islamic Republic’s all important Chinese ally. In point of fact everyone from the Supreme leader on down has vehemently condemned the Chinese, and when the late Ayatollah Rafsanjani did so from the Tehran University mosque pulpit, the standing-room-only crowd began chanting marg bar chin – “Death to China!” When the Corona virus began its lethal spread across the latter country, several Iranian preachers claimed it was divine retribution for the oppression of the Uigurs by the Communist party – until the disease engulfed Iran itself. Still, there is no question that the geo-political interests of the Islamic Republic are considered by its leaders to be tantamount to the interests of Islam as a whole, and China’s support of Iran – as of July, 2020 sealed by an unprecedentedly encompassing economic and strategic cooperation agreement – is seen as worth the price of Uigur (Sunni) Muslims. Much the same might be said in regard to the Iranian support of Christian Armenia in its ongoing conflict with the Muslim Republic of Azerbaijan, given the latter’s relentless opposition to the Islamic Republic and its encouragement of secessionist sentiment – feeble though it may be – in the North-West Iranian province of the same name. The American record for supporting regimes whose ideology and actions are antithetical to those of the United States – most recently Saudi Arabia – is of ourse well known.  What is really being said, both by outside observers and by reformists in Iran, is that we are witnessing a joining of forces between a conservative military and the “principlists” (osul gara). But this is a far cry from military dictatorship: it is just the grumbling of one clerical camp that

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the army tends to support the other clerical camp, or, if we look at the matter more idealistically, the plaint that the military is not supposed to support any camp.

Chapter Three: Confusing the Nature of the Conflict The four fantasies about present-day Iran which we have outlined and attempted to debunk over the previous pages – that “everyone hates the mullahs”; that Iranian youth are forsaking religion and the revolution en masse; that Musavi’s “Green Wave” necessarily advocated – and the reformists still necessarily advocate – a less belligerent foreign policy and seek to excise the “Islamic” from “Islamic Republic”; and that the cleritocracy is losing ground to an old boys’ network of Revolutionary Guards – all partake at bottom, in addition to the specific motives we have attributed to each, of a fundamental Western intellectual-philosophical tendency: the inability to conceive of “irrationality” sustaining itself for any length of time when “rationality” is easily available for the taking. This is, after all, the principle and process upon which modernity was built: the gradual but inexorable encroachment of (what are construed as) rational modes of thought onto the territory of tradition and faith, and, ultimately, the almost total annihilation of the latter by the former. An “irrational” system functioning and even prospering in our day and age, when the indisputable logic and innumerable blessings of “rational” life are immediately accessible, or at least visible, via the click of a button, is quite simply unthinkable (“Today is the time of logic and reason, and [the clerics], like madmen, are trying to lie” inveighed Mohammad Reza Shah at the time of his “White Revolution”).¹ Islamism in general, and the Islamic Republic in particular, appear to Westerners not only as atavistic and retrograde, but as untenable. Revolutionary Iran conjures up in our minds the image of a ball perched precariously on the narrow tip of a hillock with steep slopes falling away on all sides. The ball cannot possibly maintain itself up there, and it is only a matter of time – a very short time – until the force of gravity has its inevitable way and the ball rolls down to level ground. The pull of rationality, like the pull of gravity, is inescapable: “modernity is relentless.” With this fundamental conception ensconced in our brains, we are well prepared to buy into whichever latest theory purports to expose the decisive factor that will soon bring about the downfall of the Iranian theocratic regime. Its continued existence, like the ball on the tip of the hillock, represents too much pent-up potential energy for our intellectual comfort. We need that potential energy to be converted into kinetic energy – we need the ball to fall – if for no other reason than to relieve the tension built up in our heads. (Our approach, in other words, is profoundly entropic).

 Cited in Milani, The Shah, p. 296. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-006

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This is the wrong way to look at the matter. Throughout the countless vicissitudes and oscillations of human thought, it is rare that rationality or irrationality has fully conquered its antipode. When this has occurred, anomalies have been produced that are indeed not long for this world: on the one extreme, for instance, the ill-fated logical positivist communes of the nineteenth century Comteans (followers of August Comte), dedicated to rigorously rational cooperative living, all of which disintegrated with great rapidity soon after they were established; on the other extreme, messianic fantasist cults like “Heaven’s Gate,” whose members committed group suicide in 1997 in order to ascend to a “supra-human level of existence” on the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet. Unlike such polar excesses, the vast majority of man’s belief systems involve a combination of the rational and the irrational, in varying proportions that fluctuate along a spectrum. Thus, for example, while the culture and consciousness of the average secular Westerner may be grounded to a considerable extent in reason and empiricism, it is also shot through with an abundance of unproven assumptions, illogical emotions, metaphysical speculations and just plain superstition (a particularly trenchant example being the widely accepted and instinctually assumed – though at the same time irremediably amorphous and thoroughly anti-rational – notion that human beings are possessed of a willful, sentient “soul”). Similarly, while belief-based living is inextricably bound up with what is, for the most part, blind faith in the supernatural, it also embraces more than a modicum of dialectical reasoning (as in scholastic theology or the science of jurisprudence) as well as no small amount of daily pragmatic behavior (a man came to the Prophet Muḥammad and complained: “I relied on God, but my camel still fled!” Muḥammad replied: “Rely on God, and tie up your camel” [iʿqal wa tawakkal]).² For purposes of the present discussion – and bearing in mind that such fields of inquiry obviously do not lend themselves to exact measurements or even fully agreed upon definitions – we can designate as “modern” those systems of thought in which “rational” components predominate, and as “religious” those systems of thought in which “irrational” components predominate. Given this breakdown, the first observation we can safely make is that those systems that we are defining as “religious” have reigned over most of human society for the greater part of history, and, after a relatively short “modern” interregnum, are currently regaining their

 Medieval Muslim kalām literature (al-Ghazālī, Ibn Kammūna, Ibn Sīnā, etc.) plays host to more than a few discussions of “excessive tawakkul (reliance on God)”: one cannot earn a livelihood without working; nor can one go out into the desert and live with the animals and expect God to provide food and drink as He did for the Children of Israel in the Sinai; the precept of tawakkul, as central as it is to Islam and to the notion of tawḥīd (monotheism), must not lead one to doubt the this-worldly chain of cause and effect; etc.

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former dominion in countries across the globe. Indeed, having been cut down mercilessly during the Aufklärung or Enlightenment by the jagged pruning hooks of secular humanism, the tree of theism is now growing back with unprecedented vigor, this time equipped with powerful “antibodies” generated by the near lethal encounter with skepticism: that which did not kill God made Him stronger. Perhaps, then, we should at least be willing to discuss with an open mind the proposition that not Middle-Eastern Islamism, but Western liberalism represents the transient episode in humanity’s career; that not faith but the lack thereof is the bizarre exception to the conventional rule. Perhaps the instinctual human yearning for at least a modicum of moral absolutism to counteract the excesses of relativism; for a set of time-honored values to preserve society from the ravages of moral rudderless-ness; for the continuity and richness of tradition to remedy the atomistic disconnection and flatness produced by “progress”; for some mystery and fantasy to irrigate the desolate wasteland left behind by scientific reductionism; and for at least a remnant of restraint and respect to tame the refractory bronco of unbridled liberty – perhaps the natural human longing for these and other related correctives to the perceived excesses of contemporary Western-inspired culture and ideology means that not the house that Khomeini built, but rather the house that modern Europe built, is erected on sand. Perhaps the post-industrial, rationality-obsessed West is the ball teetering precariously on the tapered pinnacle of the hillock, in imminent danger of plummeting. Perhaps – pace Gerecht and the legions of contemporary Western thinkers and even Middle East scholars who share his outlook – it is not modernity but religion that is “relentless.” The late, liberal, “green” Ayatollah Yusuf Saneʿi: [The Eighth Shiʿite] Imam [ʿAlī] al-Riḍā was asked by one of his disciples: “What is the meaning of His words, Exalted be He: ‘The Night of Destiny is greater than a thousand months’ (Qurʿan, 97: 3). The Imam answered: “‘A thousand months’ refers to the duration of the reign of the descendants of the Deviationists (nasl-e qasitin, i. e., the Damascus-based Umayyad dynasty, 661 CE – 750 CE: the calculation is not exact – this dynasty ruled the Muslim world for 1068 months – but is close enough for the propaedeutic purpose – Z. M.).” Note carefully (continues Ayatollah Saneʿi) that following the interpretation of his Eminence (an hazrat, i. e., Imam Riḍā), the Night of Destiny – when the Qurʿan was revealed to the Messenger, may God’s peace and blessings be upon him – is declared to be greater than the earthly sovereignty of the forces of oppression and unbelief (i. e., the Umayyads) not just at the point when the light of the latter banishes the darkness of the former, that is, after the Umayyads were cast down from the heights of dominion, but throughout the period of their rule as well: during every day of every week of every one of those thousand months, faith was stronger than irreligion (dindari az kofr nirumandtar bud). How is it possible to claim this? After all, the supporters of Truth (havadaran-e haq, the early Shiʿa) were harassed, exiled, plundered and massacred under the Umayyad despotism (estebdad-e omaviyan), and moreover, once that despotism was overthrown, another one took its

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place, lasting far longer than the first (i. e., the Abbasid dynasty, 750 CE – 1258 CE – Z. M.) and in many cases persecuting the followers of the Imams even more severely [than their Umayyad predecessors had]. With all this in mind, how can one speak of piety being stronger than impiety? Is not impiety in a position of power? The answer is that unbelief, even when it is dominant, is weak, and belief, even when it is subjected, is powerful. This is because irreligion is contrary to the innate life-force (fiṭra) of human beings, it contradicts humanity’s instinctual need to believe in something more meaningful than the materialist (maddigari) outlook on existence, which reduces us to dead atoms and molecules, undermines the foundations of moral behavior and deprives life of its spiritual aspect (abʿad-e maʿnaviye-ash). Such a philosophical-ideological system is not suited to the human condition and therefore cannot survive: it is in decline from the moment it appears on the scene; it is, indeed, stillborn from its inception and only awaits burial. The satanically presumptuous and Godless culture of today’s West (farhang-e-mostakber va bikhoda-ye gharb-e emruz) is an anomaly that will soon disappear from the face of the earth. “Gird yourselves with patience (O believers), for God’s promise will surely come true!” (Q. 30: 60).³

Ayatollah Saneʿi is no less confident than Raoul Marc Gerecht that the ascendancy of his ideological nemesis is intrinsically unsustainable and therefore temporary, and that victory will be his in the end. Western intellectuals think they have Iran and Islam on the run; Iranian Islamists think they have the West on the run. Ayatollah Khameneʾi makes use of the strong Shiʿite bifurcation between the pure, inner dimension of things (bāṭin) and their crude, outward dimension (ẓāhir) to explain why appearances can be deceiving: the Western powers look dominant and durable, but they are profoundly ill and rotten to the core on the inside. In Khameneʾi’s eyes – Meir Litvak explains – The primary factor in Western civilization’s inevitable decline and disappearance is its philosophical and ideological nature, which is comprised of secularism, humanism and the thoroughgoing reliance on rationalism, science and positivism…The fall of civilizations, claims Khameneʾi, is the result of deviations [from the divine straight path], and today we are witness to signs of the imminent deterioration of this [Western] culture bereft of morality, of this materialism bereft of spirituality, and of this power bereft of justice.⁴

In general, most of the world’s political entities are currently beset by an endless array of internal and external challenges of a political, social, economic and cultural nature, including profound ideological schisms that position vast segments of their populations and political establishments at fierce loggerheads with other vast segments of the same (the United States comes immediately to mind as a pre-

 Yusuf Saneʿi, live sermon, Karbala Satellite channel, 01/07/2016.  Litvak, “Westoxication,” p. 8.

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mier example, but few polities on the planet are immune to such menacing problems). The obsessive focus on Iran – a country the political echelons of which, even when we include the so-called “reformists,” actually enjoy a fair degree of overall ideological unity – as somehow far more vulnerable than other states to imminent disintegration is certainly misplaced. All of this having been said, there is one factor militating specifically for that unique vulnerability that cannot be ignored. The Islamic Republic is on the front lines of a battle royale that is spreading across the globe, between religious faith and the lack thereof. Iran was Islamized, then Westernized, then Islamized, and now it is facing a second round of Westernization, brought on primarily by exposure to the Internet coupled with disappointment with, even disgust at, the Khomeinist regime. Throughout the world one or the other of these forces – religion or secularism – currently has its rival on the run, but in Iran not only do both competing camps draw their power from relatively deep wells (since liberalism and democracy have been percolating into the national consciousness for over a century), but – unlike the case in America or Britain, for instance – the very identity and existence of the state is invested in the continuing relevance of religion. This is a recipe for trouble, not stability, and there are unquestionably signs that indicate that that trouble is seriously brewing. Where it will lead – who will win the culture war in Iran or what compromises will be made between the warring sides – remains to be seen. But one should be wary of assuming, as Westerners have done for a hundred-and-fifty years and more, that they know who the winner will be.

Problematic Assumptions One of the truly intractable foibles bedeviling the Western encounter with Iran, and with the Islamic world in general, is the absence from most discussions on the subject of even an elementary level of intellectual rigor. This perennial shortcoming is reflected, inter alia, in a specific brand of superficial treatment that involves (to borrow from the nomenclature of geometry) focusing on the propositions or theorems of a given problem instead of on its postulates or axioms. In other words, we often rush to evaluate and critique derivative conceptions or institutions while completely ignoring the more fundamental premises or underlying worldviews upon which they rest. In the summer of 2010 it was reported that an increasing number of Muslim parents in Britain were removing their children from music classes at public schools despite a strict national prohibition on doing so. Now, ignoring for the moment the contentious question of whether music is partially, or completely, or not at all forbidden according to Islamic law; and

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side-stepping the highly charged issue of whether there is, or should be, a higher law than the law of the country in which one resides; and, finally, putting aside the almost instinctual revulsion felt by many for any system or ideology that would deny children the enriching experience of listening to melodious compositions; skipping over all of these undeniably worthwhile conversational footballs, we would ask the reader instead to contemplate the most common response to this news item voiced by the various professionals – music teachers, school principals, social workers, lawmakers, journalists, philosophers, Christian clergymen and the like – interviewed on the subject by the BBC. Almost every one of these speakers emphasized, in diverse formulations, the highly interrelated if not virtually identical points that “music is the international language”; “music brings people of different faiths and cultural backgrounds closer together”; “music transcends boundaries, and breaks down the barriers that separate us”; “music allows members of different communities to get to know one another and share a common sense of exhilaration” – don’t these Muslim parents understand this?! The clear implication of all of these statements (they were actually, for the most part, expressions of sincere astonishment on the part of the speakers) is that if the Muslim mothers and fathers who pulled their children out of music class had only been aware of the peerless power of music to unite, integrate, connect or even just break the ice between people of different societies and faiths, they would never have taken the decision that they did. Several suggestions were even proffered by interviewees for how such benighted progenitors might be made aware of these specific positive qualities of music. The one notion that never even entered the minds of the reporters or their respondents in this tele-survey was that there might exist, somewhere on our planet, a society or religion in the eyes of which breaking down barriers and bringing people of different cultural and religious backgrounds closer together is not a desideratum. They did not even entertain the possibility that certain groupings or ideological systems could conceivably prefer insulation to interaction, could favor segregation over integration, could strive for exclusivism instead of “happy hybridity,”⁵ especially when the surrounding human environment is characterized by norms and values that the group or system in question does not condone and indeed vehemently condemns. In Islam, maintaining a separation between believers, on the one hand, and those whose worldviews and lifestyles conflict with that propounded by Allah through the Prophet Muḥammad, is a central precept (usu-

 Lucia Volk, “Crossing the East-West Divide: Lebanese Returnee Youth Confront ʻEastern’ Sectarianism and ʻWestern’ Vice,” Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 8 (2009), p. 201. Volk does not seem to use the phrase to reflect a value judgment.

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ally associated with the hijra or emigration of the first Muslims in 622 CE from pagan Mecca in order to form their own separate enclave in Yathrib/Medina).⁶ One need not like or agree with such a bedrock premise in order to recognize that acknowledging (or discovering) its existence and striving to fathom its nature and parameters is an essential first step toward understanding the proverbial “other,” in our case the Khomeinist clerics of Iran. Moreover, even those who cannot abide the notion that groups of human beings should live separately from one another need to understand that grasping and respecting the predilection of many pious Muslims for a certain degree of segregation from the surrounding non-Muslim world is a necessary prerequisite of…communication. Admittedly, the initial shock attending the realization that they differ from members of another culture so fundamentally might rather serve to discourage Westerners regarding the prospects for mutual comprehension and eventual entente. But “getting to the bottom” of our disaccord with others – grasping that “they do not possess the same regime of truth as ours”⁷ – is by any account the indispensable first step toward just such fruitful dialogue and possible future rapprochement: otherwise the parties to the conflict will continue talking past each other forever. (Moreover, is the natural propensity of parents to distance their children from what they believe to be harmful influences really so alien to us, really so difficult for us to conceive? Maybe this concept is closer to us than we think). Be that as it may, we must put at least a minimal amount of effort into ascertaining what the argument is really about before we go fifteen rounds with a foreign faith or culture. In the above case, music itself was only the tip of the iceberg. Another example of our tendency to attack derivative institutions while ignoring the premises that gave rise to them involves the veil. Islamic law requires women (and, to a lesser extent, men) to cover up their bodies when in public. In the several years leading up to the revolution of 1979 sections of the young female populace in Iran began “re-veiling” as a sign of cultural authenticity, a rejection of Western modernity and, in many cases, a genuine renewed interest in religion. There were those, it is true, who covered up out of fear – to avoid being roughed up or even having acid thrown in their faces by zealots – but for the most part re-veiling was chosen freely and seen as a form of empowerment. After the revolution the minor covering known as hejab – though not the major covering known as chador – became mandatory.

 Certainly, this attitude of al-takfīr wa l-hijra is one that Islam shares with a number of other major religions.  Foucault, cited in Afary and Anderson, Foucault, p. 125.

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The Western media and intelligentsia have had an ongoing field day with this “misogynous” – or “prudish,” or “oppressive,” or “debasing,” or just plain comic – regulation for decades, and incessantly denounce the prescribed Islamic dresscode as the Muslim world’s “war on women.” But the motivation for the imposition of the ḥijāb/niqāb/qināʿ/chador/burqaʿ is not prudery (anyone who is at all familiar with the sacred legal-literary heritage of Islam knows that “prudish” is the last adjective that can be used to describe it), nor is it hatred of women, or a desire to demean or oppress them; and it is certainly nothing to joke about: Allah, the Blessed and Exalted, commands His Messenger in His noble book: “Enjoin the believing men to lower their gaze and to guard their modesty; that is purer for them…And enjoin the believing women to lower their gaze and to guard their modesty, and to refrain from flaunting their natural adornment” (Qurʿan, 24: 30 – 31). These verses would appear, at first glance, to suffer from a redundancy (hashv): if human beings are ordered to “lower their gaze,” that is, to avert their eyes from those parts of the bodies of others that are liable to awaken lust, then what need is there for them to simultaneously “guard their modesty,” that is, to cover up those same body parts – if, based on the first injunction, nobody is looking? Or, concomitantly, if human beings are ordered to “guard their modesty,” then there will be no desire-inducing body parts exposed in the first place for anyone to look upon, and so why are the believers additionally directed by the Qurʿan to “lower their gaze”? Our Pure Imams and illustrious sages tell us that this is, indeed, the only “double-ply ordinance” (farz-e-do barabar) in the entirety of sacred scripture, because it is designed to guard the most precious and essential institution in all of human society: matrimony.⁸

The purpose of the veil (in Iran it does not cover the face) is, more than anything else, to protect families from destruction. A well-known but cryptic Qurʿanic verse speaks of “the satans who teach the people witchcraft and that which was revealed to the two Babylonian kings Hārūt and Mārūt: they learn from them that which separates a man from his wife…” (Q. 2: 102). Though “Hārūt and Mārūt” are evidently Arabic versions of the Zoroastrian sub-deities Haurvatat (“Perfection”) and Ameretat (“Immortality”),⁹ Iranian-Shiʿite preachers regularly construe these words as referring rather to the “wisdom” of the West: a wisdom that specializes…in breaking up marriages. In an Arabic language Friday sermon in the Iraqi city of Karbala during the fall of 2013, Iranian Ayatollah Morteza-e Qazvini put the matter thus: Islamic law mandates the concealment of every part of the human body, male or female, that is liable to arouse lust (yuthīru l-shahwa) among those outside of their immediate family circle (maḥārim); indeed, it enjoins that any aspect of a person that excites the carnal urge in

 Hojjatoleslam Vahedi, IRNA, 22/05/2013.  Whence the Iranian months Khordad and Mordad.

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someone other than that person’s spouse be covered or avoided. If a lady’s voice – not even her singing voice, mind you, just her talking voice; not directly overheard necessarily, but even through the telephone or on a loudspeaker – if a lady’s voice stimulates the “natural instinct” (al-ghariza al-ṭabīʿiyya) among certain men, then let her not speak within their earshot; if a man’s voice arouses the passions of a given woman, then let him not utter a word when she is near. For that matter, the law prescribes that if her written name inspires passion in a man’s heart, then he must not be allowed to see her signature on a piece of paper, and she must not sign a document that he is liable to see, and the same is true vice versa… Why do the Qurʿan and Sunna go so far [in this matter]? Why do they extend this prohibition on witnessing that which awakens sexual desire to such extreme lengths? Well, is the answer not clear? If a man’s or woman’s inner demon (al-jinnī al-dākhilī) is disturbed from its slumber, we all know that there is almost nothing that he or she will not do in order to satisfy that appetite and obtain the object of desire. That is simply how we human beings work! Think of the consequences for the wives of these men, for the husbands of these women, for their families, for their children – I seek refuge in God! Ask any clerk in any court in the country: he will tell you that ninety percent of the divorces that occur today are a direct result of marital infidelity. And marital infidelity is a direct result of the arousal of the carnal urge, and the arousal of the carnal urge is a direct result of exposure to erotically charged phenomena (al-ẓawāhir al-jinsiyya). Think of the destruction, of the disaster, of the agony and misery! Think of the murder, God forbid, that such violations of family sanctity and honor so often lead to! Think of the happiness of so many people eradicated in a single instant, for the sake of a momentary gratification. One whiff of her perfume, one rustle of his beard, one glimpse of her “pocket” (jaybuhā, i. e. her cleavage), one trill of his voice, and…wa waylā!!! ¹⁰

The exponents of Iranian Islamism do not hesitate to challenge premises in this connection that have long since assumed virtually sacrosanct status in the West: In societies where women – and, to a lesser extent, men – expose the erotically stimulating parts of their bodies, the instance of adultery skyrockets. This is simply the case, however unacceptable or “politically incorrect” (the speaker uses the English term – Z. M.) it may be to point it out, and no matter how impudently it may fly in the face of what has become a fundamental principle (mabdaʾ-e bonyadi) of Godless Western societies for several decades now, that is, that one’s mode of dress has no causal relation to inappropriate sexual behavior. No doubt, as many would argue today – especially in the wake of the so-called “Me Too Moment” (lahze-ye man ham) – men and women ideally should be able to control their instinctual urges (gharaʾez-e tabiʿiyeshan mahar konand) even under the most titillating of circumstances. But the fact of the matter is that they do not. Millions of people, most of them children, are made unspeakably miserable in America and Europe as a result of the rampant infidelity that replaces conjugal love with seething hatred and in most cases leads to ugly divorce.¹¹

 Morteza-e Qazvini, Karbala Satellite Channel, 09/06/2013.  Hojjatoleslam va l-Moslemin Sayyed Hashem-e Rasuli-ye Mahallati, IRIB Qurʾan, 23/06/2019.

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Islamists recognize that the imposition of the modesty covering is just that – an imposition – but from their perspective Allah has weighed whatever damages may be incurred due to this regimented modesty against what He sees as the catastrophic consequences of libertarian life, and has come down squarely in favor of the former option. Looked at from this angle, at least, the West may be said to value individual (and specifically female) freedom over the preservation of families, whereas Islam may be said to value the preservation of families over individual (and especially female) freedom. Now we know what the argument is about, and if we wish, we can engage in it. Each camp, as it turns out, advocates a position that “makes sense,” at least internally, a position that the opposing camp – however much it may disagree with it – can at least comprehend and debate, perhaps even appreciate. Civilizations do not survive for centuries unless there is at least some kind of method to (what we may perceive as) their madness. No side of this story is just plain crazy or evil. In the eyes of the Iranian revolutionaries who overthrew the Shah, the West was already being devastated in the late twentieth century by “free love” run amok, and sought in its final throes to bring the Muslim world down with it. “What they call ‘freedom’ in the West is freedom to fornicate,” fumed Ayatollah Khomeini, admonishing his Iranian listeners to beware the “seduction” of modern latitudinarianism. “Westerners admit of no constraints or restrictions on the appetites of the flesh, and pursue whatever their hearts desire,” continued the Imam. “They are ‘free’ to bury themselves in debauchery as deeply as they please (azad hastand dar fahsha ghowtevar shavand).”¹² But the West, Khomeini argued, was not satisfied to bury itself; it sought to inter the Muslim world along with it, spreading its degeneracy to the Iranian populace with the help of Israel and via the offices of the Shah, whose “television is a center of prostitution, [whose] radio is a center of prostitution, [and who has built] more liquor stores in Tehran than book stores.”¹³ Already in 1941 Khomeini had castigated the Pahlavi modernizers: “In your European hats you stroll the boulevards, ogling naked girls, thinking yourselves fine fellows, unaware that foreigners are carting off the country’s patrimony and resources.”¹⁴ Khomeini’s student, Ayatollah Taqi Mesbah-e-Yazdi – Tehran University professor, senior Shiʿite cleric and a highly influential political figure in the Islamic Republic until his death in 2020 – delivered himself of the following diatribe in this connection in a Qom seminary in 1998, which we quote at some length:

 Sahife-ye Nur, 9: 82.  Matn-e Kamel-e sokhanrani-ye tarikhiyya hazrat-e Emam Khomeini, Fars News Agency.  Khomeini, Kashf al-asrār, cited in Buchan, Days of God, p. 115.

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The West preaches the twin principles of evolution and progress (takamol va taraqqi), and yet it does not practice them. How so? Well, according to Darwin’s theory human beings are descended from animals. These animals, as they gradually acquired human characteristics, began to clothe themselves more and more, covering up first their private parts and then the rest of their naked bodies. By the time of the Victorian period in Europe, there was barely an inch of flesh visible to tantalize members of the opposing sex. But the West in modern times has performed a full-fledged volte face, and is now hurtling headlong back in the direction of the cave man (ghar neshin) whence they claim to have come. Having spent a thousand generations progressively covering up those visual stimulants that divert the mind from higher and more humane pursuits, they are now busy stripping themselves back down to nudeness, and deliberately exciting the carnal urge (amdan shahvat ra tahrik mikonand). In their media, their advertisements, their movies, their couture, and indeed everywhere one looks in their increasingly animalistic society, the body has reclaimed center stage, its flagrant sexuality bared for all to see. As a result, marriages are destroyed, families fall apart, immorality is rife, the president of the Great Satan commits adultery in the White Palace, and the president of the Little Satan commits adultery in his little palace.¹⁵ Once upon a time they were naked and unashamed – and now they are again (yek vaqti berahneh budand va khejalat nakeshidand va halah dobareh intor shode-and). Yet with all this, do they criticize themselves, do they examine themselves, do they consider reforming their own society or resolve to curtail the promiscuity and immodesty that has become so widespread therein? No. In their incorrigible arrogance (garden farazi-ye eslah napazir-e-shan) they insist that theirs is the best of all possible worlds, while they take Islam to task for its refusal to turn its women into sexual objects (mowzuʿha-ye shahvat) and its men into frothing beasts.¹⁶

Over two decades earlier, in the early 1970s, another of Khomeini’s students – Morteza Motahhari, whom we have already met – after discoursing at length on what might be called the “different but equal” philosophy of gender relations in Islam, launched into a diatribe concerning the harmful trajectory and consequences of the Western feminist movement in behalf of egalitarianism. He asserts that before marching headlong toward parity with men, women should have asked an even more fundamental question: parity in what? Perhaps the “achievements” of the male of the species are not all worthy of imitation. Perhaps the entire premise should be re-examined:  The reference is to Bill Clinton and Israeli head of state Moshe Katzav. In Persian the American White House is called kakh-e sefid, the White Palace, which may say something about the newness of the concept of democracy to Iranians.  IRIB Qurʾan, 28/08/1998. Note the (extremely rare) direct Biblical usage. This author recalls an Iranian cleric complaining on official state television about the French law against “Islamic swimwear”: “French women walk virtually naked on the beaches of their country – I seek refuge in God! – like savages from some African tribe, but they call the Muslim women who dress decently and refuse to disrobe in front of all and sundry “primitive”!

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Unfortunately the term “equality” (tasavi), as a result of endless repetition and indoctrination, has lost its original meaning, and the movement to obtain this once lofty goal has lost its way. From a praiseworthy struggle for equal rights, it has metamorphosed – predictably, because it was not sufficiently moored in immutable moral principles – into something else entirely. In the eyes of the ignorant purveyors [of this new doctrine], whereas in the past men rode roughshod over women and oppressed them (beh zanha zur migoftand), today women ride roughshod over men, as well, so all is well – equality in ill-treatment has been established! Whereas in the past some ten percent of marriages ended in divorce initiated by men, today, in many parts of the world, the divorce rate has risen to forty percent, in half or more than half of the cases initiated by women. So let us celebrate and be joyous, for full “equality” now reigns in human society! In the past it was almost always men who betrayed their wives, it was men who were not sufficiently restrained by the bonds of matrimony, chastity and piety; but today – God be praised! – women betray their husbands as well. What could be better! In the past men were the manifestation of hard-heartedness and cruelty; they were the ones who so often abandoned wife and needy children in pursuit of novel amorous adventures. But today – by the grace of God! – women too, even women long married and mothers of growing children, callously leave all behind as a result of a single encounter on the dance floor to follow their fancies. What could be more lofty! So it is that instead of treating the burgeoning ills of society; instead of strengthening the weaknesses of men and women; instead of shoring up the breaches in the fortress of family; instead of all this, we undermine the foundations of the family more and more every day that goes by. Instead of healing the moral ailments of humanity, we have now achieved an equal distribution of depravity. Long live equality – death to difference!! (marg bar tafavot).¹⁷

The usually circumspect, philosophical Motahhari should not be suspected here of descending into pure, splenetic invective – though that is present, as well (the extent of Eastern traditional rage against what is perceived as the modern West’s highly contagious and horrifically destructive march toward moral corruption – invariably and maddeningly combined with a smug cultural condescension – cannot be overestimated, and has grown exponentially since Motahhari’s time). The ayatollah’s underlying argument in this excerpt goes beyond lamenting the increase rather than decrease in moral turpitude occasioned by the addition of women to the ranks of the heartless and dissolute. His more sophisticated, almost ontological lament – alluded to in the passage’s bitterly sardonic concluding interjection (“Long live equality – Death to difference!”) – may be teased out with the help of a lecture delivered by one of his many illustrious students, Ayatollah Movahhedi-ye Kermani, at a commemorative conference convened in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of his teacher’s martyrdom.  Morteza Motahhari, Nezam-e hoquq-e zan dar eslam in Majmuʿe-ye athar-e ostad-e shahid-e Motahhari (Tehran: Ketabkhane-ye Melli, 1378), vol. 19, pp. 267– 268.

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Professor Motahhari took truth from wherever it came (haqq ra az har manbaʿi mipaziroft). Like the Prophet of God (Muḥammad) and his legatee, the Commander of the Faithful (ʿAlī), His Excellency (Motahhari) did not disdain to study, absorb and even adopt elements of surrounding cultures and civilizations. What he found meritorious among the Jews, Christians, Greeks, even Zoroastrians and pagan Arabs, he praised profusely and sought to incorporate into the tenets and intellectual methodology that he passed on to his countless disciples. This enlightened open-mindedness (rowshanfekri) extended as well – indeed especially – to the impressive ideas and institutions of modern Europe. Though he wrote many tomes criticizing socialism, communism and capitalism, Martyr Motahhari found much to admire in particular aspects of these systems and made no secret of this, advocating the appropriation of these aspects by Muslim societies. He could condone certain parts while condemning the whole. This was because His Excellency was as profound a philosopher as they come: he peered far beneath the surface and was able to observe the subterranean connections between what almost all people see as separate phenomena. Our teacher was, as another instance, an indefatigable champion of women’s rights (pishro-e khastegi-napazir dar ehqaq-e hoquq-e zanan), and as such he valued many individual facets of Western Feminism and made this clear time and again. Nevertheless, he rejected the enterprise as a whole. This was because he was convinced that on the most profound level – indeed, often unbeknownst to the activists and ideologues themselves – the impetus for the women’s liberation movement was less a concern for the welfare and freedom of the fairer sex, and more an underlying, pan-human, instinctual and inexorable inclination toward entropic leveling (mayl va jazb-e hame-ensani-ye gharizi-ye zati-ye taslim nashodani-ye hampayegi-ye dargashti). The modern urge to erase difference, our professor believed, is spurred on more than anything else by a misguided analogy to the rational-scientific method known as “analysis” (tajziye va tahlil). This method proceeds by (a) breaking down all known objects into ever-smaller particles or ingredients, (b) discovering that at bottom those particles or ingredients are universally identical (atoms, quarks and the like), and (c) concluding accordingly – not unlike the doctrines preached for millennia by Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism as well as many Sufis – that uniformity is the ultimate truth, that all variety is illusion, and that grasping this reality represents the height of illumination. Imitating, consciously or unconsciously, the scientific principle of the denial of all distinction, Western feminism seeks to eliminate everything that distinguishes women from men, that is, to undermine the natural condition (fiṭra). This, our master felt, was not only poisonous for gender relations, but for human relations in general (he attributed a similar underlying motivation to communism). The Muslim movement for the liberation of women, on the other hand – that movement epitomized by the incomparably egalitarian verse “God has prepared a reward for the submitting men and the submitting women, the believing men and the believing women, the devout men and the devout women, the truthful men and the truthful women…” (Q. 33: 35) – our women’s liberation movement, I say, stresses nothing so much as difference, as the Exalted says: “O humankind! We have created you male and female…that you may come to know one another” (Q. 49: 13). The greatest happiness in life – the “coming to know one another” that we call ʻlove’ – has as its indispensable prerequisite the preservation of distinction between the

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sexes! Thus it was that Martyr Motahhari saw in the attempt to blur the lines separating male and female a dire threat to human happiness on all levels.¹⁸

From Motahhari’s perspective – seen through the lens of Movahhedi-ye Kermani’s exegesis – while central aspects of the modern feminist enterprise are laudable and dovetail with (and even help improve) the Muslim world’s outlook on the subject, the sub-stratal motivations and latent tendencies upon which that enterprise is ineluctably contingent will ultimately do more harm than good. Women, like men, will secure for themselves (in Khomeini’s straightforward formulation) “the freedom to fornicate.” The bedrock premises and algorithms informing the modern women’s movement are contraindicative not only to gender discrimination – on the positive side – but, at the same time (claims Motahhari), to a great many of the traditional mores and inhibitions that have traditionally prevented the commission of indecent acts inimical to family integrity. Even more ominously, the quest for equality easily deteriorates into a quest for uniformity, which will replace multeity not only in the realm of gender, but in other important areas of human endeavor as well. This is the tragedy Motahhari feared and sought to avert. In 2017 the “Harvey Weinstein scandal” exploded: the highly successful Hollywood film producer was eventually accused of harassing and molesting – when he did not outright rape – scores of actresses and other women. His case had an immediate ripple effect that led to the exposure of a rampant culture of sexual exploitation that seriously harmed and often devastated untold victims, and initiated a process that went on to destroy the careers and families of hundreds of the rich and famous, as well as a myriad of ordinary men. The “discovery” of this epidemic of exploitation – for decades an open secret in Hollywood as elsewhere – brought about a campaign of condemnation and legislation that, in short, excoriated men for failing to control themselves, demanded that they do so, and threatened increasingly dire punishment if they did not. What this series of traumatic revelations did not lead to – argue Iranian Shiʿite clerical exponents – was a re-evaluation of the entire modern secular ethos in the context of which these infractions have become so rife, an ethos shorn of all the traditional checks on what was once considered “immoral” behavior. Hojjatoleslam va l-Muslemin Ali Eslami-ye Qaraʾati: The so called “Me Too Moment” (lahze-ye man ham) coincided with the rise of a new and appalling American-European phenomenon known as the “Slut-Walk” (rahpaymaʾi-ye zanan-e harze), in which the claim that has long since metamorphosed into an article of faith in

 Geramidasht-e siyomin salgardeh shehadat allame-ye shahid Morteza Motahhari, IRIB, 12 Ordibehesht, 1388.

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the West – scil., that sexual attraction is in no wise connected to sexual abuse – is taken to its most extreme conclusion, as women parade down municipal avenues in (and out of ) their undergarments, holding aloft signs that read: “I’m still not asking for it!” Safeguards such as modest dress, or avoidance of situations in which men and women are alone together, are as far from the minds of the debauched sinners of the lands of Arrogance – who by and large support as well, in the name of “freedom,” a vast pornography industry that irreparably ruins the lives of countless millions of young women and men – as is participation in such an abominable parade from the minds of pious Muslims, Heaven forfend. But Islam teaches that it is these very safeguards which ensure that society and the individuals composing it are not plagued – are not utterly destroyed – by the ravages of sexual misconduct. The Harvey Weinstein debacle furnishes irrefutable confirmation of the correctness of the Islamic way of life.¹⁹

The Brett Kavanaugh scandal that broke over a year later (on top of the hundreds of other scandals that exploded in between) is viewed in the same manner by Muslim clerics: this candidate for the U. S. Supreme Court was accused just prior to the congressional vote on his nomination of molesting a fifteen-year old girl when he himself was seventeen. Both parties were inebriated, both were wearing revealing bathing suits, and – except for a male friend of the accused who either participated in or foiled the attempted rape – the couple was alone together in a room. Regardless of one’s opinion concerning the extent of Kavanaugh’s guilt and the extent to which it should have disqualified his bid for the coveted post, one thing is certain: young people following Islamic law would never have found themselves in any of these three situations in the first place. Even when fully clothed, fully sober and out in the open, the sharīʿa forbids the mixing of the sexes. Ayatollah Abd al-Hosayn-e Dastgheib was imprisoned by SAVAK in 1976 for thundering from a Shiraz pulpit in the wake of a local street festival sponsored by Queen Farah Diba in which men and women mingled (to say nothing of the explicit nudity involved in some of the productions put on): “Shut down this abomination, or we will shut it down for you! Go ahead! Send your thugs and your tanks as you did at Fayziyyeh (the Qom seminary attacked by government agents in 1963, see below)! We will die in the streets before we allow this…”²⁰ Here is recently deceased Hojjatoleslam va l-Muslemin Akbar-e Hamidzadeh, in a soliloquy prompted by a phenomenon that in contemporary Western eyes would be beyond benign, namely, a new

 Fasad az zir-e dherre-bin, IRIB Qurʾan, 15 Ordibehesht, 1398.  Footage of speech on IRIB Mostanad, 10/12/2020. Ayatollah Dastghayb was seventy years old when arrested. In the end he was killed not by the Shah’s forces but by assassins belonging to the mojahedin-e khalq in 1981. He thus became the seventh so called “pulpit martyr” (shahid-e mehrab) of the revolution.

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trend in Tehran’s posh Northern neighborhoods in which male hair stylists pay house calls to female customers: It is well known that there is no sin that has undermined and ultimately led to the eradication of the nations of the past like the sin of profligacy and promiscuity (velgardi va biqaʿedegi). From the People of Lot (i.e., the Sodomites), through the Achaemenids, Sassanids, Greeks and Romans, and down to the countries of Europe and America in our own time, shamelessness and unchastity have served as the primary cause and foremost symptom of the moral erosion that inevitably brings even the mightiest empires to their knees. First family and home life is undermined, then traditional social mores are upended, and finally those whose responsibility is to lead and defend become too debauched (harzeh) to do so properly. We in the Islamic Republic of Iran will not allow this debacle to overtake us. We will dig trenches and build barriers and erect fortresses and lay down our very lives so that this satanic enemy of all that is pure and good makes no inroads into our holy communities. No amount of Western cultural imperialism (tahajjom-e farhangi), no amount of “soft war” (jang-e narm) conducted against us via satellite or Internet by the agents of International Arrogance, no amount of “modern” propaganda about “free love” and women’s liberation (azadi-ye zan) – no woman is free like the Muslim woman! – will cause us to swerve from our deeply held beliefs. A wholesome society is a healthy society. We seek refuge in the Lord of the Firmament and the Master of Time (the Hidden Imam – Z. M.) from the temptations of the Evil One!²¹

Much of what has become par-for-the-course in modern Western society for quite some time is new and shocking for Iranians, especially (but not exclusively) of the more religiously inclined variety. The longstanding battle over social media “filtering” was considerably exacerbated on December 13th, 2020, when a video went viral on the Persian internet in which a fourteen year-old boy made lascivious comments to a thirty-four year-old female “influencer” – living abroad and scantily clad by Islamic standards – and informed her that he masturbated to her image thrice daily (the huge hullabaloo engendered by this “unprecedented abomination” thoroughly upstaged the fierce debate over journalist Ruhollah Zam’s execution of the week before). The “Concerned Ones” (delvapasan) – a “principlist” lobby that focuses on issues of family – immediately launched a crusade against what they, and many others, saw as the feeble measures taken by Rouhani’s “reformist” government to mitigate the internet’s negative impact on Iranian youth. They wanted (and still want) Instagram and other social media thoroughly blocked.²² The attitude of the Islamic Republican regime to “modesty” in public spaces will call to mind for many Western readers the fundamentalist-misogynist hell

 IRNA, 02/07/1989.  See Arman-e Melli, 17/12/2020, p. 3. The video is here (viewer discretion is advised): https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=p-uBHoOhO10. Last accessed 12/10/2022.

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of the “Gilead” dystopia in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Basijis (a volunteer militia that serves, among other things, as the modesty police) stand on street corners and roam the sidewalks – albeit without weapons – and are liable to harass women whose headscarves are tilted too far back (bad hejab), or malefemale couples who are neither married nor maḥārim (nuclear family relatives). Veiling under the Islamic Republic is as forced (ejbari) as unveiling was under Reza Shah: it became mandatory for women hard upon the heels of the revolution, the date of its announcement coinciding with International Women’s Day (March 8). Demonstrations protesting this reimposition of traditional Islamic female attire were followed by counter-demonstrations – larger by an order of magnitude and made up almost entirely of women – featuring the less than genteel chant: “Cover up or get smacked!” (ya rusari ya tusari). And so the matter has remained for forty years. In a bizarre mix of civilian traffic enforcement and Covid-19 tracking, Iranian women since late 2020 have begun receiving via their smart-phones summonses to appear at police stations due to modesty lapses in their vehicles spotted by other drivers.²³ (This, as it were, “deputizing” of the average citizen to enforce female modesty – which often seems to serve little more than an excuse for lascivious males to snap pictures of members of the opposite sex – was made necessary by the recent development of a new app – reminiscent of the “fuzz-buster” devices and notices on “Wayz” that reveal to drivers the whereabouts of traffic police – which warns women of the proximity or imminent approach of gasht-e ershad, the modesty patrol). The limitations on female deportment and curtailment of women’s rights in Iran do not stop there, however. The testimony of a woman in court is worth half of that of a man, and daughters inherit half of what sons do (in the interest of fairness, it should be noted that in Jewish law female testimony is not valid at all, and in Sunni Islam girls inherit nothing). Women may not leave the country without their husbands’ express permission (in 2020 the coach of Iran’s All Star Alpine Ski Team did not accompany her group to the European championship tournament because of an argument with her spouse). The fairer sex is prevented from dancing or singing in public (the latter is occasionally allowed if she is part of a choir). Young ladies are currently prevented in certain parts of the country from riding bicycles, and in virtually all parts of the country from attending sports events in stadia.²⁴ Opponents of these measures have launched a (virtual and actual) “gender jihad,” one retroactively crowned hero of which is Sahar-e Khodayari or the “Blue Girl” (dokhtar-e abi), who, after being summoned to trial for gaining

 Nahve-ye Eʿteraz beh payamak-e Kashf-e Hejab dar Khodro, Mehr, 06/01/2021.  E. g., Asr-e Iran, 14/06/1399, “Mamnuʿiyyat-e docharkhehsavari-ye banovan dar Mashhad.”

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ingress to a soccer match dressed as a male, immolated herself in 2019 at nineteen years of age to protest the exclusion of female spectators from soccer matches.²⁵ It should be borne in mind, however, that enforcement of the “moral code” in the Islamic Republic is for the most part rather lax – or rather, the level of stringency varies from period to period – and that the punishments for infringements are more often than not mere slaps on the wrist (Hooman Majd, Robert Baer and other authors contrast the relatively relaxed atmosphere in Iran to the stringent enforcement of the Muslim moral code in the Gulf principalities and several other Middle Eastern countries.²⁶ Emily Sciolino opens her Persian Mirrors with a description of a raucous outdoor wedding party in the heart of Iranian Kurdistan in which not a single rule of Islamic modesty is left unbroken).²⁷ It should also be remembered that women are more highly represented than men at this writing at Iranian universities and in a variety of prestigious professions such as medicine, engineering and education – a far cry from the status of women in the fictional Gilead, who are not allowed to read, let alone study or work. Of course, in Western feminist eyes such a defense is understandably more damning than no defense at all, as is, for instance, Ayatollah Khomeini’s promise that “women are free to choose their mode of dress within Islamic standards,”²⁸ or the following encomium of Ayatollah Motahhari: Women had a major share in the revolution – this is universally acknowledged. The great leader of the Islamic Revolution repeatedly praised and honored the active role of the female element of the population, and more than once affirmed that their portion in the revolution was greater than that of the men. The leader of the Islamic Revolution, with his keen vision and sense, understood that without the participation of women the Islamic Revolution of Iran would not have come to fruition. It is for this reason that he decreed their participation in the post-revolutionary ceremonies and commemorations not just permissible but obligatory, and did not even require that they receive the permission of their husbands or their fathers….²⁹

 She was known on social media prior to the incident as the Blue Girl after the colors of her favorite soccer team, Tehran based Esteqlal. She ignited herself outside of the capital city’s revolutionary court, where she was soon to be sentenced. She died of her burns a week later, on September 9, 2019. She was barely mentioned in the Islamic Republican press.  The enforcement of religious strictures and mores has since been relaxed in certain contexts in certain Gulf countries – and thus some Iranians have the opposite experience – though it is far from clear how long this state of affairs will last in the Gulf.  Baer, Devil We Know, p. 9; Majd, Ministry of Guidance, pp. 190 – 93 (but cf. his discussions passim of the intrusiveness of the gasht-e ershad). Emily Sciolino, Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (New York: Free Press, 2005), preface.  Takeyh, Last Shah, p. 224.  Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 24, p. 302.

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We should, nevertheless, reiterate: all states, including Western states, have minimal dress codes, and women or men who violate those dress codes in public are liable to be arrested by the police. Imagine a scenario in which dozens of women paraded through a residential neighborhood in Chicago, Philadelphia or Manchester every day with their breasts exposed: would not the municipal authorities intervene to put a stop to such behavior? Well, as much as it might grate on the Western ear to hear it, in traditional Muslim societies a woman’s hair is like her breasts. ³⁰ As inconceivable a concept as this may be for Americans or Europeans – who are more ignorant than most of cultures other than their own, and have been thoroughly convinced for well over two centuries that theirs is the only defensible lifestyle extant – it behooves us to grasp the reality that for a large segment of the Iranian (and Muslim) public a “glimpse of tresses” is indeed “something shocking.” On his way to the opening ceremony of Tehran’s Teacher Training College – an occasion he had resolved to exploit in order to promote his own policy of de-veiling women – Reza Shah himself confessed to his mother that “Death is better than a life in which I am forced to parade my wife bare-headed in front of strangers.”³¹ The exposure of body parts that would not raise an eyebrow today in most Western societies is quite explosive in the majority of Muslim societies. A “selfie” taken on the steps of the al-Aqsa mosque in 2022 by a Spanish female tourist one of whose legs was exposed up to the mid-thigh saw the launch of a furious Hamas campaign under the slogan: “Your harlotry will not defile the purity of alAqsa!”³² The third page of (Roy Mottahedeh’s fictional but representative protagonist) Ali-ye Hashemi’s Pahlavi elementary school workbook “had a picture of a woman, identified as ʻMama,’ leaning over a naked child. Mama seemed half naked herself: her arms were uncovered almost to the shoulder, and her short hair showed her long neck.”³³ Nudity is in the eye of the beholder. What is the difference between being stopped by the traffic police for running a red light and being stopped by the gasht-e ershad (the “guidance patrol”) for exposing too much hair? Or, if the immediate answer is, “The latter is far more intrusive and invasive,” then what is the difference between being fined by the police for wearing one’s Corona mask around one’s neck, and being reprimanded by the basij for bad hejabi (an insufficiently tight headscarf )? After all, in both cases the

 This, despite the fact that – according to the Nahj al-balāgha (sermon 233) – women came running with their breasts exposed to offer the oath of fealty to ʿAlī.  Asadollah Alam, Yad-dasht-ha-ye alam (Tehran: Ketab-e Sera, 1393), vol. 4, p. 298.  https://mobile.srugim.co.il/article/704794: “Lan yudannisa ʿuhruki ṭuhra l-aqṣā!” Last accessed 19/ 09/2022.  Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, pp. 41– 42.

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security apparatus is interfering in matters of personal attire and coercively controlling what parts of our body we do or do not cover. And were one to parry that in the case of hejab-checks issues of sexuality and gender are involved and a humiliating, masculine-hegemonic act is perpetrated against women, then finally: what is the difference between an American policeman (or better: policewoman) directing a young lady to refrain from “indecent exposure” and an Iranian (female) “morality guide” taking her to task for “mal-veiling”?³⁴ At bottom – with allowances made for the more extensive concealment in the Iranian case, which is a matter not of principle but of degree – the answer would appear to be that the difference lies primarily in the basis upon which the laws being enforced have been legislated. If we conceive that basis to be John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Benthamstyle utilitarianism – i. e., do what you will so long as it causes no harm to others – then we are willing to endure the infantilizing experience of being told how to behave by the police. If I lower my face mask while Covid-19 still rages abroad, I am endangering the health of my fellow citizens. But if the basis for the law is not utilitarian but “religious,” then my privacy and autonomy have been infringed upon unjustifiably. No one has the right to foist his religious beliefs upon me: faith is a personal matter. But what if, in the eyes of the Shiʿite Muslim authorities and the traditional segment of the Iranian populace, God’s command that a woman’s hair and other body parts be concealed is as utilitarian in nature as the rule about wearing face masks during an epidemic? What if they perceive the harm caused, to individuals and to society at large, by the exposure of such body parts to be almost as great as, or even greater than, that caused by mass contagion – and not solely in a metaphysical sense? Or what if they believe sincerely and with all their hearts that to violate God’s orders – whether in the matter of hejab, alchohol consumption, the Ramadan fast or what have you – is a very bad idea regardless of whether one can associate these infractions with direct terrestrial-utilitarian damage or not? And what if, on top of all this, the ruling clerics of the Islamic Republic and those who helped them to power are convinced that such “religious” regulations are no different than any other regulations: not at all a matter of “personal conviction” or personal choice, but rather a matter of communal and even cosmic duty, to be enforced – coercively if necessary – by the powers that be? What then? When former president Ahmadinejad suggested a “cultural campaign” to combat insufficiently tight headscarves, one of his strongest clerical supporters, Guardian Council chairman Ayatollah Jannati, lashed out:

 Hooman Majd’s felicitous translation of bad hejabi in The Ministry of Guidance invites you to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (New York: Doubleday, 2013).

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Drug dealers are hung, terrorists are executed, and robbers are punished for their crimes, but when it comes to the violation of God’s law, certain people speak of ʻa cultural campaign’.³⁵

All states are police states. The main difference between them concerns the provenance of the laws that are enforced. When accomplished French scholar of Islam and left-wing activist Maxime Rodinson warned in ominous terms that the postrevolutionary Iranian regime would “brutally enforce the moral and social order,” he could just as easily have been talking about Sweden: every polity the world over “brutally enforces the moral and social order” of its choosing.³⁶ And when that brutality exceeds legal bounds, it is – at least in theory – no less unacceptable in the Islamic Republic than it is in the United States: Mahsa Amini, the Kurdish woman who died in the custody of the Iranian “Morality Police” in 2022 is thus no different in this regard than George Floyd, who died under the knee of an American policeman in 2020. Both incidents were condemned by their countries’ authorities – who punished those responsible – and both led to massive protests on the part of populations that did not deem such punishments sufficient, and that saw what had occurred as symbolic of a far more profound problem with the nation’s core principles. In the fall of 2019 a video went viral on the Persian internet in which plainclothes policemen were filmed roughly shoving a young lady into a patrol car. She was being arrested for the crime of doffing her headscarf in a public park, and then execrating – and expectorating at – officers who arrived at the scene and directed her to replace the article of clothing in question. Western (and Israeli) bloggers who got hold of and circulated the video construed its popularity in Iranian cyberspace as a nationwide outcry against the government’s repression of women. Unquestionably, that aspect was evident: even ayatollahs went on record censuring police for their poor handling of the incident and manhandling of the girl. But upon further inspection (carried out by a student team directed by the present author) it became increasingly clear that what was at issue for the major Los Angeles Times, June 19, 2010.  Maxime Rodinson, “Islam Resurgent?” cited in Afary and Anderson, Foucault, p. 102. The major disconnect between modern Western outlooks on this subject and the traditional attitude harbored by (among others) the ulama is brought home by Queen Farah Diba’s description of her meeting with Ayatollah Khoʾi in Iraq, whose last minute aid she sought against Khomeini. Khoʾi was opposed to Khomeini, but what exercised him during that visit was something else. “There was a momentary flash of anger when Khoʾi’s aides told her not to look directly at him. ʻI was told to look down’… At the end, he told me, ʻYou are a Moslem, your pictures should not be in the newspapers, and you should not shake hands with me.’ He lectured me on my clothes and about modesty” (cited in Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 457). For Ayatollah Khoʾi – not an Islamist, but still a devout Muslim cleric – such matters were more momentous than just about any others.

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ity of those commenting on the affair was somewhat different. These complained primarily about (1) the poor upbringing and atrocious manners of the detained teenagers who, it transpired, had engaged just prior in a water-pistol fight not only sans hejab but scantily clad (by Iranian standards), and who had been reported to the authorities by mothers “concerned for the spiritual and moral welfare” of their children playing in the park; and (2) the fact that, contrary to the prescriptions of Islamic law, a male and not a female officer had laid hands upon the young lady. Both these types of gripes partake far more of a pro-religious than an anti-religious, far more of a restrictive than a latitudinarian position. Another viral video from about the same time period was exploited by opponents of the Khomeinist state for a similar purpose: to point up the pervasive and fierce anti-regime and anti-Islamic sentiments ever simmering below the surface and erupting with increasing frequency as time goes on. It depicted a vehement shouting match on a traffic-ridden highway between a woman in a car who had pushed back or entirely removed her head-covering (perhaps due to the excessive heat) and another woman – properly “wrapped” – who had exited her vehicle for the express purpose of reprimanding her derelict fellow citizen. The impact of the video depended entirely on the outlook of the viewer, and, as a quick sample of the extensive commentary revealed, more respondents identified with the righteous rebuke than with the intrepid defense. Shaparak Shajarizadeh, the most famous of the Iranian women who shucked their headscarves in protest and held them aloft as “flags of freedom” during the Spring of 2018, was sentenced to two years of jail time (not twenty, as originally claimed, but still: two whole years behind prison walls) for the crime of “sowing corruption.” Why do people who expose themselves in public in the West never serve serious jail time? Why do the participants in the aforementioned “Slut Walk” garner no penalties at all, though they have unquestionably engaged in what is legally defined as “indecent exposure”? Because regardless of the vestigial regulations that remain on the Western law books, large and influential segments of American and European society no longer believe that there is anything harmful or problematic whatsoever about exhibitionism or sexual libertinism. The clerical class in Iran, on the other hand, is not so “progressive” and “enlightened”: its members still cling stubbornly to the “primitive” and (perhaps) rationally indefensible notion that some aspects of human experience, and some parts of the human body, should be private and not public (a modern art exhibit in Tehran of 2022, based largely on the dethroned Pahlavi king’s impressive collection, was protested by many ulama and others because of the portrayals of nudity it included. These

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were removed and the exhibit remained open).³⁷ From the point of view of Iran’s Muslim scholars, women and men who buck sharīʿa modesty laws are opening the door to the infiltration of the Abode of Islam (dāru l-islām) by incomparably destructive Western norms, and are ripping apart the fabric of traditional Muslim society. Such transgressors, in their eyes, are precipitating nothing less than a social and moral catastrophe. True, few if any issues represent a more incendiary flashpoint in the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic than the hejab. The combination of the invasion of intimate space (not even the genitals are more “intimate” than one’s face and head); the suppression of individual “style” and individuality in general, in a time when exposure to the Internet influences young Iranians to value the freedom to act and dress as they please above much else; and the demeaning, overtly sexist nature of modesty enforcement (young men telling women to “cover up”) and the opportunity it often affords for males from a lower socio-economic order to “lord it over” females hailing from the upper classes – these and many other problematic aspects of the phenomenon make the institution of the modesty police the potential lightening rod for significant opposition, perhaps even more the kind of unrest that the authorities will find particularly hard to handle: neither army, nor police nor even the plainclothes thugs often sent out by elements within the “deep state” will shoot indiscriminately into large crowds of protesting women, even in Khuzistan or Kurdistan, to say nothing of Tehran. All of this having been said, the regime itself, and vast swaths of conservative religious society in Iran together with it, will fight hard against the removal of the veil: this is a red line, because the hejab both symbolizes and makes possible the type of collective existence required by, and forming the bedrock of, Islam. Given all of the above – and there are, of course, thousands more pages of elaboration by hundreds more Muslim and Shiʿite luminaries on dozens more dimensions of this seminal issue – is it still so easy to pounce on the veil as the root of all evil and backwardness? Are there no other, more profound questions, no previously avoided cost-benefit analyses, no heretofore unexamined non-Western or traditional perspectives that ought to be taken into consideration when broaching this subject? Must the veil, which is designed to prevent all and sundry from perceiving a Muslim woman’s external beauty, prevent us from perceiving her inner beauty? What does it say about the secular modernist that instead of being distracted by exposure to erotic stimulants, s/he is distracted by the lack of exposure thereto? Unfortunately, the overall Western attitude to the veil reflects the same

 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/11/tehran-museum-unveils-western-art-master pieces-picasso-warhol. Last accessed 13/10/2022.

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abject ignorance that informed the words of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, secularizing founder of modern Turkey, uttered a century ago: In some places I have seen women who put a piece of cloth or a towel or something like that over their heads to hide their faces, and who turn their backs or huddle on the ground when a man passes by. What are the meaning and sense of this behavior? Gentlemen, can the mothers and daughters of a civilized nation adopt this strange manner, this barbarous posture? It is a spectacle that makes the nation an object of ridicule. It must be remedied at once.³⁸

Ali Ansari, Leila Ahmad, Houchang Chehabi and others have noted that a major motivation for the unveiling project was embarrassment, a fear of appearing uncivilized to the culturally hegemonic West. But no less salient in the above passage is the rapidity with which a time-honored custom virtually universal in Islamdom up until a year or two prior to the great ghazi’s speech (Ataturk certainly saw his own mother veiled as a child) can disappear from the general consciousness as if it had never existed, metamorphosing overnight into a marvel that, when encountered, engenders surprise and shock and epitomizes all that is backward. We shall see another example of this lightning-fast forgetfulness and lack of historical perspective immediately below.

Getting to the Bottom of Things The inability (or unwillingness) to probe more deeply into the various components charging the Islam-West conflict – to uncover and grapple with the more fundamental issues that put the two cultural-ideological camps at odds and even at daggers drawn – clouds our perceptions and widens the trans-cultural communication gap between the two civilizations in a whole host of significant areas. On April 19th, 2010, the New York Times and many other major American and European newspapers reported (accurately) that Hojjatoleslam Kazem-e Sedighi, interim Friday prayer leader (emam-e-jomʿe-ye-movaqat) of Tehran, had preached during the previous week’s communal mosque sermon (known as the khuṭba) that “ladies who are improperly attired cause the spread of fornication in society, which in turn leads to an increase in earthquakes.”³⁹ From the moment that this item entered the public sphere, a tidal wave of uproarious laughter washed across the Western world: comedians had material for entire routines (“He meant, of course, the  Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 164. Note that Ataturk speaks of the institution of the veil as if it were something newly introduced.  Banovan keh zaher-e monasebi nadarand ba’es-e gostaresh-e zena dar jame’eh mishavand keh in ba’es-e afzayesh-e zelzeleh hast.

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earthquake in his pants!”), talk show hosts spent half of their monologues on the subject, staid anchor-people broke down in hysterics, bloggers and “tweeters” slapped their cyber-knees with abandon. Purdue University senior Jennifer McCreight used the Facebook network to organize a satirical experiment dubbed “Boobquake” that saw upwards of two hundred thousand scantily clad and even fully naked young men and women gather in West Lafayette, Indiana to “see if the power of our scandalous bodies can produce some seismic activity.”⁴⁰ Sedighi’s statement was the howler of the year: modern society had never encountered anything so ridiculous. It cannot be denied that from the present-day, scientific perspective, the linkage of immodest dress, and the promiscuity that may result therefrom, to an increase in the frequency of natural disasters is grist for the humor mill. “And here I thought earthquakes were caused by plate tectonics,” jeered a geology professor. “I guess I had better go back and study some more!” “Aren’t these Muslims a gas?” asked one commentator, unable to suppress a series of loud guffaws. “Where do they come up with such outlandish ideas?” Where, indeed? Well, for starters, from the Talmud: What is the cause of earthquakes? Rabbi Akha said: homosexuality (mishkav zakhar), as it is written: “[God] looks upon the earth and it trembles.” The Holy One, blessed be He, says: “You have moved your member back and forth in an improper place? Verily, I will move the earth back and forth under your feet!⁴¹

Where else? From the canons of the Church: In the 1120th year of the incarnation of our Lord, because our sins demanded it (peccatis nostris exigentibus), the land was left desolate through the consumption of its crops over four years by locusts and mice; through the most frequent assaults and ambushes of the Saracens; and through the deaths of very many foreigners and citizens in storms, floods and other calamities. Because of the compulsion of the land that so demanded it, [the Latin Kings and the prelates of the Church have] established the decrees which we have inscribed below in order to check the lapsing populace. For since, at this time especially, the people of this region were following every downward slope into carnal pleasures, and were therefore exposed to the threat of daily calamities (cum enim eo maxime tempore predicte regionis populous omnia voluptatum declivia sequeretur, ideoque cotidianis infortuniis inmunutus pereclitaretur), there seemed to be only one refuge from them: both to invoke the mercy of God and to impose

 An earthquake actually occurred in Taiwan on the day of the event.  Yesushalmi Brachot 9: 13; Yalkut, Psalms, 862.

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some reins of justice upon the sins of the wayward populace, until their sins ceased, as we read happened to the Israelites, and the divine vengeance was halted.⁴²

And from the Biblical Prophets: The foundations of the earth do shake, the earth is utterly broken, the earth crumbles away, the earth quakes violently, the earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard (noʿa tanuʿa eretz kashikor) and shall rock back and forth like a flimsy shed, for its transgression is heavy upon it (kaved ʿalayha pishʿah).⁴³

And, of course, from the Book of Books in general, the warp and woof of which is heavily embroidered with admonitions and instances of divinely engendered natural disasters geared to punish humanity for its sins: from the Deluge of Noah; to the plagues upon Egypt; to the countless retributive droughts (including the one threatened in the celebrated Shmaʿ Yisraʾel or “Hear O Israel” Pentateuchal passage, which became Judaism’s most sacred prayer); to the castigatory famines, earthquakes and astronomical terrors portended in Matthew, Luke, Romans, Hebrews, Peter, James and Revelation. Indeed – today’s would-be neo-Zoroastrian opponents of Islam and Khomeinism would be sorry to discover – according to the “good religion” (beh din) of Ahura Mazda the commission of the homosexual act increases famine, drought, plague and all the evils of the world. This is the sole transgression the malodor of the impurity of which reaches the very nostrils of the Creator, and one of three sins so severe that even the best of good deeds – marrying one’s own mother – cannot atone for them.⁴⁴

When Hojjatoleslam Kazem-e Sedighi associated earthquakes with sexual immorality, he was not forging a new idea ex nihilo. The entirety of Judeo-Christian civilization – and the vast majority of the world’s other religions and traditional cultures from the dawn of history down to the present day – took for granted and, indeed, proclaimed from the hilltops at every conceivable opportunity that the universe is a morally meaningful place, that the events that transpire therein are not random, and that human behavior – or, more accurately, the divine response to human behavior – exerts the determining influence over the behavior of the heav-

 “The Canon of Nablouse,” Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. Lat. 1345 (s. XII med./2), fols. 1r3r. The passage quoted is from the introduction to the canon, the regulations of which deal almost entirely with sexual offenses. (Benjamin Z. Kedar, “On the Origins of the Earliest Laws of Frankish Jerusalem: The Canons of the Council of Nablouse, 1120,” Speculum 74 (2), April 1999, Appendix).  Isaiah, 24: 19 – 20.  Gindin, HaTov, pp. 65 – 66.

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ens and earth, over meteorological and geological events. That the early nineteenth century American author (and, by the way, masterful biographer of the Prophet Muḥammad) Washington Irving could gently mock this notion attests to its pervasiveness: New England in the year 1727 was visited by a series of earthquakes. They had some value, of course, because there were a good many hardened sinners at the time who simply would not repent. With the earthquakes, some of them were shaken from their evil ways, and that was a blessing.⁴⁵

Obviously, members of modern Western society need not buy into such a “teleological” (that is, purposeful or “end”-based) outlook on our world. The Roman philosopher Seneca already expressed a preference for the “etiological” (purposeless, “cause”-based) explanation of phenomena almost two thousand years ago, and post-renaissance scientific rationalism and positivism has, of course, increasingly confirmed his thesis. Nor need we sign on to the profound callousness inherent in the notion that God would crush thousands of families, including untold numbers of children and infants, under ten-ton blocks of collapsing concrete because members of the society in which they live expose their midriffs or “sleep around.” But before we bellow out, with Voltaire, Ecrasez l’infame! or “Crush the infamous thing!” – that “thing” being specifically the religious-based credulity with which the Portuguese populace greeted the clergy’s imputation of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 to “the peoples’ sin” – there are three steps that the denizens of today’s secular West definitely should take. First, they ought to cease exhibiting such abysmal ignorance regarding the strongly held beliefs of some ninety-five percent of the world’s inhabitants over some ninety-five percent of humanity’s career. For several centuries (a fraction of human history) Europeans and then Americans (a fraction of the planet’s inhabitants) have led an intellectual movement (which admittedly had antecedents in early periods, especially among the Greek and later Muslim philosophical elite) toward a more rational and empirical, and less romantic and mystical, conception of the cosmos. Whatever the merits of this movement and the novel perspectives on existence (and impressive technological advances) that it has spawned, to live a life so thoroughly circumscribed to the here and now that one is bereft of even the most elementary awareness of alternate or competing (or previously pervasive) worldviews, is to cultivate the very hide-boundness and provincialism against which modernity so famously vociferates. The wall-to-wall Western stupefaction  Washington Irving, “The Devil and Tom Walker,” in Tales Worth Retelling, ed. Herzl Fife (New York: Globe Book Company, 1979), p. 108.

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and incredulity that greeted Sedighi’s statement – what a strange, inane, insane thing to say! – is nothing but that same unpardonable shallowness that derives from the hubris of the juvenile: only recently arrived on the scene, he is quite sure that he is already in possession of all of the knowledge that could possibly be worth knowing. There is a millennia-old, world-wide tradition that persists among multiple communities and hundreds of millions of people down to our own time, of linking human ethical comportment to the deity’s manipulation of terrestrial and celestial vicissitudes. We may choose not to partake in this tradition, may choose even to criticize, confute or roundly condemn it; but not to be cognizant of it at all is just boorish. Specifically, any attempt to comprehend the worldview of Iran’s Shiʿite clergy and the devout portion of its populace without taking into account that “to them, the world is still a theatre of God’s power, where miracles can occur,” will bear un-edifying fruit.⁴⁶ Sedighi’s declaration is the negative corollary of Roy Mottahedeh’s interpretation of his protagonist’s mother’s vow-taking: “It was…a commitment to give, in the expectation that the world would give something back…She said to her Creator, ʻI believe the world is generous, and I am going to act on that belief.’”⁴⁷ God is not dead in the Middle East. This brings us to the second imperative incumbent upon Westerners in the same connection: calling a spade a spade. When we mock Islamic chastity precepts, ridicule Muslim theological beliefs, or decry Islam’s anti-democratic or anti-liberal approach, our problem is not with Islam per se. Our problem is with religion in general. Most of Islam’s positions and provisions concerning sexual behavior, metaphysics, individual freedoms and a host of other topics are shared by the rest of the world’s traditional monotheistic (and, for that matter, polytheistic) faith cultures, and many of these Muslim tenets and outlooks were inherited directly from the preceding “higher Semitic” creeds (may he, for instance, who did not invent, or at least enshrine in his scriptures, the penalty of lapidation, cast the first stone at those who still retain it on the books and occasionally even carry it out). Yet despite this, in order to get our digs in at Islam, we are willing to “trash” our own religious heritages – or at least those of our great-grandparents – without so much as a thought (this author has more than once had the surreal experience of participating in conferences on the subject of Iran held in the State of Israel, in the United States, in Europe and in India and watching Jews, Christians and Hindus – a goodly number of them demonstrably religious – lambast and lampoon the Islamic

 Jonathan A. C. Brown, Misquoting Muḥammad: The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy (London: Oneworld, 2014), p. 72.  Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 277.

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Republic’s stand on, for instance, the separation of the sexes, a position which is virtually identical to that legislated by their own faiths). I said that we are willing to trash our own religious heritages “without so much as a thought.” Here, too, ignorance is the reigning factor. Near the outset of this section we cited the renowned contemporary British philosopher Roger Scruton, who promised to enumerate “some of the critical features of the Western inheritance which must be understood and defended in our current confrontation [with the Islamic world]” each of which “marks a point of contrast, and possibly of conflict, with the traditional Islamic vision of society.” Here is one of his examples: To us, for instance, a law punishing adultery is not just absurd, but oppressive. We disapprove of adultery, but we also think that it is none of the law’s business to punish sin just because it is sin. In the sharīʿa, however, there is no distinction between morality and law…⁴⁸

Of course, Christian Canon Law or Jewish halakha envision no more and no less of a “distinction between morality and law” than the Muslim sharīʿa does: none of these religions’ legal systems punishes evil thoughts, for instance, whereas all of them contain severe punishments for adultery. Such that when Scruton blithely presumes to speak for the entirety of occidental society in declaring legal penalties for unfaithfulness “absurd” and “oppressive” – and when he takes for granted that all Westerners are of the opinion, with him, that “it is none of the law’s business to punish sin because it is sin” – what is truly on display is this modern thinker’s wholesale dismissal of the religious dimensions of his own civilization’s heritage. ⁴⁹ Since Scruton’s declared purpose in this essay, and specifically in adducing these examples, is to “defend the Western inheritance,” it is certainly thoughtless on his part to attack so directly, in the same breath, one of the central elements of that Western inheritance, scil., nothing less than Judeo-Christianity. Worse still, he is either unaware that he is attacking it – because he is not particularly knowledgeable about the legal systems of the monotheistic faiths – or he is deliberately obfuscating for propaganda purposes. Perhaps most egregious of all is that Scruton is, as we noted earlier, widely considered “Britain’s leading conservative intellectu-

 Scruton, p. 41.  What is also on display is Scruton’s lack of intellectual rigor: after all, many actions considered “sinful” by religion – such as murder, theft, etc. – are considered felonies according to secular law as well. Scruton albeit offers up, both in this article and elsewhere, some nebulous lip service to “the social function of religion,” but he regularly demonstrates his lack of affinity for, superficial grasp of, and willingness to distort the religious worldview. Most of the time he describes religion in terms that empty it of all content, such as when he enthuses that “the remarkable fact about our own [Christian] religious tradition is that it allows not only apostasy but overt atheism” (“The Joy of Conservatism: An Interview with Roger Scruton,” Carnage and Culture, 4. 4. 06, p. 5). Does it, now.

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al.” How exactly does the title “conservative” tally with Scruton’s full scale rejection of such a large portion of the ideas and institutions that characterize his own culture’s past? The remaining “critical features of the Western inheritance” that Scruton proceeds to adduce and eulogize – citizenship, the nation-state, irony, self-criticism, secularism, tolerance, pluralism – are all, in the final analysis, products of the modernist mutiny against traditional society. This “conservative” is in reality a radical revolutionary, who may well declare – in sonorous harmony with none other than Karl Marx – that “the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”⁵⁰ In order not to fall into the trap of reproducing Scruton’s critical misrepresentations it behooves us, in general, to study well the subjects upon which we plan to pronounce. More specifically, when it is the fundamental theistic outlook common to all traditional creeds that repulses us, then let us have the courage to admit as much: not “We condemn Allah and Islam” but “We condemn God and religion.” Let us be honest enough to call a spade a spade: once the truth is out, the international battle lines may end up being drawn quite differently (it is conceivable that in a not-so-distant future secular Americans, Europeans, Israelis and Iranians will find themselves facing religious Americans, Europeans, Israelis and Iranians across a hostile border). But there is a far more profound and significant level on which the “exuberant” Western reaction to Hojjatoleslam Sedighi’s admonition constitutes a particularly unfortunate approach to the issue. When religious traditions associate sexual immorality with the occurrence of earthquakes – as we saw at least four of them do – they are not really trying to say anything about the etiology of earthquakes. They are trying to say something about the momentous nature of sexual immorality: that it is capable of shaking the world to its foundations. In the religious worldview (and that of Sigmund Freud, and a great many other thinking people throughout history, religious or otherwise), no force is more powerful – for good and for evil – than the human libido. Not for nothing did the biblical deity forbid Adam and Eve to taste the fruit of the tree of carnal passion: all of creation trembled at the prospect of the unleashing of such an untamable beast. From the first bite, humanity paid for the joy of sex with the agony of death, but that was only the initial installment in a frightfully long series of payments: the incomparable havoc that the biological urge can wreak on our lives was clear to all the ancients, and they struggled mightily to harness this raging bull for the benefit of the human community and reduce its destructive capacity to a minimum. To this end they leg-

 Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm, p. 1. Last accessed 10/10/2022.

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islated, and admonished, and took every precaution, and anxiously supplicated their gods for assistance in resisting the irresistible. The system of checks and balances that keeps the rabid brute penned up, save for those occasions (e. g., marriage) on which it may be safely and legitimately released, is religion’s premier bulwark against what it sees as social cataclysm. The breakdown of that system is traditional society’s ultimate nightmare, is the destabilizing of the very foundations of its existence, is the rocking of the ground beneath its feet: it is an earthquake. An earthquake and a holocaust: “Flames of passion,” wrote founder of the Fadaʾiyan-e Eslam, Navvab-e Safavi, “rise from the bodies of immoral women, and burn humanity to ashes.”⁵¹ In the end, then, that that which Muslim (and Jewish, and Christian, and Hindu, and Buddhist) believers are most concerned about and perceive as most sacred – i. e., modesty and chastity – the modern West sees as little more than the butt of an uproarious joke. The late, great Fouad Ajami was puzzled by the “obsession” of contemporary Islamist movements with issues of dress, segregation of the sexes, and the like: The attaching of such an enormously great weight to sex, as though it was the greatest problem dwarfing all others such as bread, shelter, and the feeling of security and justice, is a type of excessive prohibition which is in fact another form of excessive interest in sex…⁵²

Setting aside the tired and rather shifty technique of turning the tables on those passionately opposed to a given practice by asserting that this betrays an inordinate attraction to that self-same practice, Ajami is not exaggerating when he portrays this issue as perched atop the Islamist order of priorities, even above life’s basic necessities. It is a cause for which untold Muslim activists and even traditional believers have been willing to fight and die. Why should the contemporary secular West care about the religious world’s “inordinate obsession” with the dangers of unrestrained sexuality? After all, humanity spent thousands of years being “uptight,” and now, finally, a portion of mankind has managed to free itself from the shackles of puritanism. Why shouldn’t we celebrate our liberation by shoving it in the face of the prudish pietists who continue to repress the natural appetites of men and women and enshroud the world in their somber gloom? When Hojjatoleslam Sedighi equates immodesty

 Cited in Saʿid Amir Arjomand, “Traditionalism in Twentieth Century Iran,” in Arjomand (ed.) From Nationalism to Revolutionary Islam (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), p. 209. It is easy to mock such statements, and all the more so when they come from the pen of a murderer, but it is crucial to realize that for large segments of humanity (down to the present day) such sentiments are as serious as can be.  Cited in Ayubi, Political Islam, p. 45.

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with massive underground convulsions – when he strives to convey to his Muslim listeners what a devastating, what an earth-shattering impact the spread of unchastity can have on family and society – why shouldn’t we mock his reactionary medievalism by organizing a “Boobquake,” in which we strip down to nothing and parade our wares for all to admire? Here is why. It is one thing to disagree completely with the moral system of another culture and to run one’s life and community on the basis of one’s own strongly held set of beliefs. It is quite another thing to take the dearest and most deeply held values of that other culture, deliberately trample upon them in broad daylight with the entire world watching, and laugh like a hyena while doing so. This generates a hatred that burns for years. This is a casus belli par excellence. This is a recipe for a rage that cannot be quenched. This is, simply put, why there was an Islamic Revolution in Iran. There is another reason why responding with ridicule to ideas that are alien to our current ethos is not the best policy. One of the hallmarks of maturity is the willingness to listen to, and learn from, others. Adolescents and teenagers are not very good at this: they are often convinced that they have the corner on the knowledge market. Adults, however, have ideally begun to realize that others – including their predecessors! – have a great deal to teach them, and that they should keep their ears and minds open at least long enough to decide whether the “other” has something compelling to say. The fastest and most effective way to shut down the flow of ideas into our milieu and consciousness is to ridicule them: this ends the discussion before it begins. Perhaps the Iranians (or the Muslims, or religious people in general) have a worthwhile point to make concerning Western “exhibitionism”; maybe their position can actually provide modernists with some food for thought or reason for pause. But we will never know, because we are too busy guffawing and disrobing. Moritur et ridet. How difficult it seems to be for most people to acknowledge the reality and the legitimacy of difference, to conceive that what is trifling by their lights might loom large for others, that what is pleasurable to themselves might be painful to others, that what is beneficial in their eyes might be detrimental in the eyes of others. In the summer of 1978, as the Islamic revolution gathered steam, one Farhad-e Mojtaba penned the following open “Thank You Letter” in a mass circulation Persian daily: How many wonderful and precious gifts you have bestowed upon me, my good friends from the West! In the name of capitalism, you have turned me into a money-monger, In the name of individualism, you have ripped me from my family, In the name of universalism, you have robbed me of my identity,

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In In In In In In In In In

the the the the the the the the the

name name name name name name name name name

of of of of of of of of of

rationalism, you have murdered my God, pluralism, you have annihilated my Truth, efficiency, you have undermined my humanity, straightforwardness, you have destroyed my manners, entertainment, you have emptied my mosque, feminism, you have ruined my marriage, liberalism, you have loosened my children’s morals, progress, you have buried my tradition, science…you have made all my poems irrelevant

And so, in the name of everything that is dear and beloved to me, I beseech you, O friends from the West: keep your gifts to yourselves! ⁵³

The third and final charge, then, that Westerners should lay upon themselves in regards to their interaction with the Muslim world in general, and Iran in particular, is this: cultivate the ability to empathize with the other, to put oneself in his shoes, to look at matters from his perspective; and try like the devil not to make light of his weightiest precepts.

 Kayhan, 14. 10. 78. Even former SAVAK chief Hassan-e Pakravan would complain to an American journalist that “we are being swamped by you…we are overwhelmed by material goods and we are losing our own values. Children do not respect their parents…What you have, is that really a way of life?” (cited in Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 198).

Chapter Four: Shiʿite Islam and the Struggle for Democracy Our analysis so far has, in a sense, tiptoed around at least one of the elephants in the room. After all, the West is not really betting on the Iranian population’s hatred of clerics, love of liquor, weak flesh, encroaching military or even the inroads of rational or scientific thought to rid the world of what it sees as the obnoxious anomaly called Islamic government. It is betting on the most powerful weapon in its arsenal, the most attractive gift that it has to offer: democracy. And after waxing indignant about the many things that the Green or Reform movement was and is not – anti-religious, anti-theocratic, anti-Khameneʾi, pro-Western – it behooves us to affirm, and to grant some deserved attention to, the one thing that the Green and Reform Movement indubitably were and are: pro-democratic. The hundreds of thousands of Iranians who took to the streets in the days and weeks following the presidential election of June 12, 2009, were more than anything else venting their outrage and frustration at what they saw as the hijacking on that date of the preeminent vehicle available to them for influencing the policies of their government and the character of their country. The growing pre-electoral excitement among certain segments of the population (mostly the young, urban, upper-middle class) surrounding the reformist-centrist candidate Mir Hosayn-e Musavi – prime minister during the Iran-Iraq war (after which the office was abolished) – made the prospect of ending the “regressive” and “embarrassing” era of Mahmud-e Ahmadinejad seem like a tangible one. All-night parties-posing-as-rallies in and around entertainment districts, university campuses and the challenger’s campaign headquarters generated a sense of euphoria in certain quarters that had not been felt since the groundswell of rebellious sentiment that swept the reformist candidate Hojjatoleslam Mohammad-e Khatami into the same political office in 1997. Victory was in the air. By the eve of the election “sources” inside Iran, cited by the foreign media and syndicated across the Persian and worldwide Internet, were smugly assuring anyone who cared to listen that Musavi was a shoe-in, that he was set to win by a landslide. (In actuality, domestic Iranian opinion polls, for whatever they are worth, were split down the middle – half of them giving a substantial victory to Ahmadinejad and the other half forecasting a Musavi win by just as large a margin – and the only more-or-less reliable Western survey, conducted for the BBC and ABC News less than a month before the election and reported in the Washington Post and other respectable venues, predicted that Ahmadinejad would receive more than double the votes garnered by his closest opponent – which, in the event, he did. Indeed, Ahmadinejad reportedly complained several weeks after the election that Khameneʾi’s support had cost him ten million https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-007

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votes. ¹ These facts have not prevented the notion of the “stolen election” of 2009 from spreading far and wide and assuming the character of an unassailable verity, among the Western public at large and even among many Middle East experts).² Having decided the election before it was held, and having begun celebrating the advent of the “New Era” before it had dawned, it was only natural that the green-festooned supporters of Mir Hosayn-e Musavi would react with consternation and disbelief when it was announced – under a set of particularly suspicious circumstances (e. g., before all of the votes could possibly have been counted) – that Iran was to endure four more years of the man his detractors liked to call “the mad dwarf ” (kutule-ye-divaneh). Was the election stolen? Even taking into account the many undeniable irregularities and violations (some of them officially acknowledged by the Guardian Council itself ) that plagued this ill-fated plebiscite, there is no hard evidence of this. The commonly held view among Americans, Europeans, vociferous Iranian oppositionists and not a few academic specialists that the powers-that-be in Tehran simply switched the tallies between the two candidates, giving Musavi’s twenty-four million votes to Ahmadinejad and Ahmadinejad’s thirteen million votes to Musavi, strains credulity beyond the breaking point for a great many reasons (and partakes of the incomparable Persian fancy for conspiracy theories,³ as well as the Western willingness to believe just about anything negative about the Islamic Republic). Musavi and Karroubi themselves did not dare to level such an accusation, but limited themselves to the general claim – for which they adduced no convincing (or even unconvincing) documentation – that the extent of fraudulent activities carried out by Ahmadinejad supporters before and during the polls with the tacit approval of elements in the Ministry of the Interior was sufficient to warrant a blanket invalidation of the election (the sort of claim that is heard from losing candidates in elections the world over, including in Western democracies). And it should be borne in mind that both before and after 2009, candidates who were considered favorites of the Supreme Leader

 Majd, Ministry of Guidance. p. 63 – 4.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_presidential_election,_2009. Last accessed 13/10/2021. See also: Eric A. Brill, “Did Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Steal the 2009 Election?” at http://brill-law.com/ iran2009election-100710.pdf . Last accessed 12/10/2021. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund poll, also known for its reliability, conducted one month prior to the elections, gave Ahmadinejad 34 % of the vote to Musavi’s 14 % (Jack Straw, The English Job: Understanding Iran and Why it Distrusts Britain [London: Biteback Publishing, 2019], p. 288. On the other hand, signs of tampering were certainly not absent, nor did it help matters that “for the first time in the history of elections under the Islamic Republic, an incumbent president won every single province” (Farhang Morady, “Who Rules Iran? The June 2009 Elections and Political Turmoil,” Capital and Class 35 [1], 2010, p. 53).  See, among many others, Ervand Abrahamian, “The Paranoid Style in Iranian Politics,” in Khomeinism, pp. 111– 131.

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and the conservative establishment lost by a landslide, while their unsupported and “undesirable” rivals – such as Khatami and Rouhani – triumphantly marched into the Saʿdabad Palace. Those results are never challenged by Western analysts or opposition pundits. So why were these? Be that as it may, the accumulation of anecdotal testimonies from points throughout the country leaves little doubt that this was hardly Iranian democracy’s finest hour, and the overall sense of dirtiness, the aforementioned predisposition of the populace to credit even the most outlandish conspiracy theories, and the dashed hopes of many concerned citizens for a brighter and more progressive tomorrow, all combined to bring about an explosion of collective frustration in the summer of 2009 that rapidly metamorphosed into a widespread, semi-coordinated cry for a deeper democratization (and in some cases the overthrow) of the political system. Shiʿite Muslims know a thing or two about the more deserving candidate being cheated out of his rightful office: it is the reason they exist. Shiʿism came into being as a protest movement against (what its progenitors saw as) the usurpation by tribal kingmakers and backroom politicians of the leadership over the Muslim community, after the Prophet Muḥammad’s death, from the person legitimately entitled to it (ʿAlī), and its bestowal upon a well-connected but far less qualified individual (Abū Bakr). The revulsion felt by members of this minority Muslim sect for plots to invest the wrong man with authority is thus fierce and deep-seated, and their faith’s “never forget, never forgive” theology has always ensured that despite long periods of underground hibernation, the demand for redress and rectification of such wrongs will ever fight its way back to the surface. Even if Supreme Leader Khameneʾi, his “beloved son” Mahmud-e Ahmadinejad, and the conservative-dominated judiciary and security apparatus managed to kill Musavi’s Green Movement dead – and they did – its resurrection in one form or another is almost a foregone conclusion, and the “oppressors” and “usurpers” will be looking over their shoulders for a long time to come. Indeed, one of the more salient and significant dimensions of the post-electoral (and pre-electoral) pro-democracy movement that Iran witnessed in 2009 is the extent to which it drew on the traditional Shiʿite paradigm of betrayal and dispossession. Ever since the end of the Khatami era and the accession of Ahmadinejad in 2005, those figures most closely tied to “the Line of the Imam” (khatt-e-emam) or Khomeini’s ideological legacy – men like Ayatollah Tavassoli, who expired in February, 2008 on the Expediency Discernment Council floor while vociferating against the abuse of Ayatollah Khomeini’s grandson; or Ayatollah Taheri-ye Esfahani, who in July, 2009, pronounced the previous month’s elections “null and void” – ever since President Khatami was pushed out of public life these figures have been berating the Iranian establishment that coalesced in the wake of his demise for

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deviating from the illustrious founder’s (that is Khomeini’s) teachings. They have gone so far as to assert that those who hold the key positions in the Islamic Republic in our time were hostile to Khomeini’s revolutionary project from the first, and have now, ironically and tragically, managed to seize the reins of power in a sort of coup d’etat. Ayatollah Tavassoli, during his aforementioned “last lecture,” even quoted a letter written by Khomeini in 1984, in which the great leader predicted that after his death “a group of holier-than-thou, fossilized, reactionary imposters, on the pretext of defending this humble servant, will insult and molest my children, supporters, family and friends, and trample underfoot the fundamental principles of the revolution.”⁴ In Shiʿite consciousness, such usages immediately conjure up the hypocritical cooptation of the Muslim system and catastrophic deviation from the true tenets of Islam perpetrated after Muḥammad’s death by the shaykhān (the first two caliphs, Abū Bakr and ʿUmar) and later by the leaders of the pseudo-Muslim Umayyad dynasty, who also maltreated and even murdered the Prophet’s offspring. One of the main areas in which the eslah talaban – not “reformists,” the reader will recall, but “restorers” – claim that Khomeini’s legacy has been perverted is that of democracy or people power. Hosayn-e Musavi reminds his readership: The Imam erected all of the pillars of the Islamic Republic solidly on the foundation of the people’s trust (eʿtemad-e-mardom), and in addition to this, he prescribed annual festivals and occasions during which the people would be “present in the arena” (hazerin dar sahneh), so that no would-be tyrant could ever succeed in overturning the edifice of the people’s sovereignty (bonyan-e-hakemiyyat-e-mardom).⁵

(This characterization of post-revolutionary Iran’s many new-fangled holidays as deliberately contrived opportunities for the masses to flex their muscles in public so that government does not become despotic, is curiously reminiscent of the justification for the right to bear arms enshrined in the American Constitution’s controversial Second Amendment). Ayatollah Hashemi-ye Rafsanjani, revolutionary Iran’s longstanding king-maker, took up, to some extent, the cause of the anti-Ahmadinejad protestors in 2009 (for which reason the conspiracy-happy Iranian rumor mill refused to accept that his death eight years later was from natural causes, so much so that his English Wikipedia entry actually reads, at this writing: “Rafsanjani died on 8 January 2017 at 19: 30 due to a heart attack while being drowned in a

 Aftab-e Yazd, 03/12/2010. “Goruhi az hoqqeh-bazan-e-moqaddasnama, motehajjar va-vapasgara, dar qaleb-e-defaʿ az in janeb, farzandan, dustan, yaran ve-bayt-e-bandeh-ra mowred-e-towhin va-barkhord qarar khahand dad.”  Musavi, Communique 13.

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pool” – with no further comment.)⁶ Several weeks after the contested election, Rafsanjani explained to an overflowing audience at the Tehran University Mosque (capacity: some 8000) how thirty years earlier “Our illustrious Master, may Allah guard his secret” (an expression inserted following the names of Shiʿite luminaries) had pressured the first prime minister of the Islamic Republic, Mehdi-ye Bazargan, to begin forthwith the process of drafting a constitution, so that the people could benefit from representative government. He added that Khomeini himself had then revised the preliminary version of the constitution submitted to him in the direction of even more far-reaching democratic rights: As a result of this process, you all know that according to our country’s constitution, every component of the state’s government is controlled by the votes of the people: from the Supreme Leader (rahbar), who is selected and supervised by the [Council of ] Experts (khobregan), which is in turn elected directly by the people and which is therefore a creature of the votes of the people (makhluq-e-raʾye-mardom); to the President, who is elected directly by the people; to the Parliamentarians, who are elected directly by the people; to the local councils (shuraha), who are directly elected by the people. And whoever accedes to any of these offices is dependent for his continuation in office on the votes of the people. This is government by the people, coupled with religious government (hokumat-e-dini): “Islamic Republic” is not just an empty phrase: it is a republic, and it is also Islamic.⁷

Echoes Musavi: “In the ‘national covenant’ (i.e., the qanun-e-esasi or constitution), initiated and approved by our beloved Imam, the legitimacy of every arm of government is based on the support and trust of the people, to such an extent that if we scrutinize the matter closely it will become clear that even a body not subject to supervision (nahad-e-nazarat napazir) such as the Guardian Council (shura-ye negahban) is nevertheless not far from the hegemony of the people…We want what our great Imam wanted: an “Islamic Republic,” not one word less!⁸

In the eyes of the eslah talaban (reformists/restorers) in general, and the jonbesh-esabz (Green Movement) in particular, the heavy emphasis placed by Khomeini on the will of the people and the system of checks and balances that he and his revolutionary coterie established to prevent the (re)emergence of oligarchic rule – all of this was giving way under the Khameneʾi–Ahmadinejad axis to suppression and

 Much like his hero, Amir-e Kabir, whose biography he wrote and concerning whose sad fate he wept in one of the last recorded sermons he gave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akbar_Hashemi_ Rafsanjani#Death. Last accessed 13/10/2022. The Persian version lacks the addition “while being drowned in a pool”).  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljSRM6qIFE0. Last accessed 12/10/2022.  Communiques 13 and 11.

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dictatorship. This development was portrayed by the leaders of the Green movement as a tragic betrayal of the original aims of the revolution: These days there is no night during which I do not think of the Imam [Khomeini] and the Martyr [Ayatollah Mohammad Hosayni-ye] Beheshti (architect of the constitution, assassinated in 1981 by the Mojahedin-e-Khalq or People’s Front) and the other dear martyrs, and whisper to them: ‘Look what you were after, and look what we have come to! (shoma cheh mikhastid va emruz ma beh cheh reside-im).⁹

Again following the Shiʿite historical paradigm, in tandem with the abandonment of the principles upheld by the founders, their progeny are also made the objects of persecution (as Muḥammad’s daughter and grandchildren were oppressed by his successors). Thus Ayatollah Khomeini’s grandson is denied the right to run for a seat on the Committee of Experts” (majles-e khobregan) due to “insufficient religiosity” (his candidacy was re-instated on appeal) and another grandson may even have been murdered by the intelligence services; Ayatollah Rafsanjani’s children must flee the country to avoid arrest after the election of 2009; and the abovementioned Ayatollah Beheshti’s daughter contacts Rafsanjani (like the Imam Ḥusayn’s sister Zaynab turning in despair to aging Companions of the Prophet after the Karbala massacre), complains of her brother’s arrest and asks: “Shall Martyr Beheshti’s grandchildren fear for their safety and be forced to go into hiding during the ‘Ten Days of Dawn’ (dahe-ye fajr, the annual celebration of the revolution)?” – and both the caller and her interlocutor weep on the telephone.¹⁰ As the crackdown on the post-electoral demonstrations escalated into violent repression and mass arrests, Ayatollah Karroubi – one of the three leaders of the Green Movement – went so far as to compare Supreme Leader Khameneʾi to the hated Shah ousted by the revolution (just as the Umayyads in their day were seen and described by the Shiʿites as atavistic throwbacks to Qurashite jāhilism). Mounting the bed of a truck in the midst of thousands of cheering supporters, Karroubi – whose unbelievably poor showing at the polls constitutes the clearest evidence of vote fraud in the 2009 election – flipped open volume one of Ayatollah Khomeini’s collected writings (the Sahife-ye Nur or “Scroll of Light”) and read with deep emotion the Imam’s 1963 defiant challenge to the Pahlavi monarch, turning it into his own defiant challenge to Khameneʾi: Sir! Take my advice. You have seen by now that neither persecution, nor beatings, nor imprisonment, nor torture, nor exile, nor humiliation have afforded you a victory. You have seen that the people grow angry; an entire people cannot be crushed under the heel of the jackboot

 Musavi, Communique 14.  Communique 12.

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forever. You have seen this. Sir! The government belongs to the people! (dowlat mal-e-mardom ast). The state budget comes out of the pockets of the people! You are the servant of the people! Governments are the servants of the people! (dowlatha khedmatgozar-e-mardomand).¹¹

Musavi also did not hesitate to draw an analogy between the conduct of the present-day Iranian regime and the methods of the manipulative monarchy that it overthrew: “The similarities between the recent elections and the ‘elections’ that took place in those days are yet another indication that the forces of despotism (qodrat-ha-ye estebdad), which were never fully stamped out, are once again hard at work in our society.”¹² An even clearer articulation of the connection made in the minds of many Iranians between the behavior of the Khameneʾi-backed Ahmadinejad government and Shiʿism’s classic nemeses in the early days of Islam was provided on the morrow of the first post-electoral “show trial” in Tehran in August, 2009. In this surreal, Stalinist spectacle – not devoid of precursors in the history of the Islamic Republic but unprecedented in terms of its scope – some one hundred politicians, journalists and activists identified with the eslah talaban (reformists/restorers) were paraded, hollow-eyed and in prison pajamas, in front of national television cameras. The most prominent defendants, including former vice-president (under Khatami) Mohammad Ali-ye Abtahi, recanted virtually every principle they had consistently and vociferously upheld in speech and in writing in the years and decades prior to their arrest, and labeled themselves and their erstwhile comrades “traitors” to the Islamic Republic. This unholy display led former ombudsman and prominent religio-legal scholar Ayatollah Mostafa Mohaqqeq-e Damad to address an open letter to his old friend and seminary study partner, Ayatollah Hashemi-ye Shahrudi, then Head of the Judiciary. In the midst of this missive, which tugs on heart strings but pulls no punches, Mohaqqeq-e Damad relates the following historical anecdote without any transition or introduction: When [the notorious seventh century Sunni-Umayyad general and governor] Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf al-Thaqafī, on the orders of the Marwānid [Sunni caliph] ʿAbd al-Malik and for the purpose of silencing the protests of the opposition (i. e., the supporters of the Shiʿite Imams), entered Kufa accompanied by a bevy of executioners, he made his way directly to the central mosque and summoned the entire population of the city. He then ascended the podium and declared: “O people! I will have mercy neither on your young children nor on your elderly. I will scourge the innocent among you instead of the guilty, and on the strength of a mere guess I will send them to the executioners (be sarf-e-goman tahvil-e-jalladan khaham dad). All of these actions

 BBC Persian News, 08/10/2009.  Communique 5.

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are part of my inalienable prerogative, and whatever I deem proper – that is the law! (har cheh man maslahat bedanam ayn-e shar ast).”¹³

Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf is very high up on the Shiʿite black-list, and the implied comparison here between the role of Minister of Justice Shahrudi in the post-electoral crackdown and the cruel and arbitrary comportment of al-Ḥajjāj in suppressing the seventh century Shiʿite community is designed to cut the addressee no less deeply – indeed far more so, because he is a loyal Shiʿite and a cleric – than Khomeini’s dubbing the Shah “Yazīd,” the Umayyad caliph responsible for Ḥusayn’s murder. Today’s advocates of greater freedom and political participation in Iran are thus likened (by themselves and even by some who do not fully espouse their cause) to the original Shiʿites, and the repressive osul gara or “principlists” currently in power (known in the West as “hardliners” or “conservatives”) to Shiʿism’s Sunni oppressors. The heroes of the Shiʿite religion, for their part, are made into paragons of proper democratic behavior. Here, again, is Ayatollah Rafsanjani – in his much-anticipated khuṭba (Friday mosque sermon) after the “stolen” second election of President Ahmadinejad – getting in a thinly disguised dig at the increasingly dictatorial policies of the man he helped put into office, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameneʾi: One day the Prophet – who at that time, in the last year of his life, was deeply preoccupied with and anxious about the future – said to ʿAlī son of Abū Ṭālib: “To you belongs the allegiance of my community (laka walāʾu ummatī).” This took place after [what the Shiʿites claim was the explicit appointment by Muḥammad of ʿAlī as his successor in 631 CE at the pool of ] Ghadīr Khumm, and the Prophet’s intent was: “You are the ruler (walī) of this people and authority is yours, having been given to you by God.” Next, the Prophet said to ʿAlī: “If [the people] accept you wholeheartedly and endorse you unanimously (in wallawka fī ʿāfiyatin wa ajmaʿū ʿalayka bi-l-riḍā), then assume the leadership.” (Rafsanjani translates this statement into Persian for his audience, and then relates its continuation). “But if they disagree concerning you, then leave them to their own devices” (in ikhtalafū ʿalayka fa-daʿhum wa shaʾnihim).¹⁴

The way that Rafsanjani has wielded this hadith (prophetic tradition) is little less than shocking, especially coming from a Shiʿite mojtahed (and from a cautious elder statesman, who in his own heyday as president of the republic did not exactly eschew high-handed tactics). Parsed in the manner he has parsed it, it means nothing less than that God proposes and man disposes. ʿAlī’s authority, declares the Prophet in no uncertain terms, was bestowed upon him by Allah; notwithstanding

 Aftab-e Yazd, 12/05/2010.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljSRM6qIFE0. Last accessed 07/29/2021. According to a widely cited tradition, ʿAlī himself conditioned the imamate of his eldest son Ḥasan on the decision of the Muslim community (Dakake, Charismatic Community, p. 73).

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this awesome fact, he is advised by Muḥammad to step down and relinquish that authority if the people do not support him by general consent (which is exactly what ʿAlī did, as we shall see in Part Two). Vox populi is given precedence over vox dei. Like Musavi, Rafsanjani lays emphasis on the indispensable nature of both components of the name given to the post-revolutionary regime – “Islamic” and “Republic” – and asserts not only that the latter is dependent upon the former, but (most radically) that the former is dependent upon the latter: The “Islamic Republic” is not just an expression; it is, rather, a reality and a truth that derives from our religious beliefs and that has come down to us from our Qurʿan, from our traditions (revayat), from our Imams and from our Prophet. We believe in this [system of government], and its two aspects must remain forever entwined. Be assured, that if one of these two is ever diminished, then our revolution will have perished. If “Islamic” is removed, then we will quickly find ourselves going nowhere in a desolate wasteland, and if “Republic” is removed then [our dream] will never be realized. Wherever the people do not choose [their leaders], that is not Islamic government (anjaʿi keh raʾye mardom nabashad an hokumat-e-eslami nist). It was for this very reason that ʿAlī son of Abū Ṭālib stayed at home for nineteen years (because the majority of Muslims opted for Abū Bakr after Muḥammad’s death, and then for ʿUmar and then for ʿUthmān– Z. M.), and only when the people came and crowded into his house “as thick as the hair on the mane of a horse” [and demanded that he accede to the caliphate after the assassination of the third caliph, ʿUthmān] did he agree [to take office].¹⁵

Imam ʿAlī knew when he wasn’t wanted, and he exited the stage, waiting in the wings until the public mood shifted and his constituency banged down his door and dragged him to the seat of government. ʿAlī saw power as vested in the people; his namesake, Ali Khameneʾi, has forgotten this lesson – so Rafsanjani. Long before this, officially disgraced but still influential Ayatollah Montazeri – patron saint of the Reformist and Green movements prior to his death in 2009 – went so far as to publish the following shocking proposition (all the more so coming from the man personally responsible for erecting the religio-legal underpinnings of “the Guardianship of the Jurist” at the time of the revolution): Since, based on the constitution, the faqih (the Guardian Jurist – Z. M.) is elected by the Assembly of Experts (who are in turn elected by the people – Z. M.), would it be wrong if his election, similar to that of a president, had a time limit, for example six or ten years? This time limit will emphasize the popular nature of the regime and will increase peoples’ trust

 Dakake, Charismatic Community, p. 73. The Ayatollah’s math seems to be a bit off; by most accounts ʿAlī stayed out of the political limelight for almost twenty-five years (632– 657 CE).

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in the system…based on the same logic the accountability of the faqih has to be addressed. He should be accountable to both the Assembly of Experts and to the people…¹⁶

Is the Green pro-democracy movement of Iran – at the moment all but dead, but unquestionably resurrect-able – destined to become the Islamic Republic’s Achilles’ heel? Will the powerful pull of the prospect of more political freedom finally succeed, where so many other forces have dismally failed, in undermining the theocratic regime of Khomeini’s disciples? Will the exploitation by the Greens and eslah talaban (reformists) of Shiʿite historical paradigms make their message sufficiently potent to force the Supreme Leader to revert back to the comparatively humble role of spiritual guide or even hapless figurehead, leaving behind a vacuum that will be filled by elected officials with limited tenures and the “healthy” growth of a “civil society”? Judging by the considerable material and moral investment that the leaders of the free world have made, especially since 2001, in the “exportation of democracy” project, it would certainly appear that the democratization of Iran (and the Muslim world at large) is the West’s great white hope, and for good reason. There is unquestionably no weapon more powerful against the variform dictatorships that terrorize their own populations at the same time as they threaten international stability than the pull of democracy. Is this weapon powerful enough to turn Iran into a “normal” nation?¹⁷ There are several answers to these questions, some of which are already found in the questions themselves (and in the citations that preceded them). First, the ubiquitous presence and central role of the Shiʿite historical paradigm in the current struggle for democracy in Iran should serve to dispel the knee-jerk Western conclusion that it is an irreligious or anti-religious struggle. A movement originally led by a trio of politicians two of whom are clerics – one an Ayatollah (Karroubi) and the other a Hojjatoleslam (Khatami) – and a movement whose grassroots activists consistently compare their cause to that of the Prophet Muḥammad, Imam ʿAlī, Ḥusayn, Fāṭima, Zaynab, Mālik al-Ashtar, Abū Dharr al-Ghifārī and other members of the Shiʿite pantheon (and characterize their political opponents as the Shiʿite villains Yazīd, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, al-Ḥajjāj, Ibn Ziyād and the like) is certainly not sowing the seeds of a freethinking humanism detached from the country’s religious heritage. But religious coloring does not automatically preclude a “secularist” agenda – according to the original sense of that term, viz., the advocacy of a sep Cited in Siavoshi, Montazeri, pp. 217– 218. All of this acquires even greater force when we recall that both the Iranian and the Shiʿite political outlook have always favored autocracy. See also Rajaee, pp. 210 – 214, which includes a personal interview by the author with Montazeri.  See the brief but insightful discussion of the prospects for a further democratization of the Islamic Republic in Axworthy, Revolutionary Iran, pp. 410 – 414.

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aration of church and state – especially in the case of Shiʿism, in the eyes of which governmental authority has been synonymous with pure evil for more than fourteen centuries. Here, too, however, the regular and adulatory referencing of Khomeini on the part of the eslah talaban (reformists) and jonbesh-e-sabz (Green Movement), whose exponents enthusiastically claim to be the Imam’s sole bona fide legatees, militates for a different conclusion: that these parties uphold, to the contrary, what was probably Khomeini’s most unrelenting demand throughout his twenty-five year-long revolutionary career, to wit, that the insidious Western-inspired principle of religion-state separation be shattered beyond repair (we elaborate on this outlook below). But let us not limit ourselves to the “official” positions of what amounts to the Islamic Republic’s “loyal opposition.” Could not what began as a measured call for change within the system – a call that sought (and found) support in the discourse of the revolution’s “framers” – quickly spiral out of control and metamorphose into a full-fledged counter-revolutionary movement dedicated to “liberating” Iran from the grip of the clerics and transforming it into a secular democracy on the American or European model? Could not the “winds of freedom” which only recently blew across the Arab world fan the flames of discontent among the Persian populace to such a point that they burn down the house that Khomeini built? One reason that this is an improbable eventuality is that, unlike almost any of the Arab states, Iran is already a democracy on at least some important levels. Ayatollah Rafsanjani’s delineation of the elected or “people-based” elements of the Iranian regime, while a bit of an idealization, is in the main accurate. Many of the powerful bodies in the government of the Islamic Republic are indeed directly elected by genuine universal egalitarian suffrage: (1) the majles-e-khobregan or Assembly of Experts, composed of eighty-six highranking Islamic jurists (Arab. sing. mujtahid, Pers. sing. mojtahed) whose mandate includes selecting the vali-ye faqih or “Guardian Jurist” (also known as the rahbar or “[Supreme] Leader”), supervising his activities, and even deposing him if necessary. This body is elected every six years by the populace at large. Caveats: the running field for the Assembly of Experts is limited to qualified Muslim jurists; the Assembly meets very rarely, essentially rubber-stamps the previous rahbar’s appointee, and has never deposed a Guardian Jurist (who is elected for life). Caveats to these caveats: within the pool of fuqahāʾ or high level jurists the public is free to express its preference, and often boots regime favorites down to the bottom or even off of the list; and as for the argument that this body is a rubber stamp: there has only been one turnover in the office of Supreme Leader – from Khomeini to Khameneʾi – so all determinations about what the Assembly of Experts does or does not do (or will or will not do) in this connection are based on a single in-

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stance, which cannot be considered representative in any case because of the incomparable charisma of the Father of the Revolution. (2) the second election-based institution in present day Iran is the qove-ye mojriye or executive office, occupied by a raʾis-e-jomhur or president who is chosen every four years by the people’s unmediated vote – when the rules are followed. Caveats: clearly, the rules are not followed, witness the great electoral robbery of 2009; and also, the running field is narrowed to “authorized” candidates. Caveats to these caveats: the 2009 election was by no means a squeaky clean one, but there is no definitive evidence, as we have pointed out above, that Ahmadinejad did not receive the majority of legitimately cast votes. Indeed, in at least one previous election, the candidate emphatically preferred by the Supreme Leader was roundly defeated: the 1997 landslide victory of “reformist” Mohammad Khatami over Khameneʾi-backed Ayatollah Ali Akbar Nateq-e-Nouri, and many would say the same about the election of current president Rouhani; we will take up the question of the circumscription of the running field below. (3) the third democratically-based body in revolutionary Iran is the majles-eshuraye-eslami or “Islamic Consultative Assembly,” the 294 member Parliament, put in office every four years – again – by popular national elections. Caveats: the Parliament is never far out of step with the wishes of the regime; and here, too, there is rampant disqualification of candidates for factional and ideological reasons. Caveats to these caveats: the majles or Parliament is part and parcel of “the regime,” and is therefore, if anything, never far out of step with its own wishes. Moreover, this body has a long history of run-ins with the chief preservers of the theocratic element of the government, the shura-ye negahban-e-qanun-e-esasi or “Guardian Council of the Constitution.” This last is a twelve member body consisting of six “just Islamic jurisprudents” (foqaha-ye ʿadel) appointed by the Supreme Leader and six experts on various areas of the law (hoquqdanan) selected by Parliament from a list compiled by the head of the Judiciary (who is himself appointed by the Supreme Leader).¹⁸ The increasing conflict between Parliament and the Guardian Council in the 1980s – with the latter vetoing the former’s often radical legislation with ever greater frequency and the former striving to circumvent these vetoes through diverse stratagems – led Ayatollah Khomeini to push for the creation of a new, non-elected body called the majmaʿ-e-tashkhis-e-maslahat-e-nezam or “the Committee for the Identification of the Interests of the Regime” (usually translated as “The Expediency Discernment Council”). This group of twenty to thirty-five elder statesmen (the number has varied over time), most of whom are Ayatollahs but many of whom are not even clerics (Mousavi is cur-

 Clause 91 of the constitution

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rently a member, though he cannot attend), was charged by the revised constitution of 1988 with mediating and issuing verdicts in cases of dispute between the majles (Parliament) and shura-ye negahban (Guardian Council). Over the years since that time, this committee – even though six of its members are the six clerical jurisprudents simultaneously serving on the Guardian Council itself – has on dozens of occasions resolved these disputes in favor of parliament, rejecting the religiouslybased veto in favor of the original, democratically-based legislation. Thus, the Iranian parliament, despite its considerable limitations (including the aggressive vetting of candidates for its seats by the Guardian Council), cannot be dismissed either as a powerless rubber-stamp.¹⁹ Iran’s revolutionary government is, moreover, characterized by a constitutionally mandated separation of powers (qova-ye mostaqel az yekdigar)²⁰ and a system of checks and balances, which, taken together, ironically resemble (in form if not always in content) the American or British model more than any other. This includes the Legislative Branch (qove-ye moqannaneh), thus named by Ayatollah Khomeini and his fellow revolutionaries in knowing contradistinction to the traditional Islamic outlook, according to which Allah is the sole legitimate lawgiver while the purview of human beings is confined to implementing, or at the most interpreting, divine legislation. Next comes the Executive Branch (qove-ye mojriyeh), wherein sits the president and his cabinet (nominees for which must pass muster with the majles or parliament, which has to date voted down not a few presidential picks; in Feb. 2011 parliament even impeached Ahmadinejad’s transportation minister for failing to reduce traffic accidents). And finally there is the Judicial Branch (qove-ye qazaʾiyeh) that contains the court system, which ostensibly functions on the basis of Shiʿite sharīʿa alone, but which in practice is guided and influenced by a much more complex amalgamation of principles and factors. There is little harmony between these various arms of the Iranian government, and Ahmadinejad for his part battled parliament during his term – even though it was thoroughly dominated by his own conservative camp – no less than Khatami wrestled with the Judiciary during his own stint in office, and Rouhani does today. Before we go further, let us take a look at the structure of the Iranian government in graphic (and more-or-less hierarchical) form:

 In the elections since 2009, it must be admitted, the Guardian Council has invalidated the candidacy of thousands of candidates for parliament, most of them leaning in the “reformist” direction. Matters have come to such a head in this attempt to fill the legislative body with “conservatives” that even Ali-ye Larijani – for decades a staunch pillar of the right-of-center camp – has had his bona fides revoked.  Clause 57 of the constitution

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Vali-ye Faqih (Guardian Jurist) or Rahbar ([Supreme] Leader)

Majles-e-Khobregan (Assembly of Experts)

Majmaʿ-e-Tashkhis-e-Maslahat-e-Nezam (Committee for the Identification of the Interests of the Regime or “Expediency Discernment Council”) Majles-e-Shura-ye Negahban-e-Qanun-e-Esasi (Guardian Council of the Constitution) Qove-ye Mojriyeh Qove-ye Moqannaneh (Legislative Branch) consisting of (Executive Branch) consisting Majles-e-Shura-ye Eslami of Raʾis and Hayʾat-e-Vozara (Islamic Consultative Assembly or (President and Cabinet) Parliament)

Qove-ye Qazaʾiyeh (Judicial Branch) Supreme Court Clergy Court

This is not the place to delve into the extremely sticky and probably unanswerable question of what constitutes a genuine democracy. Nor can we usefully entertain the widespread view that the entire electoral mechanism of the Islamic Republic – consisting all told of literally thousands of national and local contests involving tens of thousands of candidates who engage in energetic, fierce and sometimes even negative campaigning (for the purpose of which many receive considerable state funding) – that the whole process from beginning to end is a sham. Purveyors of this outlook envision a country-wide stage upon which all the participants are consciously and consistently play-acting, aware as they are that nothing they say or do will have any impact whatsoever on the outcome of the race. They engage in energetic campaigning, that is, even though they know that the results of every single election – from the presidential ballot down to the competition for the five-thousand-or-so “Islamic City Council Assistant” seats in some three-hundred-and-fifty municipal districts – are determined ahead of time by the “deep state,” by the Supreme Leader and his cronies, and both voters and would-be office-holders merely go through the motions. One might ask why, if all the candidates have been vetted and approved by the Guardian Council, and all the undesirables disqualified, why would there be a need to intervene in each and every contest in favor of a particular nominee; or why, for that matter, voters turn out at all if everyone knows that the whole business is a farce (are they, too, part of the show?); or why losers so often demand a recount (why bother?); or why it is as clear and true as a catechism to all and sundry that the 2021 election of Ayatollah Raʾisi was rigged and its outcome predestined, but just as clear and true in their eyes that the all-time-low voter turnout, which severely embarrassed the regime, represented an honest and accurate number (why didn’t the Supreme Leader just order the relevant ministry to add thirty percent?); or why reformists regular-

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ly win these contests by large margins (the present mayor of Tehran is one, as was his predecessor; “reformists” received 215 out of 290 seats in the parliamentary elections of 2000; the aforementioned Islamic City Council Assistant election was swept by self-described eslah-talaban in 2019, to say nothing of the numerous examples in between these dates)? Or why the majles (parliament) recently enacted into law – after a fierce debate and by an extremely slim margin – a bill imposing stiff penalties on any candidate who assists or donates funds to (and thereby seeks to garner the support of ) religious organizations during, or just prior to the onset of, an election campaign?²¹ Why go to so much trouble to ensure fair play (this is hardly the first example of such legislation) if, in the end, the whole business is rigged? (Certainly one could argue that the creation of this or that democratic mechanism or its safeguard may not always arise out of the purest of motivations, e. g., perhaps the new law against donating to religious associations in an election year represents an attempt by “principlist” elements in parliament to undermine the “reformist” mayor of the capital, who is reputed to maintain close ties with several such associations. Similarly, one might claim that such mechanisms or regulations are consistently manipulated after their enactment by vested interests intent upon promoting or pillorying a given candidate: in other words, that both the motivation and implementation of these regulations are tainted. But won’t such laws then come back to haunt their creators once the latter achieve their goal and gain office? And do not such tainted motivations and post-facto manipulations partake of the reality of every single democracy the world over?). While it is obvious that Iran’s democratic system is nowhere near as “clean” as that of, say, Great Britain, France or the United States – none of which are as “clean” as they theoretically ought to be – it would appear, when all is said and done, that many aspects of a genuine democratic process are alive and kicking in Iran. Having said that, it should always be remembered that the Islamic Republic, as its name unabashedly – indeed proudly – indicates, sees itself as a democracy deliberately and emphatically tempered by theocratic elements, the notion of a thoroughly unrestricted and unguided government of the people being anathema – being a veritable recipe for disaster – in the eyes of (most of ) the ulama who run the country (on which more immediately below). The pro-democracy trend in Iran – whether incarnated in the domestic green/ “reformist” movement or cultivated from abroad as part of the Western mission civilisatrice to spread democracy in the Middle East – thus poses less of a threat to the Islamic Republic than it might to other regimes in the region. This is so be-

 See http://www.pishkhaan.net/Archive/1398/06/13980611/ArmanMeli6511411097109495449101305. pdf. Last accessed 12/10/2022.

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cause, as we have been endeavoring to show, the Islamic Republic is already in possession of many of the ingredients of a modern democracy, and can therefore bend more easily in the winds of change without breaking. In theory, if not always in practice, today’s Iranian government is a representative one, a government that derives its legitimacy from popular participation in the political process. Some of its democratic “vessels” may, it is true, be hollow at the moment (many of the “local councils” or shuraha adduced by Rafsanjani as an instance of “control of the government by the people,” for example, have remained on paper for thirty eight years), but the fact remains that said vessels are in place, ready to be filled by the will of the people if and when conducive circumstances and the necessary Zeitgeist emerge.²² Beyond formal channels such as elections, or structural elements such as the separation of powers, democracies are (rightly) identified today by other components, including the extent to which civil society or public opinion can influence the leadership. Here we often come upon a paradox when it comes to assessments of the Islamic Republic. Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, for instance, is at pains in his Religious Statecraft to portray “the contingent nature of Islamist ideology” in post-revolutionary Iran: the cleritocracy, he essentially argues, goes with the flow. Though the present writer cannot sign on to what appears to be Ayatollahi Tabaar’s almost blanket rejection of the possibility that genuine religio-revolutionary conviction plays a role in the positions adopted by members of Iran’s ruling hierarchy, still, the following description rings true: Elites are manipulated by the very masses they are striving to manipulate; competing factions tap into existing popular preferences to gain advantages against each other. Sometimes strong public sentiments can limit political options.²³

With this assessment an Iran observer cannot but agree. Even Ayatollah Khomeini was accused by Abu l-Hasan Bani Sadr of almost invariably “acting by reaction” to events,²⁴ and long beforehand Khalil Maleki observed that “these [National Front] leaders are not even demagogues but merely followers of the demos.”²⁵ But then,

 One could, of course, make the argument that this is the case in countries across the Middle East where democracy is nominally the form of government, but there are important differences. For a highly insightful analysis of the unique balance of forces that explain the staying power of the current Iranian regime, see Elisheva Machlis, “The Islamic Republic: A Bastion of Stability in the Region?” Middle East Critique 10, 2016.  Ayatollahi Tabaar, Religious Statecraft, p. 302.  Cited in Buchan, Days of God, p. 318.  Milani, The Shah, p. 257. Andrew Cooper echoes, in a more positive tone: “The Shiʿite clergy saw their role less as molding public opinion than reflecting it” (Fall of Heaven, p. 53).

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what Ayatollahi Tabaar has described here smacks strongly of responsiveness to the protestations of civil society, even a healthy respect for (the power of ) public opinion. The constant zigzagging of politicians in all the world’s recognized democracies in order to line themselves up with what their pollsters most recently discovered or the latest trends on social media – is this not a case of “elites being manipulated by the very masses they are striving to manipulate” or “competing factions tapping into existing popular preferences to gain advantages against each other”? Moreover, is this profound, populist sensitivity to the caprice of the masses anything but the time-honored orientation of Shiʿite mujtahids towards their constituencies writ large? Is it not a state-size version of their perennial quest to secure the favor of their muqallidūn? So again, we must ask, as we did in a previous chapter: which is it? Are Iran’s movers and shakers doctrinaire dictators forcing a fiercely unpopular religio-revolutionary ideology down the throats of the country’s citizenry, or are they the diametric antithesis of this: malleable, fickle, cynical opportunists buffeted about by the surge and ebb of the people’s will (like most Western politicians)? One cannot have it both ways.

The Right to be Right There are, of course, other important ingredients besides fair elections that go into a genuine democracy. Ayatollah Khomeini regularly railed against the Pahlavi monarchy for its suppression of free speech and a free press (azadi-ye qalam), both before the revolution… Our country is a place where all people constantly think to themselves, “When is the agent going to show up at my door?” A person is guilty of no crime, but what can he do? The possibility, even the weakest possibility [that he has done something wrong is enough to bring the authorities to his house]! Just as during the time of the accursed Ḥajjāj [b. Yūsuf ] and [ʿUbayd Allah] Ibn Ziyād (both Umayyad governors in the seventh century) even the smallest suspicion that someone might belong to the party of ʿAlī, upon whom be peace, was enough [to bring down the wrath of the authorities on his head], so today, even the most unfounded rumor is sufficient grounds for taking someone to jail, torturing someone, who knows what! One word of advice to the [royal] court escapes a person’s lips, one word of council is published by him in the newspaper or in a book – and they come and take him away! Nor can you know when and where and for what reason they will strike: a fellow might be preaching from the pulpit (dar sar-e-menbar harf mizanad), not even very vehemently or censoriously, and just the tiniest little word (adna kalameh), that’s all, comes out of his mouth, and that’s it: they come and cart him away and throw him in prison! Are we not

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duty bound to at least mention these crimes [of the regime]?…The press must be free: no one has the right to prevent the pen from writing what it will.²⁶

…and after the revolution, when Khomeini was already in power: During the previous regime it was said that the people were given a great deal of freedom. [U. S. president] Carter came here and said as much: he said we were blessed with a lot of freedom. That’s right: the cross-country hue and cry that came out of the mouths of the people everywhere was a protest against all the excess freedom that they had been given! By God, not one of our newspapers or journals was free – they couldn’t write a single word! Nor were our radio stations free – they couldn’t utter a single syllable in opposition! It was all dictated.²⁷

Ayatollah Khomeini’s prize student, Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari, advocated an unrestrained ideological pluralism of the pen: As we consolidate the revolution, we must ensure full and genuine respect for the various freedoms. If the Islamic state, the Islamic Republic, the Islamic government intends to institute a reign of strangulation (ekhtenaq), then it will certainly be toppled…In truth experience has shown us that whenever in the history of our [Iranian] society freedom of thought has been the rule, this was never detrimental to the cause of Islam but always redounded to its benefit. This is on condition that we make our case as well – not that they speak and we keep silent. Let them put forth, for example, their arguments for the economic system that they advocate, or their notion of humanity or of history, freely and with no interference, and then we shall put forth ours just as freely. Then the people can choose between them: just as freely. In this manner Islam will grow ever stronger.²⁸

In order to support the right, nay, the duty to speak one’s mind and challenge authority, Ayatollah Motahhari even inverted the apparent intent of the well-known Qurʿanic story of the Prophet Moses and the “righteous servant” (Q. 18: 65 – 82). Moses has sworn not to question the actions of this personage – identified by later tradition with the legendary Khiḍr or “Green One” – but upon witnessing his commission of a series of inexplicable deeds (boring a hole in the bottom of a boat, killing a boy, repairing a decrepit wall not his own), cannot keep silent. He later discovers the moral rationale for each act. The story has traditionally been perceived as a criticism of Moses – or at least as a lesson concerning the elu-

 Sahife-ye Nur, 2: 367– 8; 1: 290.  Sahife-ye Nur, 9: 82.  Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 24, pp. 174– 175.

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sive nature of ultimate truth – but Motahhari holds up the Prophet’s conduct as exemplary of the ethical obligation to question and protest.²⁹ As a result of the heavy emphasis placed by the Iranian revolutionaries on freedom of speech (azadi-ye bayan), the constitution of the Islamic Republic includes several articles geared to ensuring that freedom. True, almost since the outset of the new regime’s history these clauses have been largely honored in the breach: hundreds of newspapers have been closed down (and weblogs “filtered”) by the authorities during different periods on the charge of voicing even oblique criticism of the system. Indeed, it is doubtful that Khomeini himself ever really accepted or even understood the modern notion of freedom of expression. He said: The pen must be in the hands of the pious and the learned (ashkhas-e saleh va afazel); when it falls into the hands of rascals (arazel), far-reaching perversion and degeneration ensues.³⁰ The honorable gentlemen would do well to take care that their pen is never wielded in order to weaken the Islamic Republic. I have always preferred to deal with your excellencies softly (ba molayamat), through discussion and advice. But if it becomes necessary…if someone seeks to do harm to Islam with the written word, then the situation will be different.³¹ If you see someone coming out in opposition to the president, know that this is not done for the sake of God; the hand of the devil is at work here (dast-e- eblis dar kar ast).³²

Khomeini consistently demanded of Iranian intellectuals, clerics, professors, journalists and the like that they all “speak with one voice” (vahdat-e kalam) and avoid “deviation” (enheraf ). He condemned and threatened any who expressed ideas at variance with his conception of pure and “revolutionary” Islam. There is no doubt about the fact that in his eyes, authors and journalists had the right…to be right. As recently deceased Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi put it straightforwardly: “The prophets of God did not believe in pluralism. They believed that only one idea was the correct one.”³³ Even supposed arch-liberal Mohammad-e Khatami, when running the Kayhan newspaper in the early 1980s, explained that the role of the press was to express the views of the people, and the views of the people are “identical to those of Khomeini.”³⁴ This pursuit of journalistic Gleichschaltung cost not a few publicists their lives, from the earliest days of the revolution through the end-of-the-millennium “chain

     

Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 20, p. 176 – 177. Sahife-ye Nur, 3: 305. Sahife-ye Nur, 20: 128. Sahife-ye Nur, 20: 228. Today many newspapers contain daily attacks on the president. Rajaee, Islamism, p. 173. Secor, Children, p. 80. His position has changed since.

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murders” (qatle ha-ye zanjireʾi) and down to recent times. In June of 2020, Ruhollah Zam – son of a respected Hojjatoleslam who “went rogue” after the 2009 election fiasco, did jail time for his participation in the subsequent demonstrations and then escaped to Paris where he began a career of fierce anti-regime blogging – made the mistake of going to Iraq. Revolutionary guards kidnapped him and brought him to Tehran where, after a lightning trial, he was condemned to death – a verdict that was applauded by the “reformist” almost as much as the “principlist” press³⁵ – and executed forthwith on December 11 of that same year. (One is tempted to call him the Iranian Khashoggji – after the Saudi ex-pat journalist who was hacked to pieces by Prince Muhammad bin Salman’s henchmen in the country’s embassy in Ankara – but Zam was at least tried in court). Even Ayatollah Motahhari, despite his embrace of “full and genuine respect for the various freedoms,” regularly made an exception for enherafat or “deviations” – which must, he affirmed, be rooted out. The justification of the “Special Court for Clerics” for the arrest of reformist philosopher Mohsen-e Kadivar read, oxymoronically: “Mr. Kadivar has not been detained due to the expression of his views or his manner of thinking; rather, he is being held on the accusation of propagandizing against the Islamic Republican Regime and brainwashing the public (tashvish-e adhhan).”³⁶

This, of course, recalls the guarantee of freedom of expression in the Iranian constitution of 1907, “so long as such expression does not transgress the bounds of Islam,” as well as Mohammad Reza’s institution of an “Open Space” for debate in 1975, “so long as there were no calls for a republic or criticisms of the Shah.”³⁷ Despite being so often honored in the breach, the “freedom of speech” clauses – albeit with their “anti-blasphemy” caveats sewn in – remain on the books (the books that Ayatollah Khomeini himself approved) and can therefore be more effectively fought for today by those so inclined. At the turn of the third decade of the new (Christian) millennium, newspapers, at least, have been granted more freedom to critique the government and those in the rival political camp, and have taken full advantage of this. If and when truly unrestricted freedom of the

 See, e. g., Motahhare-ye Shafiʿi’s barely disguised glee at Zam’s capture and sentence in Arman-e Melli, 01/07/2020, p. 3. Zam may have worked with intelligence services inimical to the Islamic Republic, and his telegram account was closed down because he allegedly encouraged the use of Molotov cocktails in anti-regime protests.  Cited in Akbar-e Ganji, Tarik khane-ye ashbah (Tehran: Tarh-e No, 1379), p. 96.  Striking a middle ground, Ayatollah Beheshti, while supporting freedom of speech and the press, argued that “we must never grant – in the name of freedom of speech – freedom to prevaricate and spread lies” (cited in https://www.pishkhan.com/Archive/1400/01/14000131/Jomhour iEslami741111111041095149492165.pdf ). Last accessed 12/10/2022.

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press, together with other democratic rights enshrined in the constitution but to one degree or another lapsed in reality, are achieved in the Islamic Republic, this will probably be perceived by most educated (or indoctrinated) citizens not as an overthrow of the revolutionary regime, but as the long-awaited realization of its oft-touted principles. Still, the kind of media freedom that allows journalists or bloggers in Western countries to speak in the crudest of terms about sacred figures or institutions – or write about matters that traditional societies believe should be reserved for private intercourse – is not to be expected under Iran’s theocratic democracy.

Blood and Iron Censorship is not the only area in which the Islamic Republican regime has taken a palm-size leaf from the book of Stalinist Russia. Only a little more than a decade has passed since Iran put on, in full view of the world (or at least anyone who had satellite access), one of the more spectacular show-trials since the Soviet Union’s Great Purge in the nineteen thirties. Several months after the outbreak of widespread protests in the spring of 2009 against what many saw as the bogus reelection of Mahmud-e Ahmadinejad to the presidency, no less than one hundred defendants, many of them considered (up until that moment) “pillars of the Islamic revolution,” were marched en masse into a Tehran courtroom. Hollow eyed and bent over, physically and emotionally exhausted as a result of what had almost certainly been weeks of emotional and perhaps physical torture, they were ushered to their seats wearing prison pajamas in order to play spectators – along with the rest of the country – to their comrades’ lengthy, scripted confessions. Yesterday’s heroes, today’s “leaders of sedition” (saran-e fetneh), mounted the rostrum one after the other in descending order of eminence and told in remarkably convincing tones the story of their betrayal of their country and religion, of their cooperation with Western and Zionist agents, of their “corruption on earth” and their “warring against the Imam” (the latter title referring simultaneously to the Awaited Mahdī of Shiʿism and Ayatollah Khomeini). This was not the first time by any means that the Islamic Republic had resorted to show trials or filmed confessions.³⁸ Perhaps the most notorious of these in See Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions, especially chapters three and four. It must not be forgotten that many of the defendants in the trials and executions that took place immediately after the revolution had themselves committed atrocities against political prisoners under the Shah, even allowing for much exaggeration on this score by pre- and post-revolutionary propagandists. Tears shed for SAVAK commanders and government officials who had presided over, or known

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volved Abbas Amirentezam, deputy prime minister under Mehdi-ye Bazargan, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1981 on (apparently) trumped-up charges of working with the C. I. A, and died behind bars in 2018.³⁹ A year after Amirentezam “confessed” during prime-time and was promptly jailed, erstwhile foreign minister and Khomeini right-hand-man Sadeq-e Qotbzadeh was evidently tortured into admitting on the airwaves his part in a plot to assassinate the Guardian Jurist. Tudeh (Iranian Communist Party) members, hunted down despite the full backing they had afforded Ayatollah Khomeini, admitted to a litany of heinous crimes in filmed “panel interviews” during 1983 (seventy-one-year-old party secretary Nur al-Din Kianouri confessed to spying for the Soviets and infecting Islamic Iran with a “foreign ideology” throughout his career. Ehsan-e Tabari, the organization’s longstanding theoretician, explained that he had realized that his entire life’s work was spurious upon reading the works of Ayatollah Motahhari, presented to him by his jailers).⁴⁰ Militant exporter of the revolution and Montazeri aide Mehdi-ye Hashemi, having blown the whistle on the Iran-Contra deal, was televised as he owned up to his collaboration with the Great and Little Satans (and to committing the heretofore unsolved murder of Ayatollah Abu l-Hasan-e Shamsabadi a decade earlier), tried in the “Special Court of the Clergy,” and executed in 1987. General Hosayn-e Fardust, longtime bosom buddy of the ousted Shah, was dragged onto the

of but did not protest, unjust detention, torture and murder, are certainly out of place (as are tears for Director Pakravan, who would “often meet [the imprisoned] Khomeini for lunch and discuss religion, philosophy and affairs of the day” and whom Khomeini “would repay for this humane gesture by making sure that Pakravan was one of the first people executed after the revolution” [Takeyh, Last Shah, p. 165], as if these tete-a-tetes should have ingratiated the warden to the inmate). On the other hand, a great many victims of the Khomeinist komitehs and the revolutionary courts were convicted and punished on flimsy evidence – Pakravan’s trial itself lasted all of fifteen minutes – or for purely ideological crimes (regarding the latter, however, it is important to recognize that the acceptance and even cultivation in parts of the modern West of the notion of religious or ideological pluralism is rooted in the attenuation among Westerners of religious and ideological conviction. Apostasy, heresy or “corruption on earth” are not considered crimes by secular Western society because most members of that society no longer believe. Are today’s progressive liberals sufficiently serious about their pluralism to be capable of acknowledging the legitimacy of contemporary societies in which religious conviction is still – or again – genuine and pivotal? Or will they claim to be “tolerant of everything but intolerance”? This is a classic, circular conundrum no easier to solve than the age-old question whether the Deity can make a rock too heavy for Him to lift).  See the moving description of this trial in Secor, Children of Paradise, pp. 47– 49. Amirentezam smuggled out descriptions of prison conditions under the Islamic Republican regime that showed them to be little better than those under the Shah and SAVAK. He spent some twenty-seven years behind bars. When he died, Ayatollah Montazeri’s son said the funerary prayers over his grave.  Ervand Abrahamian, excerpted in Frontline. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehran bureau/2009/08/history-used-and-abused.html. Last accessed 10/10/2022.

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set in order to regale viewers with tawdry (but mostly true) tales of his majesty’s amorous adventures, and to claim that the last Pahlavi king had been a closet Bahaʾi. Earlier, even Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem-e Shariʿatmadari – an opponent of the “Guardianship of the Jurist” doctrine – was “defrocked” (khalʿ-e lebas) and forced to recant his position on air, admit to participating in a Western-backed plot against the Islamic revolution, and beg the public’s forgiveness.⁴¹ But something about the high quality and polished presentation of the live video – it felt like watching C-span – on top of the comparatively calm national context (this was not a time of foreign or civil war) made the collective show-trial of 2009 particularly chilling. Ahmadinejad’s two contenders, former Chairman of Parliament Ayatollah Mehdi-ye Karroubi and former prime minister Mir Hosayn-e Musavi, were spared such public pillory: they were placed under house arrest without any semblance of due process, and have languished there for over a decade to date (regular rumours of their imminent release have consistently proven premature). Ever since the Terror that followed hard on the heels of the revolution of 1979 and saw the execution (especially by the notorious “hanging judges” of the new regime, Ayatollah Sadegh-e Khalkhali and Mohammad Mohammadi-ye Gilani) of thousands of Pahlavi functionaries, generals, officers, SAVAK commanders, ideological dissenters (Tudeh communists, Mojahedin fighters), Bahaʾis, Kurds, Arabs and Jews as well as political prisoners of different stripes, the Islamic Republic has excelled at officially sanctioned killing (Ayatollah Montazeri remarked, after his former teacher Ayatollah Khomeini condemned author of The Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie to death in 1989, that “the people of the world think of Iran as just in the business of killing people”).⁴² Iran has for some time been racing neck-and-neck

 To this day the endlessly repeated “Death to…” chant that functions as applause in the official Islamic Republic includes the line: “Death to the enemies of the Guardianship of the Jurist!” (marg bar zedde velayat-e faqih), inspired primarily by Shariʿatmadari (ironically, even Khomeini’s prize pupil, Ayatollah Motahhari, was reportedly not sanguine about the application of the wilāyat alfaqīh concept to Iranian government, but he was assassinated before he could influence matters). Show trials were also a staple of Pahlavi policy, going all the way back to the “Group of Fifty-Three” in 1938, who would later form the nucleus of the communist Tudeh party. The best source for these methods of repression, shared by both regimes, is Ervand Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (Irvine: University of California Press, 1999).  Amanat, Iran, p. 862. This having been said, the Western horror at (what was seen as, and what by Islamic standards in many cases actually was) the lack of due process prior to most of the executions carried out in the days, weeks, months and even years immediately following the revolution must be balanced out by the crisis-ridden atmosphere in the country – including genuine fears of counter-revolution as well as an “imposed” and extremely bloody eight year war (jang-e tahmili) – but even more, by the crimes of commission and omission perpetrated by many of those exe-

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with China toward the title of highest rate of capital punishment in the world (another legacy from the Shah’s days).⁴³ On the same day (Dec. 12, 2020) that Salim Ayyash, the Hezbollah operative dispatched by Iran who killed Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and twenty innocent bystanders together with him, was sentenced by a court in the Netherlands – after nine years of deliberation – to life in prison, journalist-activist Ruhollah Zam, who embarrassed the Khomeinist leadership and encouraged popular protest demonstrations, was sentenced by an Islamic Republican court – after two weeks of deliberation – to death on the gallows (the sentence was carried out the following day).⁴⁴ Sartre-esque public hangings, and public lashings, though less frequent than the impression created by Western (and Israeli) television series, foster an atmosphere of dread and fear. Many are

cuted when they worked for the Pahlavi repression machine. International, especially French, pity for the roly-poly, teddy bear-like, highly cultured figure of Prime Minister Hoveyda was misplaced: he, like many others, knew enough about the outrages perpetrated by the Pahlavi police state to render him culpable ten times over, and his plea of innocence at his trial basically amounted to the assertion that he was “just following orders” (the man who many say shot him twice from behind before he could reach the firing squad, Hadi-ye Ghiffari, was avenging, among others, his own father, a venerated ayatollah who had died, possibly under torture, in a Pahlavi prison). The execution, even the lynching, of SAVAK commanders and agents, many of whom had presided over torture (and sometimes murder) for years – or silently acquiesced in the same – should certainly not go down in history as a terrible moral stain on the Islamic Republic. There were, however, unquestionably many excesses, and, as we note on several occasions below, the post-revolutionary regime – like so many others before it – soon came to employ many of the same methods of repression that had blackened the face of the monarchy it had replaced, and even to add some new ones. Ervand Abrahamian’s Tortured Confessions, though informative and probing in general, neither fully substantiates its sweeping claim that torture and extra-judicial killings did not occur under the Pahlavis, nor succeeds in bolstering its thesis that these outrages took place with far greater frequency under the Islamic Republic (on the contrary: the focus of this second section of his book primarily on the torture and execution of MEK and Tudeh prisoners – which were unquestionably horrific – highlights its inability to marshal significant additional evidence of such crimes in later years).  “The Shah of Iran retains his benevolent image despite the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief ” (Amnesty International Annual Report – 1974 – 5, https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/PO L100011975ENGLISH.PDF, p. 8. Last accessed 12/21/2019). Amnesty’s report has, however, since been convincingly discredited, and shown to rely on highly problematic sources and evidence.  Zam himself was the son of a revolutionary cleric who, though estranged from his “rogue” offspring, complained bitterly of the swift execution about which even the family was not informed. Well known opposition figure professor Mahmud-e Amjad of the howeze-ye ʿelmiyeh called Zam a shahīd and a maqtul-e mazlum (oppressed victim of murder), and called Ayatollah Khameneʾi “bloodthirsty.” Iraqi-Iranian Grand Ayatollah Ali-ye Sistani, a phony invitation from whom appears to have lured Zam to Iraq where he was captured by the Qods Force, has so far been silent.

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executed monthly on the catch-all charge of “smuggling.”⁴⁵ Ayatollah Montazeri would write to his master years later with burning regret: “Do you know that in the jails of the Islamic Republic horrific crimes are committed in the name of Islam, of a kind that never took place even under the hated dictatorship of the Shah?!”⁴⁶ The crimes perpetrated under that dictatorship were indeed a hard act to follow: one perusal of Reza Baraheni’s horrific (and beautiful) The Crowned Cannibals – the Iranian answer to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago – will convince any reader of the monstrous price at which stability was purchased by the Pahlavis. But that same Reza Baraheni, despite his best efforts to cooperate with the revolutionary project, was thrown right back into solitary confinement by the Islamists, and this time for a period more than twice as long.⁴⁷

 During certain periods such regular executions of smugglers, often as a mere pretext, took place under the Shah as well.  Montazeri, Khaterat, p. 586. Faraj Sarkouhi, editor of the left-wing Adineh who was kidnapped by security officials in 1996, described the seven years he had spent in the Shah’s prisons as preferable to his forty-seven day ordeal under the Islamic Republic (Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions, p. 227).  Baraheni, Crowned Cannibals. There is a great deal more to this classic book’s J’accuse than vivid descriptions of prison torture. It is a fascinating and profoundly human attempt to characterize, not to say psychoanalyze, the entire social, political, economic and cultural dynamic of Pahlavi Iran. This includes a severe critique of quite a few Islamic practices. Some have claimed that Baraheni exaggerates, even fabricates, in this book. Certainly, his inability to recognize a single contribution made by the Pahlavis to the betterment of Iranian society undermines his credibility, or at least his objectivity. Baraheni bemoans the soaring rate of illiteracy in Iran (pp. 7– 8) at a time when the Shah’s Literacy Corps (sepah-e danesh), according the most accounts, was effecting a minor miracle in this field. He asserts that “the lot of the majority of people in Iran has not moved forward even an inch during the last fifty years of the Pahlavi dynasty’s reign” (p. 10). He complains that “the Shah is purging the Persian language of all that is Arabic and Turkish” (p. 12), even though by “all” he means at most twenty percent. He states that “In Quri-Chai, the northern slums of Tabriz, there is only one school for 100,000 schoolchildren” (p. 9), a claim that beggars belief. He repeats the well-worn but demonstrably false claim that some one hundred thousand political prisoners experienced the Shah’s jails (Andrew Cooper, while rightly helping to debunk this inflated claim [Fall of Heaven, p. 10], nevertheless accepts without challenge “press reports [that] spoke of ten thousand who had ʻdisappeared’” immediately after the 1979 revolution [Fall of Heaven, p. 491]). Perhaps most damning is Baraheni’s glossing over of his own public recantation, evidently induced by torture or threats toward his family (see Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions, pp. 116 – 19), for which he was pilloried by the opposition. Still, most of the account in Crowned Cannibals rings true, and even if only a tenth of the horrors depicted by Baraheni actually took place in Pahlavi prisons – and there is certainly corroboration of such moral outrages from a host of other sources – the king and his numerous henchmen should have been tried for, and convicted of, crimes against humanity long before 1979. That many of the methods for dealing with dissenters were simply taken over lock, stock and barrel from the SAVAK by the Islamic Republic’s SAVAMA and now VAJA – and even augmented by novel techniques – is one of the great (but cer-

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As cruel and compassionless as the Shah’s system of suppression had been, it has had some substantial competition in the religio-ideological-revolutionary disregard for human life that informed the mass incarcerations and executions (and the endless sacrifice of soldiers at the front) during the first decade of Khomeinism. Though the decades that followed, with the leftist and “liberal” counterrevolutionary threat neutralized and the war crisis over, saw an abatement of such crimes against humanity, it certainly did not witness their eradication. Challenges to regime stability, from the 1999 student protests to the 2009 unrest after Ahmadinejad’s reelection to the gasoline price-hike demonstrations of 2019 to the nationwide riots in the wake the Kurdish woman Mahsan Amini’s death in the hands of the “morality police,” have been met with lethal force and large-scale violations of human rights. In the words of Faizeh Hashemi, daughter of recently deceased pillar of the revolution Ayatollah Hashemi-ye Rafsanjani, “In every sector of society entire groups of protesters are in jail: teachers, truck drivers, women’s rights activists, environmentalists, students and average citizens.”⁴⁸ The Islamic Republic, a regime that condoned, supported and then glorified the hostage-taking and inhumane treatment of fifty-two American diplomats for four hundred and forty-four excruciating days, has for decades financed terror organizations across the globe: not just those defined as such by the U.S. State Department – some of whom are guerilla organizations that could convincingly dispute such a characterization – but groups that premeditatedly murder innocents as a consistent policy, including, at times, (the flagrantly Sunni) al-Qaʿida and the Afghan Taliban. In true Soviet style the regime of the ayatollahs has devoured its own, turning pillars of the revolution and the republic into enemies of the people and of Islam, and compassing the demise of not a few of them, both at home and on foreign soil. Since 2011, Iran, with Russia behind it, has been the staunchest supporter – not just morally and diplomatically, but with men and materiele on the ground – of a Syrian government crackdown that has involved the systematic imprisonment, torture and murder of suspected dissidents; the regular massacre of civilians, including tens of thousands of women and children; bombardment by the national army and punitive raids by the so-called shabiha (shadow units that carry out the most heinous atrocities); and the deployment of chemical weapons. The Islamic Republic puts down popular protests with lethal force, and the various police, army and other security organizations deployed for the purpose do not scruple to shoot into crowds, often killing unarmed demonstrators,

tainly not unexpected) tragedies of Khomeinism. Baraheni finally fled Iran and has lived out the rest of his days in the West, together with not a few of his purported torturers.  Aftab-e Yazd, 28/12/2018.

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women as well as men. Many reports, accompanied by rather conclusive video and other evidence, indicate that government (or “deep state”) policy involves the refusal of medical treatment to protesters severely injured by police or army gunfire, bleeding young people being barred entry to hospitals and expiring in the driveway. Iran aspires without question to the production of nuclear weapons, “the use of even one of which inside Israel,” explained “moderate” Ayatollah Hashemi-ye Rafsanjani “will annihilate the entire country” (hame-ye Esraʾil ra nabud khahad kard).⁴⁹ On its domestically manufactured missiles (now being dispatched to Russia for use against the Ukraine) are printed the Hebrew words: Yisrael tzrikha lehimakhek me’al – “Israel must be erased from…” (Persian syntax, in which the verb always comes at the end, seems to have caused the printer to forget to add “the face of the earth”).⁵⁰ President Ebrahim-e Ra’isi essentially denied the Holocaust – as Iranian leaders from Rafsanjani to Ahmadinejad to Khamene’i have regularly done over the years – on the internationally aired “60 Minutes” program in September of 2022.

A Land of Make Believe One may debate the assertion that the present-day Islamic Republic is a police state. The worst incidents of mass incarceration and execution took place during the first decade after the revolution – against the background of war with Iraq and fears of counterrevolution – and although periodic eruptions of popular protest since that time have been put down harshly, and conduits of free speech regularly subjected to state-sponsored sclerosis, the average Iranian today does not feel constantly monitored or live in fear of arbitrary arrest, torture or disappearance (Emily Sciolino, pointing out that, for instance, no dissident cleric has been sent to a gulag, is largely correct in stating that “totalitarianism in its strict sense does not exist” in the Islamic Republic).⁵¹ There is even an argument to  Quds Day Speech, 2001, Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The entire quote places this threat in a “balance of power” context: Rafsanjani is at pains to point out that when Iran achieves nuclear capability the Middle Eastern “Mutually Assured Destruction” equation will break down, because while the Islamic world is vast and only a small part of it can be damaged by Israel’s nuclear arsenal, Israel is comparatively tiny and its population can be eradicated by a single atomic explosion. Of course, Iran has no monopoly on “lying, cheating and stealing” in military or strategic matters. But it does have a monopoly on regularly threatening to wipe the present author’s country off of the map (mahv-e kamel-e Esraʾil az safhe-ye ruzegar).  The Persian original, printed just above on the missile, has the entire sentence.  Sciolino, Elusive Iran, p. 60. This is true, Sciolino instructively points out, among other reasons because “Iranians by habit operate in two worlds: the public and the private. Traditionally just

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be made that Pahlavi Iran in the 1970s was more repressive than the post-millennium Islamic Republic. But police state or not, what cannot be debated by any fair and knowledgeable person, outside Iran and especially inside, is that the Islamic Republic is a propaganda state. Iranian citizens who believe in the veracity of their country’s television, radio or (though to a lesser extent) print news are, one might say, bound to be in a perpetually good mood.⁵² The Tehran stock market is almost always bullish; the country’s employment rate is constantly skyrocketing, while inflation is ever plummeting; domestic rainfall levels are somehow unfailingly higher than those of previous years; traffic accidents are invariably on the wane; national sports teams rarely ever seem to lose; most all students pass their exams with flying colors; criminals are consistently caught (and usually Kurds); home-made missiles always strike their targets; the population at large is at all times “passionate” (por shur), “alert” (hoshyar), “discerning” (basir), “revolutionary” (enqelabi), and “in the arena” (dar sahneh); and the politicians currently in office are almost without exception upright, competent, pious and solicitous (although the print media of the opposing camp has begun in recent years to take them to task).⁵³ As in the government-controlled media of dictatorships everywhere, the lion’s share of news programming is devoted to upbeat but appropriately bland items such as the inauguration of new dams, factories, textile mills, petrochemical plants, water works, highways, hospitals, concert halls or teacher’s colleges, sometimes at

about everything meaningful in both social and political life happens behind closed doors” (Sciolino, Elusive Iran, p. 29). This phenomenon, in turn, may be attributed both to the Islamic principle of istiʾnās – the requirement to announce one’s presence before entering an abode, which harbors many implications for the sharīʿa’s respect for private space – and to the traditional Iranian division of the house itself into borun and anderun sections. A significant exception to this statement is the gasht-e ershad or “morality police” (lit., “The Guidance Patrol”) which scrutinizes women (and sometimes men) on city streets in search of modesty violations.  In recent years the print media – as opposed to official radio and television – has increasingly shown itself willing to reflect (at least economic) reality more accurately, and even to critique government policy (especially when the government is in the hands of the opposite political-ideological camp). Occasionally such latitude is even granted to television and radio.  Previous office holders are liable to be attacked even on television, a current case in point being former president Ahmadinejad and former Prime Minister Mousavi. During those periods when journalism enjoys a modicum of freedom, newspapers (but almost never other media) affiliated with one camp will attack the policies, and occasionally even the integrity, of political figures affiliated with the other. Criticism of members of the more “theocratic” bodies is extremely rare. Another partial exception to this relentlessly positive reporting involves one act of God – the Covid19 virus – and one act of Satan – the economic sanctions imposed by the West: both allow for the occasional acknowledgment of negative developments on the domestic front, which are blamed (accurately or otherwise) on these culprits.

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the extremely impressive but eminently implausible rate of several dozen per week; the diplomatic travels of this or that cabinet minister who invariably discusses with his third world counterparts the “improvement of relations between the two states on diverse fronts” and seemingly never returns home without at least one or two new “mutual trade and cooperation” agreements in his satchel; those sports in which Iranian teams have half a chance, especially soccer, wrestling, weight-lifting, volleyball and women’s marksmanship; religious subjects (about which more later); and the exposure of the latest crimes committed, and latest plots and conspiracies hatched, by the ever menacing and never slumbering “enemy” (doshman). As in the Soviet Union of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, so in today’s Iran, only good news is broadcast about allies – Venezuela, North Korea, Syria, Hezbollah, China – and only bad news relayed about adversaries: a high school shooting, racist incident, political scandal or even train derailment in America or England receives top billing, and is exploited, sometimes implicitly and on many other occasions in so many words, as evidence of the “rotten foundations” of Western society. The “Black Lives Matter” protests that swept across America in the Summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd – choked by the knee of a Minneapolis policeman – took up a major portion of Iranian news programming in the months afterward, killing two birds with one stone: America was shown to be an endemically racist state (a problem far less acute in Iran), while the harsh treatment of demonstrators by Iranian security forces – most recently during the pre-Corona unrest over gas price hikes in the Fall of 2019 – was supposed to pale in comparison with the brutality of the United States police. Throughout that same year (2020) Iranian television put up statistics each day, every hour on the hour, showing the U. S. in the lead with more Covid-19 deaths than any other country in the world (this development was greeted with especial glee in official Iran, since the American media had done the same to the Islamic Republic several months earlier, gloating at the criminal ineptitude of the regime of the ayatollahs in handling the epidemic. Now the shoe was on the other foot).⁵⁴ Attitudes are appropriately elastic: so long as Turkey was emphatically secular, oriented toward the West and an ally of Israel, nothing good ever happened there; now that Turkey is Islamizing, turning its back on Europe and (with some backtracking) cooling its relationship with Israel, nothing bad ever happens there. Before the presidency of Dilma Rousseff, Brazil was a paradise; when she assumed  Satellite images purporting to show mass graves dug hastily by Iranian authorities were all the rage on American (and Israeli) social media in March of 2020; in the summer the Iranians requited with videos of what they claimed to be mass graves dug by American authorities in many cities. Each thrilled to the misery of countless families on the other side.

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office (and reversed her country’s previous pro-Iranian foreign policy) it became a drug-infested nightmare. On the same day in late October, 2020, that Ayatollah Khameneʾi protested what he called Europe’s double standard, according to which Holocaust denial is a crime but insulting the Prophet Muḥammad is perfectly licit, Iranian Press TV broadcast a documentary detailing the miserable plight of Holocaust survivors in Israel (who were said to be “severely neglected” in general, and more so than ever during the Corona crisis), in the course of which individual survivors were portrayed who had “lost their entire families in [Birkenau, Maidanek, Auschwitz, etc].”⁵⁵ Saudi prince Muhammad bin Salman’s alleged order to murder and dismember journalist Jamal Khashoggji in 2018 was in the Iranian news for over a year, while the Iranian “Blue Girl” – who burned herself to death in 2019 in protest against the law preventing women from attending sporting events – was utterly ignored, even by the “reformist” press. When former chairman of Parliament and of the Association of Combatant Clerics Mehdi Karroubi was in favor, he was regularly hailed by the national newspapers as the erstwhile “right hand of the Imam [Khomeini]” and “a self-sacrificing servant of the people”; since Karroubi fell from grace – as a result of his support for the 2009 post-electoral protests – he has been referred to by the very same tabloids as “a perpetual thorn in the side of the revolution,” and mounds of “evidence” has all of a sudden surfaced to the effect that Khomeini saw him as untrustworthy and corrupt (and like the “fallen” founding fathers of the Soviet Union, Litvinov, Zinoviev and Molotov, Karroubi has even been airbrushed out of many an historic photo). Before Ayatollah Mahmud-e Amjad “defected” to the Green Movement in 2009, and then publicly lambasted the Supreme Leader for authorizing the execution of journalist Ruhollah Zam (in 2020), this cleric was portrayed as the “moral pivot of the seminary” and a “shining sun of walāya”;⁵⁶ after having thus sinned, his students suddenly remembered him admitting in class that “I sat in the presence of [legendary teacher of ethics Ayatollah Reza-e Baha al-Dini] like a brick” (“at first,” explained the student informant, “we attributed this statement to Mr. Amjad’s profound humility; now we know that it referred to his inability to absorb the ethical messages conveyed by that saintly teacher”).⁵⁷ The creeping demonization of Ayatollah Rafsanjani, pillar and pivot of the Islamic Republican regime almost from its inception

 IRIB Mostanad, 10/23/2020.  IRIB Qurʾan, 07/11/1384. Walāya is the Shiʿite notion of loyalty to, and love of, the imams.  Tasnim, 03/10/1399. “Eʿteraf-e Mahmud-e Amjad beh ʿadam-e bahre bordan akhlaqi va maʿnavi az mahzar-e Ayat Allah Baha al-Dini.” One imagines that this student received a low grade.

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who later voiced criticism of regime clamp-downs, began long before his death in 2017, and has proceeded apace until the time of this writing.⁵⁸ Not a single “value neutral” news item graces the airwaves, cyberspace or television screens of the Islamic Republic: if an airplane crash in Europe is reported in depth, the scarcely concealed purpose is to demonstrate that the recent Iranian airplane crash is not a thing out of the ordinary; if the public is informed that China is holding four Japanese nationals on charges of spying, the clear but unspoken subtext is that Iran is fully within its rights to hold three American nationals on charges of spying. In the Fall of 2020 a series of lengthy, in-depth interviews were conducted on Iran’s Channel Five in which the resounding failures of the once highly lauded “Jihad of Construction” corps (jehad-e sazandegi) were admitted and attributed to the profound error of merging this organization with the Ministry of Agriculture, where matters became sluggish and over-bureaucratized. On the face of it, this looked like serious and sincere breast-beating on the part of the Iranian powers-that-be. Those with ears attuned to the not-so-subliminal messaging methods of the Islamic Republican propaganda machine, however – no doubt most of the viewing public – easily detected the ulterior motive: it was on Green Movement/Reformist idol former president Mohammad-e Khatami’s watch that this fateful blunder was committed. If the goal justifies the means, even American heroes may be feted: an unlikely object of media praise in post-revolutionary Iran is none other than George Washington, because, like the “Imam” (Khomeini), he fought a monarchical regime in the name of political, cultural and economic autarky. Abraham Lincoln – together with the Prophet Muḥammad, a famous manumitter (muʿtiq) – has even been granted the status of shahid. ⁵⁹ Some of the material on offer on the Islamic Republic of Iran News Network (IRINN) or on the various Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) channels is pure invention: the British law against marrying prior to having sex cited in a lecture by Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Reza Shahidi-Pur; the statement by Supreme Leader Khameneʾi to the effect that Israeli commandoes “killed everyone on board the [Mavi Marmara ship] and prevented the humanitarian freight from

 In the second half of 2020, a gradual but unmistakable reversal could be seen in the official attitude to Rafsanjani. Dead and gone and no longer a threat, he is being gradually rehabilitated, with an emphasis on his loyalty to the Guardian Jurist and the Islamic Republican regime, and a de-emphasis of his dissent.  It is tempting to compare the thoroughgoing lack of value neutral or objective material on the Iranian news to the warp-to-woof polemic that is Shiʿite historiography, but from this bit of “essentialism” we shall abstain. No religion or regime has a monopoly on propaganda.

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reaching Gaza”;⁶⁰ the assertion that British Intelligence created the Saudi-Wahhabi movement in mid-eighteenth century Arabia; the claim that the U. S. S. Vincennes premeditatedly and under direct orders from the American government shot down Iran Air passenger plane 655.⁶¹ But there is no apparatus for exposing such dissimulations, and few inside Iran would dare make use of it if there were. Most news in the Iranian media is, to one degree or another, fake news. Taking a leaf from George Orwell’s 1984, the state broadcasting agency until recently regularly scheduled the Islamic Republican equivalent of “Two Minute Hate” sessions focusing on the various iconic “enemies of the people,” including disgraced first president Abu l-Hasan Bani Sadr (who fled Khomeini’s wrath in 1981, under cover of darkness in female attire, and eventually made his way to France where he resided until his death in 2021);⁶² former Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Ata Allah Mohajerani (detested by Iranian hardliners and ultimately pushed out by Supreme Leader Khameneʾi due to his self-proclaimed policy of “leniency and tolerance” [tasahol va tasamoh]); Masʿud-e Rajavi, commander of the despised monafeqin or “Hypocrites” (the Socialist-Islamic Mojahedin-e-Khalq or Peoples Front, which – after having been highly instrumental in the success of the revolution – was relentlessly pursued by Khomeini and his henchmen for its “eclecticism” and eventually joined Saddam Hussein’s side in the Iran-Iraq war); leader of the 2009 post-electoral protests Seyyid Hosayn-e Mousavi; and (in a more indirect fashion, because he was a highly respected cleric) the “Trotsky” of the Iranian revolution, Khomeini’s estranged prize student, Ayatollah Hosayn Ali-e Montazeri. Over the course of such mini-programs, which are invariably accompanied by ominous and cacophonous background music, these and other “criminals and traitors” (jenayatkaran, khiyanatkaran) are lambasted, anathematized, compared to the villainous foes of the first Shiʿite Imam, ʿAlī, portrayed in sinister-looking negative film, photo-shopped into hideous forms, crowned with Uncle Sam hats or Donald Trump wigs, outfitted in female dress, decked out with red horns and devil’s eyes, and framed by stars of David. Far outnumbering such rituals of vilification, and filling the space created by what was, until recently, Iranian television’s relative lack of advertisement, are the regular shorts containing excerpts from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameneʾi’s mosque sermons, followed by insets depicting his fatherly interaction with the people; grainy black and white clips showing his role in the 1979 revolution and  In truth Israeli forces killed ten people on board and subsequently towed the humanitarian aid to Gaza themselves.  http://www.jomhourieslami.com/About/b6.htm. Last accessed 03/09/2016.  Fleeing dressed as a woman is a common motif in Iranian history: army generals, for instance, were rumored to employ this ruse to elude capture by invading allied forces in 1941.

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later in the “Sacred Defense” (defaʿ-e-moqaddas, the Iran-Iraq war, also known in regime propaganda as hasht fasl-e ʿeshq, “Eight Seasons of Love”); and finally, silhouetted images of the be-turbaned chief cleric walking off in the direction of a dazzling light, more often than not to the soundtrack of the movies “Braveheart” or “Chariots of Fire” (and, on at least two occasions witnessed by the writer of these lines, in an ironic twist resulting from the ignorance of some producer or technician, to the tune of HaTikvah, the Israeli national anthem).⁶³ It is perhaps more than a linguistic curiosity that in Persian the words for “objective” and “subjective” are the same (mowzuʿi). Traditional societies in any part of the world have never been bastions of impartiality; but traditional societies that metamorphose virtually overnight into revolutionary societies – as in the case of Iran – and thereby bypass the bourgeois-democratic stage experienced by much of Western Europe, are essentially denied the opportunity to experiment with the notion (however theoretical) of a balanced and unbiased perspective on the world. There is thus nothing strange or even obnoxious to many Iranians about the highly educated and articulate interviewer on their television screen asking his no less highly educated and articulate interlocutor, in high level and articulate Persian: “Do you feel that the shocking deviations and murderous acts of sedition perpetrated by the wolf-pack of blaspheming thugs known as the ‘Green Movement’ are justified – or not?” or “What is your opinion of the C. I. A.-funded mob of bound-for-hell hoodlums who disturbed the peace of the hard-working, God-fearing people of Shiraz yesterday?” “Proof ” in the Islamic Republic is more often than not blatantly circular and conveniently self-referencing. The official government line, for instance, reflected in the op-eds of national newspapers (newspapers that in most cases either agree to function as bullhorns of the “deep state” or are immediately closed down), was that the culpability of the post-electoral protesters of 2009 was established by the fact of their arrest. This claim, in turn, was itself deemed to have been vindicated by the subsequent show-trial confessions beaten out of those same prisoners. The veracity of a given government statement resides in the saying, and the “big lie” is the method of choice: after dozens of peaceful “Green Movement” protesters were shot down in cold blood during the large demonstration of 25 Bahman – most famous among them Neda Agha Soltan, whose rapid demise has been called “the most widely watched death in human history” – Tehran’s police chief called a press conference and declared with a straight face that the protesters

 Though a cultural Philistine compared to previous generations of his musically oriented family, the present writer is in fact capable of distinguishing Smetana’s Moldau Suite from his country’s official hymn.

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had been fired upon and killed by gunmen working for the Green Movement itself.⁶⁴ Arguments, as well, never occur on Iranian television or radio: the exiguous number of disagreements that are allowed to surface in the studio are too slight and superficial to get anyone worked up. Two interviewees will, however, often wax enthusiastic in their agreement with one another, confirming each other’s statements and sentiments with increasing ardor until a veritable climax of concurrence is reached.⁶⁵ There is but one truth in official Islamic Iran, at least regarding the most fundamental issues, and everybody (on television, radio and – with exceptions – in the print media) stands by it. Founder and fortress of the regime Ayatollah Hashemi-ye Rafsanjani admitted as much: “Despite the existence of some twenty national television channels, because the subject matter is invariably presented from a single perspective, little interest is generated among viewers…”⁶⁶ Public space is as engagé and partisan as the media. Looming posters and murals, usually of the founder of the republic, Ayatollah Khomeini, and his successor, Ayatollah Khameneʾi (or, alternately, of a war martyr), adorn a great many vertical surfaces, while Soviet-style slogans scrawled across gargantuan banners occupy much of the leftover area. The most pervasive and versatile of these slogans are of the “Death to…” genre, which, in its verbal form, has been for over a quarter of a century now the most popular method of applauding in official Iran. This leads to some ironic situations. In early 2006 the “Guardian Jurist” (Ayatollah Khameneʾi), in an attempt to defuse some of the diplomatic tension occasioned by then President Ahmadinejad’s frequent and flagrant calls for Israel’s destruction, concluded an uncharacteristically moderate Friday sermon in a Tehran mosque with the following ringing words: “We Iranians do not deny the right of any polity in any place on God’s earth to exist and prosper. We are a peace-loving country

 IRNA, 19/02/2010.  How far this mutual fawning is from the pugnacious “You say … but I say …” that echoes vigorously across the halls and under the domes (and in the books) of the traditional Shiʿite madraseh!  Retrieved in Arman-e Melli, 03/08/2020, “Jaʿl va Tahrif Nakonid; Bogzarid ma ham Pasokh Dahim,” https://www.pishkhan.com/news/190073/. Last accessed 10/10/2022. The print media has, in recent years, played host to criticism of the government, and of late even criticism levelled by newspapers affiliated with the same camp as the government (e. g., a writer in Arman-e Melli attacking a policy failure of President Rouhani). The shooting down by Iranian forces of Ukrainian flight 752 with great loss of life, combined with the regime’s serious failures in tackling the Corona virus (with immense loss of life), has led perhaps for the first time to a slight opening up of official television channels, especially IRINN, to the notion of criticism, and government officials (though never clerics) are being interrupted in mid-sentence for the first time (for decades the procedure was that a question would be asked and then the official would have the floor for as long as s/he wished, with the interviewer occasionally nodding “baleh”).

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whose only wish is to live, and to let live, in peace.” The seven thousand worshippers in his audience – readers were informed by the correspondent covering the event, who completely missed the irony – “expressed their unanimous and enthusiastic support for the Supreme Leader’s sentiments by repeatedly chanting: marg bar Omrika, marg bar Esraʾil – ‘Death to America, Death to Israel!’”⁶⁷ Slogans (sing. shiʿar) are a major aspect of post-revolutionary Iranian life. There are slogans for everything, some of which are taught to Iranian children at a tender age, so that they remain deeply implanted in their consciousnesses for the remainder of their lives. When previous president Ahmadinejad arrived in the province of Bam, which was still recovering from one of the worst earthquakes in Iranian (and world) history – almost thirty thousand dead – he first asked how everyone was doing. In response the crowd of thousands, with hundreds of schoolchildren in the forefront, chanted “Death to America, death to Israel!” and then “Nuclear energy is our absolute national right!” (enerji-ye haste-i haqe mosallam-e mast). The regime and its organs are, indeed, quite open about the central role of slogans in society, to the extent that in post-revolutionary Iranian Persian the word for “slogans” has become almost synonymous with the word for “values” – as in the pervasive slogan: “Live your slogans!” One must have a slogan ready for every occasion: former president Ahmadinejad, on his Fall, 2010 trip to the province to Ardebil, felt the need to “compose a slogan about the people of that province on the way over in the car.”⁶⁸ In a manner reminiscent of ancient SumerianAkkadian “year names” (“The Year in Which Sargon destroyed Elam,” “The Year in Which Ur Namma straightened out the Road from the South to the North,” etc.), under Supreme Leader Khameneʾi each year has been granted its own (not particularly ringing) slogan or motto. 2021, for instance, was “The Year of Production, Supports and the Removal of Barriers.”⁶⁹ (For the last five years, the word “production” has been included in one way or another in the annual slogan). The pseudo-academic conference, a widely used tool to promote the notion of the Islamic Republic as a hothouse of research and intellectual sophistication, represents another cog in the Iranian propaganda machine. Most readers will have heard about the “World without Zionism” conference of 2006, at which former president Ahmadinejad first gave voice – in what was essentially a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini – to his ambition to “erase Israel from the face of the earth”  “Sokhanrani-ye maqam-e moʿazzam-e-Rahbari dar Masjed-e Sepah-Salar,” Jomhuriya Eslami, reported by IRNA, 26/01/2006.  “Raʾis-e jomhur az mardom-e khiyarak didan kard,” Hamshahri, 11/06/2008.  Rahbar-e enqelab 1400 ra sal-e “Towlid, poshtibani ha, manezodaʾi ha” namgozari kard (ISNA, 5 Shahrivar, 1401).

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(mahv-e Esraʾil az safhe-ye ruzegar),⁷⁰ and about the Holocaust denial colloquium in Tehran of the same year, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Between 2011 and 2021, conferences were held in various provinces across the length and breadth of the country sporting such titles as “The Distress of the Western Woman” (parishani-ye zan-e gharbi); “The Genuine Roots of Democracy: Greek or Islamic?” (the unanimous answer of the participants was, of course, the latter); “Racism, Terrorism, Capitalism, Zionism and Imperialism”; “Judaism and Hollywood: A Diabolical Conspiracy”; “Winebibbing and the Wane of the West” (maykharegi va oful-e-gharb); “Human Rights in Islam and in the West”; “Zionism and the SARS Disease”; “Genocide in Rwanda and in Gaza” (only one speaker addressed Rwanda, while the remaining fifteen spoke about Gaza); “The Philosophy of Secularism and the Destruction of the American Family”; “International Arrogance (the common appellation for the U. S. and sometimes the United Kingdom) and the Support of Dictatorship;” “The Physiological Benefits of Islamic Prostration” (attended by orthopedists, chiropractors and sports doctors); “Space Exploration as Described in the Qurʿan”; “Fāṭima (the Prophet Muḥammad’s daughter) and Genuine Feminism”; and dozens more of this ilk. Many of these conferences (like their Western counterparts) are ill attended – despite the common practice in Iran of dragging raw recruits straight from boot camp to fill up the seats – but in true Orwellian fashion the reporter covering the event will often stand in front of a visibly half empty hall and declare unabashedly: “As you can see, it is standing room only here at the ‘The Jewish Roots of MI-6’ conference.” Artists, actors and writers in Iran must demonstrate that they are “committed” (motaʿahed) to the revolution and to Islam if they want to receive funding (and avoid jail) – the Qom seminary newsletter offers guidelines for producing honar-e vaqeʿi va motaʿahhed ⁷¹ – just as political candidates must demonstrate unswerving loyalty to the principle of “the Guardianship of the Jurist” (velayat-efaqih) if they want to run for office (and avoid jail). If any branch of the economy is suffering so badly that the deficiency cannot be hidden, the equivalent of Solzhenitsyn’s “wreckers” (Russian vreditili, Persian mofsedan, lit. “corruptors”) are in-

 Reams of paper and gallons of ink were wasted at the time feverishly debating the question of whether this phrase should be translated “the erasure of Israel from the face of the earth” or “the erasure of Israel from the pages of history.” This author was personally called and consulted by dozens of media outlets and even intelligence outfits as to which was the more correct rendering. From his perspective, as a father of four living in the Tel-Aviv area, the difference was negligible.  “Realistic and committed art.” See, e. g., https://hawzah.net/fa/SpecialTopics/View/76589/%D8% A7%D8%AD%DA%A9%D8%A7%D9%85-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B2%DB%8C%DA%AF%D8%B1%DB %8C-%D9%88-%D9%87%D9%86%D8%B1%D9%BE%DB%8C%D8%B4%DA%AF%DB%8C?utm_ source=browser&utm_medium=notification&utm_id=970515. Last accessed 10/10/2022.

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voked, and that sector’s poor performance is duly ascribed to those elusive saboteurs. Thousands of headlines read like that on the front page of the Kayhan newspaper of 12 July, 2020: “The Secret of the Soaring Dollar is Revealed in the Court of Felonious Foreign Currency Managers!!” – meaning the regime has found a new scapegoat for runaway inflation in corrupt officials.⁷² When all else fails – and even when it doesn’t – the usual suspects may be hauled into the docket and saddled with the responsibility for…just about anything: Zionism is the source and embodiment of all the ugliness, selfishness, thievery, sedition, usurpation, exploitation, discrimination and murder that have stained the career of humankind since its inception. This satanic movement is founded upon lies and deceit, and its continued existence depends upon crime, malevolence, rapine and slaughter. The Holocaust is one of the lies circulated by Zionism, and the cogent proof of this fact is that since (a) all evil is a product of Zionism, and (b) Nazism was evil, then (c) Nazism was a product of Zionism, and a creature does not inflict harm upon its creator (afarinesh beh afaridegar asib nemiresanad). The rapacious Zionist regime harbors within itself all of the blasphemous deviations, all of the pollution and filth, and all of the immorality and licentiousness to be found in the universe (dar giti), and its malicious intrigues and diabolical conspiracies lie behind every misery, mishap and disaster the world over. It is the task of the Islamic Republic to lead the believing Muslims of the world into battle against this indefatigable satan (shaytan-e khastegi napazir) until the world is rid of its vicious influence.⁷³

This assessment of the founding ideology of the Jewish state, proffered by Chairman of the powerful Council of Guardians (majles-e shura-ye negahban), Ayatollah Ahmad-e Jannati, is almost Zoroastrian in its dualistic breakdown of the cosmos into pure good and pure evil eternally contending with one another. Zionism’s noxious impact transcends place (it infects the entire “universe”) and time (it is the source of all the ills that have beset humanity “since its inception”) and encompasses every atrocity, abomination and calamity that the world has known to date. Blaming Zionism (and Judaism) for most of Iran’s (and the world’s) ills is an Islamic Republican pastime. The Guardian Jurist, sounding every bit like an Aryan Nations or Ku Klux Klan spokesman (or Sayyid Qutb), regularly explains to his countrymen that Zionism lurks behind all our other enemies. The Zionists constitute the largest capital investment group in the United States, and they control the politics and policies of that country. Today the American state, the American government, the American congress – in all fields: monetary, propagandistic, cultural, etc. – are under the spell of the Zionists (asir-e telesm-e

 Kayhan, 12/07/2020: Raz-e afsar gosikhtegi-ye dolar dar dadga-he modiran-e arzi-ye motekhallef. This was the Soviet way, and is still the preferred Chinese method.  IRIB Qurʾan, 07/02/2006.

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sahyonistand). The lion’s share of the world media is in Zionist hands. Most of the well-known international news organizations are under their control. And those that aren’t, go along with them and support them.⁷⁴

The “International Jew” is hard at work. The Khomeinist media is filled to overflowing with reports of his unflagging activity. On any given day one reads in Iranian newspapers about the behind-the-scenes machinations of the Jews directed to ensuring that the United States and the United Nations (!) invariably back the Israeli agenda;⁷⁵ the Jewish cabal that built and still owns Hollywood and exploits the enormous potential of honar-e-haftom-donya (“the world’s seventh art,” i. e., cinema) in order to bolster the Zionist cause by making movies that paint Islam in the darkest colors;⁷⁶ the Jews who “control every single one of the two thousand newspapers in the United States” and also “strive to weaken the cultures, identities, economies and political independence of all the world’s countries”;⁷⁷ the Israeli Mossad that was behind the London bombings of July, 2005, and the New York attacks of 9/11;⁷⁸ the Zionist money and pressure responsible for the anti-Iranian bent of the hugely popular al-Jazeera television network;⁷⁹ American Jewry as the primary force pushing the United States toward a full-scale invasion of Iran;⁸⁰ “the Jewish dictatorship over Europe”;⁸¹ the Jews as “worse than Satan” and “humanity’s greatest challenge”;⁸² world Jewry as the force behind the midtwentieth century Stalinist depredations;⁸³ the way in which the Jews carved Prot Khameneʾi, Jehad-e farhangi, p. 214. Although this is a run-of-the-mill anti-Semitic trope, Khameneʾi cannot fail to have in mind the Reuter Concession of 1872.  E. g., Mahdi-ye Alikhani, “Zavaya-ye-tariki az taʾsis va tahbit-e-esraʾil,” Mawood Online, 14 April 2004.  Mahmud-e-ʿAlizadeh, “Sinama-ye-sahyunisti badhari keh dar mantaqeh kasteh mishavad,” www.yahood.net, originally posted 8/13/2003.  Talash mikonand farhang, hoveyyat, eqtesad va-esteqlal-e-siyasi-ye-har keshvari-ra dar Jahan tadʿif konand (Rabiʿ Aqazadeh, “Jahan garayan-e-Yahudi,” ISNA, 10/24/2002).  “Mosad az hamalat-e-landan ettelaʿ dasht,” Hamshahri, 07/19/2005.  Kazem-e-Yazdi, “Nezam-e-ettelaʾ-e-resane-ye-Felestiniyan dar dakhel-e-Sarzaminha-ye-Ashghali,” Hamshahri, 02/31/2005.  Yusef-e Mazluman, “Hamleh beh Iran beh farman-e ‘Divaneha,’” Hamshahri, 03/23/2005. Note that some seventy percent of American Jews voted for Joe Biden and against Donald Trump in the 2020 election.  “Diktatori-ye Yahudiyan bar Orupa,” Kayhan, 08/01/2005.  https://www.jns.org/iranian-ayatollah-jews-are-the-greatest-problem-of-islam-and-humanity/? utm_source=The+Daily+Syndicate&utm_campaign=483643ef77-Daily+Syndicate+08-22-21+%28new% 29_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8583953730-483643ef77-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID% 5D&ct=t%28Daily+Syndicate+08-22-21+%28new%29_COPY_01%29. Last accessed 10/10/2022.  “Gerdehamaʾi-ye-Ukraʾin: Khatar-e-Sahyonizm baroye bashariyat kamelan jaddi ast,” Javan, 10/ 27/2005.

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estantism out of Catholicism in the sixteenth century in order to return Christianity to the Old Testament ethos and consequently to the notion of the Jews as Chosen People;⁸⁴ and literally thousands more “expositions” of this sort. On the last Friday of Ramadan, 2020, which doubles as “Jerusalem Day” (ruz-e ghods) in post-revolutionary Iran, Supreme Leader Khameneʾi called on “all the freedom-loving nations of the world” to “unite to rid the world of Zionism as you have united to rid the world of Corona.” In speeches around the same time he also called the present writer’s country (Israel) – as he has done on countless previous occasions – “a cancerous tumor,” “a genocide factory,” “the fount of ungodliness,” “the homeland of the devil,” and – just for irony’s sake – “a pharaonic regime.”⁸⁵ The editors of the mass circulation Ettelaʿat write on a weekly basis, down to the present, of the Islamic Republic’s “primary mission” to “free Palestine and utterly erase the robbers of the original direction of prayer of the Muslims (mahv-e kamel-e ghaseb-e qeble-ye avval-e moslemin), that germ of corruption and obscenity, the artificial, racist, baby-killing Zionist regime”;⁸⁶ Jewish nationalism, in short – together with American presumptuousness (estekbar), Western power-mongering (qodrat-talabi) and British conspiring (towteʾe-gari) – can thus always be made into the public fall guy for whatever Iranian problems are not explained away easily enough by other, more specific factors.⁸⁷ Fantasy manufacturing in the Islamic Republic is a far more effective tool of domestic indoctrination than one might think. The undeniable popularity of former President Ahmadinejad in Iran is an excellent case in point. There is no doubt that he was perceived by considerable segments of the public as a charismatic (if low-class and buffoonish) figure, but there was more to his success than just personality (or election-rigging). Here is how it works. The Iranian

 Nader-e-Saheb, “Nagoftehaʾi az qorun-e-miyane-ye va jadid-e-Orupa: Gerayesh beh ideha-ye-Yahudi dar Prostestantizm,” Kayhan, 07/05/2004.  For surveys and analyses of the age-old theme of the “International Jew” and its rapid percolation into the Muslim world during the twentieth century, see Yehoshafat Harkaby, Arab Attitudes to Israel (Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1971); Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites (London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., 1986, reprinted with new afterward, 1997); Daniel Pipes, Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); and now Efraim Karsh, “The Long Trail of Islamic Anti-Semitism,” Israel Affairs 12/1 (2006), where a selection of recent Palestinian claims regarding purported Israeli machinations – among them the infecting of Palestinian children with the AIDS virus, cancer and mad cow disease – may also be found.  Ettelaʾat, 18/05/2020.  The Pahlavi regime itself employed such tactics, blaming super-power interference and hidden hands for many a societal ill or policy failure. The Shah himself attributed a goodly number of the crises he faced throughout his reign, including the Islamic Revolution itself, to (especially) British and American conspiracies to unseat him or achieve various imperialist objectives.

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audio-visual media, as we pointed out above, emphasizes all of the government’s domestic and international successes – genuine or concocted – and none of its failures. No radio reporter or television anchorperson since the 1979 revolution (or before it, for that matter, under the Shah) has ever uttered a sentence like: “the ministry of transportation’s goal of reducing pollution levels by a quarter has not been remotely met” (though the political opposition does sometimes get away with criticizing certain government policies, even on the airwaves, especially during elections). The people are thus treated only to uplifting and encouraging stories of economic boom at home and diplomatic conquest abroad, much of which is naturally laid at the feet of the incumbent President (who is described, of course, as following the sage advice of the Supreme Leader). Now, if and when Iranians turned to foreign sources – the BBC, the Voice of America (VOA), the Voice of Israel (VOI), the Internet – to get the “real” story, they were, albeit, bombarded with criticism and condemnation of Ahmadinejad (on the VOA and VOI much of it quite shrill), but because these news/propaganda organizations have little or no interest in, or for that matter access to, the gritty details of Iranian national experience, they rarely try to rebut the success stories put about by Iranian domestic media (if they are even aware of them), and rebut them poorly when they do try. If, for instance, Ahmadinejad was credited by Iranian Television with pushing through a pioneering project to improve water distribution in the Ardabil and Mazandaran provinces, the Voice of America – and even the BBC and the vast majority of websites on the Internet – had no way of investigating the truth or falsity of this claim, and had no motivation to do so either (their listeners abroad are simply not interested). Instead, the VOA would regularly deride Ahmadinejad for Holocaust denial or Green movement suppression, issues about which the people of Ardabil or Mazandaran (and most of the rest of the country) simply could not care less. The President came out smelling like a rose. Rouhani receives the same treatment, and his critics at home and abroad suffer from the same limitations and misperceptions. Propaganda is, in a word, pervasively ensconced in the corporate psyche of the post-revolutionary Iranian regime.

The Added Dimension Any reader who has been paying attention will have noticed, however, that the limits placed on popular sovereignty and freedom of speech in today’s Iran are not just de facto but also de jure. Even if all the shuttered newspapers and weblogs were re-opened and allowed to print whatever they pleased (as the constitution stipulates, with minor reservations, that they should be), and even if the local councils materialized and a wider pool of candidates was permitted to run for par-

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liament and the presidency than is usually the case, it takes only a glance at the government chart to understand that Iran would still be far from “free” in the modern Western sense. This is so because side by side with – or rather, in most cases, just above – the nominally democratic institutions of the Islamic Republic (especially parliament and the presidency) sit potent religious or theocratic entities (especially the Guardian Council and the “Guardian Jurist” himself ) whose primary task is to rein in those democratic institutions if they go too far down the road of un-Islamic liberty. The Supreme Leader, perhaps going further than usual due to the turmoil and anxiety produced by the “Green Movement” demonstrations, did not mince words on this score (though he did insert a significant caveat): “The decisions and authority of the Guardian Jurist, as far as they are pertinent to the public interests of Islam and Muslims, take precedence and prevail over the will of the masses, if they are in contradiction.”⁸⁸ The elected bodies of the Islamic Republic are paralleled by appointees of the Supreme Leader, many of whom shadow these bodies and function as commissars to keep them from overstepping their bounds. No bones are made about this. Imam ʿAlī is frequently held up by the revolutionaries as the symbol of this “duumvirate” of spiritual and temporal authority. In Shiʿite theology and historiography, the political prerogative of this cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet is legitimized in two separate ways. First, at the conclusion of Muḥammad’s final pilgrimage to Mecca, at a rest stop in the desert called Ghadīr Khumm, the “Messenger of God” purportedly held up ʿAlī’s hand and admonished the assembled believers: “Of whomever among you I am master, this ʿAlī here is also master. May Allah befriend those who befriend him and oppose those who oppose him…” This statement of the Prophet’s, seen as inspired by Allah, constituted the divine designation of ʿAlī as future ruler, known in Shiʿite nomenclature as nass (Arabic for “stipulation”). Later on, however, when ʿAlī’s (illegitimate) predecessor in the caliphal post, ʿUthmān, was assassinated, it was the people – the Muslims at large, “civil society” – who rushed to ʿAlī en masse, raised him up on their shoulders and offered him the oath of obedience (bayʿa). This act constituted the human designation of ʿAlī as ruler, referred to by some modern Shiʿite writers as nas (Arabic for “people”).⁸⁹ Authority, in other words, should ideally derive – as it did in the case of ʿAlī – from the combination of naṣṣ and nās, of divine appointment and human election, and good government should accordingly involve a delicate mixture of both theoc-

 Cited in Ayatollahi Tabaar, Religious Statecraft, p. 261.  This use of nas should not be confused with that found in Shiʿite classical sources, where it indicates those “common people” outside the Shiʿite community.

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racy and democracy.⁹⁰ With the subsequent murder of ʿAlī a mere five years into his tenure as caliph, this Shiʿite doctrine was violently deposed, and from then on in Islamic history neither heaven’s yoke nor the people’s choice characterized Muslim governments, but rather (in most cases) the autocratic tyranny of men. The Sunni caliphs and sultans of the medieval period were almost invariably despots and oligarchs, equally heedless of vox populi and vox dei (and so were the nominally Shiʿite rulers of North Africa and Iraq in the tenth Christian century). The Shiʿite aspiration, the utopia yearned for by this sect’s idealists, has always been to restore the balance between celestial and terrestrial authority that supposedly found its perfect embodiment in the reign of ʿAlī. The revolutionary regime that Khomeini inaugurated was intended to realize that balance for the first time in fourteen hundred years. This, then, is the other side of the seemingly oxymoronic designation “Islamic Republic”: freedom, yes, but within certain religiously defined parameters. True, every democracy envisions the freedom it grants its citizens as hemmed in to one degree or another by various limits; this is the nature of the social contract and the very purpose of law. In the case of revolutionary Iran, however, the difference is that a portion of these restrictions on pure freedom, and on the right of the public to shape its own destiny, derive from religion, and specifically from (Khomeini-and-company’s interpretation of ) Shiʿite religion. Moreover, this Islamic element of the law – unlike the Republican element (and unlike the entire legal corpus in Western democracies) – is perceived as immutable and everlasting (though certainly stretch-able through interpretation). The new revolutionary system was intended to reflect just that ʿAlī-esque modus Vivendi between theocracy and democracy, in which the voice of the people resounds harmoniously (even occasionally cacophonously) with the voice of God, in which political legitimacy springs from the “Nation of Believers”, but no less from Allah. The radical clerics (as opposed to their traditionalist peers and predecessors) were willing to accept a modified version of the sophist Protagorus’s famous maxim: not “man is the measure of all things,” but “man is the measure of many things.” Some questions, they insisted, do not fall within the jurisdiction of human beings, because these questions are too important to hand over to the caprice of fallible flesh and blood, and have therefore already been decided by heavenly revelation. The injection by the Khomeinists of a portion of Platonic absolutism into that institutionalization of Protagorean relativism known as democracy, is designed to ensure that at least some Archime-

 The 1906 constitution, in a similar vein, described the Iranian monarchy at one and the same time as a gift of God and an institution upheld by the people.

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dean points of certainty – without which a society can easily lose its bearings and spiral out of control – are never lacking. Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi: In recent centuries a new trend arose in moral philosophy that sees the source of all moral values as the will of the people (moral positivism). According to this trend, the will of the people and moral values are always and by definition identical – there can be no contradiction between them. If a government and its policies are approved by the majority of the people, then it is considered a moral government. But what if the proclivities of the majority are not moral at all? What if they involve persecuting a minority? There is another model of government: the Islamic model…⁹¹

For Mesbah-e Yazdi, the “Islamic model” tempers the potential excesses, and stabilizes the potential inconstancies, of entekhab ([the people’s] “choice”) by means of entesab ([divine/clerical] “appointment”). Like many other opinion makers in the Islamic Republic, he is at pains to dilute what he sees as the potentially dangerous democratic elements of the regime – the “saqifian” aspects⁹² – with the traditional Shiʿite antipathy to majority rule, which is woven into this sect’s historiography and very being (like Ḥusayn’s followers, Shiʿites are the quintessential elitist minority [khāṣṣ] rejecting the Sunni majority’s [ʿāmm] prerogative). Indeed, “majority” in Shiʿite tradition is almost a synonym for “benighted,” or even “iniquitous.” Few refrains are more omnipresent in the Qurʿan than aktharahum lā, “most of them do not…” (know, understand, obey, believe, express gratitude, etc.). When Saul set out with his hosts, he said, “Truly God will try you with a stream. Whosoever drinks from it is not of me, and whosoever tastes not of it is of me – save one who scoops out a handful.” But they drank from it, save a few among them. So when he crossed it, he and those who believed with him, they said, “We have no power today against Goliath and his hosts.” But those who deemed that they would meet their Lord said, “How many a small company have overcome a large company by God’s leave…” (Q. 2: 249).⁹³

 Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi-ye Mesbah-e Yazdi, Porsesh-ha va Pasokh-ha (Qom: Moʾassase-ye Amuzeshi va Pervarashi-ye Emam Khomeini, 1385), pp. 25 – 26.  I.e., those aspects that reflect the values associated with the “mob scene” at Medina’s central meeting place – the saqīfat Banī Sāʿida – where Abū Bakr was unanimously chosen as caliph after Muḥammad’s death. The antithesis of these values is represented by Ghadīr Khumm, the stopping place after the pilgrimage to Mecca where Muḥammad purportedly designated ʿAlī as his successor. Sunnis oppose to such anti-majority sentiments traditions such as “Whosoever distances himself even one step from the collective has removed the collar of Islam from his neck” (man fāraqa l-jamāʿata shibran fa-qad khalaʿa ribqata l-islāmi min ʿunuqihi) and, of course, “My community will not agree on an error” (lā tajtamiʿu ummatī ʿala l-ḍalāla).  While it certainly seems that the Qurʾan has here conflated Saul with Gideon – as it elsewhere may have conflated Mary daughter of Amram and sister of Aaron with Mary mother of Jesus – this sensitive and contentious issue is not of concern to us here. The notion that the righteous are in-

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The preponderance of people seems invariably to get it wrong, to “follow a multitude to do evil” (Exodus, 23: 2). Human communities are thus in need of constant guidance, in the form of infallible imams and their heirs the scholar-jurists. As we saw immediately above, however (with Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi), the arguments wielded by the present-day Iranian opponents of unalloyed democracy are not merely “religious” in nature. Here is Hojjatoleslam va l-Moslemin Hashem-e Safi al-Din, elaborating on the same subject: They speak of democracy, the rule of men, and claim that it represents the most advanced and perfected method of government. And yet according to that method, there is no value in the world which is fixed, no truth on earth that is immutable. In such a system everything is potentially permissible (dar in ravesh hameh chiz mituneh jayez bashad). Were the American people to vote today to amend their constitution such that individuals with dark skin, or slanted eyes, or pointy ears must pay higher taxes than others, or could not vote in elections, or even that they should be herded into concentration camps and exterminated, then that would become the law of the land, and those terrible crimes would be perpetrated. Even if their Supreme Court struck down the new law, clearly delineated procedures allow for the supersession of the court’s ruling. In short, if the majority wants something to happen, sooner or later it will happen. This is not some kind of nightmare concocted by the imagination, for it has already happened and is happening as we speak. Take, for example, the right that women have been given in the United States to perform abortions, an act that was thoroughly forbidden only several decades ago and was thought of as murder. The denizens of Arrogance (estekbar) are not limited in any way. They possess no anchor to prevent them from floating far off this way or that, in every direction and eventually to destruction. In the Islamic Republic this could never happen: here the will of the people (erade-ye mardom) plays, albeit, a major role in the decision-making process, but only up to a point and within certain parameters (dar miyan-e hodud-e moʿayyan). When the issue is a mundane one (donyavi), the appropriate governmental branch in its capacity as representative of the nation is free to make policy as it sees fit. But when it comes to matters that go to the very heart of our religion and our revolution, we believe that the principles governing such matters are enshrined in our eternal law (shariʿat-e javid-e ma), and it is thither, and not to the whim of the people or its leaders, that we must turn for guidance. We could never discriminate against a section of our populace on the basis of their physical characteristics or ethnic background, because the sacred law of Islam forbids it, and the sacred law of Islam will always forbid it. Just as, for the same reason, we could never be the first to attack with nuclear weapons in any conflict, while the Great Satan not only could but did do exactly that – twice!⁹⁴

variably a minority is, of course, not confined to Shiʿism, and may be found in the doctrines of ancient gnostic cults as well as modern revolutionary movements, such as Leninism, as well as those of many groups in between.  Andrew Cooper praises Mohammad Reza Shah for initiating Iran’s nuclear program (Fall of Heaven, p. 8), even though this monarch would later tell Le Monde that one day, “sooner than is

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They say that we are the unpredictable ones, the crazy ones, that we can’t be trusted. When it is, in truth, Western non-religious culture which is thoroughly unpredictable, unlimitable, inconsistent and unreliable. It is Western culture that threatens the future of humanity.⁹⁵

The shepherds of society may be swayed by their flocks in many matters, but not in all. Some issues are so seminal, so crucial, so fundamental, that a properly run system must have a method to ensure that they are not subject to the whim of the mob. That is where the theocratic arm wrestles down the democratic arm in the Islamic Republic. In the specific case of a committee run by ayatollahs (i. e., the Guardian Council) vetting the candidates for high office, the theory is simple: if such a candidate cannot commit to upholding (for instance) the doctrine of the Guardianship of the Jurist (velayat-e faqih) – the central pillar undergirding the entire Islamic Republican edifice – then he may not run. Nor is this tactic as anathema to democracy as some would have us believe. Individuals and entire parties are prevented from participating in elections by many present-day democratic regimes (in Israel, the extreme right and the extreme left have been regularly disqualified from the polls). As astute Iranologist Hooman Majd points out: Although there is no prohibition on radicalism in American politics, reality trumps theory, and no American candidate for high office could, for example, run as an atheist or a communist, let alone a socialist or a Muslim – that is, not if he or she wanted to be taken seriously by the mainstream media, which, as Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader effectively complain every four years, is the genteel and subtler version of Iran’s Guardian Council.⁹⁶

(Bernie Sanders almost succeeded in upending this thesis, but instead ended up proving it). In practice, many candidates in Iran today are disqualified for less than “pure” reasons, that is, as part of the incessant power play between political camps.⁹⁷ In the parliamentary elections of 2020 this abuse was quite fiercely on display, as the disqualification of hundreds of “reformist” candidates ensured

believed,” Iran would be “in possession of a nuclear bomb” (Milani, The Shah, p. 333). On the same page, Cooper castigates the Islamic Republic for seeking a nuclear weapon, even though its leaders have consistently denied that they are doing so (while this denial is a full-blown prevarication, that just evens out matters out between the Khomeinists and the Shah: both wanted a nuclear arsenal).  IRIB 4, 09/12/2012.  Hooman Majd, The Ayatollah’s Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), p. 123.  There are, strictly speaking, no political “parties” in Iran – or rather, there is only one for everybody – because the Qurʾan knows of only two parties (Arabic aḥzāb, sing. ḥizb): “the Party of God” (ḥizb Allah) and “the Party of the Devil” (ḥizb al-Shayṭān). Take your choice. The slogan hard on the heels of the revolution was: hezb faqat Hezbollah, rahbar faqat Ruhollah, “The only party is the Party of God, the only leader is Ruhollah [Khomeini].” Still, of late various political groups have begun to employ the term ḥizb/hezb.

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that the new majles would be dominated by “conservatives.” Still, political camps are formed in Iran (as elsewhere) largely around ideological positions, and exploiting one’s membership in the Guardian Council in order to throw a spoke in the wheels of the faction that stands for what one believes to be ideological treason is not the same as crass self-interest or pure power politics (in 2016 the Guardian Council rejected the candidacy of Mahmud-e Ahmadinejad, a champion of the “Principlists,” and this body’s spokesman hinted strongly that the former president should not bother applying again in the future. The news was greeted with undisguised glee by the reformist press).⁹⁸ The Iranian revolutionary notion of mardomsalari-ye dini or “religious democracy,” then, is the Islamic Republic’s strongest bulwark against the inroads of the green/“reformist” and Western-inspired (and funded) pro-democracy trend, among other reasons because to some extent it takes the wind out of their sails. This governmental compromise between contradictory systems (the theocratic and the democratic) offers those who live under its auspices sufficient leeway in the matter of quotidian decision-making – zoning laws, traffic regulations, oil prices, bread subsidies, housing issues, the exchange of old political leaders for new ones – to avoid a general feeling among the populace of frustration due to abject non-representation, or at least to muffle that feeling if and when it arises (the sense that government, and the powers-that-be in general, ignore the interests of “the little guy” and turn a deaf ear to his pleas and predicaments is as pervasive worldwide, including in the Western democracies, as the belief that politicians are corrupt. The Iranian public has no monopoly on such sentiments). At the same time, the theocratic side of the Iranian regime holds onto the reins tightly enough in areas of more fundamental importance to it – education, social morality (earthquake material!), foreign policy, the maintenance of clerical power – to guarantee that the revolution’s original goals are kept in sight, thereby also tapping into the power of religion to provide the populace with a sense of rooted tradition and stability. This combination of authority-cum-stability, on the one hand, and autonomycum-mutability on the other, is a very powerful one, and despite appearances, will not be easily vanquished or even corroded by the clarion call of Western style, unalloyed democracy. Ayatollah Khameneʾi: [As part of their efforts to undermine the Islamic Republic, the Western enemy] has evolved a philosophy – a veritable philosophy! – according to which the third generation after every revolution backtracks and undermines [the regime and institutions created by the revolution]. What lies, what foolishness, what nonsense! In 1879 there was a revolution in France. But not the third generation, not the second generation, but the very first generation already

 See, e. g., Arman-e Melli, 11/08/2020, p. 3.

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reverted [to pre-revolutionary principles]! After four or five years a counter-revolutionary movement arose and took hold of the reins of power for three or four years. Four or five years after that an insurrection against these last was initiated, and by 1802 the nature of the revolution had been so thoroughly transformed that someone like Napoleon could come and crown himself king! In other words, the country that had risen up against the institution of monarchy and guillotined Louis the Sixteenth, after ten or twelve years had become a country where Napoleon Bonaparte could place a crown on his head and declare himself emperor and rule the country for many years! After that, royal dynasty after royal dynasty ruled France for some eighty or ninety years, all of them embroiled constantly in wars, neglect and corruption. Forget about the third generation – that revolution didn’t even reach the second! Because it was raised on weak foundations. Today, more than two centuries later, some people in the Islamic Republic have no shame: they offer us that self-same ideology (i.e., secularism – Z. M.) that was incapable of propping up a revolution even for the duration of two generations. They offer this to the people of Iran, who carried out the greatest revolution upon the firmest of foundations, and who have weathered all storms and preserved their tremendous achievement for years on end.⁹⁹

By the “firmest of foundations” Khameneʾi intends mardomsalari-ye dini, “religious democracy” (one could certainly parry that specifically secularism was the most influential long-term contribution of the French Revolution – to France, to Europe and to humanity at large – but Khameneʾi would of a surety riposte that that remains to be seen). The Egyptian uprising of 2011 succeeded (temporarily) where the green movement of 2009 failed, specifically because Mubarak’s regime could not rely on this double-ply defense: the ruling caste of Egypt had neither democracy nor religion in its satchel, whereas the ruling caste of Iran has both (no matter how imperfectly). And indeed, the rabīʿ al-ʿarabī or “Arab Spring” of 2011 that (again: temporarily) swept aside dictatorships from North Africa to South Arabia was far more indebted to – and in the end will lead, if anything, to the establishment of regimes far more evocative of – the Iranian model than the Western model. Theo-democracy is the wave of the future in the Middle East (and probably beyond). Far from challenging or threatening the Weltanschauung upon which the Islamic Republic is based, the Arab Spring may be said to have confirmed it as the Muslim world’s political philosophy of choice.¹⁰⁰ But there is a third and far more profound reason why we should not expect the collapse of the Iranian theo-democratic system and its replacement by full-

 Khameneʾi, Jehad-e farhangi, pp. 67– 68.  Thus, while we cannot go as far as Elaine Sciolino – who suggests that “the legacy of the Iranian Revolution may be not exporting theocracy to other Muslim nations, but exporting democracy” (Persian Mirrors, p. 314) – we can perhaps go half (or double?) as far.

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fledged liberal Western democracy any time soon. This reason has less to do with the nature of the ayatollah’s regime, and more to do with the nature of democracy itself. Although this is a highly complex issue that deserves a far more lengthy treatment, we will try to do a minimum of justice to it in several paragraphs. Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi: The leadership of the Islamic nation is entrusted with the task of guiding that nation. Its purpose is not circumscribed to administration alone, that is, maintaining a certain standard of living among the population or establishing and preserving social order for the sake of the community’s this-worldly welfare (behbud-e wad’-e in jahani-ye mardom). Rather, its task is to unite the nation in a forward march toward perfection. One of the fundamental differences between the religious worldview and the Western secular (sekular) worldview relating to issues of governance and society, involves just this dichotomy of purpose: the goal of Western secular government does not go beyond securing the basic necessities of existence (bread, shelter, clothing…) and ultimately the expansion of comfort and luxury (tawseʿe-ye refah)…In all other matters save these, the government has no right to interfere: its sole mandate is to ensure that the conditions exist that will allow [members of society] to pursue a variety of individual activities each according to his desires, and to guarantee that the rights and freedoms of individuals are not violated (serfan beh nezarat bepardazad ta hoquq va azadi-ye afrad makhdush nagardad)…A religious government, on the other hand, on top of this goal, pursues another, loftier goal: the cultivation and perfection of communal virtue such that the ground is prepared for the service of God. The achievement of the first goal allows for the achievement of the second goal…¹⁰¹

Democracy, like many another modern Western institution, is not a presence; it is an absence. It does not presume to offer substance to those who live under its aegis, but rather to provide as wide and facilitating a framework as possible within which individual citizens may create or choose their own substance. Thus, save on those comparatively rare occasions when the people actively participate in the political system – especially on Election Day – democracy’s role is decidedly not to fill up national life with positive content. Indeed, in most cases democracy serves, almost by definition, to empty collective societal experience of just such content (it is an argument a fortiori that it cannot reasonably be viewed in itself as an example of such content). As the preeminent handmaiden of individual freedom, democracy’s mandate is to forge circumstances conducive to the coexistence of a variety of different and even conflicting lifestyles, cultures, beliefs, narratives and the like within the confines of a single national system. The only “democratic” tradition unifying the members of a democracy is the tradition that there is no requirement to cultivate traditions that unify its members, indeed, that cultivating such traditions – what John Rawls referred to (and essentially rejected) as “comprehensive  Mesbah-e Yazdi, Porsesh-ha va Pasokh-ha, pp. 158 – 160.

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doctrines” – is undesirable.¹⁰² This is what we call “freedom,” the right of the individual to choose, and it of necessity promotes variety at the expense of uniformity. Democracy unifies the citizens of a polity behind the requirement…to facilitate a lack of unity. The problem is that nations (and other collectives) need unifying traditions and common cultural content in order to survive and prosper in the long term. Such traditions and such content not only infuse meaning into the collective national “enterprise,” they also afford the participants in that enterprise – the men, the women and especially the young people and children who make up the all-inclusive group – powerful daily reminders of that meaning, of the raison d’etre justifying the existence and integrity of the political entity to which they belong. “Every community,” writes Yann Richard, “has its sacred history, a store of foundational deeds and myths allowing the collective consciousness to protect itself against oblivion and adversity.”¹⁰³ A pervasively observed cultural tradition offers its “consumers” a sense of rootedness and continuity, of timelessness and connection: connection to past generations, as well as to one-another in the present. Such a tradition supplies a tremendous amount of nourishing material into which participants can collectively and simultaneously “sink their teeth,” and provides a cornucopia of stimulating, edifying, socializing (not to say indoctrinating) and even entertaining experiences that forge a common identity between the inhabitants of a particular nation-state (or religious community). It furnishes a country’s citizens (or a religion’s adherents) with stories to tell their children, songs to lift their spirits, rituals to punctuate their calendars, heroes from which to take inspiration, and in general, with the cultural-historical depth and sense of common heritage and mission essential to the preservation of communal affinity. Democracy cannot match this offer. Whereas the saga of the national struggle that brought about democracy’s victory over autocracy may certainly furnish some inspiring reminiscences, such struggles are in many ways universal – a worldwide, modern-day campaign against tyranny and on behalf of rights and representation – and thus cannot function as the foundation of that type of particularism indispensable to strong nationhood or communal identity and loyalty. Moreover, it is a struggle that takes place over years or (at most) decades, not centuries or millennia, and therefore does not have the opportunity to accumulate the enormous quantity of particularist experience and narrative content required to fill up a people’s cultural treasure chest. As for the institution of democracy itself, once it has been established in a given country: this institution is, as we have attempted to

 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap, 1971), passim.  Richard, Shiʿite Islam, p. 15.

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show above, singularly incapable of providing the requisite “material” for national coherence, solidarity and continuity, because “providing” anything other than freedom and representation is not, cannot be, indeed must not be, part of democracy’s job description. Democracy alone cannot define and maintain a nation. The problem is that pure, unqualified democracy – that is, democracy unadulterated by any absolutist or immutable elements – inevitably ends up being alone. It may begin by working in tandem with a given unifying cultural tradition, but eventually, rapidly, it will perforce bring about the disintegration of that tradition in the name of diversity and individual freedom, and will remain from that point forward the only unifying game in town: a consensus to avoid consensus. Democracy, left wholly to its own devices, has no choice but to don its armor and ride out in relentless battle against the commonly held notions that constitute national culture. Democracy is programmed, by virtue of its very nature, to pulverize and atomize that culture, and leave nothing intact that is “grand” save itself. And since democracy in the West is protected by law whereas national culture is not, the latter tends to lose this battle, allowing itself to be pummeled, smashed and, slowly but surely, scattered to the four winds. The weakening of the Western powers in our time is, more than anything else, a function of this very process: the same democratic features that once lifted these powers high above the rest of the nations of the world have now become, paradoxically, the agents of their precipitate decline. Can the absence of tyranny (i. e., democracy) defeat the presence of communal content (i. e., tradition)? Perhaps at the outset. Oppressed societies naturally yearn for nothing so much as freedom. But once that freedom is attained, the question of course becomes: what are we to do with it? Life and liberty are indubitably prerequisites of the pursuit of happiness, but they are not in themselves that happiness. How give collective social-national existence a sense of meaning after liberation? For what ultimate purpose did we – we! – liberate ourselves? In order to disintegrate and disappear as a unit through the fragmentation of our national- or religiocultural legacy? If the answer to this last question is “no,” than have we no choice but to return to despotism – or turn to fascism – in order to retain our nationalreligious tradition? The revolutionary ayatollahs of Iran argue that we do, in fact, have another choice: we can seek out, through much trial and error if necessary, the optimal combination of individualism and communalism, of relativism and absolutism, of freedom and limitation, of Protagoras and Plato. This is mardomsalari-ye dini, “religious democracy,” and when it actually works (and this is, admittedly, far from consistently the case) it is not easy to see, given all of the above, how pure, unalloyed, Western-style democracy can mount an effective challenge to it in the hearts and minds of the people of Iran. Indeed, any country or communal

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entity that inaugurates a truly democratic regime after years and decades under tyranny – as many citizens of Arab countries hope to do today (though so far in vain) – will soon thereafter have to ask itself: now that we are free, what shall we do with our freedom? Where shall we go from here? Where are we headed as a collective? And if national integrity, if remaining together as a group entity is important to us, how do we construct our state and society in such a way that while its laws preserve individual rights, they do not preclude – indeed, they actively facilitate – the maintenance and enhancement of national-religio-cultural solidarity? The Islamic Republic’s theo-democracy is revolutionary Iran’s attempt to answer these questions. With all its foibles and even horrors, it may well become a model for other polities to follow. Once we understand all of the above, we will cease searching high and low for signs that the Iranian theo-democracy is about to collapse – or is a farce – and we will begin to do what very few Western analysts, researchers, journalists, public intellectuals or decision-makers have done to date: take the Islamic Republic seriously. The Shiʿite ayatollahs have striven to create a polity in their own image – a national seminary of sorts – not only for its own sake, but as a vehicle for a message that they hope will transform the Muslim umma at large, and eventually the world. To remain ignorant of the content of that message, to dismiss it as irrelevant, regard it as impotent, or deride it as primitive, is at best rank ignorance, and at worst a tremendous mistake that we will live to regret.

Chapter Five: Problems of Emphasis and Portrayal Although the numerous obstacles denying Western audiences access to the genuine internal experience of Iranian Shiʿism have by no means been exhausted in the previous pages, we shall make do with only several more examples. The first of these takes us back to the beginning of this section, where we assigned part of the blame for Western ignorance of Islamic high culture to the “anti-Orientalism” of Edward Said and his hangers-on. What we did not say at the time was that the Orientalists themselves shoulder a portion of the responsibility for this lacuna. By saying so now I do not mean in any way to impugn the scholarship of this academic camp which, unlike that of its detractors, is for the most part highly edifying and has, indeed, created the discipline. But the problem is that the concerns of Orientalists – especially those who have weathered the storm of Saidian post-modernism and are still researching and writing at the universities today – are almost always directed at the specific aspects of Islamic literary tradition of least interest to Muslims themselves. A salient example of this phenomenon may be had from the field of Islamic history. The curiosity and focus of academic researchers in this discipline naturally encompasses the entire gamut of Muslim historical experience, and their ranks are divided more-or-less equally between experts on (1) the Islamic formative age, from Muḥammad to the end of the “Righteous Caliphate” (570 to 661 CE); (2) the ascendancy of the Umayyad, Abbasid and Turkic dynasties (661 to 1258 CE); (3) the post-caliphal or Mongol-Mamlūk era (1258 to 1453 CE); (4) the early Ottoman (and Safavid-Mughal) period (1453 to 1798 CE); and (5) modern Middle East history (1798 to 1979 CE). Now, whatever may be the absolute worth of, for instance, Mamlūk or Ottoman studies to the advancement of human knowledge, these sprawling sub-fields, which employ thousands of diligent researchers, support dozens of professional journals, are taught in hundreds of college curricula, and are discussed at countless prestigious conferences every year, mean next to nothing to today’s Muslims. The historical period that exercises the Muslim minds and hearts of our time – the epoch to which they consistently turn for education, inspiration, guidance, even entertainment – is the first one listed above, that of the Prophet Muḥammad and his immediate successors, and to the extent that most committed Muslims of the present generation have even heard of Seljuq sultans, Mamlūk slave soldiers or Ottoman padeshahs they consider most of these to have been something akin to infidels. Were the academic discipline of Islamic history in tune with, and in proportion to, the passions of the world Muslim population (I

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-008

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am not necessarily saying that it should be),¹ we would see a lopsided distribution of scholars and students, with a majority or at least a plurality focusing on the first decades of the faith. But that is not what we see. Moreover, even among those researchers who do concentrate on the earliest period, the proper objective of study is perceived as ferreting out wie es eigentlich gewesen, in Leopold von Ranke’s phrase: “what really happened.” This critical approach not only dismisses all of the miracle stories and ignores most of the piquant or heuristic anecdotes that make up a goodly proportion of the classical canon; it also, by undermining the authenticity of nearly every available source-text, razes to the ground the entire edifice of formative Islamic history, leaving a desolate wasteland in its wake. We can perhaps learn a great deal from such scholarship about “what really happened” – or, in this case, about “what really did not happen” – but we will obviously learn very little from it about the (conscious) mindset of contemporary Muslims, for whom nothing in the past is as real, as true and as significant as the career of the Prophet Muḥammad, his Companions (ṣaḥāba) and his Successors (tābiʿūn), or, in the case of the Shiʿa, the career of the Prophet and the Imams. Orientalists do not limit their purview to historical texts, of course, and strictly “religious” material comes in for their scrutiny, as well. Here, however, there are two problems. First, most Orientalists specialize at elucidating the circumstances surrounding the creation and transmission of such texts, including the biographies of their authors and the classification of their extant manuscripts, and only rarely do they occupy themselves in any depth with the actual content of such works. When they do engage with content, it is, naturally enough, in the context of adducing proof-texts in order to demonstrate the veracity of theses which are seldom of interest (let alone palatable) to the Muslim community or relevant to its current belief system (the assertion, for example, that the overwhelming majority of Shiʿites in the ninth century CE did not originally believe that a son had been born to their eleventh Imam – and, self-evidently, did not sign on to the notion that that son had gone into “occultation” five years later to return some day as the mahdī or Savior – is certainly of historical interest, but is just as certainly in every way inconsequential to today’s devotees of Shiʿism, for whom the twelfth or Hidden Imam and his anticipated advent is as irrefutable a reality and fundamental principle of faith as the oneness of God). Indeed, as experienced by religious (and even not so religious) Shiʿites, the belief in, connection with and yearning for the

 As I argued in the preface to this volume, historical research that unearths “what really happened” is extremely important for comprehending the – shall we say – “subconscious” aspect of the modern-day Muslim ethos.

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occulted savior is far more emotional than intellectual in nature, and thus cannot be effectively undermined or even unsettled by “empirical” demonstrations of any kind. In recent decades some Orientalists (by which term the writer intends, if it is not yet clear, those students of Islam and the Middle East who pour over medieval Arabic, Persian and Turkish texts) have begun to wrestle more seriously with the substance of the religious works at their disposal, and to do so with a view toward buttressing or disproving propositions of concern not just to Western academia, but to the Muslim community as well. Such monographs mine the classical sources for material that sheds light on subjects like The Islamic Concept of Justice, Diplomacy in the Muslim Tradition, Islam and Gender, Authority in Shiʿism or The Islamic Idea of Liberty. When properly conceived and executed, they conduct readers on a guided “theme tour” down several of the boulevards and byways of the classical canon, and in this fashion bring to light some of the seminal ingredients that have gone into constructing the Islamic worldview. We are still not home, however. Two related problems render such enterprises – again, whatever their scholarly value – largely unhelpful and even misleading when it comes to “getting into the heads” of the exponentially increasing number of religious Muslims that people our planet. First, while the chosen research topics themselves (Islam and justice, diplomacy, gender, authority, liberty, etc.) are not irrelevant to the concerns of the Muslim community, the manner in which they are couched and presented tends to reflect the intellectual preoccupations of these books’ Western audience. This may seem sensible enough: authors write for their readers, catering to their concerns and addressing the subjects that interest them. But what emerges more often than not from such undertakings is an attempt to answer the question: “What does their cultural tradition have to say about things that matter to our cultural tradition?” The far more significant question that consequently goes unanswered is: “What does their cultural tradition have to say about things that matter to their cultural tradition?” This is not to argue that Muslim society has never been, or is not now, exercised by issues that we would unhesitatingly subsume under categories like “liberty,” “authority,” “diplomacy” or “gender.” But these are our categories, our designations, not theirs. We might call the Prophet Muḥammad a “consummate diplomat” for the way in which he snatched a bloodless victory from the jaws of what would otherwise have been a sanguinary contest at Ḥudaybiyya (628 CE). But neither those present at the event nor the later generations of the Prophet’s followers ever thought of him in those terms or even possessed a semantic equivalent with which to express such an idea (to this day, “diplomacy” in Arabic is diblumasiyya). Muslim sources have spoken in this connection of Muḥammad’s ḥilm – a combination of mildness, compassion, maturity and forethought – of his kiyāsa –

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an amalgamation of shrewdness, courtesy and eloquence – even of his makr – a mixture of craftiness, deception and strategic thinking. Each of these terms is as untranslatable into European languages as “diplomacy” is into Arabic. Combing Islamic classical sources for behavior that evokes (in our minds) the practice of “diplomacy” certainly has a rationale: it allows the Western reader to learn about Islam “from the comfort of his own home,” so to speak, with the help of terms that are familiar to him. After all, any attempt to bridge the gap between a reading audience and a society alien to it requires the pervasive employment of transposition, of the rendering of that society’s concepts and customs into their closest counterparts in the societal media of the reader. Or does it? Perhaps there is another, more effective way of conveying to a given readership the genuine purport of the ideas and institutions of a foreign culture. Let us make an analogy to language. Every national idiom contains terms and expressions the full range of meaning and variety of appropriate uses of which cannot be fully “gotten across” to non-native speakers. But suppose we are nevertheless determined to try, and are in search of the most profitable method by which a foreigner might be made to understand the connotations and semantic latitude of a given “untranslatable” word. How best, for instance, to render the full sense of the Russian conjunction vyed to an English speaker? Well, we could search for a usage in the latter language that approximates its significance: maybe “you see?” or “you know?” But any English-speaking Russian will tell you that this is far from helpful, and even misleading: it accounts for maybe one third of the contexts in which the term is employed, and even for these defines it poorly. We could venture the more open-ended explanation that this monosyllabic utterance, depending on where it is placed and in which type of sentence it appears, alternately indicates (a) mild surprise, (b) something akin to the French “ne c’est pas?,” (c) the equivalent of “since obviously” or “given the fact that…,” or (d) a tinge of irony. Is this any more helpful? Does it convey any truly valuable information about the word’s diverse and nuanced functions in everyday Russian speech? Will the student, having ingested the above explanations, now know just when to slip in or tack on a vyed in his daily discourse, and when to refrain from doing so? Obviously not. Because both of these methods – providing an approximate translation or supplying a list of variant connotations – seek to educate the English speaker about the reality of Russian conversation in English, and this is a futile endeavor that will inevitably result in superficial comprehension at best, complete cluelessness and rank distortion at worst. So how does one get the genuine “low-down” on the term vyed? The answer to that question is simple: one learns Russian. Diving headfirst into the Slavic linguistic milieu, the student pricks up his ears and takes careful note of the different ways and diverse circumstances in which this elusive conjunction is employed

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by natives – not hesitating to engage in some unabashed trial and error of his or her own whenever possible – and slowly but surely begins to acquire the “feel” of this and other sui generis Russian usages in their genuine native context. Only by coming at a foreign term inductively and, most importantly, from the inside, will the student eventually grasp its true meaning, which is literally ineffable in his mother tongue. Just as one cannot teach Russian in English, one cannot effectively enlighten readers about Islamic tradition and culture by trying to translate its concepts into their putative correlates in Western tradition and culture (“Egalitarianism in Islam,” “Authority in Shiʿism,” etc.). “There is no such thing as a delivered presence,” wrote Edward Said, quite perceptively, “only a re-presence, or a representation.”² And that representation is forever doomed to mis-represent. Human experience is not identical from place to place, and even when it is similar, the concepts and terminology evolved in each society to describe aspects of that experience will break down differently. Instead of enlisting Muslim sources in an attempt to shed light on ideas or institutions with which Muslims are unfamiliar – because those ideas or institutions do not exist in that form (or at all) in the Muslim milieu – it behooves us rather to expose Western readers to the authentic Islamic ideas and institutions themselves, to allow him to see them in indigenous context, to watch them at work in their “natural habitat,” to experience their unique semantic and social latitude, and gradually, inductively, to gain an “insider’s perspective.” Muḥammad will not come to the modern Western mountain: if we want to learn anything worthwhile about the Muslim Prophet and his religion, our mountain will have to come to him. Instead of attempting to draw Islam out, we must attempt to draw the reader in. Forcing Islamic sources to address topics of interest to the modern West skews our perspective in still another fashion. The Muslim classical canon is, for instance, far more concerned with questions of cultic ritual than with questions of “authority” or “government” (just as the average Muslim believer spends considerably more time performing ceremonial rites than he does seeking political office or interacting with representatives of his country’s administration). Joseph Schacht writes that the Islamic legal corpus is “weakest, and in some respects even non-existent, on penal law, taxation, constitutional law, and the law of war” whereas it is strongest on “cult and ritual and family law.”³ Former Chief Justice of Egypt Muhammad Saʿid al-Ashmawi points out that of the minuscule proportion of Qurʿanic verses of a “legislative” bent (he counts seven hundred out of a total of over six-

 Said, Orientalism, p. 21.  Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 76.

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thousand), less than two hundred concern matters of muʿāmalāt (public law) while the remainder address issues of ʿibādāt (ritual law).⁴ Despite Ayatollah Khomeini’s hyperbole, geared to urge clerics to involve themselves with politics, to the effect that “of the fifty sections of the hadith corpus… only three or four relate to matters of ritual worship… while the remainder are concerned with social, economic, legal and political questions,”⁵ the opposite ratio is closer to the truth.⁶ Even after the installation of a cleric-run Islamic government in Iran, most ayatollahs and hojjatoleslams – despite the avid Khomeinism which many of them affect – continue to concentrate more on matters of ritual and theology than matters of politics and economy. But the average Western political scientist cares about, and understands, phenomena like authority, government and economics; he could not care less about, or be more perplexed by, the phenomenon of religious ritual. There are hundreds of books on the market and in the libraries about Islam and government; Islam and democracy; Islam and feminism; Islam and economics; Islam and science; Islam and post-modernism; Islam and international relations; etc., even though (what can be teased out of the classical canon regarding) all of these subjects combined would not fill up half of the pages in Muslim sacred texts, or half of the space in Muslim daily life, that ritual does. About Islamic ritual, on the other hand, there exist barely a handful of volumes penned by Western academics. In other words, rather than affording us an accurate representation of the true nature of Islamic religious culture, the current trajectory of American and European Middle East scholarship offers us a diametrically obverse image of it. But there is a deeper problem still than the distortion caused by the superimposition of foreign categories onto Islamic tradition. This problem is more subtle, perhaps, than any we have raised thus far, but it is no less significant for that. The problem is not so much with the categories employed as it is with the Western pen-

 William Shepard, “Muhammad Saʿid al-Ashmawi and the Application of Shariah Law in Egypt,” IJMES, 28 (1996), p. 45.  Khomeini, Guardianship, p. 8. Khomeini also asserts and attempts to demonstrate, in Khomeini, Guardianship, p. 37– 8, that Islamic law covers every aspect of human individual, family and collective life.  Richard Bulliet, albeit reading the preeminent Sunni hadith collection, concludes that “Out of the 7,077 hadiths record in al-Bukhari’s Sahih, over 2000 are devoted to ritual matters like prayer, ablutions, fasting and the pilgrimage to Mecca…In contrast to this overwhelming concentration on topics that were meaningful for individual Muslims in their daily lives, a meager thirty hadith touch on criminal matters (ḥudūd), and another eighty on issues of governance” (Richard Bulliet, Islam: The View from the Edge [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], p. 32). The same is true a fortiori for Shiʿi compilations: even though they tend to include more theosophy, this is offset, e. g., by a greater emphasis on purity law.

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chant for categorization in the first place, or more accurately, for reduction. This requires some explanation. Ever since the pre-Socratic philosophers, and even more so since Aristotle, the sages of the occident have been obsessed with discovering what the “point” of things is: what is the purpose of this activity, what is the result of that process, whither does this excursion lead, why bother telling that story? This pursuit of the teleological “upshot” has become second nature to us in the West: we perceive almost as a tautology the statement that the significance of all phenomena lies in their ends. And when ends are the crux of every matter, when they are the sole raison d’etre of all actions and events, whatever is not an end is perforce consigned to the subservient role of “means.” Now since means only exist, by definition, for the sake of ends, they can possess no value in and of themselves: even while they are busy plying their indispensable trade as facilitators of the realization of a given goal, their status never rises above that of mere vehicle. This is true a fortiori when their task is completed, that is, once a particular end has been achieved: then the means toward that end immediately forfeit what little prestige they once commanded and become utterly superfluous, like a placenta after a birth. This inferior standing justifies a contemptuous attitude toward (whatever we choose to label) “means,” an attitude that allows us to disport with “means” in any manner we wish. As instruments, they may be modified, optimized, streamlined, circumvented or just plain discarded; as objects of inquiry – the aspect that most concerns us in the present chapter – they may be distilled, summarized, reduced, epitomized, or ignored outright. An excellent illustration of this “teleological” approach and its consequences may be had from the occidental perception of oriental ritual. In order to render Jewish cultic practice intelligible (and palatable) to his Hellenized readership, the first century Judeo-Platonist thinker Philo of Alexandria portrayed each and every religious rite and restriction prescribed by the Pentateuch as a medium designed by the deity for either (a) the prevention of health problems, (b) the inculcation of ethical norms, or (c) the representation of metaphysical truths. Thus in the sphere of dietary laws (kashrut) swine flesh was prohibited because it led to indigestion; carnivorous beasts were banned lest slaughtering these slaughterers should inure us to vengeance; the consumption of ruminants was encouraged because cud-chewing is symbolic of careful deliberation while split hooves are a metaphor for discernment; and among insects the “leaping” are edible while the “creeping” are not because the former are an allegory for the Rational Soul, which battles the downward pull of the corporeal and achieves transcendence. In other words, Philo’s utility-based system envisioned Israelite ceremony as a collection of means by which to attain a series of desirable ends. And because means, as we have said, inevitably come to be seen as menial, whereas ends are just as sure to be promoted in comparative rank, the intrinsic worth of biblical and rab-

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binic ritual depreciated in the eyes of those who followed Philo’s lead – mostly Church Fathers and medieval scholastics – to the extent that it could eventually be asserted that “now that X desideratum has been achieved (or now that we have discovered an alternate or more effective route toward achieving it), there is no longer any need for Y ritual performance or restriction.” If (to take a different example) the purpose of the Biblically mandated immersion in a mikveh (purification pool) – or of the Qurʿanically required full-body lustration known as ghusl – is declared to be hygienic; and if we now know that a quick shower with soap is both more expeditious and more salubrious; then the logical next step is to jettison the practice of mikveh or ghusl. An Iranian intellectual, avowedly concerned about the desertion of religion on the part of the younger generation, visited Ayatollah Borujerdi in Qom soon after the Second World War and told him: Many of today’s youth make the claim that modern living conditions differ vastly from those that obtained thirteen hundred and fifty years ago at the outset of Islam. While a goodly number of beneficial practices had to be encouraged in the medieval milieu of the Bedouin of the Arabian peninsula by presenting them as religious ordinances – such as the rituals of purification and the various lustrations – in today’s world, where we have running water, baths and showers available to all, we have no need of divine prescriptions in order to encourage the maintenance of cleanliness, and so wuḍūʾ and ghusl and like ceremonies are unnecessary. Similarly, thirteen hundred and fifty years ago certain types of animals and foodstuffs were considered unhealthy in certain regions, but in today’s society, where entire research disciplines are devoted to matters of health and diet and more and more important discoveries are made by scholars and scientists in this field all the time, it is nothing less than rank injustice to resort to the diktats of ancient times, and present them as eternal and immutable precepts. Worse still, people who have as their objective the corruption of our youth (kasani keh qasd-e enheraf-e javanan-e ma ra dashtand) can throw such issues in their faces, on top of a host of other institutions that provoke disdain and disgust such as the contamination of menstruation and the keeping of slaves, and thereby send them fleeing from the religion of God.⁷

This intellectual, prima facie so solicitous for the future of Islam, is as ignorant of the pillars upon which this religion stands as are the youth whose desertion he laments, and his misconceptions inform several generations of Iranian thinkers, as well as Western-based scholars of Iranian Islam (e. g., Ali Rahnema, see below), down to the present day. If, however – and here is the crucial point – in the occidental (which evolved into the secular modern or rationalist) milieu ends are paramount, and are therefore constantly in search of new and better means to press into their service, in the  Ali-ye ʿEzzati, “Didari ba Ayat Allah Borujerdi,” (2) April, 1981, p. 30.

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oriental (that is, the traditional religious) milieu means are paramount (or at least they become so), and are therefore constantly in search of new and better ends to press into their service. If medical research discovers that the consumption of pork does not, indeed, necessarily lead to indigestion – or if we have invented a pill that will alleviate that malady – then the logical next step in the religious worldview is not to sanction the consumption of pork, but rather to seek out a new justification for its prohibition (it causes trichinosis, pigs are disgusting animals, eating pork engenders gluttony, God said “no” – almost anything will do). Put another way, whatever may have been the original motive or purpose of a given ritual practice, in the religious realm that motive or purpose very quickly takes a back seat to the practice itself, which is henceforth enshrined and sanctified for all eternity: the means become the end, and the end, the means.⁸ To this day, Muslim men still expose their right shoulder whilst circumambulating the Kaʿba in the counterclockwise direction, even though the original impetus for doing so – Muḥammad’s desire to show that his followers were strong enough to deflect any attack that the pagan Qurashites might have planned – ceased to make sense over fourteen hundred years ago.⁹ Another area in which this dichotomy of sacred and profane outlooks on ends and means manifests itself is that of law. Islam, for example, divides its legal sphere into two components: fiqh and sharīʿa. Sharīʿa is the positive law, the consolidated digest of regulations that Muslims are obligated to obey. Fiqh is the complex, dynamic and often volatile intellectual process that leads up to and engenders the provisions that make up the sharīʿa. It seems obvious enough from this description that fiqh argumentation constitutes the (servile) means whereas the sharīʿa legal code comprises the (august) end, and on paper – according to the “official theory” of the faith – that is indeed the nature of their relationship. But it requires only a single romp through the pages of an Islamic legal text or several afternoons spent at a madrasa or howzeh (religious seminary) to discover that in reality, the diametric antithesis holds true. Muslim scholars of law or clerics in training are  This is in direct contradistinction to the position of many sociologists of religion, such as Victor Turner, who states: “People only come together to perform ritual in terms of beliefs so powerfully held that they overcome all the forces that under other circumstances divide them from one another and set them at odds. If these beliefs lose their efficacy, the rituals and symbols that embody them will produce not cohesion but contention, and finally indifference” (V. W. Turner, The Drums of Affliction [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968], p. 8). We are arguing that that the rituals and symbols themselves, even (indeed especially) sans the beliefs – which are the most divisive element – are the premier instruments of cohesion.  The same is true, staying with pilgrimage rites, in the matter of walking briskly between the stations of Ṣafā and Marwa (see Jonathan Brown, Misquoting, pp. 96 – 97). There are scores of other examples.

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truly in their element, are at their most engrossed and passionate – not to say ecstatic – not when they finally arrive at the legal conclusions that comprise the positive law canon, but when they are engaged in the pugnacious controversies themselves by virtue of which the practical statutes of the corpus juris are eventually worked out. Centuries after the prescriptions of the law code have been more or less fixed, the greater part of the seminary student’s daily schedule continues to be devoted to the acrobatic logic-chopping, discursive ratiocination and dizzying dialectics that have ever been the fare of the fuqahāʾs (jurists’) education: the supposed “end” was long ago achieved, and yet the “means” are still mightily in motion. Indeed, even before the sharīʿa was crystallized, Muslim scholars (like their rabbinic counterparts) spent myriad hours and pages debating splendidly hypothetical questions that harbored no relevance whatsoever to practical legislation (if a Muslim shoots an arrow at a heathen on the battlefield, and the latter utters the shahāda or creed – and thereby converts to Islam – while the arrow is in flight, is the shooter then guilty of murder? If a man falls through a floor and his reproductive organ inadvertently penetrates the genitalia of a married woman in the apartment below, does he incur the penalty for adultery? If one espies a source whence water may be taken for ablutions, but a lion stands between him and that source, then shall he be considered “one who has not found water” and be allowed to substitute sand ablutions? If a believer trespasses on someone else’s land and then prays there, has he committed a sin and observed a commandment at one and the same time? Or does the sin cancel out the commandment? If one performed his ablutions and then entered his domicile with the intent of praying, but afterwards emerged having forgotten whether he had in fact prayed or, rather, had had conjugal relations with his wife, must he [a] assume that he prayed, [b] assume that he slept with his spouse and therefore perform the major purification known as ghusl and then pray, or [c] act as if he had done neither and both simultaneously? Etc.). The Shiʿite Muslim legal tradition crowns its most illustrious mujtahids or fiqh dialecticians with honorifics like “invincible warrior,” “cleaver of mountains,” “piercing awl” and “scorching flame,” while the comparatively humble qāḍīs (and even muftīs), whose task is to dispense the ripened rules of the sharīʿa to the people, rarely merit accolades of any kind.¹⁰ There is no title more profoundly respected in the Muslim world – medieval or modern – than faqīh (theoretical jurisprudent). Today, a faqīh is the highest authority in Iran.

 There are unquestionably exceptions, and there is sometimes overlap between the two professions, but for the most part a self-respecting faqih wouldn’t be caught dead in the qāḍī’s chair. “It is a curiosity of scholastic Iran,” writes James Buchan perceptively, “that the more learned the religious jurist, the less ready is he ever to preside over a court of law” (Days of God, pp. 296 – 297).

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Now, Western scholarship on Islamic law has displayed a decent amount of interest in the end products of the Muslim jurisprudential enterprise – digests of Islamic penal and civil ordinances have been translated into European languages ever since the onset of modern Western Imperialism (tellingly, the earliest translations were made in India) – and in recent years even the principles upon which fiqh activity is based (uṣūl al-fiqh) have begun to be investigated by capable occidental academicians. But the thousands of pages and millions of hours of scintillating argumentation that leads from the latter to the former has been largely ignored: such argumentation is, after all, only the channel – that is, the means– through which the sought-after destination is ultimately reached. This, despite Meir Litvak’s study which concluded that “[f ]iqh works constituted 62.3 percent of the titles in the survey [of the books produced by sixty-nine leading mujtahids in the nineteenth century Iraqi shrine cities] and uṣūl 22.5 percent” and that “Mujtahids who dealt with fiqh enjoyed an advantage over their colleagues or rivals who were mainly experts in uṣūl.”¹¹ In other words, that which is, and has almost always been, most highly prized and valued in the Muslim milieu, is given short shrift by most academics studying Islam. The great turn-of-the-century Hungarian Orientalist, Ignaz Goldziher, found two related aspects of the religion he spent his life studying especially disagreeable: (1) “the soul-destroying pedantry of the jurists of Islam” whose “quibbling discriminations” and “dreary exegetical trifling” proved “detrimental to the inwardness of religion”; and (2) the inclination among those same “perverters of the law” to “think up contingencies that will never arise” and entertain “far-fetched legal cases, casuistic constructs quite independent of the real world” as they indulge in “the boldest and most reckless flights of fantasy.”¹² Goldziher objected, in short, to what he saw as the dual plague of hair-splitting and theoretical sophistry afflicting the classical works of Islamic jurisprudence. Here, at some length, is his revealing summation on the subject: The predominance, in religious learning, of the tendency to search into the law, using the methods of casuistry, as I have said elsewhere, gradually resulted in impressing upon the teachings of Islam the stamp of a quibbling legalism. Under the influence of this tendency, religious life itself was seen from a legal point of view. This was not likely to strengthen true piety, the devotion of the heart. A faithful adherent of Islam is thus, even in his own consciousness, under the governance of man-made rules. Next to them the word of God, which is for the Muslim the source and means of moral improvement, orders only an exiguous part of the customs and observances of life, and indeed is forced into the background. Precisely those

 Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, p. 107.  Ignaz Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, trans. Andras and Ruth Hamori, (Princeton, 1981), 62– 65.

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people are considered doctors of the faith who employ the methodology of jurisprudence to investigate the ways in which the law’s demands are fulfilled, who subtly develop and manipulate the findings of these investigations, and carefully see to it that they are adhered to. It is understood that these people are meant in the saying ascribed to the Prophet: “The scholars (ulama) of my community are the Prophets of the people of Israel” – they, and not religious philosophers or moralists, not to mention the representatives of secular sciences. I have mentioned that there was no lack of earnest men who raised their voices in strict condemnation of this perversion of the religious ideal, which manifested itself very early in the history of Islam, and who worked hard to rescue the inwardness of religion from the clutches of quibbling religious lawyers.¹³

The prejudice here – not to say the pretension – is quite clear. Goldziher knows what is best for Islam. He was a Jew, but right religion for him is more akin to Christianity: less law, more spirit. This outlook would inform the scholarship of not a few Middle East specialists who followed in the footsteps of the “founder of the discipline,” and Iran experts are no exception. Hamid Dabashi complains bitterly throughout his Shiʿism: A Religion of Protest (Harvard, 2011) of the latterday upstaging of Mulla Sadra-esque, Shaykhi-Babi-inspired, Shariʿati- and Soroush-like world-embracing, ecumenical, philosophical Shiʿism, by what he regularly disparages as “retrograde,” “medieval,” “backward,” “endogamous” and “dead and deadening” clerical jurisprudence.¹⁴ Even a scholar of the stature of Abbas Amanat – whose grasp of modern and pre-modern Iranian history and society has rarely been matched – can call the premier intellectual pursuit of the Shiʿite jurists “tedious” no less than three times in his recent magnum opus. ¹⁵ But in the eyes of the ulama – the students and teachers at the madaris and howzehs – fiqh is anything but tedious. Ayatollah Motahhari calls it “the sweet science” (elm-e shirin), because of the intense intellectual and spiritual pleasure it affords.¹⁶ It “lures in the mind of the student,” “challenges him with its bewildering  Goldziher, Introduction, p. 66. Goldziher was, of course, far from alone in this assessment. As one example from among a great many of this attitude to Islamic jurisprudence we may adduce the following aside of Alfred von Kremer: “Besides religious quibbling over the Qur’ān and traditions, matters with which only the people of the lower order, especially the clients, concerned themselves, there were no other serious scientific studies.” See Kremer, The Orient under the Caliphs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1920), p. 50.  Dabashi, Shiʿism, pp. 170, 298, 299 and passim.  Amanat, Iran, pp. 116, 319, 484. He also calls the study of hadith (p. 119) and of fiqh (p. 590) “a pedantic preoccupation” and compares the preferred reading material of Amir Abbas Hoveyda – Andre Gide and Andre Malreux – with the “dry texts of jurisprudence” in which Ayatollah Khalkhali dabbled (p. 780). “Ten years were wasted in disputation in the madrasa,” sang Iran’s poet laureate Malek al-Shoʿara Bahar. “We detest history, geography, and chemistry. We are alien to philosophy. But every madraseh is clamoring with ʻhe said’ and ʻI say’” (also cited by Amanat, p. 377).  Motahhari, “Kolliyat,” p. 27.

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proofs, refutations, parries and ripostes,” and constitutes an unsurpassed “mental exercise and honing of cognitive rigor (varzesh-e fakir va-tamrin’e deqqat-e zehn).”¹⁷ It “trains the mind of the pupil, forges his dialectical skills, and focuses his perception.”¹⁸ It is “the King of the Islamic sciences.”¹⁹ Students struggle to be accepted to fiqh courses, which are always filled to overflowing, far more so than to those of any other madraseh sub-discipline. Professors are regularly forced to turn them away.²⁰ Classes on jurisprudence, especially but not exclusively the debates (munazarat or majalis al-jadl) in the context of the high level “classes exceeding [the text]” (durus al-kharij), are the scene of shouting matches, and often crescendo into a deafening cacophony of vociferous argumentation. Students in such classes find the passionate logomachy therein “greatly exhilarating.”²¹ Their questions evince a “clear enjoyment of the scholastic game.”²² They learn to construct an intellectual arabesque that could twine and divide and retwine until it seemed logically to embrace everything in the text before them. And in the intellectual efforts to create this arabesque they engaged in the rough and tumble of debate that had as much excitement for its young devotees as the most challenging forms of physical sport.²³

Whereas “to the secularized intellectual it seems altogether appropriate that traditional Shiah learning should have taken as its home a vast necropolis” (i. e., the cemetery surrounding Fāṭima the Immaculate’s grave at Qom),²⁴ in the mind of many if not most of those engaged in it such learning is as alive an experience as they were ever privileged to have. No less vociferous a critic of Shiʿism and

 Motahhari, “Kolliyat,” p. 38.  Mojtaba Ahmadi ʿAbd al-Reza (ed.), Cheshm va cheragh-e marjaʿiyat: Mosahabeha-ye vizhe-ye majalle-ye howzeh ba shagerdan-e Ayat Allah Borujerdi (Qom: Daftar-e tablighat-e eslami-ye howze-ye ʿelmiyyeh, 1379), p. 129.  Hojjatoleslam va l-Moslemin Ruhollah Hosaynian, IRIB Amoozesh, 12/5/2015.  Gholamreza Karbaschi, Tarikh-e howze-ye ʿelmiyye-ye Qom (Tehran: Markaz-e asnad-e enqelabe eslami, 1380), pp. 220 – 221 and passim. As we have noted, relatively little appreciation has been shown for the centrality of the science of furūʿ al-fiqh to the Islamic intellectual (and spiritual) experience. To see this science at work, albeit primarily in Sunni contexts, see Muhammad Khalid Masud, Brinkley Messick and David Powers (eds.), Islamic Legal Interpretations: Muftis and their Fatwas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). For profound insight into the place of fiqh in Islamic religion and history, see Jonathan Brown, Misquoting, passim, and especially the author’s own dazzling responsum on women leading prayer, pp. 189 – 199.  Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 109.  Michael Fischer, Iran from Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 71.  Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 108.  Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 25.

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its academy than Ahmad-e Kasravi (see below) can write regarding the study of fiqh texts with his peers at the Tabriz madraseh, their arguments regarding which they would carry after class out into the fields and flower beds of the city’s public parks, that “thirty odd years later, I still remember those days with pleasure.”²⁵ “Tedious,” then, is the last adjective that should be employed to describe the experience of fiqh. The injection of an author’s personal prejudices or cultural predilections into his or her assessments thus causes Western scholarship to skew yet another aspect of the reality of Middle Eastern religious life. The polarity of modern Western versus traditional “Eastern” positions on ritual and jurisprudence is mirrored by the contrary attitudes of these same players toward sacred narrative. The process whereby classical epics or sagas are devalued by occidental purveyors of “rationalism” (and their oriental mimics) should thus ring familiar. First, it is asserted that the tales and anecdotes that make up a given faith’s literary corpus are invariably related for a purpose: every story has a moral, every legend has a message to impart (or a political agenda to push) which is its raison d’etre. Next, as expected, the prestige of the stories themselves, in their capacity as “means,” goes into free-fall, while the standing of the moral or philosophical (or political) principles that the stories purportedly exist to instill (the “ends”) soars to ever greater heights. Finally, “enlightened” individuals come to the conclusion that because such principles can be instilled – or such lessons learned, or such morals taught, or such qualities inculcated – without the good offices of the traditional tales (or that indeed, these goals may be achieved even more rapidly and effectively via other methods, or that in point of fact the stories fail miserably in this vein), therefore the stories are extraneous… and expendable. In the age of animal liberation and conflict resolution, we have little need for silly old yarns about St. Francis making peace between townspeople and wolves.

 Mottahedeh, Mantle of Prophet, p. 100. There is also no lack of levity at the seminaries. Once madraseh students in Yazd drenched a dog in water and set it free in the room of one of their peers, where it naturally shook off its inherent ritual pollution – “conducted” by the moisture – onto all that the poor taleb owned. Despairing, the victim of this “purity prank” shut his eyes and prayed, “God willing, it was a goat!” (enshallah buz bud – Introduction to Ruhollah Khomeini, Resalat-e tawdih-e masaʾel [trans. J. Borujerdi (pseudonym), Boulder: Westview Press, 1984], p. xi). Ayatollah Nateq-e Nuri tells a story about himself and four friends who dared each other to chant the azan (the call to prayer) from the dormitory courtyard in the middle of the night in exchange for five thousand tomans. Nateq-e Nuri said he would do it for five tomans, and did so. Surrounded by scores of bleary-eyed fellow students who had been rousted out of bed by his throaty call, he made up a custom on the spot so as not to be pummeled fiercely – he claimed a woman was just then giving birth and that it was “recommended” (mostahabb) to chant the azan to help her through it – but had unfortunately awakened an ayatollah as well… (Nateq-e Nuri, Khaterat, pp. 37– 38).

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That is modern Western secularism (or medieval scholastic dialecticism) talking. But, of course, what makes Catholics distinctly Catholic is neither animal liberation, nor conflict resolution, nor forgiveness, nor the spiritual charisma and faith in Providence that enables the pious to calm wild beasts – nor any other “lesson” or “message” or “principle” that has been or might be teased out of this ofttold escapade of the venerated Italian friar. Kindness to brutes, peaceful reconciliation between antagonists and amnesty for past offenses are causes advocated by countless agnostics and atheists in our time, and the idea that the deeply devoted are granted a share of divine power is the domain of virtually all deistic systems. The moral conceptions of religio-cultural systems are more-or-less universal, and even their theological notions vary less than is generally conceded. Far more, then, than the abstract religious or moral principles that have been derived from the story of St. Francis and the wolf – far more even than the original, “authentic” intent of whichever initial medieval narrator included said anecdote in his homily – what makes Catholics uniquely and vitally Catholic is their awareness and transmission of the account of St. Francis and the wolf itself, along with the hundreds of other adventures, miracle tales, narratives and myths that together constitute the chrestomathy of the Church. These, along with the customs, rituals, holidays and abstentions, bind Catholics to their creed ten times more powerfully than such general notions as “charity,” “compassion” or even “the glory of God,” of all of which the particular stories and observances of Catholic tradition are ostensibly illustrations or expressions. It is the stories themselves, not the morals of the stories, that color and reinforce religious identity. It is the sacred protagonist himself, more than the ideals for which he purportedly stands, who anchors believers to their tradition. Charity is unquestionably important to Catholics; but St. Vincent de Paul’s charity is more important. (Ayatollah Motahhari would emphasize just after the Iranian revolution that “our movement sought justice – but Islamic justice; our movement sought freedom – but Islamic freedom; our movement sought independence – but Islamic independence”).²⁶ If the analysis offered above is controversial regarding Christianity (a confession that arose, after all, as much under the influence of occidental as oriental thought), it is far less so in the case of Islam. Here the exchange of roles between literary means and moral-philosophical ends – such that the former become essential and the latter lapse into contingency – is particularly sharp. The greatest part of the Muslim classical narrative is composed of hadith, that is, reports concerning the statements and activities of the Prophet Muḥammad, his Companions and their immediate descendants (or, for the Shiʿa, of Muḥammad and his own descendants –

 Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 24, p. 169.

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the Imams – for twelve generations). Long before Western “higher criticism” undermined the authenticity of a large portion of this literature, medieval Muslim scholars themselves had declared the overwhelming majority of hadith reports to be “unreliable” or even “invented.” Why had they been invented? For a variety of reasons: to answer the burgeoning number of questions asked by the burgeoning number of adherents to the new faith; to buttress the legal, theological or political claims of a particular school or party within Islam in its polemic with rivals; to provide context to abstruse passages in the Qurʿan; and to edify, indoctrinate and perhaps even entertain the masses. Indeed, when, about a century and a half after the Prophet’s death, compilers began to organize the hadith anecdotes – the “forged” or “weak” thereof together with the “sound” or “verified” – into linear narratives beginning before Muḥammad’s birth and continuing beyond his death, the literary products of these endeavors were designated Sīra, probably meaning not so much “biography” (as this word is usually translated into English) but something closer to “a model life” or “exemplary deeds.”²⁷ It can be said, therefore, that the better part of early Muslim sacred lore came into being (or, at least, was preserved) for a purpose, as a tool for imparting lessons and advancing agendas. But very soon this ends-means relationship was reversed, and whatever the staying power of those lessons and agendas – some disappeared, some were transformed over time, some remain tenaciously as they were down to the present era – it was not them but rather the heroes and villains of the hadith reports themselves who gained immortality, and their exploits and personalities are more vivid for millions of Muslim believers today than their own country’s evening news. The preacher may be a ninth century mutakallim (theologian) discussing freewill, a twelfth century faqīh (jurist) expounding on inheritance law, a fifteenth century ṣūfī (mystic) preaching self-abnegation, or a twentieth century Uṣūlī (Islamist)²⁸ advocating sharīʿa government: in all of these cases, the pool of anecdotal illustrations and proof-texts – in other words, the means – remains the same: the age old hadith. In the religious milieu, most “ends” are born and die; most “means” live on forever. Even when a given lofty ideal – say, tawakkul (reliance on God) or ʿadl (justice) – does manage to entrench itself for the duration, it is generally too ethereal, colorless and universal to compete with the vibrant humanity, exotic richness and flavorful particularity that characterizes a given community’s heritage of classical  M. M. Bravmann, The Spiritual Background of Early Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972), pp. 73 – 91. Much like the title of Ibn Khaldūn’s magnum opus, the Kitāb al-ʿIbar (Book of Lessons).  Uṣūlī in the modern Sunni context refers to Salafi fundamentalists, and is not connected to the identical Shiʿite term.

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stories. Both ideals and the narratives that purvey them participate in creating and maintaining confessional identity, but the senior partner is the latter. Justice is unquestionably important to Shiʿite Muslims; but ʿAlī’s justice is far more important. There is little wrong, in the end, and even much that is right, about utilizing Muslim classical sources to illuminate subjects such as “gender in Islam,” “authority in Shiʿism” or “Islamic civil society.” But what this angle of approach fails on the whole to do is provide the reader with a taste of the genuine experience of being a traditional (or revolutionary) Muslim. That experience, all lip service to the contrary, privileges the concrete over the abstract, the specific over the general, the immanent over the transcendent, and the existential over the essential. Islamic societies (we would argue: most societies) are best studied not by distillation but by expatiation, not by conceptualization but by specification, not by deduction from a modicum of general principles but by induction from a myriad particular incidents, past and present. The remainder of this book will employ the latter method.

Chapter Six: Islam, Nationalism and the Battle for the Iranian Soul The Story is about You On December 15th, 2010, two frail young men made their way into the center of a thronging crowd outside of a mosque in the Southern Iranian port city of Chabehar, and set off the explosive devices strapped to their torsos. These suicide bombers belonged to a Sunni Muslim guerilla group called Jund Allah (“Army of God”) dedicated to freeing the province of Baluchistan from the grip of the Shiʿite ayatollahs. The result of their “act of martyrdom” was some forty worshippers dead – men, women and children – and nearly one hundred wounded. Within hours of the incident, news agencies and internet sites around the world began broadcasting a video clip of President Ahmadinejad weeping uncontrollably into his scarf: “Iranian leader convulsed with grief over terrorist attack” announced accompanying headlines and authoritative-sounding anchor-people. Many Western reporters and bloggers expressed surprise that a top political figure would be caught in such a public display of emotion, especially one so inured to violence as Mahmud “killshot” Ahmadinejad, who was reputedly responsible for finishing off prisoners executed by firing squad in the South-West province of Khuzestan during the early days of the revolution. Other American and European commentators evinced an ugly, if perhaps understandable, schadenfreude – “There, now, taste some of your own terrorist medicine!” – coupled with a certain satisfaction at seeing this alternately feared and despised international villain reduced to a quivering mass of lachryma. But Ahmadinejad was not crying over the massacre at Chabehar, which in fact had yet to take place at the time his heaving sobs were captured on camera. December 15th, 2010 coincided on the Muslim calendar with the ninth of Muḥarram, the penultimate day of the week-and-a-half long annual Shiʿite commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Ḥusayn and his family. The president was bawling in recollection of the carnage at Karbala almost fourteen hundred years ago in 680 CE – specifically, in remembrance of the heroic death of Ḥusayn’s half-brother, ʿAbbās son of ʿAlī, reputedly killed on the ninth day of the month while attempting to obtain water for the Prophet Muḥammad’s great-grandchildren – and he was not alone. Speaker of Parliament Ali-ye Larijani, chairman of the Guardian Council Ahmad-e Jannati, late chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council Hashemi-ye Rafsanjani, commander of the regular army Ata Allah Salehi, commander of the Revolutionary Guards Mohammad Ali-ye Jaʿfari, Supreme Leader Ali Hosayhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-009

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ni-e Khameneʾi, and a host of other Iranian movers-and-shakers were at that same moment at the Hosayniyyeh or “mourning canopy” of their choice in various locations across the capital and provinces, bewailing the seventh-century slaughter of the male members of Muḥammad’s family at the hands of their fellow (“protoSunni”) Muslims, listening to the impassioned re-enactment of the devastating incident by a professional rowzeh khan (“threnody reciter”)¹ and unabashedly shedding tears – ritualized but nevertheless (at least in this author’s estimation) largely genuine – in front of the entire country. Indeed, unbeknownst to most, former president Ahmadinejad, his successor president Rouhani, current president Raʾisi and the remainder of Iran’s governing elite weep copiously in public on an almost monthly, and sometimes weekly, basis while commemorating the birth and death anniversaries of each of the twelve Shiʿite Imams (and their siblings,² offspring and occasionally even nephews, uncles and cousins), occasions that punctuate the Shiʿite calendar from beginning to end. On Shiʿite holidays one does not offer greetings but “condolences” (tasliyat). The sixth imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq taught that “he who recites poetry about Ḥusayn, causing fifty people – indeed even thirty, twenty, ten or just one person – to weep, and who weeps himself, assures his place in paradise.”³ The day of ʿAlī’s martyrdom on the twenty-first (or nineteenth) of the month of Ramadan calls forth sorrowful processions and additional lamentation. Every Thursday night moving recitations in mosques, cemeteries and hoseyniyes of the powerful duʿa komayl prayer – reputedly dictated by ʿAlī to a Companion of his by that name – are accompanied by unrestrained displays of emotion, and there are many other opportunities for such catharsis. The power of such melodious dirge-panegyrics as tasbih-e Fatemeh or “The Praise of Fāṭima,” intoned in unison by thousands of devotees and accompanied by the traditional percussion of mass body-striking, is hard to convey, and elicits extreme emotions among participants and spectators.

 Contemporaneously with Esmaʿil Shah Safavi’s conquest of Iran, Hosayn Vaez-e Kashefi composed his Persian language (though Arabic titled) Rawdat al-shuhada (Garden of Martyrs) in the maqātil genre. It became a “hit,” and eventually a reciter of dirges for Ḥusayn and other imams – whether using this work or others – acquired the name rowzeh khan. Ayatollah Shaykh Jaʿfar-e Shustari said: “Every food requires salt, and the salt of any religious lecture is the remembrance of the tragedy of Karbala.”  There is a difference of opinion regarding the death dates for the most famous of these siblings, Fateme-ye Maʿsumeh, sister of the eighth imam who is buried in Qom – the options being the 10th of Rabiʿ al-Thani, the 12th of that same month, and the 8th of Shaʿban. The first two dates being adjacent, the anniversary of this noble lady’s death is commemorated during a three-day period commencing from the 10th of Rabiʿ al-Thani.  Mahmoud Ayoub, Redemptive Suffering in Islām: A Study of the Devotional Aspects of ʿĀshūrāʾ in Twelver Shīʿism (The Hague: Mouton Publications, 1978), p. 158.

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Nor is the phenomenon of sobbing statesmen confined to such “official” occasions: Iranian politicians, like the devout among their fellow countrymen (the males more so than the females), will weep at the drop of a hat, as it were on demand, whenever the suffering of this or that long dead sacred personage is recollected. In September 2018 a video clip showing Hasan Nasrallah, leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah, weeping upon the mention of Imam Ḥusayn’s name, went viral in Western and Israeli circles and occasioned much surprise (and ridicule), even though such displays are quite common, even routine. On October 5th, 2020, on the fortieth day [Arab. arbaʿīn, Pers. chelleh] after the commemoration of Ḥusayn’s martyrdom (20th of Safar), Supreme Leader Khameneʾi – listening all alone on one side of the mammoth Hosayniyyeh at Ayatollah Khomeini’s mausoleum compound to a masked dirge declaimer keeping his distance due to Corona all the way on the other side – broke down and wept copiously into his own mask literally seconds after the recitation began.⁴ Ayatollah Khameneʾi’s own eulogy for Ayatollah Motahhari – highly accomplished philosopher, theoretician, historian, jurist, exegete and celebrated hero of the revolution – opened with: “He was a weeper.”⁵ A famous mullah of the Qajar period, Muhammad Baqer-e Shafti (the first to be addressed as “hojjatoleslam”), was said to imitate the Imam Ḥusayn’s son ʿAlī Zayn alʿĀbidīn⁶ by weeping every day from morning to night, until his doctors forbad this as detrimental to his health and drove all maddahan (narrators of the story of Ḥusayn) from the mosque he attended lest his emotions be aroused.⁷ Shiʿite supererogatory prayer is ideally performed “with love and tears” (ba ʿeshq o ashk). Shiʿite “prayer-books” sport titles like “Stream of Tears,” “River of Tears,” “Lake of Tears,” “Sea of Tears,” “Ocean of Tears,” “Flood of Misery,” “Key to Sadness,” “Burning Lamentations,” etc. To protest his colleague Ayatollah Khomeini’s arrest

 IRIB Qurʾan, 5/10/2020.  Ishan ahl-e geryeh bud (cited in Khameneʾi, Jehad-e farhangi, p. 143).  The fourth imam, also known as al-Sajjad or “the prostrator,” lone male survivor of the massacre at Karbala, whose forehead callus had to be shaved down monthly and who wept incessantly (he supposedly smiled only once in his life, when he received a package containing the head of his father Ḥusayn’s persecutor, ʿUbayd Allah b. Ziyād, sent to him by the Kufan rebel al-Mukhtār). Supplications ascribed to this imam are collected in a devotional anthology entitled al-Ṣaḥīfa al-sajjādiyya, which is still in use today (and comes highly recommended by the Supreme Leader). Other marthiyyas or dirges are attributed to Ḥusayn’s wife Rabab and especially his daughter Sukaynah, who vowed, like her brother ʿAlī, to weep tears of blood all her life. ʿAlī Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn married his uncle Ḥasan’s daughter, who bore him the fifth imam, Muḥammad al-Bāqir. The latter’s half-brother, Zayd (son of a slave-girl) who led an ill-fated rebellion against the Umayyads in the Iraqi city of Kufa in 740, became in death the eponymous founder of the Zaydī branch of Shiʿism, whose adherents – in the guise of Houthis – currently control most of Yemen (with Iranian help).  Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 207.

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by the Pahlavi regime, Ayatollah Shariʿatmadari went to the Shah ʿAbd al-ʿAzim shrine and “sat weeping under a mulberry tree.”⁸ Mohammad-e Mosaddeq, the celebrated parliamentarian and prime minister of the early 1950s who nationalized the oil industry and was on the verge of ousting the Shah until a CIA-assisted coup helped neutralize him, was known in the West – and also among Westernized intellectuals in Iran – as “the crying prime minister” (nokhost vazir-e-geryan) because of his frequent watery outbursts. In truth, there was nothing overly exceptional about his melodramatic behavior: it was and remains par for the IranianShiʿite course.⁹ There is, then, nothing embarrassing in Iran about high officials or elder statesmen weeping; on the contrary, it is shameful not to weep when the circumstances warrant it, and the narrator of ancient horrors who can most ably jerk tears from the eyes of his audience is in high demand. It is told that one of the last kings of the Qajar dynasty (1796 – 1925), Nasser al-Din Shah (reigned 1848 – 96), once went on pilgrimage to Karbala in Iraq, the site of the Imam Ḥusayn’s demise, together with his prime minister. Before setting out for the holy enclosure where the Imam’s body is buried, his majesty enjoined the premier to hire the services of the most impassioned rowzeh khan or maddah (panegyrist of Ḥusayn and the other martyred imams) in the city, so as to ensure that he, the king, would cry. But try as they might, none of the professional dirge declaimers succeeded in panging the monarch’s heart sufficiently to produce actual sobs. The prime minister grew nervous, and told the local clerics that if the king did not break down, there would be hell to pay. Finally, an elderly rowzeh khan was brought in who promised to achieve the desired result. He entered the shrine in the presence of Nasser al-Din, turned to the grave of the Imam and exclaimed: “O Ḥusayn! When all of your comrades had been slaughtered and you stood alone facing the ferocious assassins sent by the accursed caliph Yazīd, you looked this way and that in utter despair and cried out, ‘Is there not a single naser (“savior”) to help me?’ (Arab. hal min nāṣirin yanṣurunī?). No one answered your cry. Now this ‘Nasser’ has come (i. e., Nasser al-Din), but alas – it is too late!” At this the Shah burst into tears, and the day was saved.¹⁰ During the reign of the same

 Buchan, Days of God, p. 127.  Mosaddeq’s penchant for pajama wearing, connected to his hypochondria (and genuine ailments), is another story. Reza Shah all but banned the processions and passion plays in honor of Ḥusayn, telling his prime minister: “I am devoted to the Lord of the Martyrs, but do we really need all this weeping and wailing?” (Buchan, Days of God, p. 93).  Abbas Salehi Najafi, Cheshm va cheragh-e marjaʿiyyat (Qom: Markaz entesharat-e daftar tablighat-e eslami howze-ye ʿelmiye-ye Qom, 1379), p. 223. This king himself would be “martyred” –

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sovereign, a famous clerical figure received a letter from a colleague describing the pervasive practice in one of the outlying provinces during the Ashura holiday: the rowzeh khan would have his lap filled with hundreds of stones prior to the recitation, and if too few people wept under the influence of the telling, the lanterns in the mosque would be extinguished and the speaker would hurl the stones at the heads of the people until the desired cries and moans were obtained.¹¹ Pious Shiʿites weep for Ḥusayn, the qatil al-ʿabra (martyr of tears), and the remainder of their “oppressed” imams the year round and in a wide variety of forums. One of the more intriguing aspects of this national custom is the way in which portrayals of even the most minor suffering undergone by a member of the Prophet’s Family (ahl al-bayt) will elicit displays of empathy and misery from those within earshot: …and [Imam ʿAlī] stood face to face with the possibility that his life of leisurely study and ritual piety was now over, and that he would from this point forward be forced to forsake his precious books and his prolonged prostrations in the mosque and take in hand the reins of government, with all of the burdens, responsibilities, demands and disappointments involved therewith…¹²

A crowd in the city of Kerman in the summer of 2010 chose this moment in the preacher’s narration of ʿAlī’s woes to break out in violent wailing, not just in commiseration with their first Imam for the difficult trials that would later punctuate his tenure as caliph, but also (as is easily perceived when one observes the responsive dynamic between the maddah and his listeners) in sympathy with ʿAlī’s foreboding on that specific occasion regarding what lay ahead in his life. In other words, the temporary stress produced in ʿAlī’s psyche by his momentary contemplation of a future in which the pleasures of piety and scholarship were to give way to the pains of administration and bureaucracy was perceived as tragic enough to elicit loud grieving. This is strange. After all, we are not talking here about the loss of a limb or of a child; this is emotional distress over the implications of a career change. Indeed, in many cases an account of a relatively slight discomfort – Ḥusayn’s thirst, Zaynab’s fatigue, a toothache of the seventh Imam, a headache of the eighth, even a stubbed toe – can evoke lamentation just as effectively, and sometimes even more so, than portrayals of murder or massacre. This paradoxical phenomenon is highly revealing. Like most religious cultures, but with a greater frequency and intensity than perhaps any other, Shiʿism reassassinated by a disciple of famed anti-imperialist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani al-Asadobadi in 1896 – and was styled by some shah-e shahid.  Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 16, p. 131.  Dirge recital on IRIB 2, 04/11/2012.

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counts its foundational stories to its adherents beginning at infancy and continuing throughout life. The ritual retelling of the adventures and anguish of ʿAlī, Fāṭima, Ḥasan, Ḥusayn and the remaining Imams and members of the ahl al-bayt (the Prophet’s lineal descendants) so closely accompanies the cultural calendar and even daily existence of Shiʿite believers for such a prolonged period (viz. their entire lives) that these sacred protagonists inevitably assume a certain present tense reality in their minds. The cast of characters of early Shiʿite history become reified and tangible for many members of this community, they come to life for them, as it were walk among them, are transported from the distant past directly into the here and now. At the same time, the believer himself is catapulted back hundreds of years to those history-making events themselves, and imagines his own participation therein: as a defender of Fāṭima’s home against the onslaught of Abū Bakr’s loyalists, as a member of the shūra council charged with choosing a new caliph after ʿUmar’s assassination, as a soldier in ʿAlī’s forces at the Battle of the Camel, as a martyr along with Ḥusayn at the siege of Karbala. The story goes that a European tourist once arrived in Iran during the final days of the Ashura. Witnessing so many of the local people crying out and flagellating themselves, he asked one of these what had happened. “A great leader of our people has died,” came the reply. “When?” persisted the visitor. “Fourteen hundred years ago,” he was told. Bewildered, the European queried: “And you found out only now?!” Shiʿism is all about the maintenance of memory – emotional memory. More than this: as happens to most of us when we are deeply engrossed in an epic novel or (what is perhaps more common in the West today) when we are addicted to a lengthy television series, many Shiʿites begin to identify with the heroic figures of these endlessly re-told tales, consciously or unconsciously merging their own sense of selfhood with the personalities and destinies of the celebrated men and women of their confessional pantheon. Like the novel reader or the series watcher, they root for and even cast themselves in the part of the good guys, and are devastated when these righteous paladins are unhorsed and defeated. It is this submergence of the audience in the legendary spectacle that best accounts for the counterintuitive phenomenon described above: the considerable anguish produced by the mention of even trivial inconveniences or annoyances irritating the Shiʿite saints. For to the extent that the present-day believer becomes Ḥusayn – to the extent that s/he suffers adversity as Ḥusayn – s/he is affected not just by the grandiose and horrific tribulations that this “Prince of Martyrs” underwent, but also by the more immediate aches, pains, discomforts and depressions that afflicted that great man as they do all people. Put another way, if one “zooms out” and observes Ḥusayn from outside of Ḥusayn – that is, from the point of view of a present tense spectator looking back at a legendary historical figure – then one’s lens will perforce be focused panoramically on the more grandiose events, on those su-

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preme moments of heroism and self-sacrifice that were destined to reverberate down the generations and centuries. But if one has imbibed Ḥusayn cum lacte, and has increasingly come to empathize and identify with this sacred paragon over the ensuing years of life due to the unrelenting ritual of telling and retelling, then instead of the bird’s eye view that peers down from above and captures only the “big picture” phenomena important for posterity, the devotee may be said to experience what the Imam himself experienced, from the Imam’s perspective, from the inside out, and specifically without the “long-term view.” The devotee in question is therefore powerfully impressed by those comparatively “minor” nuisances – an ingrown toenail, a parched throat, a sad thought, angst about assuming office – that in fact loom so very large in the daily life and consciousness of individuals (one is killed in battle only once, and rather quickly – and of course cannot reflect upon this event – whereas an ingrown toenail inflicts steady, debilitating pain for days on end and is present in one’s consciousness throughout that time). The melodramatic manner of describing these relatively insignificant ordeals in the medieval maqātil (“slaughter”) literature, and the tearful breast-beating such descriptions induce in audiences of worshippers, is thus indicative of the profound extent to which the more ardent members of Iranian Shiʿite society intermittently live with, identify with, even merge with, the heroic characters of the religion’s classical canon.¹³ Ayatollah Khameneʾi appears to refer to this phenomenon when he describes the highest level of walāya: The first level is encapsulated in the verse: “Your protector (waliyyukum) is only God and His Messenger, and those who believe, who perform the prayer and give alms while bowing down” (Q. 5: 55). This subsumes the notions of loyalty, devotion and knowledge (i.e., the verse contains an information statement regarding the relationship that should obtain between believers and those to whom they should resort for succor – Z. M.). The second level is explicated in the verse: “O you who believe! Obey God and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you…” (Q. 4: 59). This refers to the realm of action. In the arena of activity one must obey and follow. But there is a third level, the level of love (mavaddat): “…I [Muḥammad] ask not of you any reward for [the transmission of revelation] save affection for [my] kinsfolk” (al-mawaddata fi l-qurbā – Q. 42: 23). What is this “affection”? It is the basis for the other two levels, indeed, for the whole of walāya…it is the emotional join-

 This identification and even merging with paragons of the past still involves a certain amount of “acting”: after all, the heroic figures themselves would probably not have wept and wailed to such an extent because of a headache or an in-grown toenail. There is here a deliberately exaggerated empathy existing alongside the absorption into the character.

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ing of oneself (payvand-e ʿatefi) to the friends of God, which in turn is cultivated by means of a feeling of direct connection to these sacred personages.¹⁴

This phenomenon, the connecting up to the heroes of yore, points us in turn in the direction of a further inference, even less palatable to the modern – and perhaps especially post-modern – mindset: that Iranian Shiʿites, including (and perhaps especially) their religio-political leaders, regularly re-enact the scenes of their heritage in a great deal of their daily and more momentous endeavors. A statement of this sort, of course, runs the risk of being decried or dismissed forthwith as the rankest “essentialism.” But fear of such accusations must not deter us from propounding what we believe to be a true and important observation. What is more, at least when it comes to the epitome and epicenter of this tendency – the rituals of Ashura – we will undoubtedly have the backing of the participants themselves, which must count for something. We will also have the backing of one of the most highly respected Western scholars of Iranian culture and Shiʿite ritual in the present generation, whose research is based on an incomparable amount of fieldwork: [The tragedy of Karbala] transcends history into meta-history, having acquired cosmic proportions. This places the passion of the Imam Ḥusayn at Karbala at a time which is no time and in a space which is no space. In other words, what happened in the year 61 of the Muslim era (680 AD) on the battle field of Karbala is as if it were taking place now, in the present in any place where the Shiʿi live, and especially wherever they are humiliated, deprived and abused…The self-mortification of the Shiʿa is an attempt to identify themselves with the suffering of Ḥusayn as though Karbala could be reproduced in the present and they could share in the Imam’s passion of martyrdom…[Carrying the ʿalam or standard in mourning processions] gives the participants the feeling that they are actually fighting at Karbala…Audience participation [in the taʿziyeh passion play] is so intense that men and women mourn and weep as though the scenes before them were taking place in the immediate present. Remorse that Ḥusayn should have been allowed to die so horrible a death is felt as a personal loss here and now…The actors and spectators feel just as responsible for Ḥusayn’s death as those who betrayed and abandoned him in the year 61/680.¹⁵

 Khameneʾi, Jehad-e farhangi, pp. 174– 175. All three of these verses suffer many and various interpretations.  Peter Chelkowski, “Popular Shiʿi Mourning Rituals,” Alserat 12, 1986, passim. Chelkowski has worked in tandem with Hamid Dabashi, who, as we have seen, has often vociferated against the “crime” of “essentialism,” making it that much more difficult to accuse Chelkowski himself of such a felony (Dabashi would, however, attack our – and Chelkowski’s – use of the term “fieldwork”). Indeed, in a work authored by both scholars a famed theatrical innovator is quoted to the effect that “when [Ḥusayn] was martyred [in the taʿziyeh] the theater became a truth – there was no difference between past and present. An event that was remembered as having happened in history 1,300 years ago, actually became a reality in that moment” (Dabashi and Chelkow-

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Many have told of an unlucky actor who played Shemr – Ḥusayn’s villainous murderer – in a taʿziyeh production of several generations ago, who was beaten to death by an enraged crowd of spectators. Yeki bud, yeki nabud, as the Iranians are wont to say regarding incredible stories: “Perhaps it was, and perhaps it wasn’t.” What is certain is that a decent number of the many and varied Persian scripts of the taʿaziyeh play have been for some time punctuated by a series of “caveats” or “disclaimers,” in which actors portraying negative figures are instructed to turn to the audience every so often and “set the record straight.” If, for instance, one has been assigned the role of the hated Ibn Saʿd, commander of the Sunni Umayyad forces in Iraq, and among his required lines is: “My hatred for the Prophet’s family is as deep and dirty as the well of Buḍāʿa!” Immediately afterwards in parentheses the actor is ordered to turn and address the audience with the words: “Of course – I don’t really mean that! Remember: I am only an actor, playing a part. In truth, my love for the Prophet’s family is as pure and bottomless as the well of Zamzam! I detest Ibn Saʿd, that son of a whore!” The past is, in short, alive and kicking for the adherents of Shiʿism. As we remarked in the previous chapter, few slogans drop off the lips of contemporary Western analysts as frequently as the claim that religious sentiments, narratives, precepts and institutions are exploited by political leaders for their own practical, partisan ends. There can be no doubt that this has often been the case, and in the modern history of Iran – and perhaps never so clearly and flagrantly as during the struggle between conservatives and reformists after the contested 2009 election of President Ahmadinejad – Shiʿite motifs have served as the premier propaganda weapons of the opposition no less than of the government. If the regime-sponsored newspapers regularly referred to Green Movement leaders Musavi and Karroubi as “Ṭalḥa” and “Zubayr” (the longtime pseudo-backers of ʿAlī whose true colors were exposed when they betrayed the first Imam at the Battle of the Camel in 657 CE), the greens/reformists were wont to style Ahmadinejad “Ibn

ski, Staging a Revolution, p. 80). In a Persian language article Chelkowski would describe how “the audience is both here and in the desert of Karbala” (Peter Chelkowski, “Hengami keh na zaman zaman ast va na makan makan: Taʿziye-ye Emam Hosayn,” Iran Nameh 9 [2], p. 220). In his “A Persian Passion Play” Matthew Arnold wrote: “The power of the actors [in the taʿziyeh] is in their genuine sense of the seriousness they are engaged in. They are, like the public around them, penetrated with this” (cited by Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 177). John Buchan makes so bold as to assert that “Iranian history is a sort of passion play, a constant recitation of the foundation tragedy of Shia Islam” (Days of God, p. 380). None of this means that present day Iranians do not go about their daily lives in much the same way as the rest of humanity. But the claim of so many astute observers to the effect that a recurrent reenactment of themes from Shiʿite sacred time forms what one might call the religio-national operating system of Iranian society should not be dismissed out of hand.

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Ziyād” (the Umayyad henchman who ruthlessly repressed Ḥusayn’s supporters in Kufa in 680 CE). But as the spectator continues to observe this phenomenon, s/he is gradually overwhelmed by the increasingly powerful impression that even more than Iranian politicians and protesters exploit Shiʿite religious history, Shiʿite religious history exploits them. However strong and unique the personalities of a Khatami, an Ahmadinejad, a Musavi, a Rouhani, a Larijani, a Raʾisi, a Jannati or a Khameneʾi may be, the more one begins to feel the “rhythm” of Iranian-Shiʿite history, the more each of these leaders, and all of their vociferous cohorts making up the various factions currently battling it out for control of the levers of power in the Islamic Republic, begin to resemble nothing so much as rival manifestations of an all-engulfing, ancient “spirit.” It is almost as if these dueling opinion-makers were human incarnations of competing ideas locked in an epic, historic struggle within the four walls of tradition – or at least, servants or mercenaries of conflicting interpretations of that same tradition.¹⁶ However momentous and sui generis the upheavals and vicissitudes affecting modern Iran may appear, the more one peers at these events in the context of the greater picture of a millennium-and-a-half of Iranian-Islamic history, the more they seem like waves and ripples that give an illusion of forward motion to water that, in reality, remains stationary and constant. The water is Shiʿite-Muslim tradition; the waves and ripples – that is, the specific historic incidents, developments, trends and personalities – mere instantiations of that tradition. The sacred narrative of Shiʿism overcomes and engulfs these latter-day occurrences and personalities, integrating them into itself, inducing them to relive and reenact, again and again, the formative stories and struggles of the faith, to transpose the medieval tales and tussles and superimpose them onto present-day experience. “Every day is Ashura,” goes a famous slogan attributed to (among others) the Iranian revolutionary ideologue Ali Shariʿati, “every place is Karbala, and every person is Ḥusayn.” “The names of ʿAlī, of Muʿāwiya, of Yazīd are as contemporary as this morning’s newspaper,” writes Bernard Lewis, “and more so than yesterday’s.”¹⁷ As Ayatollah Motahhari wrote concerning the revolution itself:

 In the preface we took the opposite position: “None of this is to suggest that the Muslim scholarjurists of twentieth and twenty-first century Iran act as little more than avatars of classical Shiʿite paragons, incarnations of eternal Shiʿite principles, servile administrators of Shiʿite law or passive receptacles of Shiʿite history.” Iranian reality is chock full of fierce contradictions and ambiguities, and lives with them.  Bernard Lewis, “The Shiʿa in Islamic History,” in Martin Kramer (ed.), Shiʿism, Resistance and Revolution (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), p. 24.

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If the Iranian people in the depths of their spirit, a spirit intimately and powerfully and inextricably intertwined with Islam, the Qurʿan, ʿAlī and Ḥusayn, did not sense that it was once again the call of the Prophet and of ʿAlī and of Imam Ḥusayn that emerged from the throat of this man [Khomeini] – does anyone believe that such a movement could have come about in this realm?¹⁸

Each and every generation of Iran’s religious leaders and thinkers has called the Shiʿite Muslim heritage to the colors; but what this really means, of course, is that the Shiʿite Muslim heritage has called each and every generation of Iran’s religious leaders and thinkers to the colors, has fashioned them, to a significant degree, in its own indelible image. The ancient adventures with their heroes and villains take hold of present events and infuse them, suffuse them, shape them, even guide them. Moderate persons who brook compromise – such as former President Rouhani, who presided over the signing of the nearly-dead JCPOA nuclear deal with the West, or his successor Ayatollah Raʾisi, whose “heroic flexibility” may facilitate the signing of a new one – are praised as Hasan-var, “possessed of the spirit of [ʿAlī’s son] Ḥasan” who is said to have forfeited the caliphate in favor of the hated founder of the Umayyad dynasty Muʿāwiya in order to avoid bloodshed.¹⁹ Enduring, resistant types are granted the honorific Hosayn-var. The longstanding economic sanctions against Iran are “the siege of the ravine of Abū Ṭālib” (hesar-e sheʿb-e Abi Taleb), or the boycott instituted by Muʿāwiya against those loyal to ʿAlī, or the denial of water to Ḥusayn’s party at Karbala.²⁰ Austere individuals are styled “the Abū Dharr of the age” (after a particularly pious and ascetic Companion of the Prophet). Military pillars of the regime, such as “martyred” commander of the Jerusalem Force (niru-ye qods) Qassem-e Solaymani, are Malek ol-Ashtar-ha (the plural of “Mālik al-Ashtar,” ʿAlī’s most steadfast general). Solaymani himself is increasingly described as no less than sayyidu l-shuhadāʾ (“prince of martyrs,” an honorific generally reserved for Ḥusayn alone). The dismembered state of Sol-

 Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 24, p. 167.  Back in the days immediately after the revolution of 1979, Ayatollah Shariʿatmadari, accused of having sought a modus Vivendi with the Shah, compared his method to that of the second imam.  In about 616 CE, the chiefs of the various clans of the Quraysh tribe instituted a boycott (muqāṭaʿa) of the Banū Hāshim clan that was protecting its native son, Muḥammad, and the adherents of his new religion. They swore to one another that they would neither trade nor intermarry with the Banū Hāshim, who withdrew into the wādī (shiʿb) of the head of their clan, the Prophet’s uncle Abū Ṭālib. They stayed there fenced in for three years – a sort of ghetto. Tradition is full of painful scenes of the misery and starvation of the penned-in Muslims, especially children, from that period. These scenes are regularly adduced by the media of the Islamic Republic and compared to the predicament of, e. g., Iranians who have lost their livelihoods or have been denied proper medical treatment due to the effects of Western sanctions.

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aymani’s corpse after his assassination by missile attack (Jan. 3, 2020) was compared by the chief of army forensics to that of the decapitated third Shiʿite imam, and this official’s own excruciating job to that of Ḥusayn’s son ʿAlī Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn, who was forced to “pick up the pieces” after the ancient massacre.²¹ In some parts of Iran a drinking fountain is still called an ʿabbāsiyya, after Ḥusayn’s half-brother ʿAbbās who was killed while hacking his way through enemy lines to the Euphrates to fetch water for the Imam’s thirsty children.²² An appeal to that same sacred figure – ya Aba l-Fazl! – is plastered across the spandex uniforms of Iranian Olympic weightlifters. The number of victims of the mujahedin alkhalq bombing of Islamic Republican Party headquarters in June of 1981 was upped to seventy-two in order to correspond to the number of martyrs at Karbala. National Nurse’s Day (ruz-e parastar) corresponds to Ḥusayn’s sister Zaynab’s birthday, because she tended the wounded after the slaughter at that venue. Iranian Mother’s Day is celebrated on the birthday of Muḥammad’s daughter Fāṭima, ultimate mother to Ḥasan, Ḥusayn and the believers at large.²³ Father’s Day is the birthday of ʿAlī. The abysmal failure of Operation Eagle Claw to rescue the U. S. hostages was likened by Ayatollah Khomeini to the miraculous destruction by pebble-wielding birds of the Christian forces converging on Mecca described in the Qurʿanic “Chapter of the Elephant.” A massive military exercise conducted near independent Azerbaijan in late 2021 was code-named “Conquerors of Khaybar,” after the Jewish town in Northern Arabia reduced by Muḥammad’s forces. Pahlavi functionaries are styled in retrospect “Muʿāwiya’s officials.” In the wake of the precipitate execution of “rogue” journalist Ruhollah Zam (Winter 2020), Ayatollah Mahmud-e Amjad called those responsible “followers of [the bloodthirsty Umayyad general] Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf ”; they in turn dubbed him “a follower of the [heretical breakaway sect known as] Khawārij.”²⁴ While in Western countries and even in history conscious Israel the codenames for military offensives have been for many years now chosen randomly by computer, the Iranian high command throughout the “Sacred Defense” conflict and afterwards chose its code-names via scriptural bibliomancy (istikhāra) – e. g.,

 KhabarOnline, 29/12/2020: Badan-e haj Qasem chand tekeh shodeh bud?  Otherwise known as a saqqa-khaneh, such niches in the wall with little faucets and brass receptacles often surmounted by a dome function as stations not only for slaking one’s thirst but – as it were – for “mini-ziyāras” (ziyāra = a pilgrimage to a saint’s tomb, in this case that of ʿAbbās).  Fāṭima is said to have been born on the 20th of Jumada al-Thani in the year 5 AH (after hijra). Her status among the Shiʿa as “Mother of the Faithful” (umm al-muʾminīn) faces off with the same title given by Sunni tradition to ʿĀʾisha and the remainder of Muḥammad’s wives.  Radio Farda, “Shaykh Mahmud-e Amjad: Defaʿ az mazlum va khashm hamiyan-e velayat-e estebdad,” 01/07/1399.

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“Manifest Victory,” “By the Dawn” – or from early Islamic engagements, e. g., Khaybar, Karbala, Badr (the same is true, of course, for the names of army and Revolutionary Guard units). Battlefield signposts during that war marked the distance in kilometers to the “threshold” of Ḥusayn in Iraq.²⁵ The highest medal for military courage is the Dhu l-Faqār, named after the two-pronged sword of ʿAlī. The bonyad or “charitable trust” attached to the IRGC is known as khatem-e anbiyaʾ or “The Seal of the Prophets” (all of the other bonyads have Islamic names, as well). Fallen soldiers, including most recently General Mohsen-e Fakhrizadeh (senior official in Iran’s nuclear program, assassinated on November 27th, 2020), are depicted in giant murals slumping into the embrace of the third Shiʿite imam. IRGC advisor Mohsen-e Hojaji, captured by ISIS in Syria in 2017 and brutally beheaded, was portrayed in illustrations across the length and breadth of social media and during his massive funeral in tandem with the Imam Ḥusayn, who was also decapitated. Both uprisings led by Ayatollah Khomeini (in 1963 and 1979) crested, like that led by Ḥusayn, in the month of Muḥarram.²⁶ The staying power of traditional names make for a surreal sense of internal bipolar strife: Ali (Dashti) versus Reza (Shah), Mohammad (Mosaddeq) versus Mohammad (Reza Shah), Mahmud (Ahmadinejad) versus Hosayn (Mousavi), Ali (Nateq-e Nuri) versus Mohammad (Khatami), Hosayn (Shariʿatmadari) versus Hasan (Rouhani), Mahmud (Amjad) versus Ali (Khameneʾi), etc. When Ayatollah Rafsanjani leveled criticism at the Iranian government for the abuses of arrested Green Movement protesters at the Kahrizak detention facility in Southern Tehran, he never mentioned Kahrizak or the protesters. He told the story of the seventh Shiʿite Imam Mūsa l-Kāẓim languishing in the dungeons of the Abbasid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd in the eighth century CE, and that was enough: everybody knew what he meant, and he couldn’t have said it better.²⁷ When Rafsanjani sought in the same speech to describe the reforms needed in the structure of the Islamic Republic, he did so by portraying in minute detail the nascent political entity created by the Apostle of Allah in the Arabian city of Medina in the seventh century CE. Modern issues, modern conflicts, modern activists and modern authorities are cast, willy-nilly, as participants in the timeless and eternally recurring saga of Islam’s “sacred time.” The paradigmatic tragedies of Shiʿism’s formative years are blended into the sacrifice and heroism of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period. The past is folded into the present, and the present into the past. Not all of Iran and not all of the time, but much of Iran much of the time, is a stage,  Buchan, Days of God, p. 94.  See Ayatollah Khameneʾi’s remarks on the crucial role of Muḥarram in the 1979 revolution in Jehad-e farhangi, pp. 167– 169.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljSRM6qIFE0. Last accessed 15/3/2019.

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and (at least the relatively devout portion of ) its citizenry players (not merely players, but players nevertheless). The script was written fourteen centuries ago: a nationwide taʿziyeh. ²⁸ “The [martyrdom of Ḥusayn on] Ashura,” preached Ayatollah Khameneʾi, “is not merely an historical event: Ashura is a culture, an ongoing process, an everlasting model for us.”²⁹ De te fabula narrator, sang the Roman poet Horace: “The story is about you.” As we noted above, analyses such as the these are immediately – not to say in knee-jerk fashion – assailed by much of contemporary academia as representing the worst kind of “essentialism”: reducing the complex array of associations, institutions, tendencies, motivations, interactions, conceptions, developments, customs, vicissitudes and especially individual personalities that make up a national history and societal ethos to the status of marionettes manipulated by an ancient religious tradition. This is not, of course, our intent here. Not only is it indisputable that the particular actors and factors that color each generation of Iranian Shiʿism are often characterized by an impressive degree of independence, allowing them to operate and innovate at least to some extent outside the direct “jurisdiction” of founding narratives and principles (present day “Uṣūlī” Shiʿism, as we shall see, goes so far as to forbid reliance on the fatāwā or legal decisions of deceased religious scholars); it is even demonstrably the case that a goodly number of exceptional thinkers, especially in nineteenth and twentieth century Iran, have turned the tables on tradition, rendering it the object of their subject, reshaping and reforming it to fit their own personal goals and predilections (the most salient example being the aforementioned Ali Shariʿati, who helped forge Shiʿism into an instrument of revolution). Here, too, however, one must never forget that it is specifically the tradition which these latter-day luminaries seek to bend to their will; the tradition is the clay they seek to remold. In this sense, their “conquest” only indicates the extent of their continuing “thralldom.” The Shiʿite heritage provides a hefty percentage of Iranians with a vast set of what Richard Dawkins has called “memes,” his culturalhistorical analogy to genes, the religio-national DNA that informs and helps shape

 The taʿziyeh passion play, coming on the scene relatively late in the game (it is perhaps two-hundred-and-fifty years old), is nevertheless important for understanding the Shiʿite mindset. For an interesting nineteenth century description by a European visitor who witnessed the spectacle, see Momen, Shiʿi Islam, pp. 241– 243. Peter Chelkowski, Taʿziyeh: Ritual and Drama in Iran, and Kamaran Scot Aghaie, The Martyrs of Karbala, are perhaps the most revealing studies of this sui generis phenomenon.  Khameneʾi, Jehad-e farhangi, p. 144. “The most recent and tremendous blessing afforded by the incident at Karbala is our very glorious revolution” (Khamene’i, Jehad-e Farhangi, p. 166).

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every step of societal growth and change.³⁰ Human communities, according to this neo-Jungian outlook, can no more escape the influence of their formative narratives and accumulated experiences than can individuals.³¹ The modern endeavor to sever Iranian society from its Shiʿite roots never took hold, even when, as in the scholarship and advocacy of outstanding intellectuals like Ibrahim-e PurDavud or Hasan-e Pirnia, the older Zoroastrian-Sassanian-Achaemenid heritage was substituted for the (slightly) newer Islamic one. This simultaneously atavistic and progressive project met with the Persian population’s resounding repudiation in the revolution of 1979. The attempts by Said-smitten anti-Orientalists, realpolitikinfatuated political scientists or wishful-thinking neo-conservatives to deny the powerful influence exerted upon present-day Iranian society by Shiʿite Muslim tradition are similarly doomed.

Competing Components of Identity The above-mentioned project of replacing Shiʿite Islamic criteria for collective consciousness and solidarity with Zoroastrian-national criteria for the same, requires both elaboration and qualification. In earlier chapters we assailed the pervasively held notion that present-day Iran should be assessed in terms of its potential to Westernize: Islamism, we argued (against the extremely widespread conventional wisdom), is alive and kicking in the polity that Khomeini built, and quite capable, on the whole, of resisting the seductions of secular modernism. Many will be “lost” along the way to those seductions – and many admittedly already have been —but on the whole, the Muslim society of Iran will not become a non-Muslim society, let alone an anti-Muslim society, any time soon. Neither the “principlists” (osul-garayan) nor the “reformers” (eslah-talaban) seek to turn Iran into a Persian-speaking America: despite the onset of the inevitable erosion and disillusionment that is the lot of any revolutionary movement, both of the above camps, as well as a goodly portion of the population at large, are still for the most part attuned, if not always wholly dedicated, to the clarion call of Iranian-Muslim authenticity, to the “return to ourselves.” In order to understand the Islamic Republic, it was urged, we must take that call seriously, and cease searching high and low for an Iran

 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).  See Charles Tilly’s remarks cited above, in the preface to this volume. C.f. Jung’s (now much maligned) theory of the collective unconscious. Ervand Abrahamian, after the de rigueur condemnation of theories of “national character” and evocation of Douglas Hofstadter, proceeds nevertheless to describe and analyze the collective Iranian personality trait of paranoia and conspiratorial thinking (Khomeinism, chapter 5).

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that (once again) seeks slavishly to imitate the Western “infidel” (al-tashabbuh bi-lkuffār). But once we have decided to concentrate on indigenous, “authentic” Iranian culture, unmodified by rampant self-effacement before the modern marvels of Europe and the United States, another question presents itself: why focus primarily on the religious or Islamic side of that culture, and, for that matter, why solely on the Shiʿite version thereof? After all, Shiʿism as the state religion of Iran, and as the creed of the majority of its inhabitants, goes back only some five hundred years in Iran to the founder of the Safavid dynasty (1501– 1722), the teenage Shah Esmaʿil, who vigorously spread the ʿAlid faith in his dominions by the point of the sword and imported Shiʿite clerics from Lebanon, Bahrayn and elsewhere to help inculcate the tenets of the new doctrine among the Iranian populace. Before that, most Persian speakers were Sunni Muslims (although Iran had always been home to significant concentrations of Shiʿites), having converted gradually to the new faith over the first three centuries after the Arab-Muslim conquest (completed by 651 CE). To this must be added the thick pre-Islamic layer of Iranian culture, consisting of Zoroastrianism and some of its more influential offshoots (such as Manicheism) as well as the grand, millennia-long tradition of (in reverse chronological order) Sassanid, Parthian, Achaemenid, Median, Elamite and before these “Kiyani-Pishdadi” kingship, receding into the mists of time and legend. Far and away the most famous work of Persian literature, the Shah-nameh or “Book of Kings” – dubbed by twelfth century Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir “the Qurʿan of the Persians” and written by Abu al-Qasem-e Ferdowsi, the so-called “Prophet of Portrayal” (payghambar-e towsif ) – begins with creation and ends with the Arab invasion; Islam is barely mentioned in it. Indeed, easily half of Iranian history, even leaving aside the primeval, semi-mythical period, was pre-Islamic, and this was, after all, the “formative” half. Given, then, the cumulative growth and multifaceted composition of Iranian culture, with its Persian-Zoroastrian, Sunni-Islamic and (most recently) Shiʿite-Islamic elements – to say nothing of its more minor components accumulated over history, such as Hellenism, Jangalism-Ayyarism (medieval Iranian chivalry), Turkic tradition, Sufism (mysticism), illuminationist neo-platonism (eshraq), scholastic theology (kalām), etc. – given all these variegated ingredients that have gone into the formation of Iranian national “identity,” what justification is there for focusing our lens, as we shall do in Part Two of this study, almost exclusively on Shiʿism, and largely ignoring these many other dimensions of the collective Iranian consciousness? It has, for instance, long since become a truism in scholarship on the subject that Iranian society is characterized by a type of “split personality” – the “two cultures” syndrome described by Nikki Keddie, or the “cultural schizophrenia” described by Daryush Shayegan – one compartment of which derives

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its identity and cultural sustenance from the Persian national tradition, the other from the Arab-Islamic tradition (like the city of Tehran, which Abbas Milani felicitously describes as “caught between the mythic mountain [of Damavand to the North, where the primeval ogre Dahhak is entombed] and the magic well [of Jamkaran to the South, whence the Hidden Imam will supposedly emerge].” The same author speaks elsewhere of “Iran’s bifurcated and tormented identity, riven between Arabic Islam and pre-Islamic Persian creeds”).³² When an elderly Iranian man wants to gather the strength to rise from his chair, he is just as likely to exclaim “Rostam!” – the name of the Herculean arch-warrior of ancient, pre-Islamic Iran – as he is to cry out “Ya Haq!” (“O Truth!”), the Qurʿan-based appeal to the Muslim Godhead. Modern Persian is filled to overflowing with myriad synonym pairs in which one term hails from Arabic and often harbors Islamic overtones, like shehadat (testimony), and the other is a survival from ancient Persian and the Zoroastrian milieu, like govahi (testimony), and Iranians alternate freely between the two options in their speech and writing, often employing both terms simultaneously to show off their erudition (e. g., beh hich shak va do-deli, “without the shadow of a doubt or a doubt,” natijeh va borundad-e in andisheh, “the result and result of this mode of thought,” “ shenasaʾi va moʿarefi-ye maraje-ʿe moʿazzam-e taqlid, “identifying and identifying the august Sources of Emulation.” Indeed, this redundancy is often more of an unconscious stylistic instinct than a boast). While over half of the vocabulary of modern Persian is derived from Arabic, the language’s Indo-European syntax often drives a deep wedge between its speakers and the Semitic idiom of Iran’s Western neighbors. Ayatollah Khomeini’s first attempt after the Islamic Revolution to give an interview in the language of the Qurʿan was, despite seven decades of studying Arabic texts and fourteen years spent as an exile in Iraq, also his last;³³ the late Ayatollah Rafsanjani wrote the opening Arabic sections of his Friday sermons in Persian, and sent them out for translation;³⁴ Grand Ayatollah Makarem-e Shirazi discusses fiqh on Arab television channels in Persian, and is simultaneously translated;³⁵ Supreme Leader Khameneʾi invariably uses a translator when palavering with Arab leaders, and when on occasion he corrects the translator’s Arabic

 Milani, The Shah, p. 12 and p. 33 respectively. The paisley that covered Reza Shah’s cloak at his coronation is said to represent a bent cedar tree: “The cedar is the tree Zarathustra planted in heaven. The heavenly tree was ʻbent’ under the weight of the Arab invasion” – Milani, The Shah, p. 33.  Khomeini agreed to be interviewed by an Algerian channel, evidently due to his long-standing admiration for the FLN.  Hashemi-ye Rafsanjani, Aramesh va Chalesh (Tehran: Nashr-e maʿaref-e enqelab, 1386), p. 164.  Lebanese Channel Mayadeen, Sep. 16, 2019.

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usage, the Iranian media swoons in admiration;³⁶ when interviewed by Arabic news stations, ex-foreign minister Javad Zarif spoke, and still speaks, in English.³⁷ Not just the medium of speech but the measure of time in Iran is Persian in origin. The months of the calendar currently in official and popular use in the Islamic Republic boast ancient Iranian designations: Farvardin, Ordibehesht, Khordad, etc., and the Zoroastrian New Year’s Day, Nowruz, is celebrated at the onset of Spring by almost all segments of society. From high culture to low, from metaphysics to daily mannerisms, Iranian society unquestionably remains wedded to its unique, age-old national heritage. That heritage is made up of both historical and mythical elements, both of which we shall review briefly before moving on.

Forgotten Empires The land known historically as “Iran” occupies a territory roughly equivalent to that of the United States East of the Mississippi river; about seven times larger than that of Great Britain; more than twice the size of Texas or Pakistan; some seventy-nine times the square mileage of the State of Israel; and, as the last Pahlavi monarch pointed out proudly in his first autobiography, “more extensive than the surface area of France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Luxembourg combined.”³⁸ Situated between the Fertile Crescent to the West and the Af-

 E. g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPtHWRa93YE. Last accessed 12/10/2022.  There are more than a few exceptions to this rule, including Arabic speakers like Ayatollah Jaʿfar-e Sobhani and, to a certain extent, the Supreme leader himself.  Mohammad Reza, Maʾmuriyyat, p. 12 (he could have thrown in Bulgaria and Lichtenstein, as well). In what Salman Rushdie once referred to as “that mighty capital of mispronunciation” – the United States – Iran’s name almost invariably sounds like “eye ran,” but the proper way to pronounce it (i. e., the way it sounds coming out of the mouths of today’s Iranians) is “ee ron,” the second syllable voiced like the first name of film producer Ron Howard (Americans shouldn’t feel too bad about this gaffe, as Iranians call the U. S. “Omrika,” to say nothing of their inability, together with the Arabs, to pronounce double consonants at the beginning of words without adding a preceding vowel, such that the state of the economy causes “eh-stress,” wise people are “ehsmart” and the former British foreign Minister was known as “Jack eh-Straw”). The New Persian (i. e., post-Islamic conquest) name “Iran” derives from the Middle Persian or Pahlavi (i.e., pre-Islamic Sassanian) name “Eran,” which in turn grew out of the Old Persian and Avestan designation “Aryanam,” meaning “land of the Aryans.” The Aryans – the word probably meant “noble ones” or “hospitable ones” – constituted that branch of the hypothesized, Ukraine-based “Proto Indo-European” (PIE) mega-tribe part of which migrated Eastward and Southward sometime in the second millennium before Christ, and descended, inter alia, into the Gangetic Plain and Iranian Plateau. Other ancient appellations for the area – or the polity – include “Iranshahr” (the Iranian realm) and “Iranzamin” (the Iranian land). Some have used “Iran” to indicate all those regions in which

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ghan plains and Transoxianian steppe to the East³⁹ – and between the Caucasus, Caspian Sea and Kopet Dagh chain to the North and the Persian Gulf, Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea to the South – the country is mostly mountainous plateau punctuated by harsh desert, with a lone navigable river (the Karun) in the SouthWest.⁴⁰ The Alborz range, snaking horizontally parallel to the Northern border, “intercepts the greater portion of the moisture-laden clouds” heading inland from the Caspian littoral, while the Zagros range, running diagonally from North-West to South-East, performs a similar function (though less hermetically) for the humidity

Iranic languages – such as Kurdish, Baluch, Pashto, Soghdian, Khwarizmian, etc. – were spoken (as opposed to “An-iran,” meaning wherever they were not spoken), but we are employing the designation in its more limited sense here. The scope and character of the Iranian state, as well as its borders – to the extent that they were defined in any sharpness – have varied considerably over time, and even in the modern period parts of what are now Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, Armenia, Georgia, Turkmenistan and beyond have for long periods been subsumed under “the Guarded Domains” (mamalek-e mahruse) of the Shah. The size comparisons in the sentence to which this note is appended are based on Iran’s current – significantly humbler, but still quite considerable – total area. Iran is today the eighteenth largest country on the planet, out of a total of two-hundred thirtyfour.  Transoxiana – meaning “beyond the Oxus river” – was the Greco-Roman name for the area that comprises modern day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Southern Kyrgyzstan and South-West Kazakhstan, or the territory between the Amu Darya (Oxus) and Syr Darya (Jaxartes) rivers. Since both Arabs and Persians looked at this region from the same direction as the Greeks and Romans, their names for it are virtually identical to Transoxiana: mā warāʾ al-nahr (“what lies beyond the river”) and fara rud (“beyond the river”), respectively. For ancient Iranians (as reflected most famously in the Shahnameh or “Book of Kings”) this was the dreaded domain of Turan, Iran’s inveterate enemy whose designation and geographical position make it tempting to identify with Turkic nomads, though most scholars disagree (see, e. g., the brief review of the question in the introduction to C. E. Bosworth, “Barbarian Incursions: The Coming of the Turks into the Islamic World,” in D. S. Richards [ed.], Islamic Civilization [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973]). The Shahnameh itself presents the inhabitants of this region as descendants of Iranian king Fereydun’s son Tur.  The Karun river flowed not far from the city of Anshan, whence Cyrus the Achaemenid – see below – would emerge to lead the South-Iranian Persians in world conquest. Herodotus tells us that beverage from this source was invariably taken along on campaign by Cyrus’ royal successors, “as that is the only water which the kings of Persia taste” (Herodotus, The History [Chicago: William Benton, 1952], p. 42, col. 2). This purported practice of the Achaemenid emperors, with its chauvinist-racialist overtones (reminiscent for the present author of the biblical-midrashic portrayal of the infant Moses as unwilling to imbibe milk from the breasts of Egyptian nurse-maids, such that his sister offered to “go and call a nurse from among the Hebrew women” [Ex. 2: 7]), has become a favorite motif among exponents of the ultra-nationalist, quasi-neo-Zoroastrian opposition to the Islamic Republic.

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that seeks ingress from the Mediterranean.⁴¹ The result is that most of the country is left literally high and dry. The earliest political-cultural entity (of which we have knowledge) to appear on any part of the territory in question was the state of Elam – a name evidently denoting “the highlands” – with its capital at Susa (the Shushan of the Book of Esther, and geographical and etymological ancestor of today’s Khuzestan, as well as of that region’s capital city Ahvaz).⁴² From its inception early in the third millennium BCE, this sometime mini-empire, which extended across the South-Western corner of the country, carried on a constant struggle with the powers that arose serially on the adjoining Mesopotamian plain: Sumer, Akkad, Babylon and Assyria.⁴³ Elam’s demise came rather suddenly around 645 BCE, when Assurbanipal, emperor of the last of these powers, utterly sacked Susa (not forgetting to re Percy Sykes, A History of Persia (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969 [first edition: 1915]), p. 9. The soaring summits of the Alborz concomitantly create a hothouse effect in the Caspian shore regions of Gilan and Mazandaran, turning parts of them into an anomalous tropical paradise. “Nothing is more striking,” writes Sykes, “than to stand on this gigantic rampart with luxuriant forest-clad slopes on its Northern face and an absolutely naked prospect to the south, when once the crest is reached” (Sykes, History of Persia, p. 9). In Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s influential Gharbzadegi – translated variously as “Westitis,” “Westoxication,” “Xenomania,” “Weststruckedness,” “Occidentosis,” etc. and often accorded the status of “literary opening shot” of the Islamic Revolution – the author muses: “Perhaps we have turned to the West because, in this parched plain, we have always looked longingly for Mediterranean clouds” (Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis: A Plague from the West [trans. R. Campbell] (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1984), p. 37.  In Indo-European languages consonants like kh, sh, s, and h regularly metamorphose into one another over time and across geographical space. Thus North-West India is known as sind by Indians, hind by Iranians; sept in Latin is hept in Greek; a horse was an asp to the Iranians and a hippo to the Hellenes; “homos” in Greek denotes “same”; and English “sister” is ultimately related to Persian khahar of the same meaning. Also highly interchangeable in this family of tongues are l, r, and n, so that altogether we can trace the English “sun” through French soleil, Italian sole, German zon, Russian solntza, Latin sol (invictus), Greek helios, Sanskrit surya, and Persian khor(shid). In the same way “Susa” evolved into “Khuzestan” and “Ahvaz.” The name “Elam” first appears in Akkadian (not Elamite) documents, and because Akkadian is a Semitic language where the root ’a. l. a. connotes “up” – and since the Iranian plateau is manifestly “above” from the perspective of the denizens of the Mesopotamian river-valley – it is a good guess that Elam means “highlands” (just as “Iraq,” derived from the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk, means “lowlands”). Nevertheless, Susa itself, just to complicate matters, was located in the Westerly and less mountainous area of Elam. North-West of Elam both the Lullubi and Guti peoples appeared during the third millennium BCE – also regularly skirmishing with their Mesopotamian neighbors – the first of which was Iranian, the second evidently not.  There is no certainty as to the extent of Elam, but at different periods during its almost unfathomably lengthy existence – in human history, only Sumer (5,400 BCE to 1900 BCE) can claim a longer lifespan – Elam held sway over areas of Western Iran even beyond its main territory. That territory more or less corresponded, as noted, to today’s province of Khuzestan.

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turn the statue of the Sumerian goddess Innana from there to its original home in the Assyrian capital of Uruk, whence it been plundered by an Elamite king one thousand six hundred and thirty five years earlier).⁴⁴ Judging by the writings discovered in Khuzestan and elsewhere, the Elamites did not speak an Iranian language (the Bible classifies them as Semites – Genesis 10: 22), and scholars speculate to this day as to their ethno-racial-linguistic affiliation.⁴⁵ The first people in recorded history to control large swaths of the Iranian plateau who did speak an Iranian language formed the relatively short-lived (some would even say ephemeral) kingdom of the Medes (Pers. Madi), one of a group of “Indo-Aryan” peoples that had migrated to the area centuries earlier.⁴⁶ The

 The temporal distances become even more dizzying when we consider that Assurbanipal reclaimed from Susa, on that same occasion, the library of Sargon the First of Akkad, who, way back in 2800 BCE, “due to his interest in antiquities,” had commanded that an archeological treasure trove of two-thousand-year-old Sumerian documents be translated into Akkadian. These myriad clay tablets – or rather, the copies thereof made by Assurbanipal’s scribes – were unearthed two-and-a-half millennia later by another imperial conqueror and shipped to its capital, where they are currently ensconced: in the British Museum.  The name “Elam” occurs a dozen times in the Bible, including once in the New Testament (Acts, 2: 9). Most “Elamists,” from Marcel Dieulafoy in the late nineteenth century down to Walter Hinz in the mid-twentieth, were not impressed by Genesis’ ethno-linguistic classification, asserting that it merely reflects the long-standing Mesopotamian Semitic (that is, primarily Akkadian) domination of Elamite territory. Also, archeological and epigraphic evidence points to the presence of a diverse potpourri of groups and individuals making up the Elamite population during various periods.  The Indo-Aryans were themselves a branch of the ancient “Proto-Indo-European” nation that – according to the latest linguistic-, archeological- and genetic-based research and prevailing theories – had spread out during several millennia before Christ from their homeland north of the Black and Caspian Seas to become, on the European side, Greeks, Romans, Franks, Goths, Celts, Angles, Saxons, Armenians, Slavs and Scandinavians, and on the Asian side, Hittites, Scythians, Indians and Iranians. The last two were originally fused as what are called in retrospect the “Indo-Aryans” and seem to have split up during their southward trek (sometime after 2000 BCE) into Indians (some refer to them as Indo-Aryans) who veered East, and Iranians who veered West (primarily the Medes, Persians and Parthians, but also the Arians, Drangians, Arachosians, Bactrians, Sogdians, Chorasmians and more). When, as we shall see below, Cyrus the Great (d. 529 BCE) conquered the Fertile Crescent (Iraq and Greater Syria, which had been ruled by Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hebrews and other Semitic peoples) and established the Achaemenid Empire, this may be characterized as a victory of the Indo-Europeans, hailing from the North, over the Semites, hailing from the South (i.e., from Arabia, at least according to certain theories). When Cyrus’ successor Darius initiated the well-known series of wars against the Greeks in response to the Ionian revolt (499 BCE), followed a century and a half later by the invasion of the Achaemenid Empire by Alexander the Great, this might almost be viewed as a great Indo-European pincer movement (somewhat akin to the way in which the Trojan war would come to be viewed in later Greek tradition as a battle between Aryan Europeans and Semitic Asiatics). The conquest of Iran and (eventually) all of Byzantium by the Muslims could then be construed as a sort of “revenge of the Sem-

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Medes ostensibly carved out an expansive realm in the Western section of the country with its capital at Ecbatana (present day Hamadan), not long after the disintegration of Elam.⁴⁷ They subjugated their neighbors the Persians (Pers. Parsi, from the region of Southern Iran known as “Pars,” originally “Parsa”), and – having survived and repelled a decades-long invasion by the warlike Scythians from the North⁴⁸ – soon afterward helped the neo-Babylonians lay waste to the Assyrian capital of Nineveh (606 BCE), taking revenge, as it were, for the Elamites (and also for the Persians, who, so the Assyrian cuneiform record tells us, had themselves

ites,” and the victory of the West over the Middle East in modern times as yet another Indo-European counterpunch – but by this time we are starting to sound a little too much like Count de Gobineau (the nineteenth century father of scientific racist theory).  “Ostensibly” because, historically and geographically speaking, the Medes are a bit hard to pin down. If we listen to Herodotus, our main source, they were for nearly a century a full-blown empire whose power and influence – extended via conquest, treaty, and marriage alliances – took in Western Iran, much of Mesopotamia and the Eastern portion of Anatolia (Asia Minor). But other than Herodotus, no sources portray the Medes as anything that resembles a structured polity, let alone an empire. The archeological record points, at most, to a string of Medean villages or small fortresses – cities are nowhere in evidence – and the general impression is one of semi-nomadic tribes among whom there was little if any unity. Assyrian and Babylonian writings refer to the Medes for the most part as mercenary troops (a traditional occupation for warrior-like bedouin in the ancient and medieval Middle East) or as palace guards to the monarchs at Nineveh. Moreover, names found in Akkadian and Elamite documents strongly evocative of those of the famous four Median kings refer to figures whose affiliation, status or chronology do not really tally with the descriptions of these monarchs in Herodotus’ narrative. For these and other reasons scholars have begun to doubt that a Medean empire ever existed as such, and to posit that the renowned Greek historian made a Medean mountain out of a Medean molehill. On the other hand, there is some evidence that after the Scythian interlude more unity and organization prevailed among the Medean tribes, allowing them to work together to achieve important conquests. Overall, the jury is still out on this question, and will probably remain so.  The Scythians were a (probably Iranian) nomadic people inhabiting the Pontic or Ukrainian steppe. They are portrayed by both Eastern and Western classical sources as the barbarians par excellence – some have seen them as most closely approximating the original Indo-European or at least Indo-Aryan “savages” – and were during certain periods, together with their sometime allies the Cimmerians, the terror of the ancient world. Their name apparently derived from a root denoting “shoot” and/or “roam,” and has left us geographical terms like the province of “Sistan” in South-Eastern Iran (originally “Sakistan”) and, via a circuitous route, the designation for European Jewry: “Ashkenazim.” (Some modern scholars, it should be noted, have cast doubt on this Scythian conquest and interregnum as described by Herodotus). Herodotus claims that Darius’ unsuccessful raid into Scythian territory over a century later was conducted “in order to avenge the Medes for this inroad” (History, p. 123). If true, this reflects a strong sense of Persian-Median solidarity. For centuries after the Medes were subsumed by the Persians, the latter were still referred to as the former in a wide variety of literary sources.

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long been reduced to tributary status by their Western neighbors).⁴⁹ Strive as they might, archeologists have yet to find a single line etched by a Mede: we know about their language from its derivative tongues and from a few names quoted in Persian and Mesopotamian sources. The colorful stories concerning their four sovereigns – Deioces, Phraortes, Cyaxares and Astyages (Pers. Dayaokku, Fravartish, Huvakhshatra, Ikhtuvegu) – are all told for the first time in The Histories of the Greek Herodotus, who wrote over a century and a half later.⁵⁰ Though certainly not made up from whole cloth, it is possible that these detailed anecdotal descriptions of far flung conquest and complex “secondary state-formation” are partially the products of embellished local sources relied upon by the “Father of History,” or of the latter’s own structural prejudices.⁵¹ In 551 BCE the aforementioned “Parsis” of the South united under a charismatic leader named Cyrus (Pers. Kurosh), purported product of the union between a Median princess – Mandane daughter of Astyages – and a Persian noble or local sovereign of the Achaemenid clan (Pers. Hakhamanesh) named Cambyses (Pers. Kambujiya).⁵² Having survived his maternal grandfather’s attempt to have him ex-

 The Medean king Cyaxeres/Huvakhshatra (Arpakhshad of the Apocryphal Judith), as part of the alliance with Nabopolassar of Babylon, reportedly affianced his daughter to the latter’s son, the notorious Nebuchadnezzar. Hasan Pirnia remarks that “the growth of the Medean empire, though it was of short duration, constituted a highly important development in the history of the ancient world, for it was the first time that members of the Aryan race had shaken the foundations of Semitic rule in Western Asia” (Hasan-e Pirnia and Abbas-e Eqbal, Taarikh-e Iran: Az aghaz ta enqerad-e Qajariyye [Tehran: Khayyam, 1375], p. 59).  Herodotus was himself born in Persian-ruled Anatolia (c. 484 BCE).  Herodotus, despite crediting more than a few miracle stories, was a careful and even critical historian, certainly by the standards of his time. He often expresses doubts concerning accounts he has heard, leaving it to the reader to decide what to believe. “Secondary state building” refers to the coalescence or construction of a polity in response to, and imitation of, surrounding political entities, and specifically in reaction to the threat that the latter represent (cf. I Samuel, chap. 8). By Herodotus’ “structural prejudices” we mean that he may have extrapolated from the examples of the regimes with which he was familiar and employed these examples as paradigms to help him organize and make sense of the bits of information he managed to dig up about Medean civilization.  Cyrus’ name – and that of his father Kambujiya and grandfather Chishpish – do not seem to be Persian, and Cyrus himself, in the Babylonian-Akkadian and Elamite documents in which he speaks in first person, refers to himself not as “king of Persia” but as “king of [the city of ] Anshan.” The only contemporary reference to him is in Elamite. The engravings in which he is called a Persian, Aryan or Achaemenid do not pre-date Darius. This has led some scholars to suspect that Cyrus was, in fact, an Elamite (who was later “appropriated” by the Persians) and to reconstrue his conquests as another in a millennia-long series of Elam’s struggles with its Western neighbors. It has also been suggested that Darius insinuated his own lineage into Cyrus’ family tree in the Behistun Inscription (see below) in order to legitimize his assumption of power (although this theory would

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posed as a babe (so Herodotus tells us, making use of a ubiquitous literary trope), and assisted by the royal servant, Harpagus, who had prevented that same exposure (for which crime he was later reputedly fed his own son by Astyages), Cyrus and his forces defeated and absorbed the Medes.⁵³ They thereafter embarked on a campaign of international conquest that began with Anatolia (present day Turkey) – specifically Sardis, capital of Lydia, under its proverbially wealthy monarch Croesus⁵⁴ – continued with Babylonia (whose ruler Belshazzar son of Nabonidus saw “the writing on the wall” – Dan. 5: 25),⁵⁵ and ultimately encompassed the subjugation of nations from Macedonia in the West to the borders of India in the East: the first world empire.⁵⁶ Cyrus became known as “the Great” not just for his victories, but for his policy of (relative) tolerance towards the indigenous cultures of the lands that fell under his sway. This policy was epitomized by the so-called “Cyrus Cylinder” (Pers. manshur-e Kurosh) – inscribed in Akkadian and discovered in Iraq in 1879 – in which the illustrious Achaemenid displayed a degree of liberality toward his subject peo-

not account for that inscription’s essential correspondence with Herodotus’ list of Cyrus predecessors). This is all highly speculative.  Herodotus, Histories, pp. 24– 28. Harpagus was more likely a Medean general. Everyone from Sargon the Great to Amphion and Zethus (twin sons of Zeus and Antiope) to Romulus and Remus to Zal the albino of Shahnameh fame – among dozens of other examples – was said to have been exposed in infancy and then rescued and raised by animals or rustic folk. Similarly, from Tantalus and Pelops to Titus Andronicus there is no dearth of repasts at which revenge is served up sweet in the form of somebody’s sautéd progeny (interestingly, such themes seem to be endemic to Indo-European literature, as opposed, for instance, to its Semitic counterpart). The omnipresence of these motifs obviously casts doubt on the veracity of Herodotus’ tale. At the same time, it should be noted, for instance, that the Achaemenid genealogy given by Herodotus, as well as several important events in the lives of Cyrus and his successors described in his account, are supported ringingly by the Cyrus Cylinder and Behistun Inscription, among other archeological finds (for which see below). According to Herodotus Astyages was forgiven by Cyrus and lived at the Persian palace until his death.  Lydia, where coinage seems to have been invented, is described as the successor state of Phrygia, with its own proverbially wealthy monarch, Midas. In Herodotus’ narrative Croesus’ audible recollection, when about to be engulfed by the flames of his auto da fé, of the wise Solon’s earlier advice to him that “no man should deem himself happy until the day of his death” is overheard by and translated for Cyrus, who is so impressed that he saves Croesus from incineration and takes him back to Iran as his – and eventually his son Cambyses’ – chief advisor.  The words, inscribed by a mysterious hand, were “mene, mene, tekel ufarsin,” which Daniel interpreted to mean, essentially, that the kingdom’s days were numbered and the Persians were coming.  Arnold Toynbee called the Achaemenid state “the first sole superpower” (“The First Iranian Empire,” Kayhan International, 10/14/1971).

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ples uncharacteristic of the age.⁵⁷ The prophet Isaiah even honored Cyrus (Heb. Koresh) with the epithet “messiah” (Is. 45: 1) in gratitude for his return of the Jews to Zion from their Babylonian captivity. In the same passage the Israelite prophet reminds the Persian conqueror, speaking for the supreme being, that “I am the Lord and there is no other, I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and sow disaster” (Is. 45: 5 – 6), in what appears to be a deliberate contrast to the dualist theology of Iranian Zoroastrianism, which envisioned a god of light and good in constant battle with an equally potent deity of darkness and evil. This is one of several clues indicating that the Achaemenids were at least proto-Zoroastrians, a system of belief that they may have shared with, or assimilated from, their predecessors in power (the Book of Daniel refers to “the religion/law of the Medes and Persians [dat Madai u Faras] which altereth not” [Dan. 6: 9]).⁵⁸ As with the Median sovereigns, what we know of Cyrus is largely derived from Greek authors, especially Herodotus and his younger contemporary Xenophon, the heroic

 “Liberality” may be too strong a word, and certainly this stunning archeological find has been grist for the Iranian nationalist propaganda mill for close to a century now, even under the Islamic Republic (it is commonly portrayed as the “First Declaration of Human Rights”). Andrew Cooper, for instance, is far too good a researcher to have reprinted faux citations of this document that include statements like “[I, Cyrus, pledge to accord] all men the freedom to worship their own gods. [I] ordered that no one had the right to bother them. I ordered that no house be destroyed and no inhabitant dispossessed…I accorded peace and quiet to all men” (Cooper, Fall of Heaven, pp. 42– 43). But the inscription undeniably displays a sense of tolerance towards non-Iranian deities and religions; a desire on the part of its author to be recognized as a liberator who restrains his troops and maintains the peace; and what appears to be a systematic policy of restoring exiled peoples to their original homelands (the latter is corroborated powerfully by the same king’s declaration as recorded in the first chapter of the biblical Book of Ezra, in which the Jews are allowed and even encouraged to return to Judea and rebuild their ravaged temple).  The Greek authors offer very little in the way of characterizing Achaemenid religion, but the rock inscriptions left by various monarchs of that dynasty repeatedly mention, for instance, Ahura Mazda, the good god of light in Zoroastrian sources from the Avesta on down. However, some of these inscriptions also mention Mithra (Mehr) – a pre-Zoroastrian Indo-European sun god/goddess – as well as Venus (Nahid or Anahita), giving an eclectic flavor to their theology (see Hasan-e Pirnia and Abbas-e Eqbal, Tarikh-e Iran az aghaz ta enqerad-e Qajariye (Tehran: Ketabkhane-ye Khayyam, 1375), pp. 121– 4. Artaxerxes II Memnon [“owner of a photographic memory”] built a palace at Susa “by the grace of Mithra and Anahita” [Sykes, History, vol. 1. p. 230]). Zoroastrianism was essentially an ethnic religion – and many of its purity prescriptions were impossible of execution abroad – and apparently sought no converts among the surrounding peoples, a factor which may partly explain Cyrus’ celebrated “pluralism.” Post-Islamic Zoroastrianism has become a closed ethnic community, into which outsiders are not only not invited but are barred (as a delegation of would-be neo-Zoroastrian anti-Khomeinists discovered to their great chagrin after chartering an airplane to India and being derisively dismissed by the chief mobad there).

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general and student of Socrates who wrote his semi-fictional, propaedeutic Cyropedia around 370 BCE. Cyrus would seem to have died on campaign against the nomadic Iranian tribal confederation known as the Massagetae in 529 BCE. He bequeathed most of his vast empire to his eldest son, Cambyses (Pers. Kambujiya), while bestowing the rule of several outlying Eastern provinces upon his second son, Bardiya (whom the Greek authors call Smerdis). Cambyses was jealous of his brother’s popularity: he himself was disliked as overly severe (one well known story has it that the emperor, having discovered that a senior judge was corrupt, had him flayed and his judicial seat upholstered with his own skin, and forced his son, who succeeded him, to sit in that chair while trying cases; another shows Cambyses commanding his guard to kill Croesus – the captured Lydian king turned Achaemenid advisor – then changing his mind, expressing joy upon discovering that the sentence had yet to be carried out, and finally executing all the members of the guard for tardiness in implementing his orders).⁵⁹ Cambyses had his sibling rival secretly assassinated, went off with a huge army to add Egypt to Persia’s prizes, and on the way back – having heard that a man claiming to be the dead Bardiya had usurped the throne in Iran – evidently committed suicide. The imposter was Gaumata the Magian (whose moniker may indicate membership in the Zoroastrian priestly class, see below),⁶⁰ and he was soon slain by a delegation of Iranian nobles under the leadership of Cyrus’ second-cousinonce-removed, Darius (Old Persian: Darayavahush, New Persian: Daryush), who became the next sovereign (521 BCE). The new emperor told the story of how he, “a Persian son of a Persian, an Aryan son of an Aryan,” thwarted the insidious plot and ascended the Achaemenid throne – cutting off a plethora of noses, ears and tongues along the way – in a gargantuan engraving chiseled one-hundred meters up the face of a sheer cliff in the North-West region of Kermanshah. Known as the Behistun or Bisutun Inscription (probably originally from “Bagestan,” meaning “Land of God),”⁶¹ this site played host to Sir Henry Rawlinson’s nineteenth-century daredevil-style decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform, partially performed while

 Herodotus, Histories, pp. 164 and 96 – 98.  In the twentieth century some on the left who opposed the Iranian monarchy would take Gaumata as their hero, interpreting terse and equivocal inscriptions to mean that he liberated the peasants and re-distributed the wealth. Reza Baraheni would even compare him to Mohammade Mosaddeq, with Mohammad Reza Shah in the role of Darius (Crowned Cannibals, p. 32).  Bag, evidently connected to bakhshidan (to grant, to distribute, and perhaps: to create), whence Russian bog (God), combines with dadan, Persian for “to give” (like Russian dat, English “data”) to form the Iranian name Baghdad, which means “God-given.” God has always been represented in Persian as the “Provider” (parvardegar).

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this scholar was suspended in mid-air after spelunking from the mountain’s peak, and carried out without the assistance of any Rosetta Stone-like parallels to already known “control” languages.⁶² Under Darius (r. 521– 485 BCE) and his successor Xerxes (Pers. Khshayarshah, apparently King Ahasuerus of the Book of Esther, r. 485 – 466 BCE)⁶³ the magnificent city of Persepolis (Old Pers. Parsapura, known today as Takht-e Jamshid, “Jamshid’s throne”) was built, becoming one of four Achaemenid capitals maintained simultaneously, the others being Susa, Ectbatana and Babylon.⁶⁴ In 499 the Greek colo-

 This stunning achievement, which built on the previous work of the early nineteenth-century German scholar Friedrich Grotefend among others, was indispensable for the subsequent decoding of much of Mesopotamian cuneiform (which in turn taught us more about ancient Iran). The Rosetta Stone, unearthed in Egypt in the year 1799 by Napoleon’s team of archeologists and pored over by the amateur Egyptologists Young and Champollion, contained an identical text translated into three languages: Hieroglyphic, Egyptian Demotic and ancient Greek (the Old Persian inscription at Bisutun was also accompanied by two translation – into Elamite and Akkadian – but neither of these could be read yet). Research and writing on the Bisutun or Bisotun inscription has practically become a sub-discipline itself. For a review of the relevant literature and arguments surrounding the believability of Darius’ (and Herodotus’) version of events and the extent to which this narrative may have been a product – or deliberate exploitation – of ancient Near Eastern and Indo-European literary topoi, see M. Rahim Shayegan, Aspects of History and Epic in Ancient Iran (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).  For a fascinating discussion of Khshayarsha’s name and its convoluted transliteration into Greek and Hebrew, see Tamar Gindin, The Book of Esther Unmasked (Tel-Aviv: Zeresh Books, 2016), Introduction and pp. 30 – 34. The representation of Xerxes as a freakish giant familiar to those who have seen the movie “The 300” is based on Herodotus, who described him as nearly eight feet tall. Darius is said to have married Cyrus’ daughter Atossa – who had previously been the sister-wife of Cambyses – and fathered by her Xerxes, who was thus the grandson of the founder of the empire. As with many Achaemenid and other ancient Iranian figures, Atossa has her echo in the Avesta (Zoroastrian scripture), where she is styled Hutaosa and is made the wife of Vishtaspa, the purported Constantine of Zoroastrianism. The relationship of historical and legendary paragons to their Avestan, Vedic and other Indo-European corollaries is an extremely complex question upon which much research has been done and upon which we obviously cannot touch. Almost all of the pishdadian – the primeval heroes of the first section of the Shahnameh – are represented in the Avesta.  Later generations of Iranians, beholding the magnificence of Persepolis even in its destruction and doubting that such a marvel could be built without supernatural help, attributed its construction to the Solomon of Iranian lore, Jamshid, who played foreman to a company of demons: thus Takht-e Jamshid, “the Throne (or Capital) of Jamshid.” Susa and Ectabana, it will be recalled, had been the capitals of the two previous Iranian empires, Elam and Media, respectively. Persepolis, which soon replaced Pasargadae (where Cyrus is buried), is taken to have been a mostly ceremonial capital used for receiving delegations and the like, and Susa is often mentioned in connection with the holding of political hostages and the conduct of high-level international negotiations. Babylon seems to have been the major administrative center of the empire – supervising the twenty-

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nists of Ionia – the Western coast of Asia Minor – revolted against their Persian masters, initially assisted by Athens (a fact which supposedly led Darius to task one of his servants to remind him thrice every day after dinner: “Master, remember the Athenians!”).⁶⁵ As a result of this uprising the series of fateful land and naval battles ensued between Persia and Greece which – although witnessing no less than two devastating sacks of Athens – eventually ensured the independence of Hellas, and would loom so large in Western lore thereafter: Marathon (490), Thermopylae (480), Salamis (480), Plataea (479) and Mycale (479). Like their “Aryan” predecessors, the Medes, the Achaemenids believed that real men do not write – they fight. And indeed, the Persian language has never had a writing system of its own, borrowing cuneiform from its Mesopotamian neighbors, the Middle Persian Pahlavi script from Aramaic, and its present alphabet from the Arabs. While modern European scholars did decipher several Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions, as we just saw, the lion’s share of our information about this oecumene-engulfing regime and those who stood at its helm during subsequent phases of its existence comes, once again, from Greek historians (the Iranians themselves, as we shall see presently, more-or-less forgot about them).

six quasi-autonomous “satrapies” (provinces) under the sway of the “king of kings” (modern Pers. shahanshah) – though this impression may arise, again, from the fact that we rely on Hellenic historians who “look at the entity from the West and imagine the heart of that empire to be in Mesopotamia and its environs” (Rezakhani, Reorienting the Sassanians, loc. 334). If Babylon did play such a central role, it was evidently chosen for the unparalleled fertility of lower Mesopotamian soil as well as the advantages for trade, communications and the extension of power afforded by the nearby Tigris and Euphrates.  Herodotus, History, p. 182. Darius’ need to be reminded – as well as his earlier inquiry regarding the very identity of those Athenians (Herodotus, History, p. 182) – points up an important corrective to the traditional Western point of view in which the Greco-Persian conflict is the central fact of that epoch (to such an extent that a good half of Herodotus’ History is concerned with it). For the Achaemenid kings Greece was on the far-away periphery of the empire and “the Greek problem” was a relatively marginal one. That having been said, it would appear that the inception of Achaemenid decline (to the extent that one can speak of such, given that the dynasty held on for another century and a half ) seems to have come hard on the heels of the military failures in that same distant West. Even here, however, we have to remember, again, that our notion of the Persian Empire’s loss of stature after the death of Artaxerxes is based primarily on the perception of Hellenist writers, for whom the Achaemenids no longer represented a serious threat. Nor should it be forgotten that even according to these writers, including Thucydides, the Persians continued to play a major balancing role in Greek internecine struggles for a long period thereafter. Still, to shift sides yet again, the Persian defeats in these celebrated battles are more easily perceived as the beginning of the end when we remember that the coup de grace for the Achaemenids would ultimately emerge from that same Greek homeland and culture.

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Xerxes was assassinated by members of his own royal guard (466 BCE),⁶⁶ and what may be seen as the extended decline of the Achaemenid dynasty began with his successor Artaxerxes (Pers. Artakhshathra, later Ardashir), also known as “the long-armed” (Pers. Deraz-dast, Greek Makrokheir, Latin Longimanus), either as a metaphor for the extensive reach of his power or because his hands drooped below his knees. Of his time it is said that the Persians, who until that point had permitted themselves but one meal a day, now interpreted the self-same rule to compass a single protracted gluttony-fest that extended from noon to night.⁶⁷ We shall not dwell on the individual careers of the three Dariuses interspersed with four Artaxerxeses who assumed the throne afterward. Several aspects of these lengthy dying days should be noted, however. First, despite the overall impression of increasingly incompetent sovereigns surrounded by bevies of perennially conspiring courtiers, army commanders and close relatives (especially queen mothers), the Achaemenid empire remained the world’s undisputed super-power almost until the end (in 333 BCE). Second, the extent of Persian interference in the domestic rivalries of Greece during this period – at the behest of the rivals themselves – was matched only by the parade of (a) Greek triremes (a war galley with three banks of oars) hired by Persian naval commanders; (b) Greek mercenary divisions fighting valiantly on behalf of the Achaemenid Shah even against their own countrymen; and (c) Greek hoplite units found in the vanguard of one or another contender for the Iranian crown (most famously, the Myrioi or Ten Thousand Soldiers employed by Cyrus the Younger in his failed attempt to wrest the throne from his brother Artaxerxes II. Cyrus’ exploits at the Battle of Cunaxa [400 BCE], and especially during the lengthy and adventure-filled retreat therefrom, were recorded in Xenophon’s Anabasis).⁶⁸ Finally, we should not fail to mention the unmatched

 In the book of Esther two of Ahasuerus’ palace guards, Bigtan and Teresh, conspire to kill the king, but the plot is foiled by Mordechai the Jew. In a recent “diplomatic” exchange, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the Islamic Republic of “requiting evil for good” and seeking the destruction of the Jewish People, as their Persian ancestors had done when Ahasuerus/ Xerxes, despite having been saved by a Jew, signed off on Haman the Wicked’s “Final Solution.” Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, not to be undone, one-upped his nemesis by pointing out that (a) Haman was not an Iranian Aryan but a Semitic Amalekite (the biblical text refers to him as an “Aggagite,” i. e., a descendent of the Amalekite king Agag [Samuel 1, Chap. 15]); (b) Ahasuerus ultimately rescued the Jews from their doom and had Haman hung; and (c) it was the Jews who had displayed the ultimate ungratefulness and carried out a genocide of the Iranian people, as recorded in the penultimate and final chapters of Esther (where they are depicted as having massacred upwards of seventy thousand of their enemies). Fun with history.  Cambridge Ancient History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), vol. 4, p. 204.  A hoplite was a heavily armed foot soldier, primarily with shield and spear, who fought side-byside with his comrades in phalanx formation. Cyrus the Younger – the great great great grandson

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wealth that continued to flow into the coffers of the Hakhamanesh treasury – illustrated by the magnificent “international tribute procession” relief carved into the stairs of the Apadana Hall at Persepolis – enabling the empire’s less-and-less warlike monarchs to buy off more adversaries than they fended off (Agesilaus, King of Sparta, famously quipped, after reaching an agreement with the Phrygian satrap Pharnabazus II in 395 BCE to evacuate his troops, that “a thousand Persian archers have driven me out of Asia,” referring to the official imperial currency, the daric, that was stamped on one side with the figure of a bowman).⁶⁹ Still, the deterioration was palpable, and it continued apace until the last of the Achaemenids, Darius III, was dethroned and executed by the Macedonian monarch and pupil of Aristotle, Alexander the Great, in 329 BCE.⁷⁰ Having razed Persepolis to the ground and massacred its inhabitants – perhaps in revenge for their treatment of Greek POWs, perhaps in retribution for the burning of the Athenian Acropolis by Xerxes a century-and-a-half before – Alexander died six years later.⁷¹ A tem-

of his namesake – had already conspired to kill his father Darius II, but the latter died first. Caught in the act of planning his brother’s assassination at the accession ceremony, he was saved from execution by the tenacious embrace of his devoted mother Parysatis – the terrible illegitimate daughter of Artaxerxes I and sister-wife of Darius II – and pardoned by his foolish sibling, after which Cyrus rose in ill-fated insurrection. Even in defeat, the hoplites of Clearchus and Xenophon learned lessons about the Persian Achilles’ heel that were studied and exploited later by Alexander himself. Despite having facilitated this civil war, Parysatis retained her influence over her son Artaxerxes II, and committed a chain of atrocities, including poisoning the king’s wife Statira, prevailing upon him to marry his own daughter Atossa (II), massacring entire families, and carrying out executions via “scaphism” (a horrific torture involving the encasement of the condemned between an upside-down and right-side-up boat, besmearing him with honey and allowing him to be slowly devoured by insects and vermin over a period of weeks – all if we are to believe the Greek historians).  Sykes, History, vol. 1, p. 226.  According to several sources it was one of Darius’ own satraps (provincial governors), Bessus, who conspired with his peers to stab the king to death as they fled Eastward – after which Bessus crowned himself Artaxerxes V – whereas Alexander, coming upon Darius’ corpse, buried it with honors. Bessus was captured and executed by torture.  Another story common among classical Greek authors attributes the burning of Persepolis to Alexander’s drunkenness, or to a combination of that state of inebriation with the whim of a dancing girl, who snatched a burning brand from the altar and tossed it among the wooden columns of the palace, after which Alexander and his generals did the same. Despite his role in ending Iran’s most glorious era, Persian tradition is ambivalent about the Macedonian wunderkind. Earlier sources, written in Pahlavi (Middle Persian), style him “the accursed (gizistag) Alexander the Roman” and condemn him to everlasting hellfire, inter alia for burning the sacred scriptures of Zoroaster so that only a few fragments remain. Later material, however, including the well-known “Mirrors for Princes” genre, often casts him in the role of a wise seer. One story has Alexander on his death bed ordering that holes be drilled in the sides of his coffin and his hands pulled out palms upward

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pestuous and bloody interregnum ensued, but ultimately the legendary commander’s generals, relatives and comrades, known collectively as the Diadochoi (“successors”), divided up his realm. One of these, Seleucus Nicator, gained control over the largest portion, containing Eastern Anatolia, the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, Iran and beyond, and inaugurated the Seleucid dynasty. Under a succession of Seleucuses (I, II, III and IV) intermixed with Antiochuses (I, II, III and IV) who ruled all told from approximately 300 to 130 BCE, Iranians – or at least the upper classes – underwent a (relatively superficial) process of Hellenization.⁷² The Seleucids saw their presence as essentially a military occupation, and concentrated their efforts on offensive and defensive campaigns against the Ptolemies and then the Romans in the West and the rising Parni/Parthians in the East. What new infrastructure and colonization they brought with them was largely concentrated in Syria and Bactria, skipping over the central Iranian plateau. Little wonder that they have left a weak-to-non-existent impression on the Persian people and their historians. In the two decades between 150 and 130 BCE, the Arsacid dynasty (Pers. Arshak which later evolved into Ashkan) of the Parthian peoples (Pers. Part), came to the fore.⁷³ Hailing from North-Eastern Iran (also known as Khorasan), they had been whittling away at Seleucid sovereignty for close to a century, and now consolidated their rule over the greater part of the country. The first Parthian King, Mithradates (Pers. Mehrdad),⁷⁴ and his many successors – including quite

before burial, to show all and sundry that although he plundered the wealth of half the world, he goes to the afterlife empty-handed. Alexander is even granted honorary Iranian status in Persian legend, being grafted onto the “Kiyani” royal family tree. In truth Alexander did marry the daughter of the last Achaemenid Darius III, Statira, in addition to Roxana, princess of Bactria (a region corresponding approximately to the territory of modern day Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan).  In the first and second volumes of his sprawling magnum opus, A Literary History of Persia, Edward G. Browne twice quotes the same statement of preeminent nineteenth century Orientalist Theodore Nöldeke to the effect that “Hellenism never touched more than the surface of Persian life, but Iran was penetrated to the core by Arabian religion and Arabian ways.”  The extreme paucity of material on this long-lived dynasty extends even to the origin of its name, which some see as an attempt to claim descent from the Achaemenid Arsaces, i. e. Artaxerxes II, while others relate it to the town of Asaak, where the founder of the line had settled. Even Aras the archer, whose bow-shot legendarily set the borders of Iran, is a candidate for eponym, and there are additional theories. The origins of the dynasty, and the “Parni” people who founded it, are no less shrouded in mystery, with both Greek and Iranian sources offering wildly differing speculations.  Mithra is the ancient Indo-Aryan sun god or goddess – perhaps the matriarchal ancestress of the patriarchal Ahura Mazda – and dat is Indo-European for “give, lay down” (witness New Persian

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a few Farhads and Ardawans (Erdogans) – over no less than four hundred years, left a deep imprint on Iran (although, again, leaving virtually nothing written for posterity).⁷⁵ They gradually replaced the Achaemenid-inspired West-Iranian cultural-historical tradition with their own homeland’s East-Iranian cultural-historical tradition, which may be why later Persian literature, especially the Shahnameh or Book of Kings, ignores the Achaemenids and engages almost solely with Khorasanian legendary heroes (see below).⁷⁶ The Parthians de-Hellenized and re-Persified the administration and the influential strata of society (or Persified these for the first time, because the Achaemenids themselves had used Aramaic for foreign and even, to some extent, domestic communication);⁷⁷ they revived the Achaemenid title shahanshah, “king of kings” (still used by the last Pahlavi ruler until his ouster in 1979);⁷⁸ they established the basic territorial boundaries of the entity henceforward known as Iranshahr or Iranzamin, and imitated the Achaemenids in looking West and establishing their capital Ctesiphon (Pers. Tisfun) more or less on the sight of ancient Babylon; they cultivated (albeit not always in a manner

dadan, Russian dat, English “data” – that which is a given – etc.). Mithradates is thus equivalent to Nathaniel (Heb. Natan-El, “God given”) and Baghdad.  Some have argued that the Parthians did compose court poetry, but at any rate none of it has survived. The extreme exiguousness of the written legacy of the Seleucids and the Parthians is reflected in the paucity of knowledge regarding, and paucity of interest in, these dynasties not just in Western scholarship but among educated Iranians themselves. In the early nationalist writer Jalal al-Din Mirza’s history textbook Name-ye Khosrovan or “Book of Kings” (published in 1870), the author essentially dismisses this entire half millennium by averring that “From the demise of Alexander to the rise of Ardashir, founder of the Sassanian dynasty, the chroniclers (dastansarayan) did not properly record the history of Iran, because the country was divided into many parts and each principality had its separate ruler” (Jalal al-Din Mirza, Name-ye Khosrovan [Tehran: Pazineh, n.d.], p. 58).  One problem with this theory is that that same literature almost completely ignored the Parthians themselves. Another reason why the Shahnameh is so Khorasan-central – though this argument cannot account for the character of much of the Shahnameh’s earlier pre-Islamic source material – is that both its author and his patrons hailed from that region.  This “de-Hellenization,” at first glance a veritable baz gasht beh khish (“return to ourselves”), must be qualified. The Parthians were major players on the world stage, and Hellenic culture and Greek language were by that time pre-requisites of participating in international affairs. Some if not much of what the Seleucids had herited to them in that area was retained. The first Mithradates assumed the title “Philhellene,” as did many of his successors. We will see one of them, below, watching a Greek tragedy. This having been said, the procession toward a more Persian/Iranian politico-cultural identity, which was to reach its culmination under the Sassanids, had unmistakably begun. By the first century CE, for instance, the Greek script of the chanceries in Media and Babylonia was replaced by Parthian.  Middle and New Persian shah derives from Old Persian kshathra, meaning “warrior” (cf. Sanskrit kshatriya, name of the Hindu warrior caste).

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acceptable to the priests) an increasingly sophisticated form of Zoroastrianism – the dualist faith pitting light and truth against darkness and falsehood which, as we pointed out above, may or may not have originated under the Achaemenids – thus preparing the ground for this religion’s full flowering under the succeeding Sassanids;⁷⁹ and they fought the Roman Empire ceaselessly and on the whole successfully, especially at the Battle of Carrhae (Harran in Northern Syria, 53 BCE) where they crushed the armies of (Caesar and Pompey’s “third wheel”) Crassus, whose severed head was delivered to the Iranian-Parthian sovereign and supposedly put to use as a prop in a (Greek!) play he was in the midst of watching.⁸⁰ From this dynasty we get the phrase “Parthian shot” – used now metaphorically to describe a pointed insult hurled upon a person’s departure – named after their soldiers’ notorious military tactic of feigning retreat and then, when pursued, swiveling around in their saddles and shooting arrows at the oncoming enemy with devastating effect (a technique later styled jang va goriz, “fighting and fleeing”).⁸¹ All the above was news to the medieval and pre-modern Iranians. If you went to Isfahan, Qazvin, Mashhad, Tabriz or Shiraz in the year 900, 1200 or 1800 CE, and chatted up the locals about Deioces and the Madha (Medes), or Cyrus and the Hakhamaneshiha (Achaemenids), or Antiochus and the Selvekiha (Seleucids), or Mithradates I, II, III, IV, V, etc. and the Part-ha (Parthians), you would get a lot of quiz-

 Parthian religious life and policy cannot be called consistently Zoroastrian, and some scholars refuse to grant it this status altogether (as did this dynasty’s successors, the Sassanians). Having brought with them from their (possible) stay with the Scythians the worship of sun (mehr), moon, stars and other natural objects, they absorbed as well the Hellenic pantheon of the Seleucids. Though they adopted the cult of the Magi (Zoroastrian priests) after their conquest of most of the country, and exposed the dead as required (or placed them in mausoleums above ground to preserve the earth from impurity), we see them later interring and even burning corpses, a highly problematic practice to say the least from a Zoroastrian ritual-legal point of view (but one that has paradoxically been adopted by many of today’s “Parsis,” the remnant of the Zoroastrians found mostly in India. See Abbas Parviz, Tarikh-e do hezar va pansad saleh-ye Iran [Tehran: Moassaseye matbuʿat-e ʿelmi, n.d.], vol. 1, pp. 169 – 170). Some individuals, if not classes, appear to have practiced marriage between brother and sister – and even between mother and son – as recommended by Zoroastrian tradition. Near the end of the first century BCE, the Italian slave girl who bore Phraates IV a son, allegedly poisoned her husband and married that son, who became Phraates V. The sister of the purported ancestor of the Sassanian dynasty – the warrior, hunter and Zoroastrian high priest Sassan who is said to have lived near the end of the Parthian dynasty – reportedly married her father.  Orodes II is said to have been watching Euripides’ “The Bacchae.”  A possible echo of the Parthians – envisaged as a disunified collection of separate local potentates – appears in the Shahnameh and other medieval sources in the form of the Arabic designation mulūk al-ṭawāʾif. Ferdowsi knows of the “Ashkanian” but, as noted below, devotes a minuscule amount of space to them.

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zical looks. They had never heard of any of these august personages or dynasties: fully eight hundred years of Iranian history, including some of the most formative and glorious segments, had been erased from the national memory banks.⁸² As was the case with a quite a few other Middle Eastern states and nations, from Egypt to Turkey to Syria to Iraq, it was left to latter-day, Western researchers to rediscover Iran’s ancient magnificence and hand it on a silver platter to the country’s late nineteenth and early twentieth century intelligentsia (who, relying on this research, promptly changed the names of many a magnificent ruin, including for instance what they had for centuries dubbed “Solomon’s mother’s mosque” [masjed-e madar-e Solayman] at Pasargadae (near Persepolis), which was henceforth called “The Tomb of Cyrus the Great”). As Hasan Pirnia, early twentieth century

 “It is well known,” confirms Gregor Schoeler in a recent essay, “that the pre-Islamic ʻnational history’ of Iran (i.e., the indigenous secular historical tradition, transmitted orally over many centuries) knows nothing at all, or as good as nothing, about the dynasties and empires of the Medes, Achaemenids, Seleucids and Parthians (700 BCE – 226 CE)” (Gregor Schoeler, “The ‘National Amnesia’ in the Traditional History of Iran,” Der Islam 97 [2] 2020, p. 502). Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh does contain an exiguous amount of material relating to the Parthians, mostly consisting of names of monarchs. Scholars like Ehsan Yarshater attribute the supplanting of South-Western Persian historical tradition by North-Eastern Khorasanian historical tradition to the adoption by the denizens of the former region of the Zoroastrian religion that (much evidence suggests) emerged in the latter region. Schoeler, following the anthropological theories of Jan Vansina, suggests an “hourglass” model to explain this yawning gap in historical memory: oral cultures tend to recollect the formative national period, receding into the mists of time, in great (legendary or at least highly embellished) detail; then to gloss over the lengthy intervening era; and finally, to furnish a plethora of information about the most recent times. Though too sweeping to be verified in any way, this thesis has going for it the fact that individuals (or at least the present writer and his spouse) tend to recollect their own lives in a similar manner: extensive and vivid memories of childhood (suitably embellished for use in bedtime stories); a blocked-out blur concerning much of the post-adolescent period until marriage and even beyond; and, obviously, a stronger awareness of what went on in the immediate pre-present, i. e., the last year or two. There are other theories that attempt to account for the erasure of all this ancient Iranian history. Some ascribe the phenomenon, at least in part, to the influence of Islam – the religion to which the vast majority of Iranians had converted by the ninth or tenth century CE – which essentially dismissed the entire pre-Islamic era as “the Time of Ignorance/Barbarity” (jāhiliyya). The Muslim conquerors did not, however, succeed in blotting out the memory of their immediate predecessors, the Sassanid dynasty. Also possibly responsible for this momentous “airbrushing out” of the Achaemenids and their Seleucid successors from the picture of Iran’s past may have been those same Sassanid sovereigns who, as we shall see, ruled the country from the third to the seventh century CE. Partially in order to ingratiate themselves with the Parthian-Khorasanian remnant, whom they needed as allies in the battle against wild “Hephthalite” nomads, the Sassanids increasingly painted themselves as heirs of the NorthEast-based Kiyani tradition (regarding which see immediately below) as opposed to the SouthWest-based Hakhamanesh (Achaemenid) tradition. The issue is quite complicated, and no solution has so far received the approval of a consensus of scholars.

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constitutionalist and four-time premier of Iran, lamented: “[Xerxes] marched the largest army in human history over a distance of nearly a thousand miles, but in our nation’s stories this king has been completely forgotten!”⁸³ Even the most knowledgeable of Iranians after the Arab conquest – great Muslim historians like al-Ṭabarī and al-Balami – know only what Judeo-Christianity told them about those paragons of yore, for instance that Cyrus was the daughter of Ahasuerus and Esther.⁸⁴ What pre-modern Iranians had heard of; what had not been erased by what venerable Iranologist Ehsan Yarshater calls “this strange historical (or national) amnesia”; what had survived the devastating, revolving-door conquests to which this land and its population had continually been subject; and what represented the greater part of the Persian⁸⁵ past in their minds, was a set of national legends the ultimate receptacle of which was a fifty-some thousand stanza-long epic poem known as the Shahnameh, “The Book of Kings” (or perhaps: “The Great Book”).⁸⁶ Composed over a thirty year period during the late tenth and early eleventh centuries CE by Abu l-Qasem-e Ferdowsi, who based his magnum opus on earlier material (especially the Khodaʾi Nameh compiled in Sassanid times, but also orally transmitted legends and Arab histories that preserved earlier Persian writings),⁸⁷ the Shahnameh recounts the fantastic adventures of primeval mega-monarchs such as Kayomars, Tahmurath, Jamshid and Fereydun;⁸⁸ of arch-villains like Dahhak, eater of Iranian children’s brains, and Afrasiab, king of the enemy Turan; and

 Taarikh-e Iran, p. 99. According to Herodotus, Xerxes’ army with all its various auxiliaries and hangers-on numbered no less than five million men. Pirnia, in his massive history of ancient Iran (based on myriad Western sources), strove to fill in the lacuna he laments.  Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, The History of Prophets and Kings (trans. Moshe Perlmann. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), vol. 4, p. 51.  It was the Greeks who, under the influence of their lengthy confrontation with the great Empire of the Persians (i.e., the Achaemenians who hailed, as we saw, from the Southern Iranian region of Pars), made the inaccurate equation of “Persia” and “Persian” with “Iran” and “Iranian.” Strictly speaking the two former terms refer to a province and a language, respectively. Nevertheless, we occasionally employ them in this volume – as Westerners (and Arabs) have done for centuries – in this not entirely accurate fashion, as a nod to common usage.  There were, in fact, quite a few “Shahnamehs” penned by various authors more or less contemporary with Ferdowsi and based partially on several khodaʾi namags and other pre-Islamic Iranian texts (the originals of many of which have been lost, but significant excerpts of which are available in later, mostly Arabic, works). Ferdowsi’s creation, however, outshone and outlasted the others.  One of the probable sources of the Shahnameh – the writings of the renowned Sassanid Mazdean priest Tansar – survived only in a Persian translation of an Arabic translation of the original Pahlavi.  Fereydun was the previous president of Iran’s original family name, until he Islamized it to “Rouhani.”

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of virtually invincible warriors like Kaveh, Zal, Rostam and Sohrab.⁸⁹ These are known collectively as the pishdadian (“those who came first”) and the backdrop against which many of their escapades unfold is the Khorasan region in NorthEastern Iran (the mother country, it will be recalled, of the Parthians).⁹⁰ The next class of protagonists immortalized by the Shahnameh is known as the Kiyanian or Kayanian – meaning “kings” or “poet-priests” – and they may have been inspired by genuine historical figures like the pre-Achaemenid Median Emperors (though it is also possible that they are echoes of Parthian rulers). Kay Kubad, Kay Kavus, Kay Khosroe, Siyavosh and a host of supporting characters frolic across the hills and dales, deserts and forests of Iran (and occasionally other lands), basically making love and war: battling dragons and demons, hunting, jousting and wrestling, pursuing buxom damsels and quaffing the juice of the grape,⁹¹ playing polo and disporting with fairies, and more than anything else: taking the field against their implacable enemy to the East, the “Turks” (Turanians).⁹² The final third of this monumental ballad (the longest poem ever written by a single human being)⁹³ begins to merge with more-or-less verifiable history, treating of the Sassanid emperors (Pers. Sasanian) who ousted the Parthians and ruled Iran from about 224 CE until the conquest of the country by Arab-Muslim forces by the

 The stories of these warriors are, to put a finer point on it, generally grouped together as “The Sistan Cycle,” referring to the region to the South of Khorasan.  The Karin branch of the Parthians traced their lineage back to Kaveh the Blacksmith (of Khodaʾi Namag and Shahnameh fame) who had vanquished the reptilian monster Dahhak (originally Dahag) and saved Airan, “the realm of the Aryans.” Airan, a way-station along the road of IndoAryan migration into Iran and India that morphed in retrospect into a sort of Garden of Eden, was thus located in Iranian consciousness (and probably in historical reality) somewhere toward the North-East, which, as we saw above, may account for the later Sassanid cultivation of a “Kiyanid” – i. e., a Khorasanian North-Eastern – genealogy: they sought common ground with what was left of the Parthians.  Concerning the Persians in general the Greek writer Strabo states that “they carry on their most important deliberations when drinking wine; and they regard decisions then made as more lasting than those made when they are sober” (Strabo, Geography [New York: Loeb Classical Library, 1932], XV, iii, 20).  The confounding of what the Shahnameh refers to as the Turanians – strictly speaking, the descendants of Fereydun’s son Tur whose father granted him sovereignty over the East – with the Turks may be the result of retroactive extrapolation from the presence of Turkic peoples just East of Iran at a later time. The identity between the two groups is widely assumed in the popular Persian mind today, and even by many scholars.  The Shahnameh is longer than the Iliad and Odyssey combined (Shaul Shaked, Introduction to Elazar Kagan’s Hebrew translation of the Shahnameh [Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1992], vol. 1, p. 44).

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year 651.⁹⁴ The Sassanids, with whom the concept of kingship by divine right and celestial charisma (farr-e izadi) reached its apogee, were the quintessential Iranian dynasty, and are credited more than any other royal house – both by academic historians and by the Persian populace from time immemorial – with forging the country’s national identity, indeed, with creating the very “idea of Iran.”⁹⁵ This they did, in part, by finally establishing Zoroastrianism, which had played a somewhat amorphous role to date in state and society, on a firm basis as the official creed of the realm, facilitating the propagation of its tenets by supporting a large clerical apparatus consisting of priests known as mobadan, gabr-ha, moghan or magus-ha (the latter title giving us the “three Magi from the East” who visited Christ in the manger and, of course, “magic”). This belief system, embodied in an ancient scripture called the “Avesta” and known to its adherents as beh din or “the good faith” (and to many outsiders, inaccurately, as “fire worship”), had been considerably transformed since its earliest Indo-European debut by exposure to Semitic, Hellenistic and other influences (and had simultaneously left a heavy imprint on those cultures, contributing to doctrines including life after death, the existence of Satan and the expectation of an eschatological savior, and to elements of praxis such as prayer paraphernalia, purification procedures and even the date of Christmas).⁹⁶

 Even with regard to the Sassanians, Theodor Nöldeke and Ehsan Yarshater argue that only from about halfway through the dynasty – starting with the reign of Yazdegird I (392– 420 CE) – does Iranian traditional history, including the Shahnameh, provide relatively accurate information. Scholars like Philip Huyse and Robert Hoyland push off the inception of non-legendary material all the way to the reign of Kavad I (488 – 531 CE). Still others are willing to accept the essential historicity of descriptions closer to the outset of the Sassanian period.  Ali M. Ansari, Iran: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).  Zoroaster himself, whenever, wherever (and whether) he lived, appears to have done a good bit of reforming of his own of the earlier Indo-Aryan faith that – transformed – would thenceforth bear his name. He seems to have added a greater moral dimension to the traditional creed, augmenting the original “true-false” axis with a novel “good-evil” axis, and may possibly have pushed in the direction of monotheism (though his followers would later push back in the direction of dualism and even polytheism). Not for nothing is he sometimes associated with Abraham (e. g., in Islamic tradition). Mithra, the ancient Iranian Sun god/goddess who was absorbed into Zoroastrianism, became an extremely fashionable deity in Rome and environs in the centuries immediately following Christ. His/her birthday was celebrated on the morrow of the darkest day of the year (the winter solstice), when sol invictus was “reborn,” i. e., on December 25th (today it is December 22nd). Since Jesus had no recorded birthday until the fourth century adoption of Christianity by the Roman emperor Constantine – and because the Son of Man is associated on many levels with the sun in the sky (an association reflected even in the name of the day upon which he reputedly rose from the dead) – it is highly probable that the date of Christmas was contributed by Iran.

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This “neo-Mazdaism,” as explicated in Pahlavi (Middle Persian) texts completed before and after the seventh century Muslim conquest, pitted the good god Ahura Mazda (originally “Spenta Mainyu” or Blessed Spirit) against the evil deity Ahriman (originally “Angra Mainyu” or Destructive Spirit) in a nine thousand year-long struggle, making Zoroaster son of Spitama – who lived in Iran centuries before Jesus and purportedly composed the “Gatha” or hymnal section of Avestan scripture – the prophet of the former.⁹⁷ Zoroaster, who was himself a reformer, was said to have converted the Kiyani sovereign Goshtasp or Vishtasp to his refined version of the ancient Indo-Aryan dualist creed, effecting “the prototype of the alliance between throne and altar.”⁹⁸ Under this ruler’s generous patronage, the prophet went about instructing human beings regarding their role in the cosmic battle between right and wrong, and on the “good thoughts, good speech and good actions” (pendar-e nik, goftar-e nik, kerdar-e nik) that would help Ahura Mazda ultimately prevail.⁹⁹ Zoroaster is also reputed to have instituted, or transmitted onward in modified fashion, a vast array of rituals dedicated primarily to preserving the four pure elements – earth, air, water and fire – from ceremonial contamination (a mission taken so seriously that the dead were neither buried nor burned but placed atop “towers of silence” [old Pers. dakhma]¹⁰⁰ to be picked to the bone by vultures, only after which the dry skeletons could be interred).¹⁰¹ Zoroast-

 “Ahura Mazda originally meant “Lord of Wisdom” (Shaked, Shahnameh, p. 30).  Goshtasp/Vishtasp was supposedly the great-grandfather of the Achaemenid Artaxerxes. The quote is from Pierre Grimal (ed.), Larousse World Mythology (New York: Putnam’s, 1965), p. 197, cited in Reza Baraheni, Crowned Cannibals (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 19.  In the Oscar-winning 2019 film Bohemian Rhapsody, this triad of principles was the only aspect of the Zoroastrian (Parsee) legacy passed on to Freddy Mercury by his father, other than the rock star’s given name: Farrokh (forugh), Persian for “light.”  This term comes from the root “to burn” – probably because pre-Zoroastrian Indo-European methods for disposal of the dead involved burning – but of course under the new dispensation meant anything but.  The very tombs of the Achaemenids at Naqsh-e Rostam in Southern Iran that sport Mazdaic images, and upon which inscriptions were discovered and deciphered that allude to Zoroastriansounding notions, prove either that early forms of Zoroastrianism did not yet lay stress on such issues of ritual purity and pollution, or that the Achaemenids were not particularly pious Zoroastrians (Shaul Shaked, however, concludes that despite these anomalies “it appears that there is no doubt concerning the Zoroastrian affiliation of the Achaemenid kings” [Shaked, Introduction, p. 24]). At the end of the 2019 film Bohemian Rhapsody, we are told that “Freddy Mercury was cremated according to the rites of his religion,” which is ironic since few infractions are more serious in Zoroastrian law than ritually contaminating a fire with a corpse. In truth, Mercury’s body was incinerated because (a) even in India, let alone in Great Britain, “Towers of Silence” are for the most part no longer tolerated, and (b) vultures are increasingly scarce. Most Parsees today therefore opt for cremation as a lesser of evils, probably because while polluting fire is worse than pol-

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rianism was sufficiently entrenched and institutionalized during the Sassanid period to give rise to heresies – especially Manicheism and Mazdakism – that sought to deterge, abstract and reinterpret it, as well as syncretize it with other faiths.¹⁰² The Sassanids furnished some of the most colorful figures to grace Iranian historiography and belles lettres. The founder of the dynasty, Ardashir Babakan, namesake of the fourth Achaemenid emperor Artaxerxes and purportedly his fifth descendant, was first favored, then banished and hunted, by the last Parthian monarch Ardawan (of whom the present president of Turkey is the namesake). Ardashir slayed the eponymous monster-worm of the South-central Iranian city of Kerman (Pers. kerm means “worm”), vanquished the Parthians,¹⁰³ married Ardawan’s daughter, and sired by her the warrior-king Shapur I.¹⁰⁴ Shapur renewed with vigor his father’s hostilities against Rome and, defeating the Imperial Legions at Edessa (260 CE), actually captured Emperor Valerian (whom he supposedly used as a footstool thereafter until the prisoner’s death, upon which Shapur had his corpse taxidermied). He commemorated this victory by commissioning an imposing rock relief at Naqsh-e Rostam, the Achaemenid necropolis and Sassanid memorial near Persepolis, accompanied by an extensive cuneiform inscription – in Pah-

luting earth, the former act is over much more quickly (also, since electricity did not exist in the time of Zarathustra, some opine that it is not considered fire and therefore forms of electrical incineration are permitted). Another possibility is that this new custom represents a sort of reversion to the ancient, pre-Mazdean, Indo-European method of disposal of the dead (see previous note).  Sassanid Zoroastrianism was also, in a sense, heretical: the royal court and priesthood had “mainstreamed” an earlier offshoot version of the faith that posited Zurvan, “Father Time” (akin to the Greek Chronos) as the primary principle. “Zurvanite” Zoroastrianism did not survive into the Islamic era. Still and all, the Sassanid Magian priesthood took its own “orthodoxy” more seriously than any of its predecessors serving under the previous dynasties, such that a rough trajectory can be observed from a more open and tolerant (perhaps because less consolidated) faith in the time of the Achaemenids to a more intolerant version practicing religious persecution in the time of the Sassanians.  But, as we noted above, did not utterly eradicate them, and not long after required their assistance, which may be why Ardashir’s Achaemenid pedigree, noted here, was to a large extent replaced as the dynasty wore on by a more Parthian-friendly “Kiyanid” lineage.  According to one legend Ardawan’s daughter tried to poison Ardashir, the latter charged a minister with her execution, and the minister saw she was pregnant and hid her till she gave birth (and then presumably carried out his master’s orders). When, years later, Ardashir complained that he had no heir, the same vizier produced the prince, and in order to reassure the king that he and not the minister himself was the father, asked for a box he had deposited in the treasury at the time Ardashir had issued the original orders to execute the queen. In the box was the minister’s excised male member (Shaked, Shahnameh, p. 48).

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lavi, Parthian and Greek – on one wall of the nearby “Zoroaster’s Cubic Shrine” (Kaʿabe-ye Zartosht). Other Sassanian rulers whose names still resound in Iranian consciousness (and who are celebrated in the pages of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh) are Shapur II, crowned pre-partum and reigning for the entire seventy years of his life (which ended in 379 CE); Bahram Gur (d. 483 CE), famed hunter and romancer, whose highly popular rule nevertheless inaugurated the decline of his dynasty, and of whom Ferdowsi famously sung: “O Bahram, who chased down the onager (gur) all your life, see now how the grave (gur) has chased you down!”; and especially Khosroe I Anushirvan (“Of the Immortal Soul”) who died in 579 CE and whose sobriquet was “the Just” (Pers. Dadgar). Though the “justice” of this much adulated monarch should be understood as the antonym of “mercy” – he had all of his brothers and their offspring executed on charges of conspiracy upon assuming the throne, and massacred tens of thousands of Mazdakite heretics, burying many of them upside down with their feet protruding into the air (which deed endeared him to the Zoroastrian clergy) – Anushirvan is nevertheless credited with setting society in order and playing fair. An Arab writer has preserved the following anecdote: The Ambassador of the Roman Emperor was shown and admired the magnificence of the palace of Noshirwan. But having observed that the square in front of it was irregular in shape, he inquired as to the reason, and was informed that an old woman owned the adjacent land, which she refused to sell at any price, and that the king would not take it by force. The ambassador exclaimed, “This irregularity is more beautiful than the most perfect square.”¹⁰⁵

The death of Anushirvan saw the fortunes of the Sassanid Empire, which had revived to an extent under the assertive Shah, take a sharp downward turn. With one or two exceptions – preeminent among them Anushirvan’s grandson Khosroe Parviz (d. 628 CE) who nearly destroyed Byzantium and briefly seized the True Cross from Jerusalem¹⁰⁶ – feeble, corrupt rulers ascended and descended the throne in

 Percy Sykes, A History of Persia (London: Macmillan, 1915), vol. 1, p. 459. Compare King Ahab’s behavior under similar circumstances (Kings II, chap. 21).  The victory of the Persian Zoroastrians over the Byzantine Christians at this time was apparently the occasion for one of the few Qurʾanic revelations in which Muḥammad is shown to be a “prophet” in the sense of a prognosticator: “The Byzantines (al-Rūm) have been defeated in a land nearby, but having been defeated they will soon after prevail, within a few years. Unto God belongs the affair, before and after, and on that day the [Muslim] believers shall rejoice (because monotheists or People of the Book will have vanquished Zoroastrian polytheists, i. e., dualists – Qurʾan 30: 1– 6).” The Byzantines under Heraclius did indeed launch a counter-offensive soon afterward that nearly dethroned the Sassanids (and retrieved the True Cross). The exhaustion on both sides produced by these hostilities is said to have contributed to the relative ease with which their armies were overrun a decade later by the Arabs.

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rapid succession thereafter. The first fourteen kings of the dynasty had reigned altogether more than two centuries; the last eleven less than five years. “O men, see how Persia has been ruined and its inhabitants humiliated,” sang the seventh century Arab poet Nābigha al-Jaʿdī. “They have become slaves who pasture your sheep, as if their kingdom was a dream.”¹⁰⁷ It is said that on the night of the Prophet Muḥammad’s birth (c. 570 CE), the Sacred Fire of Ahura Mazda, which had burned uninterruptedly for a thousand years in the central Iranian city of Yazd, was suddenly extinguished.¹⁰⁸ The Muslim conquest of the Land of the Lion and the Sun,¹⁰⁹ inaugurated by the Arab victory over Persian forces at Qādisiyya in southern Iraq in 636 CE and completed by about 651 CE, rent Iranian history neatly in twain, the millennium-and-a-half beforehand and the millenniumand-a-half afterward glaring at one another, as it were, with daggers drawn. For Aryan-Zoroastrian Iran Islamic Iran was a national catastrophe, the end of civilization, a miserable denouement to centuries of culture and glory; for Islamic Iran Aryan-Zoroastrian Iran was the dark age of pagan barbarism, of ignorance and arrogance, of tyranny and immorality.¹¹⁰ Some tried to bridge the gap: Iranian Shiʿite Muslims would eventually claim, for instance, that Ḥusayn, son of ʿAlī and grandson of the Prophet Muḥammad, had married the captive princess Shahr Banu, daughter of the final Sassanid Shah Yazdegerd III, and fathered by her no less than the line of Twelver Shiʿite imams (for whom see below).¹¹¹ The mother of

 Cited in Patricia Crone, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 7.  Other legends have King Khosroe’s courtyard burst, the stone beard of Darius burn, etc.  This designation, in Persian shir va khorshid, though established as the emblem of the country only in later (Safavid) times, draws on ancient motifs and traditions. For the labyrinthine and lewd story of the Sassanid conquest of South Arabia on the eve of the Arabian conquest of Iran – involving a Jewish youth who saved the populace from a serial sodomist and grew up to persecute Christians who were subsequently rescued by their Ethiopian co-religionists, after which Persian criminals sent to relieve the suffering pagans of the peninsula converted to Islam – see E. G. Browne, A Literary History of Persian (London: Allen & Unwin, 1906), vol. 1, pp. 267– 279.  This is a simplification and generalization, or perhaps an anachronism. Though doctrinaire ideologues and activists have always existed for whom this dichotomy was clear cut and fierce, it was the twentieth century that saw the rise of the hard and fast distinction and hostility between pre- and post-Islamic Iran. Even then, card carrying “Aryan” nationalists like Mohammad Ali-ye Forughi could appreciate aspects of Islam and Shiʿism, and Shiʿite clerics like Ayatollah Tabatabaʾi and Ayatollah Motahhari could praise elements of Zoroastrianism and mention certain ancient Iranian kings positively.  According to other versions of the myth the Persian woman who married Ḥusayn was the daughter of one of Yazdegird’s noble courtiers. Several hadiths support the widespread IranianShiʿite perception that both ʿAlī and Ḥusayn knew Persian. Once a Zoroastrian offered the former a honey roll (faludhaj) in honor of the Iranian New Year, the Nayruz (Nowruz). “Every day is Nayr-

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many a Sunni Muslim Abbasid caliph was a Persian slave-girl. The figure of Muḥammad’s prominent Companion, Salmān al-Fārisī/al-Fārsī (Salmān the Persian) – who converted to Islam after an Augustinian spiritual odyssey, brought Sassanian military tactics to bear on the Prophet’s campaigns, and eventually supported the Shiʿite hero ʿAlī against his detractors – allowed Iranians to combine their national with their religious pride.¹¹² In general, elements of pre-Islamic Persian civilization persisted through and beyond the Arab conquest and integrated, often seamlessly, with the ethos of Islamic Iran. But while a finessed synthesis unquestionably reigned between these two opposing affinities throughout much of the remainder of Iranian history, the thesis-antithesis tension was never far below the surface, and periodically erupted. Culturally speaking, Iran did not go down without a fight. It took a good three hundred years for the majority of Iranians to accept Islam.¹¹³ The Persian language, unlike the tongues of the other peoples subjugated by the caliphs, managed to hold its own (although emerging from the encounter with a massive admixture of Arabic), and even flowered to become the premier medium of fine literature in the Abode of Islam (dār al-islām) for upwards of a thousand years. Sassanid imperial traditions and court etiquette insinuated themselves into the Islamic caliphate, and the “Arabian Nights” of Baghdad – which was literally down the road from the Sassanid and Parthian capital Ctesiphon – were far more Iranian than Arabian. Persian speaking scribes and bureaucrats, though nominally Muslims, harked back to Sassanid exemplars and often expressed undisguised disdain for the Islamic canon and Arab customs (such sentiments animated what was to become known as the shuʿūbī movement, which saw Iranian litterateurs disparage and satirize the

uz,” quipped ʿAlī, displaying sufficient command of the language to know that Nayruz literally means “new day,” and devaluing the Magian festival at the same time.  That is, once most Iranians had converted to Shiʿism after the Safavid takeover, as we shall see below. For the same reasons adduced in the passage to which this note is appended, Salmān is today one of the premier villains in the propaganda of the forces opposing the Islamic Republic. He is condemned as a traitor to his country and race, and often drawn as a monkey. Iranian Shiʿites, on the other hand, point proudly to Muḥammad’s designation of Salmān – whose Persian name had been Roozbeh (“Good Day”) – as minnā ahli l-bayt, “one of us, the Prophet’s Family.”  It took other Middle Eastern nations even longer to convert to the new faith – among other reasons, because of Islam’s relative tolerance of “peoples of the book” – and as we shall see, many an Islamist in today’s Iran has expressed his or her deep satisfaction about the comparative rapidity with which his ancient countrymen adopted the religion of their conquerors. Still, the process was a gradual one, surveyed and analyzed most perceptively by Richard Bulliet in Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1979).

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cultural tradition of their new overlords).¹¹⁴ Intermittent “nationalist” rebellions, often fueled by overt or covert Zoroastrian zealotry, racked the new Muslim regime for several centuries (the leaders of these – especially Beh Afarid, Usthadhsis, al-Muqanna, Babak-e Khorramdin, Mazyar and Afshin, all active in the eighth and ninth centuries CE – have been adopted as role models since 1979 by elements of the pseudo-neo-Zoroastrian opposition-in-exile to the Khomeinist Islamic Republic).¹¹⁵ At the same time, many of those Iranians who converted sincerely to Islam, or were raised as second, third or fourth generation committed and knowledgeable Muslims, rendered a signal service to the fledgling faith. The Islamic world’s greatest historian, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Khaldūn (d. 1406), himself an Arab through and through living far away in North Africa, could write the following lines: It is a remarkable fact that, with few exceptions, most Muslim scholars…in the intellectual sciences have been non-Arabs. The founders of grammar such as Sībawayhi, al-Fārisī and al-Zajjāj: all of them were of Persian descent. Great jurists were Persians. Only the Persians engaged in the task of preserving knowledge and writing systematic scholarly works. Most of the hadith scholars who preserved traditions for the Muslims were also non-Arabs, or [at least] Persian in language and upbringing, because the discipline was widely cultivated in Iraq and the regions beyond…Thus the truth of the statement of the Prophet [Muḥammad] becomes apparent: “If learning were suspended in the highest parts of heaven the Persians would attain to it”… The intellectual sciences were also the preserve of the Persians, left alone by the Arabs, who did not cultivate them…¹¹⁶

Alfred von Kremer, the esteemed nineteenth century Austrian Orientalist, put the matter thus:

 The shuʿūbī movement took its name from a well-known verse in the Qurʾan (Q. 49: 13) which posits that though humanity is divided up into tribes and nations (shuʿūb), “the most noble in the eyes of Allah are those who are most God-fearing.” In other words, racial or ethnic aristocracy is anathema, and thus the Arabs enjoy no supremacy over the Persians. Such developments were facilitated politically by the Abbasid Revolution (750 CE), which was animated by a pro-Persian ethos (though scholars debate its extent), and they were furthered by the victory (c. 812 CE) in the “Fourth Fitna” (civil war) of Hārūn al-Rashīd’s son al-Maʾmūn, who represented a more Iranian or Eastern (mashriq) constituency, over his brother al-Amīn, who represented a more Arab or Syrian constituency.  Reza Zia Ebrahimi, in his The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), has provided a long-needed corrective to the over-estimation by such agenda-ridden groups of the traditional Iranian hostility to Arabs and/or Islam. The most thorough account of these rebellions and their leaders is now Crone, Nativist Prophets.  ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah (trans. Franz Rosenthal; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 428 ff.

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It almost seems that these scientific studies (Reading and Exegesis of the Qurʿan, Sciences of the Tradition and Law) were, during the first two centuries [of Islamic history], principally worked by clients [that is, non-Arab “hangers on” or mawālī, almost invariably referring to Persians – Z. M.], while the Arabs proper felt themselves more drawn to the study of their ancient [pre-Islamic] poetry, and to the development and imitation of the same; but, we would add, even in this field they were often outstripped by the foreigners, whose men of learning in no small degree advanced this sphere of the Arabian genius by literary and historical studies on the antiquities of the Arabs, by thorough critical researches and so forth… [E]ven if we cannot permit Paul Lagarde’s assertion that “of the Muhammadans who have achieved anything in Science, not one was a Semite” to pass in this absolute form, yet so much at least may be said, that alike in the specially religious studies as in those which grew up round the study of the Arabic speech, the Arabian element lagged far behind the non-Arabian.¹¹⁷

Echoed the incomparably distinguished scholar who is credited with founding the discipline of European Middle East and Islamic studies in the modern period, Ignaz Goldziher: “A whole series of the most eminent Muhammadans was descended from Persian prisoners of war.”¹¹⁸ The great codifier of Shiʿi tradition, Muḥammad Bāqir al-Majlisī, declared baldly that “in the matter of faith, the Iranians are superior to the Arabs.”¹¹⁹ Muhammad Iqbal, “the national poet of Pakistan,” went so far as to assert that “The conquest of Persia meant not the conversion of Persia to Islam, but the conversion of Islam to Persianism.”¹²⁰ Though hundreds of examples of the inordinate Iranian contribution to Islamic civilization in a dozen different fields could be adduced – including such dazzling stars in the Muslim firmaments of philosophy, theology, science and mysticism as al-Ḥallāj, al-Bisṭāmī, alFārābī, al-Bīrūnī, al-Ghazālī, al-Khawārizmī and Ibn Sīnā (to say nothing of Islam’s greatest historian and exegete, Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī) – perhaps no instance is more illustrative of the crucial role played by Iranians in the consolidation of Islam than that of the compilers of the so-called al-Ṣiḥāḥ al-sitta or Six Canonical Collections of Sunni Tradition (hadith), at least four of whom hailed from

 Cited in Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), vol. 1, p. 260.  Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim Studies (Trans. C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern; Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., n.d.), vol. 1, pp. 178 – 179. At the same time, not a few “Persian” writers were descended from Arab conquerors or immigrants. “Muhammadans” is an outmoded Western usage, abandoned in the twentieth century because it is inaccurate and misleading: Muslims never called themselves thus, and as the Islamic Prophet’s successor Abū Bakr explained upon the former’s death: “He who worships Muḥammad – Muḥammad is dead; he who worships Allah – Allah is alive and will never die.” Still, the hadith does occasionally speak of “the Muḥammadan religion” (dīn Muḥammad).  Enayat, Political Thought, p. 26.  Cited in Strootman and Versluys, Persianism, p. 9.

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Iran. The twentieth century Lebanese Shiʿite thinker Muhammad Mahdi Shams alDin noted the (seeming) paradox that The close companions of the [Shiʿite] imams who transmitted their traditions were pure Arabs…In contrast, the biographies of famous Sunni hadith transmitters reveal that the overwhelming majority were Persians, not Arabs. Most Sunni jurists were also Persians.¹²¹

“Those possessing the greatest share in Islam,” several hadiths sum up the matter plainly, “are the people of Persia.”¹²² The extent to which many educated Iranians threw themselves into the new Islamic dispensation – to the point of becoming, in short order, leaders and luminaries of the creed that had only recently conquered their country and (partially) erased their civilization – is of considerable importance to the subject of the present volume, as we shall see. In general, it is important not to allow Iran’s increasingly emphatic Shiʿite identity since the sixteenth century CE (on which more below), culminating in the unprecedentedly conspicuous Shiʿite cleritocracy of our day, to blind us to the fact that not only was the Iranian population overwhelmingly Sunni for more than half a millennium (from c. 900 to 1500 CE), but elite elements of that population played an incalculably important role in the formation of Sunnism.¹²³ Iran was ruled for over a century and a half (from 650 – 820 CE) by the Muslim caliphate, which had its seat first at Medina in Arabia (under the “Righteous Caliphs,” the first successors of Muḥammad),¹²⁴ then at Damascus in Syria (under

 Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din, “The Authenticity of Shiʿism,” in L. Clarke (ed. trans.), Shiʿite Heritage: Essays on Classical and Modern Traditions (Binghamton: Global Publications, 2001), p. 49.  Aʿẓamu l-nāsi naṣīban fi l-islāmi ahlu fāris – e. g., Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣbahānī, Dhikr akhbār Iṣbahān (Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, 1990), vol. 1, p. 23.  Even the great Nikkie Keddie, grand dame of Iranian studies in America, sins in this regard in her recently updated Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), in the introduction to which – entitled “[Iranian] Religion and Society to 1800” and including the medieval period – she devotes the entirety of her exposition to Shiʿite history and religion. Although we, too, place our emphasis on Shiʿite Iran throughout this book, Sunni Iran should not be ignored, at least when providing introductory historical background. Iranian influence on Sunnism and the Arab world was not limited to the medieval period. At the end of the nineteenth century two Iranians – Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakabi – were highly instrumental in bringing about the Sunni Islamic “Awakening” (ṣaḥwa) as well as the rise of Arab nationalism.  With the exception of the last of these, ʿAlī, who transferred his capital to Kufa in Iraq. Twelver Shiʿites do not see the first three of these caliphs as righteous at all.

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the Umayyad dynasty, 661– 750 CE) and finally at Baghdad in Iraq (under the Abbasid dynasty, 750 – 1258 CE). From 820 CE onwards, however, the Abbasids lost de facto control of increasingly larger portions of the country – especially but not exclusively the Eastern provinces of Khorasan and Transoxiana – to local upstart warrior bands such as the Ṭāhirids, Ṣaffārids, Sāmānids, Ziyārids, and Būyids, in what is often characterized as the “Iranian intermezzo.” Some of these, especially Yaʿqūb Layth al-Ṣaffār and his successors, partook of the ʿayyar/javanmardi/futuwwa/mutaṭawwiʿa phenomenon – a sort of picaresque, chivalrous jihadism. The Sāmānids, who reigned from about 874 CE to the middle of the tenth century, are credited with presiding over the revival of Persian literature after a lengthy hiatus: Rudaki, the first major Persian poet of the post-conquest period, was a recipient of their patronage, as was Ferdowsi. The last dynasty on the list, the Būyids or Buwayhids, ruled much of Iran, Iraq and Syria as puppet-masters of the Baghdad caliphs for a good century between 945 and 1055 CE (the Būyids were Shiʿites – see below – and under their auspices several of the important rituals of this sect took form).¹²⁵ Then came the Turks. Turkish speaking peoples from the Asian steppe gained supremacy over numerous regions of Islamdom in two ways. From the ninth century CE onward slave-soldiers from Turkic tribal confederations were imported by caliphs and provincial potentates across the Middle East, both because the nomadic Turks were considered tough fighters and because they had no stake in, and no connection to, the local Muslim populations and would therefore be loyal to the ruler and ruthless, when need be, to his subjects. It was a convincing theory, but in practice the Turkish guard generally ended up controlling the caliph or governor, whom they manipulated like a marionette (and often deposed and/or murdered). In this manner Turks reached the pinnacles of power through the “back door” of bondage, as was also the case with the Mamlūk (Arabic for “owned,” i. e., slave) sultans of Egypt and pashas of Iraq.¹²⁶ Beginning with the tenth century CE, however, entire “hordes” (following herds) of free Turks overran the Muslim world through the “front door” of direct conquest, naturally enough encountering Iran and its

 For an in-depth and occasionally colorful discussion of Yaʿqūb Layth al-Ṣaffār’s career and the adventures of the ayyarun, see Deborah Tor, Violent Order: Religious Warfare, Chivalry, and the ʿAyyār Phenomenon in the Medieval Islamic World (Istanbul: Orient-Institut, 2007).  A medieval Muslim poet sang: “A caliph in a cage, in between [the Turkish generals] Waṣīf and Bughā, uttering what they tell him to utter like a parakeet” (khalīfatun fī qafaṣin; bayna waṣīfin wa bughā; yaqūlu mā qālā lahu; kamā yaqūlu l-babghā). The proper name Waṣīf also means “slave.”

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Eastern satellites first.¹²⁷ Thus did large portions of Persia fall successively under the sway of: (1) the Ghaznavids (977– 1186), whose rule in the Eastern portion of the country overlapped first with that of the Buwayhids and then with that of the Seljuks in the Western portion, and to whose second sultan, the renowned Mahmud of Ghazna, Ferdowsi is said to have presented the finished Shahnameh;¹²⁸ (2) the Seljuks (1040 – 1240 CE), whose vast empire stretched from Transoxiana to the marches of Constantinople, whose conquest of Anatolia (present-day Turkey) triggered the First Crusade, and whose rule over Iran bolstered the country’s Sunni Islamic character and all but drove Shiʿism underground, but did not undermine its fundamental social and political structures ; (3) the Khwarazm Shahs, a Sunni Persianate dynasty of Turkic-Mamlūk origin based in Samarqand, that ruled most of Iran for a brief interval during the first two decades of the thirteenth century; (4) the Mongol Il-Khans, “the king’s deputies,” (1240 – 1350 CE), under Chingiz (Genghis) Khan’s grandson Hulegu, whose reign in Iran – despite some of the undoubted administrative and economic boons it brought with it – is recorded in the national Persian memory as an unparalleled, epic devastation, from which the polity and populace never fully recovered (to this day the red of tulip and sunset are associated with the immense amounts of blood spilt by these merciless conquerors);¹²⁹ (5) Tammerlane’s Tatars (1370 – 1425 CE), whose brief tenure saw – despite their commander’s unrivalled penchant for warmongering – an explosion of Persian architecture and literature;  At different times in its history Iran has extended its sovereignty or influence to Bactria – present day Afghanistan and Tajikistan – and Transoxiana (Arab. mā warāʾ al-nahr, Pers. fararud) – contemporary Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, as well as to Iraq in the West.  The Buwayhids were not strictly speaking Turks (but rather Daylamite highlanders) and the Ghaznavids were descendants of Turkish slave soldiers, so the schema is not entirely smooth. The Shahnameh was commissioned by a Samanid sovereign, but by the time this incomparably ambitious tour de force was completed the Samanids had been swept away. The well-known story goes that Ferdowsi presented his life’s work, fifty some thousand stanzas long, to Maḥmūd of Ghazna, who had promised to pay the author a gold piece for every stanza. The Sultan kept his word, but the courtier entrusted with conveying the payment switched the gold pieces for silver ones. (In alternate versions it was Mahmud himself who was miserly, perhaps because he was a strident Sunni whereas Ferdowsi was suspected of tashayyuʿ [a leaning toward Shiʿism, if he was not actually a Shiʿite]). Years later, the legend continues, realizing what had happened, Maḥmūd sent the gold pieces to Ferdowsi’s home town of Ṭūs, but the wagon carrying the gold entered the gates just as another wagon carrying Ferdowsi’s corpse exited them.  The red of the sunset is also associated with the blood of the martyred Ḥusayn, as in Greek mythology it symbolized the blood of Adonis killed by the boar (Goldziher, Introduction, p. 227).

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(6) the “Black Sheep” (Qara Qoyunlu) tribe, especially under Jahan Shah (r. 1438 – 67), gradually supplanted by the “White Sheep” (Ak Qoyunlu) tribe, especially under Uzun Hasan (r. 1453 – 78), whose hold on Iran continued until the advent of the Safavids at the turn of the sixteenth century.¹³⁰ This entire period of Turkish dominance in the Middle East corresponded intermittently (and somewhat anomalously, since the Turks were considered the “people of the sword” as opposed to the Arab and Persian “people of the pen”) with an intellectual efflorescence or renaissance, including the creation of colleges throughout the Eastern half of the Muslim world known as nezamiehs after their founder, Seljuk Vizier Nezam al-Mulk. The era also witnessed the finest flowering of Persian poetry – in what became known as “New Persian,” with a rich cornucopia of Arabic loanwords – giving us eminent names like Hafez, Saʿdi, Khayyam, Khosroe, Rumi, Nezami (no relation to the Seljuk Vizier) and dozens more, whose vast and surpassingly beautiful oeuvre plays a major role in Iranian cultural life to the present day (even among clerics). Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh was promoted vigorously under the Turks and Mongols, who may have identified with the mise en scene and ethos of the nomadic Asian steppe that characterized the great Persian epic. From the Muslim conquest in the seventh century until the year 1500 CE Iran was governed (with the sole exception of some eighty-five years under the Būyids, a dozen years under the Mongol Muhammad Khodabandeh, and several decades under the Black Sheep tribe) by Sunni Muslims, first Arabs, then Turks.¹³¹ The Persian population, once most of it had converted to Islam, was almost entirely Sunni as well, though with important pockets of Shiʿites. With the sixteenth century Safavid dynasty the religion of state, and soon of society, became Shiʿism.

Gone but Not Forgotten The Islamization of Iran, as we have seen, was unable fully to uproot the Persian national narrative. The tales of the legendary heroes of pre-Islamic Iran – the mostly mythical pishdadi and kiyani kings, as well as the mostly historical Sassanid sov-

 Tamerlane’s son Shah Rokh married Gawhar Shad (“Felicitous Jewel”), the sister of Kara Yusuf – second chief of the Kara Koyunlu. She built the Gawhar Shad Mosque in Mashhad (site of the notorious massacre following protests in 1935 against the edict mandating “modern” hats for men and the removal of the veil for women).  To be completely accurate we would have to except the ninth- and tenth-century Ṣaffārid and Sāmānid dynasties, whose scions were of Iranian provenance.

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ereigns – fall effortlessly off the lips of many mature citizens, a goodly number of whom are also named after these ancient paragons. Most educated (and even many non-educated) middle-aged-to-elderly Iranians can still regale listeners with tales of these primordial repositories of farr (royal charisma) and their fiendish adversaries: Kayomars, the first person (and first sovereign), the original form of whose name (geo = earth, mard = man) corresponds suggestively to the derivation of “Adam” from adama (Heb. “earth”) and “human” from humus (Lat. “earth”); Kayomars’ fifth generation descendent King Jamshid, a sort of Zoroastrian Noahmeets-Solomon (or Iranian King Arthur), who saved mankind from the World Engulfing Frost by herding two of every species into an underground haven, then organized society into classes, invented wine, perfected a variety of essential tools and technologies, and flew around the world with his huge retinue on a magic carpet borne by demons, before falling victim to his own hubris; Dahhak-e Mardush, Jamshid’s murderer, a monster-wizard of Arab pedigree (at least in his later instantiations) with snakes growing out of his shoulders to whom he fed Persian children’s heads every day, finally defeated after a thousand-year reign by Jamshid’s valiant descendent Fereydun and Kaveh the Blacksmith (whose leather apron became the palladium of Iran for centuries thereafter and today serves as a symbol of opposition to the Islamic Republic);¹³² King Fereydun’s three sons, Salm, Tur and Iraj (the Zoroastrian Shem, Ham and Japheth), between whom their father divided up his global kingdom, and the first two of whom, symbolizing West and East respectively, murdered the last, symbolizing Iran; Manuchehr (“blessed visage”), Iraj’s grandson, who avenged his grandfather’s death on his great uncles and inherited the crown of Iran, “the capital of the world”; Arash-e Kamangir (Arash the Archer), who from the peak of Mt. Damavand drew his bow with all his might, shot an arrow that would establish the extent of Iran’s territory, and died from the effort; Zal, son of Sam, exposed on the Alborz mountains at birth for the crime of being born an albino and raised by the fabulous Simorgh bird to become a soldier in the service of Manuchehr, and later the Romeo to the Juliet of Rudabeh, a female scion of the house of the aforementioned Dahhak; the illustrious, Caesarian-born product of this counterintuitive miscegenation between “pure” Iranian and “polluted” Arabian lines, the preeminent hero of Ferdowsi’s Shah-nameh and Samson-like champion of Iran’s interminable wars against “Turan,” Rostam-e Tahamtan (“Ro-

 “Blacksmith” (ahangar) was the name of the communist Tudeh party’s satirical journal on the eve of the 1979 revolution. For today’s neo-Zoroastrian, monarchist opposition to the Islamic Republic, Kaveh has become the hero with a capital H, and Dahhak has become a symbol of what might be called the “closing of the Iranian mind” by Semitic Islam since the seventh century Arab conquest, as well as the “brain-drain” due to the emigration of large sections of the intelligentsia since the revolution of 1979.

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stan the Valiant”); Rostam’s tryst with Tahmina, a Turanian princess, and their love-child Sohrab, who was destined years later to be killed in a duel by his own father in a particularly pathos-filled scene, each warrior unaware of his adversary’s identity (pas az marg-e Sohrab nush daru – “after Sohrab’s death, the medicine is administered” – is present-day Persian for “too little, too late”); Gordafarid, gallant defender of Iran’s border outpost Dezh-e Sepid, who conceals her long locks and female figure under a helmet and armor and bests Sohrab through cunning; King Kay Kavus, who tied eagles to the corners of his throne, dangled meat from its canopy just out of their reach and flew thus across the continents until he crashed in China and was captured and blinded by the White Demon (div-esefid); Kavus’s son Siyavosh, Christ-like (and Joseph-like) symbol of wronged innocence, who was falsely accused of desiring his father’s wife Sudabeh and defected to Turan where he was eventually murdered by King Afrasiab; the forbidden love of Bijan, a youthful Persian pahlavan (champion), and Manijeh, yet another Turanian princess, the latter sneaking food to her imprisoned suitor until he was eventually rescued by Rostam; the prophet Zoroaster (Zartosht), who converted the Iranian emperor Goshtasp – and through him Rostam and others – to his new, dualist religion in which Ahura Mazda, the god of light, battles Ahriman, the god of darkness and human beings are cast in the role of the fravashis or “foot soldiers” who – through the observance of a demanding regimen of ritual purification spelled out in the faith’s liturgical scripture (Avesta) and by engaging only in pendar-e nik (good thoughts), goftar-e nik (good actions) and kerdar-e nik (good deeds) – will bring on the advent of the Saoshyans (savior) at the end of nine thousand years of history; Cyrus and his descendants, the world conquering Achaemenid or Hakhamaneshi emperors (551– 333 BCE), absent, albeit, from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and from medieval Iranian consciousness, but rediscovered in modern times with the help of European archeology (and Herodotus and the Bible); Alexander the Great (Eskandar, Sekandar), who does make an appearance in Ferdowsi’s epic, but as an Iranian king (son of Darius, successor of Cyrus) who discovers the Waters of Life (ob-e hayavan) and obtains immortality, instead of the Macedonian conqueror of the Persian Empire who perished not long after his earthshattering victories;¹³³ the colorful sovereigns of the Sassanian monarchy (224– 651 CE), such as the founder of the dynasty Ardashir Babakan, who killed the giant worm (kerm) that gave its name to Kerman province; Ardashir’s son, Shapur I, who took the Roman Emperor Valerian captive at Edessa in Mesopotamia, pur-

 Alexander saw himself as the inheritor of Achaemenid royalty and sought to base his rule on both Persian and Greek traditions (and armed forces). The Iranian legend about his mixed lineage – his father Darab is said to have impregnated the daughter of King Phillip – may reflect this.

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portedly used him for years thereafter as a footstool by which to mount his horse, and had him stuffed after death; Shapur II, “of the Shoulders” (Dhu l-Aktāf ), who received this sobriquet after he commanded that all the Arab warriors whose fortress he had stormed – helped by the smitten Arab princess who betrayed her tribesmen for her paramour’s sake – have both their arms ripped off at the shoulders, and who was subsequently sown into an ass’s skin by the Byzantine Caesar and finally escaped and vanquished his erstwhile Christian captors; the model of wise rule Khosroe Anushirvan (“of the immortal soul”), who hung a bell from his bedroom window so that any subject could wake him in the middle of the night to complain of injustice; Anushirvan’s clever vizier Bozorgmehr, who invented the game of nard (backgammon) to rival the game of shatranj (chess) sent to the Iranian court as a challenge by the Hindu Raj; the eloquent physician Borzuy, who smuggled the classical collection of animal tales – Panchatantra in the original Sanskrit, Kalīla wa Dimna in the Persian and Arabic translations – out of India by memorizing it, and who discovered that the famed herb he had been seeking in that country that was reputed to restore life to the dead was in truth a metaphor for knowledge, which restores youth to the decrepit (z danesh del-e pir borna bovad); the sage Kharrad son of Barzin, who visited Caesar’s palace at Byzantium and revealed the secret of the sculpted horseman suspended there in mid-air (it was made of iron, he divined, and the dome above it of maghneyatis), after which he excoriated his luxury-loving and power-hungry hosts for their perversion of genuine Christianity; the general-turned-rebel Bahram Chubina, all around adventurer and dilligent reader of Kalileh va Demneh, who sought asylum in China and married the Khaqan’s daughter but was ultimately assassinated by the Shah’s agents; and King Khosroe Parviz and his desperate courtship of the Armenian princess Shirin (a romance immortalized by the poet Nezami, d. 1209 CE), whose rival suitor Farhad was sent by the smitten monarch on the impossible mission of carving stairs into the Behistun cliff. Most if not all of these pre-Islamic paladins and villains, and their shining glories and tragic defeats as recorded in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and elsewhere in ancient and medieval Persian literature, are well known to a large portion of the Iranian populace, and form a significant layer of the country’s cultural tradition. Pride in being Iranian, as opposed to Arab, has played a role in Persian selfperception ever since the seventh century Arab-Muslim conquest of Iran. Just how large of a role is debatable. The extent of this sense of racial supremacy and resentment vis-à-vis the Arabs has been convincingly called into question of late by Reza Zia Ebrahimi. In his The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism Ebrahimi argues that such sentiments were not, for the most part, indigenous to Iranian culture (and even that Firdawsi’s Shahnameh is not the bastion of anti-Arabism it is reputed to be), but were rather constructed to a large extent in Europe by authors like Mon-

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tesquieu and students of the Near-East such as Noeldeke, Goldziher, Gobineau and Renan, and purveyed to the Persian-speaking public as “dislocative nationalism” by home-grown intellectuals starting with Akhundzadeh and Kermani (on whom see below). With this challenge in mind – and it is important to note that Ebrahimi is not claiming that the phenomenon did not exist at all prior to the modern period – we will nevertheless look at some of the more outstanding examples of Iranian positive and negative self-definition as they relate to the country’s Arab-Muslim conquerors. The stubborn survival of the Persian tongue (albeit with a heavy admixture of Arabic) while the languages of the remaining lands of the Middle East (Aramaic, Greek, Coptic, etc.) soon succumbed to the Semitic idiom of the Muslim invaders, in itself constituted a symbol of Iranian distinction from the expanding Arab milieu. Ferdowsi, though a Muslim himself, was arguably devastated by the Islamic supersession of the ancient and glorious Iranian civilization he had so eloquently chronicled. He was also, at least in some (interpolated?) passages, quite disdainful of his country’s Arab conquerors, “who are both ignorant and incapable of acquiring knowledge” (dana nabudand va danesh pazir).¹³⁴ Cho ba takht menbar barabar shavad Hameh nam-e Abu Bakr va Omar shavad Tabah gardad in ranjha-ye deraz Shavad nasaza shah-e gardanfaraz When the minbar (mosque pulpit) replaced the royal throne And the names “Abū Bakr” and “ʿUmar” were everywhere heard Then all our long labors were plunged into ruin And the unworthy became proud and haughty kings¹³⁵ ‘Z shir-e shotor khordan o susmar Arab ra beh jaʾi resid ast kar Keh taj-e Kiyan ra konad arezu Tofu bad bar charkh-e gardun, tofu! Having been drinkers of camel milk and eaters of lizards The Arabs have since risen to such a height That they presume to seek the crown of the Kiyanids And they spit on the wheel of fate, how they spit!¹³⁶

 Shahnameh-ye Ferdowsi (Tehran: Entesharat-e Shahzad, 1376), p. 545.  Shahnameh, p. 797.  Levy, Shahnameh, p. 415.

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The so-called shuʿūbī movement of the eighth-through-tenth centuries CE – which took its name from the Qurʿanic statement (Q. 49: 13) that while Allah had “divided humanity into tribes and nations (shuʿūb)” He nevertheless judged people based on piety not pedigree – countered the Arab assumption of superiority, first with claims of Persian equality and soon with protestations of Persian preeminence.¹³⁷ They went so far as to produce works in praise of miserliness (considered an Iranian trait) and in condemnation of generosity (considered an Arab trait).¹³⁸ Over the centuries, as we saw above, no small number of Iranian authors gloried in their country’s resplendent past and looked down their noses at the comparatively primitive and history-free Arabs. Even the Shiʿism that gained ground in Iran during the medieval period until becoming the official state religion under the Safavids (1501– 1722) came to be identified, whether consciously or unconsciously, with Persian exclusivism, and facilitated the drawing of battle lines first between Iran and the (emphatically Sunni) Ottoman Empire, and later between Iran and the (largely Sunni) Arab world.¹³⁹

 Having called themselves at the outset “the Advocates of Equality” (ahlu l-taswiya) – explains Ayatollah Motahhari – the members of the shuʿūbī movement soon graduated to racism (nezhad parasti) and nationalism (qawmiyat – Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 24, p. 28).  Browne, Literary History, vol. 1, p. 267; Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim Studies (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1889), vol. 1, p. 149.  A great deal has been written about the controversy over the question whether anti-caliphal rebellions originating on Iranian soil in the medieval period can be construed as expressions of a Persian religio-national counterpunch to the Arab-Muslim conquest. The earliest participants in this debate hail from the Middle Ages themselves, especially in the context of the kutub al-firaq literature. Maqrīzī, for instances, opines that “the reason for the apostasy of most of these [Iranian rebel] groups from Islam is as follows. Persia, as a result of the vastness of her empire and the superiority of her people to all others – after all, they styled themselves ʻfreemen’ and ʻmasters’ and all others their slaves – was deeply afflicted by the loss of her empire to the Arabs, the more so as she belittled them. The Persians attempted to resist the onset of Islam militarily, under the leadership of [a series of rebels – Z. M.], but when that road did not prosper, they turned to the method of deception, feigning great love for Islam and infiltrating and corrupting Shiʿism toward their own ends” (cited in A. S. Tritton, Muslim Theology [Bristol, 1947], p. 63). In the famed Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadim under the entry “Abū Muslim” we find similar motives ascribed to this Persian chief propagandist of the Abbasid revolution, and Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih quotes from a poem of the Umayyad general Naṣr b. Sayyār to the effect that “if you ask me about the foundations of [the Abbasids’] religion, I will tell you that it is killing Arabs.” The greatest of Persian poets, Shams al-Din Mohammad-e Hafez, indited: “I am a follower of the ancient majūs; do not be angry with me, O Shaykh, for you offer me promises and he gave me reality,” and elsewhere: “I am a Parsi, loyal to the faith of my fathers; do not accuse me, O Arab conqueror, because my religion is loftier than yours” (see T. P. Hughs, A Dictionary of Islam [Chicago, 1994], entry “Sikhism,” p. 583). A similar position has been adopted in the modern period by many scholars of the Middle East, e. g., M. Azizi, La domination arabe et l’epanouissement du sentiment national en Iran (Paris:

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Why, then, despite the undeniable importance of the national element in Iranian collective consciousness, do we grant this facet of our subject so little attention in our attempt to penetrate to the core of our topic? There are several answers to this question, all of them significant in themselves for discovering the worldview of today’s (and yesterday’s) revolutionary Iranian cleritocracy. First, it is true that these two dimensions of Iranian culture, the Persian national and the Islamic religious, enjoyed a paradoxical but relatively easy coexistence over much of pre-modern history (Ali Shariʿati’s assertion that “Islamic civilization has worked liked scissors and has cut us off completely from our pre-Islamic past” is rank exaggeration¹⁴⁰): the Būyid dynasty (945 – 1030 CE) simultaneously revived old Zoroastrian festivals and originated new Shiʿite rituals; Iranians converted en masse to Islam, but never ceased singing of their national jāhiliyya; Mowlana Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273) could pine away in the same hemstitch for “the Lion of God (ʿAlī) and Rostam son of Zal”; Islamic “illumination mysticism” drew upon, and harked

1938); H. Masse and W. Madelung, “The Assumption of the Title Shahanshah and the Reign of the Daylam (Dawlat al-Daylam),” JNES 28 (1969), pp. 168 – 183; M. J. de Goeje, Memoires sur les Carmathes du Bahrain et les Fatimides (Leiden, 1886), especially the first chapter, and see also page 33, where de Goeje adduces the Carmatian claim (highly reminiscent of the New Testament take on the Jews) that “Allah does not like the Arabs because they killed Ḥusayn, and He prefers to them the subjects of the Chosroes (Iranian emperors) and their successors, because they alone defended the rights of the imams”; V. Minorsky, “Iran: Opposition, Martyrdom and Revolt” in G. E. von Grunebaum (ed.), Unity and Variety in Muslim Civilization (Chicago, 1955), in which this author calls the uprisings of the various Iranian medieval conquistadors “mighty awakenings directed against Arab rule” (p. 184), describes how the Būyids “eliminated the Arab regime and organized Persia on foundations antithetical to those of Muslim orthodoxy” (p. 187), and even opines that the Hurufiyya movement represented “the victory of Persian Sufism over Arab asceticism” (p. 205, n. 18). The rough chronological correspondence between the “Shiʿite century” and the “Iranian intermezzo” cannot have failed to play a role in such theses. Leading the countercharge against this approach are later scholars, including P. M. Holt, R. N. Frye, Ann Lambton, Bernard Lewis, Mustapha Vaziri, Reza Zia Ebrahimi and others. Zahar Barth Manzoori concludes on a more moderate note, concerning the post-revolutionary period, that “Shiʿite identity in Iran is connected with Iranian nationalism” (Manzoori, “Nationalistic and Shiʿite Identities in Iran” in Ridgeon [ed.] Shiʿi Islam, p. 37). Yann Richard points out that “All prayers and theological texts of Shiʿites are in Arabic… So Shiʿism would tend rather to strengthen Iranians’ awareness of belonging to a cultural community dominated by Arabs” (Shiʿite Islam, p. 76). Finally, we should note that the advent of the Safavids may be said to have thrown up a barrier not only between Iran and the rest of the Middle East but between Iran and the emerging European powers. Said Al-e Ahmad of the simultaneous rounding of the Cape of Good Hope and the Sufi-Shiʿite Qizilbash conquest of Persia: “The world turned away from us, and we turned away from the world, and from that time we have considered the West ritually impure (Sprachman, Plagued by the West, p. 24). Shiʿism, more than Sunnism, considers infidels ceremonially pollutive (see Maghen, “Strangers and Brothers…”).  Cited in Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, pp. 330 – 331.

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back to, ancient Iranian motifs of light versus darkness, while regularly referencing Zoroastrian angelology; an eighteenth century general could name his horse Rakhsh after Rostam’s famous steed and his sword Dhu l-Fiqar after ʿAlī’s forked weapon; both Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and lamentations over the imams were recited rhythmically by the pahlavanan in the House of Strength (zurkhaneh). Nevertheless, the invasion of ideology in the modern period (a gift of the West) sharpened definitions, hardened doctrines and undermined the longstanding “tolerance” between these two parallel traditions.¹⁴¹ A millennium of finessed, largely unselfconscious syncretism between the two cultural legacies (punctuated, albeit, as we have said, by outbursts of Iranian “anti-Semitism”) gave way at the end of the nineteenth century to more than a hundred years of pendular oscillation between polar extremes, with first one Weltanschauung and then the other seeking to monopolize the Iranian cultural field. Jalal Al-e Ahmad, the famous author of the booklet Gharbzadegi or “Westitis” that (some would argue) began the intellectual march toward the 1979 revolution, locates the political aspect of this unprecedented drawing of clear battle lines at the time of the 1963 “15th of Khordad” uprising of Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters against what they saw as the objectionable – i. e., the Westernizing and secularizing – elements of Mohammad Reza Shah’s “White Revolution” (enqelab-e sefid): These two rivals (i.e., the “national government” of the king and the “shadow government” of the clerics – Z. M.), after three hundred years of sweeping their considerable differences under the rug, have now become openly hostile to one another.¹⁴²

 The general thesis that Western modernism has influenced modern Islamism in the direction of a more doctrinaire, less pluralistic attitude toward texts, theology and the world at large was most recently advanced by Thomas Bauer, Die Kultur der Ambiguitat (Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2011). None of this is to say, however, that the delicate synthesis between pre- and post-Islamic cultural elements has disappeared in Iran. Indeed, according to some estimates the last several decades have seen a rise in the proportion of Old Persian or Shahnameh-inspired names given to children born in the Islamic Republic, and combinations like “Diyaku-we Hosayni” – a wellknown reformist journalist – are rife. Clerics regularly complain, for instance, about the “farr o vaharr” pendants they see around young peoples’ necks in recent years, in the shape of the symbol of Ahura Mazda, and about the increasingly popular celebrations of “Cyrus Day” on 29 October attended by the so-called Arya-ha and Kuroshi-ha.  Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi (trans. Paul Sprachman, Plagued by the West [Delmar, 1982], p. 50, n. 100.

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At Daggers Drawn In truth, however, this polarizing process began much earlier than 1963. Under the Pahlavi Shahs (1925 – 79), although lip-service was often paid to Shiʿite tradition (especially when the monarchy felt the need for clerical or popular support), the emphasis fell increasingly on the nationalist construction of Iranian identity. Roughly the same period witnessed the discovery and revival of interest in the pre-Islamic era – a period heretofore either ignored or reviled by Islamic tradition as the jāhiliyya or “Time of Barbarism” – across the length and breadth of the Middle East, almost invariably in connection with evidence unearthed by European scholars. Egyptian nationalists like Taha Husayn and Salama Musa built on the archeology of Napoleon’s “savants” – and especially on the epigraphy of Thomas Young and Jean-Francois Champollion who used the Rosetta Stone to decipher hieroglyphics – to evolve the “Pharaonic movement” in the 1920s and 30s; Iraqis exploited the momentous Mesopotamian discoveries of Assyriologists from Jules Oppert in the nineteenth to Samuel Noah Kramer in the twentieth century to claim the legacy of the pioneering civilizations of Sumer and Babylon; Lebanese patriots were led by the works of the Orientalists to look upon the energetic Phoenicians, inventors of the alphabet and tireless traveler-traders, as their illustrious ancestors; Turks were helped even by pseudo-scholars like Armenius Vambery (and genuine scholars like Leon Cahan) to hark back to the Hittites and their probable invention of agriculture; and the Arabs found a new interest in pre-Muḥammadan Arabia – in every one of these cases under the influence, and with the assistance, of Western historical research. In Iran it was the efforts of the early nineteenth century German philologist George Grotefend, and especially his younger contemporary the English Orientalist Henry Rawlinson – whose death-defying style of scholarship included scaling the sheer cliff of Bisitun (Behistun) in the North-West Kermanshah region and painstakingly copying the cuneiform inscription etched therein – that led to the decoding of ancient Persian script and the ability to read millennia-old messages left by Cyrus, Darius and their Achaemenid successors (and beyond). But Europe’s role in cultivating Iranian nationalism began even before Rawlinson and Grotefend, and here we have to step back momentarily into the medieval period. The names by which European Christians have for centuries designated the East as a whole – “Orient” – and the Near East in particular – “Levant” – both derive from Latin roots that signify “rising,” since from the European perspective the sun rose, both literally and metaphorically, in those regions. “Ex oriente lux,” the occidental medievals were wont to proclaim: “The light [not just of the sun, but of wisdom] emerges from the East.” This ubiquitous slogan reflected the “indom-

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itable inclination of Western man to locate in the East his dreams, his hopes and his legends.”¹⁴³ In the words of Goethe: North, West and South disintegrate, Thrones burst, empires tremble, Fly away, and in the pure East, Taste the Patriarchs’ air!¹⁴⁴

Most of the peoples of Europe could point to, and take pride in, an Eastern origin of one kind or another – linguistic, cultural, religious – whether arrived at via the Greco-Roman or the Judeo-Christian route. But the Germans, descendants of the Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Thuringians with their Teutonic language and pagan religion, felt somewhat left out of this continent-wide drang nach osten, until the sun shone upon them in the form of the English philologist and polymath Sir William Jones. In his The Sanskrit Language (1786), Jones was the first to draw attention in a systematic fashion to the startling similarities on the level of grammar and vocabulary between the European languages – especially the Germanic, Romance and Slavic tongues – and the ancient Sanskrit and Iranian languages (speakers of present-day Persian who have emigrated to Western countries cannot fail to be struck by the fundamental likenesses between their mother tongue and their adopted tongue: on the syntactical level, the use, for instance, of the verb “to be” – which is also a full-fledged cognate of its Persian counterpart, i. e. Eng. “is,” Ger. “ist,” Lat. “est,” French “et,” Russian “yest,” Pers. “ast” – and on the etymological level words as basic as “cow” [Ger. “kuh,” Pers. “gav”], “star” [Ger. “stern,” Pers. “setare”], “sun” [Ger. “zon,” Latin “sol,” Gr. “helios,” Pers. “khor”], “foot” [Ger. “fus,” Pers. “Pa”], “mother” [Ger. “mutter,” Pers. “madar”]; “father” [Ger. “vater,” Pers. “pedar”]; “brother” [Ger. “bruder,” Pers. “baradar”]; “daughter” [Ger. “tochter,” Pers. “dokhtar”]; “door” [Ger. “tur,” Pers. “dar”) and hundreds of others. Jones hypothesized that Old Persian and Indian Sanskrit derived from a single linguistic parent once spoken by “Aryans,” and his observations laid the groundwork for the “Indo-European” theory of language development, according to which Persian is actually far more closely related to German (and English) than it is to Semitic Arabic, even though, as mentioned previously, the latter language has contributed over fifty percent of the modern Persian vocabulary.¹⁴⁵ Common characteristics

 Cited in von Grunebaum, Unity, p. 59.  Said, Orientalism, p. 167.  Somewhat paradoxically – given the euphoria of liberation from Semitic religious domination occasioned by the discovery of Jones and subsequent research in that vein – the Bible strongly adumbrates the Aryan or PIE thesis: “These are the descendants of Japheth: Gomer, Magog, Madai [=

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like the lack of gender in verb conjugation, vowel sounds in the middle of roots that change with tense and quite a few more buttressed the earth-shattering theory. Intriguing similarities were soon encountered, as well, between the ancient Aryan (i. e., Indo-Iranian) pantheon and the Norse gods of central Europe, including the purported etymological resemblance between Aesir (a general name for Teutonic deities), Asura (a general name for Sanskrit deities) and Ahura (a general name for early Iranian deities), as well as the very word “God,” which may derive ultimately from Persian khoda. Sanskrit daeva (“sky goddess”), it was realized, is Persian div (“demon”), is Latin deus (“god”), is Greek Zeus (“sky god”), is Old German Tiw (whence “Tiw’s day”) is English divine (not to mention devilish). Suddenly, the German language, the Nordic deities, and even the German nation itself had been vouchsafed a bona fide historical source in the East, indeed, a source further off toward the sunrise than any boasted of by their neighbors. They had, as it were, in a single bound leaped over Caesar and over Christ, and landed far beyond them on the plains of the Rig Veda and the plateau of Zoroaster. Japheth (Sanskrit “Japeto,” Greek “Jypatos”) had freed himself from the longstanding, humiliating guardianship of his older (or younger) brother Shem, and become the father of nations as far flung as Iran and Ireland (the names of both of which connote “Land of the Aryans”). Although Friedrich Nietzsche provided a purely philosophical explanation for his choice of the ancient Iranian prophet Zoroaster as his mouthpiece in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, it is clear that this pro-Aryan, “anti-Semitic” thinker¹⁴⁶ was not uninfluenced in this matter by the scholarship of Jones, as well as (directly or indirectly) the investigations of Anquetil Duperron (first translator of the Zoroastrian scriptures or Avesta, d. 1805), the Schlegel brothers, Bop, Grimm, Muller, Spiegel, Treitschke, Jackson, Rawlinson, Chamberlain and Count de Gobineau, all of whom contributed in various ways to the evolution of the “Aryan thesis.” Nor was Nietzsche the only one to be impressed.

the Medes], Yavan [= Greece], Tubal, Meshech and Tiras [= Paras, according to rabbinic exegesis]. The descendants of Gomer: Ashkenaz [= Scythians, who emigrated to, among other destinations, Sakistan = Sistan and to Europe [Ashkenaz = what would eventually become Germany]…” (Genesis, 10: 2).  The scare quotes around “anti-Semitic” here are designed to acknowledge the undeniably complex nature of Nietzsche’s outlook on this multi-faceted subject. He famously broke with Wagner, among other reasons, due to the latter’s Jew hatred, and the dichotomy of Aryan versus Semitic in his works is neither purely racial nor consistent. Still, the writer of these lines, having perused and wrestled with a fair share of the great continental philosopher’s oeuvre, is more than comfortable styling Nietzsche an anti-Semite, indeed in many ways the anti-Semite. For an introduction to his conception of the Jews as the premier poisoners of the human race, one need not read further than the first three chapters of On the Genealogy of Morals.

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By the turn of the twentieth century the economic and diplomatic inroads of Germany into the Muslim world were of such magnitude that an English attaché serving in the area described the situation jokingly as “Deutschland uber Allah,” and during the first World War the Kaiser’s propaganda machine had already began “milking” the Aryan thesis for all it was worth, suggesting, inter alia, that the word “German” was an etymological cousin of the Iranian province of “Kerman,” with all that that implied in terms of ethnic propinquity, and therefore a foundation for solidarity, between the two states. Germany’s Orientpolitik during the interwar years included financial support for Iranian radical nationalist exile Hasan Taqizadeh’s influential journal Kaveh, named for the legendary blacksmith who deposed the Arab ogre-tyrant Dahhak and filled to the brim with laudatory expositions of pre-Islamic Iran. Hitler moustaches were all the rage among Iranian secular nationalist intellectuals)monaver ol-fekran) in the 1930s, and helped distinguish these enlightened misopogonians from the pious Shiʿite Muslim risheh daran or “beard-wearers.”¹⁴⁷ The Nazi party adopted the Hindu swastika (Sanskrit for “auspicious object” [su asti]) as its symbol, and after the National Socialist accession to power, Iranians were granted an “exemption” from the discriminatory Nuremberg Laws on the pretext that they were pure-blooded Aryans (the young Amir Abbas Hoveyda, later to become the longest serving prime minister under Muhammad Reza Shah, spent the war years in Europe and notes that he obtained a visa to go from Brussels to Paris despite harsh Nazi restrictions on travel because he was “of Aryan stock”).¹⁴⁸ The government-approved, glossy magazine Iran-e Bastan (“Ancient Iran”) regularly feted Hitler – and Reza Shah – and advocated the purification of Iran from the material and spiritual influence of the Jews and other Semites.¹⁴⁹ Nazi propaganda in Persian even promoted the notion that “Shiʿism was a true Aryan religion, in opposition to Arab Islam coined ʻSemitic Sunnism.’”¹⁵⁰

 Peter the Great, a model for early twentieth century Iranian modernizers and for Reza Shah himself, forbad beards (Ansari, Politics of Nationalism, p. 66, n. 106). Sympathy for the Germans, which was also the result of resentment toward the Russians and British, continued to run high during the Second World War, and when Mohammad Reza opened Parliament upon assuming the throne his car was surrounded by crowds shouting “Long live Hitler!” (Buchan, Days of God, p. 29).  Milani, Persian Sphinx, p. 74. Even Jews were saved in this manner by providing them with European passports (Milani, The Shah, p. 67).  Milani, The Shah, p. 60. Reza Shah, it should be said, was not entirely won over, and friction between the Iranian sovereign and the German government increased as war loomed and then raged. Still, in 1940 the crown prince was accompanied at his birthday celebration by none other than Baldur von Schirach, famous leader of the Hitler Youth (Milani, The Shah, p. 71).  Shakibi, Pahlavi Iran, p. 112.

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It was in this atmosphere that Saʿid Nafisi, a celebrated scholar, poet and fiction writer (and uncle of Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran), convinced Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1935 to insist that Europeans refer to his country henceforward not as Persia but as Iran (as it had always been known by its inhabitants), explaining himself as follows in a subsequent “Op-ed”: The word “Iran” is one of the oldest terms by which the Aryan race (nezhad-e arya) identified itself in the arena of the ancient world. This branch of the white race was the architect of human civilization (sazande-ye tamaddon-e bashari)…The cradle and first home of this race was known in the Avesta (the Zoroastrian scriptures – Z. M.) as Airan Vaʿeje, which means “Land of the Aryans” (sarzamin-e aryaha). Our ancestors were proud of their Aryan stock, as the Great Darius styled himself on the stele at Naqsh-e Rostam: “a Parsi son of a Parsi, an Aryan of the seed of an Aryan.”¹⁵¹

By the outbreak of World War II relations between the Nazis and the Iranians were becoming so convivial, among other reasons on the basis of their newly discovered racial-cultural relationship, that the Allies felt it necessary to invade the latter country in 1941, depose Reza Shah and install his son, Mohammad Reza, in his stead.¹⁵² Long before Hitler and even before Reza Shah, Iranian thinkers appeared on the stage who, under the influence of the Aryan thesis and other (for the most part Western-derived) concepts and outlooks, embarked on a path of Persian patriotism coupled with an often fierce antipathy to Islam, and to the Arabs who had brought that religion to Iran in the seventh century (in fact, this combination of agendas was already reflected, or at least adumbrated, in some of the policies of Amir-e Kabir, celebrated minister of the Qajar kings during the 1830s, 40s and early 50s).¹⁵³ Perhaps the earliest to take up the torch of anti-Arab-Muslim Iranianism was the low ranking Qajar prince – fifty-fifth child of Fath Ali Shah – Jalal alDin Mirza (d. 1872). A freethinker and freemason, Jalal al-Din composed his Name-ye Khosrovan or Book of Kings in what Ahmad-e Kasravi would later call zaban-e pak, that is, “pure” Persian cleansed of Arabic words. The work, designed

 Etellaʾat, 10 Dei Mah, 1313. Nafisi dubbed Reza Shah le createur d’une civilization in the Tehran Journal of the same year.  Obviously the ingredients that went into the decision to invade Iran, as well as those that went into the strengthening of the relationship between Iran and Germany in the years leading up to WWII, were more numerous and complex. The Allies remained in the country until after the war and established the supply train to Russia.  The truth of this statement depends on which biography or analysis of Amir-e Kabir’s career and predilections one believes: at one pole that of Fereydun-e Adamiyyat, at the other that of Ayatollah Rafsanjani, and many in between.

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as a textbook, was conspicuously devoid of Arabs, as well: the Muslim conquest, like the Mongol invasion, was essentially dismissed by it as a miserable aberration.¹⁵⁴ Another of the pioneers of what we might call this “neo-Shuʿūbism” (from the aforementioned medieval shuʿūbī movement that championed the Persian cause against the Arabs) was Mirza Fath Ali Akhundzadeh (d. 1878), whose surname hints at his pious Shiʿite upbringing (akhund = cleric, zadeh = child of ). Akhundzadeh’s intellectual career showcases the growing relationship in fin de siècle Iran between (a) Westernization and secularism, (b) nationalism and racialism, and (c) anti-Islamism and anti-Arabism (or as the Khomeinists would later describe these closely connected tendencies: gharbzadegi [“Westitis”], bastangaraʾi [“antiquiphilism”] and eslamsetizi [“Islam baiting”]), an ideological troika that would inform the advocacy of a long series of twentieth century Iranian scholars, public intellectuals and politicians from Mirza Talebov, Ahmad Matin-e Daftary, Isa Sadeq and Fereydun Adamiyat to (in our own time) Reza Mazluman (a.k.a. Kuroshe Aryamanesh), Aramesh-e Dustdar and Amir Taheri. For those modern-day Iranians, beginning with Akhundzadeh, whose exposure to Enlightenment ideas had soured them on the faith of their fathers and the official creed of their country, the “Aryan thesis” performed a singular service, seldom spoken of overtly but always palpably present: it tied Persians – culturally, historically, linguistically, even racially – to Europe, and, simultaneously, severed their ties to the despised (Semitic) Arabs, who had, so these pundits and publicists argued, ruined Iran by imposing upon it the enervating and retrogressive force of (Semitic monotheistic) Islam. (Five decades after Akhundzadeh, the analogy to the burgeoning central European nationalisms of the interwar period would provide Iranian “supremacists” with not one but two strong pseudo-historical legs to stand upon: like the Nazis, they were descendants of the master race; like the Italian Fascists, they could boast of an ancient world empire). Akhundzadeh (also known as Akhundov – he spent a good part of his life in Tiflis, Georgia [Rus. “ov” is close to Pers. “zadeh,” both denoting family relation]) launched a project to replace the Arabic alphabet in which modern Persian is written with Latin letters, and bemoaned “all the glory and majesty of the days of Kayomars, Jamshid, Anushirvan and [Khosro] Parviz” that had been “stolen by a bunch of naked and hungry Arabs” and “bartered for a glimpse of a hair on the head of a houri.”¹⁵⁵ He also regularly ridiculed Shiʿite theology and jurisprudence:  Amanat, Iran, 322– 3. Pro-constitutional preacher Jamal al-Din Vaʿez-e Isfahani – father of renowned author Mohammad Ali-ye Jamalzadeh – also combined Iranian pride (he launched a “buy domestic” campaign) with invective against clerics. He was executed in Borujerd during Muhammad ʿAli Shah’s anti-constitutional coup of 1908.  Akhundzadeh, Maktubat, p. 14.

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It’s “literature” consists of such worthy and momentous discussions as the manner in which ritual purity is to be attained; the ceremonial circumstances under which prayer may be efficaciously offered (if one is in doubt as to how many cycles of genuflection and prostration he has performed, then if he is unsure whether he has performed one or two, then he must act as if he had performed none, but if he is unsure whether he has performed two or three, then he must act as if he has performed four!); how exactly one is obligated to distribute the alms at the end of Ramadan (fetriyeh) and the charity tax (zakāt) and the fifth (khums); and that when one is responding to the call of nature he must not sit facing Mecca and should put most of his weight on his left leg…¹⁵⁶

Akhundzadeh proclaimed baldly that “Islam constitutes the premier obstacle to progress and prosperity among the Muslim nations…I therefore see the eradication of this obstacle as my life’s mission.”¹⁵⁷ His secular outlook was universal: “In my eyes,” he declared, “all the world’s religions are meaningless and fantastic (bi maʿana va afsaneh).”¹⁵⁸ All, that is, except for Zoroastrianism, which in Akhundzadeh’s view evoked the brilliance and majesty of the ancient Aryan-Iranian Empire and therefore deserved the enthusiastic support of any true mihanparast (patriot, lit. “homeland worshipper”).¹⁵⁹ Only slightly less famous as a founder of the nationalist trend in modern Iran was Mirza Agha Khan-e Kermani (d. 1896),¹⁶⁰ who regularly disparaged the Arabs and their “barbaric” culture, bought heavily into the Aryan thesis, mocked Islam and its institutions with great vigor, and viewed Semites as inferior (he even adduced the elongated pronunciation of vowels in Persian as opposed to Arabic and Hebrew as reflective of Iranian patience and deliberation over against Semitic  Akhundzadeh, Maktubat, p. 15. Ironically, similarly fierce criticisms of picayune casuistry would later be heard from the likes of Al-e Ahmad and Ruhollah Khomeini (and before them, of course, Kasravi).  Hamid Algar, “Malkum Khan, Akhundzadeh and the Proposed Reform of the Arabic Alphabet” in MEJ 5 (1969), pp. 116 – 130.  Akhundzadeh, Maktubat, p. 15.  M. Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent: Socio-Religious Thought in Qajar Iran (New York, 1982), p. 155. For more on Akhundzadeh, see Ebrahimi, Emergence, passim.  Mirza Aqa Khan-e Kermani should not be confused with his contemporary Mirza Reza-ye Kermani, although their ideological orientations and their fates were strangely similar. The former was executed in 1896 for his virulent opposition to Naser al-Din Shah; the latter was executed in the same year for assassinating Naser al-Din Shah. Mirza Aqa Khan was, in tandem with his anti-Islamism, a pan-Islamist. This counterintuitive combination works because a delegitimization of the more sui generis elements that separate Shiʿis from Sunnis in favor of the more rationally palatable, generic dimensions of religion allows (theoretically, at least) for the merger of the two sects. Additionally, the replacement of genuine religious sentiment with nativist anti-imperialism militates for an Islamic unity policy. Later reformist thinkers like Kasravi combined such ideas in a somewhat similar fashion.

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hastiness). In Kermani’s view, “Whichever branch of the ugly tree of Iranian moral corruption we trace, we arrive at seeds sown and roots put down by Arabs (taziyan). All of the base characteristics and foolish habits of the Iranians are either trusts deposited directly with us by the Arab nation (emanat o vadiyʿat-e mellat-e arab) or the indirect results of the invasion that the Arabs carried out [in the seventh century] against Iran.”¹⁶¹ Describing the pilgrimage to Mecca (ḥajj), Kermani wrote: It is a stupid custom that involves prostration before some rotten bones in dusty graves…walking seven times around a black stone [embedded in the corner of the Kaʿba] like a bunch of crazy people, slaughtering thousands of poor animals [for the sacrifice], and in the end returning to their countries having squandered all of their possessions [on the expenses of the journey], hungry and barefoot – but just think! In return for all this, they have acquired the coveted title ḥājjī! ¹⁶²

Like many Middle Eastern intellectuals of his time, Kermani was deeply enamored of Voltaire, whom he quotes on one occasion as wondering “how the Persians – this ancient, experienced, talented and glorious nation – could adopt a religion so foolish and ridiculous that even a toddler wouldn’t believe in it.”¹⁶³ Kermani himself went much further in his vilification of Muslim tradition, both the Sunni and Shiʿi versions thereof, hurling offensive invective at the “Righteous Caliphs” (including the last one, ʿAlī) and even at the Prophet Muḥammad himself.¹⁶⁴ Another key figure in the spread of such sentiments was Kermani’s more well-known compatriot, Mirza Malkom Khan, founder of Iranian Freemasonry (faramush-khaneh) and first Iranian ambassador to London until his fall from grace (for taking bribes to help European companies gain control over certain sectors of the Iranian economy).¹⁶⁵

 Amin-e Taryan, “Ijad-e kanunha-ye nasyonalisti dar asr-e Reza Shah Pahlavi,” Jomhuriye Eslami, 03/11/1999. The term taziyan, which may be translated “raiders” (though its etymology is debated), is mostly, but not always, employed in a derogatory fashion. Note that the sentence of Kermani’s here quoted consists almost entirely of Arabic loan words.  Bayat, Mysticism, p. 159.  Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Dar khedmat va khiyanat-e roshanfekran (Tehran, 1966), vol. 1, p. 83.  Ironically, Kermani may have been psychologically and culturally prepared to vault the barrier against making such fiercely offensive and blasphemous statements by the Shiʿi practice known as sabb al-ṣaḥāba or “insulting the [Prophet Muḥammad’s] Companions.” Also ironically, Kermani at one point proposed to elevate the status of none other than Source of Emulation Mirza Hasan-e Shirazi to that of a “sort of Shiʿi pope” in the hopes of using him against Qajar despotism and Naser al-Din’s willingness to sell off Iran’s resources to foreigners (Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, p. 87).  In specific, Malkom Khan was accused of taking bribes in exchange for bringing the lottery concession into Iran.

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Malkom Khan publicized many of these “progressive,” “patriotic” and “enlightened” ideas in the pages of his short-lived but influential periodical, Qanun (“Law”), during the 1890s. Still, such trends remained the intellectual playthings of a relatively small cadre of thinkers until the turn of the twentieth century. The refocusing of the cultural-ideological lens away from God and toward country and nation was accentuated by the five year-long series of protests, power struggles, coups and civil war collectively known as the Constitutional Revolution (enqelab-e mashruteh or mashrutiyat, 1906 – 11). This popular movement culminated in the acceptance by the Qajar ruler Muzaffar al-Din Shah (d. 1907) – whom the French were in the habit of calling Mauvaise Affair al-Din – of limits on his absolutist rule, and in the formation of a Parliament (majles) that has lasted in one form or another down to the present day. Though supported, and often led, by many high-ranking members of the Shiʿite clergy, it of a necessity entailed a shift in the ideological center of gravity: from the celestial to the terrestrial, from theology (elahiyyat) to humanism (ensaniyyat, adamiyyat), from the One (whether divine or royal) to the many, from the (theoretically) universal jurisdiction of immutable religion to the heady phenomenon of a national entity legislating and re-legislating for itself. By the very act of taking concerted initiative, “the people” (mardom) had willed itself into existence, had established itself as a focus of identity and allegiance and a force to be reckoned with. No longer passive subjects but active citizens-in-the-making, Iranians had embarked on a double-ply enterprise of internal and external “self-determination,” carving out a distinct, independent space for themselves vis-à-vis both their sovereign and the outside world. “Outside world” refers here not so much to other states or empires – Iran had existed as a separate national and in many cases political entity for millennia – but rather to the longstanding alternative locus of Persian self-definition and solidarity, the trans-national Muslim, or at least Shiʿite Muslim, community (umma). Just as denizens of the various principalities of the Italian peninsula gave increasing weight in the eighteenth century to their Italian nationality over against their affiliation with the Catholic Church and fealty to the Pope, so the Iranian mashrutehkhahan or constitutionalists led their countrymen away from the traditional sense of belonging to a religious umma that traversed borders and tendered obedience to a handful of maraji‘ al-taqlid (“Sources of Emulation” or “Grand Ayatollahs”), and toward identification with the common Iranian patria, language and historical-literary culture.¹⁶⁶  Though the many clerics who supported the constitutional movement – including important jurists like Ayatollahs Tabatabaʾi, Behbehani and Khorasani – obviously did not see the matter thus, a goodly number of them woke up sooner or later to the inevitable negative consequences for religion of the ideologies behind constitutionalism.

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This transformation is nowhere better epitomized than in the very terms employed by exponents of the new outlook to describe it: melli-garaʾi or melli-vandi. The suffixes garaʾi and vandi mean “inclination” and “affiliation” respectively, but the really interesting element in both designations is melli, which has a long etymological and philological history (which we shall reduce here to several sentences). Appearing over a dozen times in the Qurʿan, the Arabic word milla denotes a creed, a belief system, a school of thought, or a community of devotees to any of these. “I have forsaken the milla of a people who believe not in Allah and are deniers of the Hereafter,” the Qurʿan quotes the biblical Joseph (Yusuf ) as declaring, “and I have adopted the milla of my fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (Q. 12: 37– 8). “Neither the Jews nor the Christians will be satisfied with you (O Muḥammad) unto you follow their milla” (Q. 2: 120). The Arabic verb derived from the same root, malla, signifies “to become weary or bored,” a secondary meaning emerging out of the root’s fundamental purport, which is “to speak” or “to write” (see, e. g., Q. 2: 272) – too much of either of which can weary or bore. This most basic definition of m-l-l (or m-w-l) is related, in its turn, to the Hebrew term mila or “word,” which finally explains the Qurʿanic usage: mankind’s religions, according to the earliest Islamic perspective, are a staggered series of communications or “Words” revealed from On High – each successive scripture a “Good Word” in its own right – and the communities privileged to receive these consecutively vouchsafed divine messages (Jews, Christians, Muslims) are therefore styled “Peoples of the Book” (ahāli [sing. ahl] al-kitāb). Mellat, the Persian pronunciation of milla, traditionally meant what its Arabic counterpart meant: a faith or faith community. During the late nineteenth century, however, the meaning of mellat underwent a radical transformation (in Turkish as well as in Persian, but not in Arabic), in line with the European worldview that was beginning to infiltrate the ranks of the Iranian intelligentsia. By the time of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905 – 11) mellat no longer indicated “religion” but “nation,” and melli- garaʾi or melli-vandi signified “nationalism.” The momentous (but somehow still smooth and almost imperceptible) transvaluation of this one term speaks volumes about the philosophical-ideological and (eventually) socio-cultural metamorphoses that transpired in Iran during the first decades of the twentieth century, as the locus of loyalty and identity shifted from deus to populus. It is important to re-examine the translation of melli as “nationalist,” because this translation seems to lie at the root of several serious misconceptions. The two events in twentieth century Iranian history that are most often and most closely associated with the term “nationalist” in the scholarly and even lay literature – the Constitutional Revolution and Mosaddeq’s oil nationalization campaign – were not characterized by the same “nationalist” ideology that animated the

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Reza Shah period in between them or that of his son after them. Indeed, the two trends were often in conflict.¹⁶⁷ True, the likes of Kermani, Akhundzadeh and Malcolm Khan had had a hand in setting the intellectual stage for the protests and transformations of 1905 – 11, and there is no denying that these men, as we saw above, purveyed at the same time a strong anti-Arab, anti-Islamic and pro-Aryanist message (a combination found among some of the radical constitutionalists themselves, such as Hasan-e Taqizadeh). But the melli-garaʾi of the majority of the thinkers, agitators, demonstrators, fighters and politicians of the Constitutional Revolution and, later, the oil nationalization campaign – from Sattar Khan and Ayatollah Tabatabaʾi to Mehdi-ye Bazargan and Abol-Hasan Bani Sadr – was something else entirely. It was about liberalism; it was about strengthening Iran through restriction of the royal prerogative, through popular political participation, through the rule of law, and through independence from foreign political, economic and cultural domination. For the Tudeh and other leftists, as Mohammad Reza Shah correctly pointed out in Mission for My Country, it was about “unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union.”¹⁶⁸ It was certainly not about neo-Zoroastrianism, anti-Semitism or etatism. And in its capacity as a force for Iranian-Islamic authenticity and nativism at least partially led by clerics, it may even be said to have been about religion – the original meaning, as we saw above, of the term melli. ¹⁶⁹ In other words, such “nationalism” was in almost every way the antithesis of the Pahlavi project. ¹⁷⁰ While

 The present writer, however, would not go as far as Mehmet Talha Pasaoglu, who argues that “Whereas Mosaddeq was struggling for the nationalization of oil sources, the legitimacy of the Pahlavi regime was more or less bound to the British government” (Pasaoglu, “Nationalist Hegemony,” p. 116). After all, both Pahlavi sovereigns did much to free Iran from excessive dependence on Britain. Still, there is no question that both Reza Shah and Mohammad Reza Shah looked West, politically, economically and especially culturally.  Maʾmuriyyat baraye vatanam, pp. 164– 166, where the king states the obvious: that such loyalty to a foreign power is in no way reconcilable with the mantle of nasyonalism or mihan-parasti claimed by many of these leftist activists. The more centrist socialists of the National Front are often characterized as “left-wing nationalists” (e. g., Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 69), with a bit more justification.  The constitutional movement was melli in the sense of focusing on the people more than on the monarchy. Admittedly, for some, it was melli also in the sense of focusing on the people more than on God. Abbas Amanat writes that “constitutionalists did not see any urgency for speculative debates, nor could they see a paradox in complying with Islam as a comprehensive social order on the one hand and advocating secular modernity on the other” (Iran, p. 382). The contradiction, however, soon became clear to important exponents of both sides, who ceased finessing what they had come to realize was, in truth, a zero-sum game.  Goncheh Tazmini, relying on Ervand Abrahamian, sums up the popular Iranian perception of the second Pahlavi Shah as “a Western lackey, and a dictator who had imposed an alien culture on the country. This ʻalien culture’ was criticized by Iranian intellectuals [during the Mossadeq peri-

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all historical trends are infinitely complex, and there were unquestionably shared sentiments between, say, Kermani, Naʿini, Teymurtash and Mossadeq – a common attraction to humanism, perhaps; a solicitousness for the Iranian nation; even a love of patria¹⁷¹ – still, overall we have to do with two almost diametrically opposing tendencies, and we should be wary about employing the same term for both. Calling Mehdi-ye Bazargan and Ayatollah Taleqani’s Iranian Freedom Movement [nehzat-e azadi-ye Iran] “nationalist,” for instance – as the vast majority of authors do – would seem to be a recipe for confusion, especially when Reza Khan and Saʿid Nafisi, or Ahmadinejad and Esfandiar Mashaʿi, are called nationalists in the same breath.¹⁷² Khomeinists are aware of this problem, and tend to use the European word nasyonalism when referring to Pahlavi-brand patriotism. At any rate, what we might call, with the above reservations in mind, the liberal- and religious-based nationalism (melli-garaʾi) of the Constitutional period, would soon give way to – or be upstaged by – the mihan-parasti (lit. “patria-worship”) or fascist/chauvinist/racist and brutally secular nationalism of the early Pahlavi period, already adumbrated in the work of Akhundzadeh, Kermani and their ilk. Iraniyyat was coming into its own; Islamiyyat was on its way out. (Harking back to the pre-Islamic, “Kiyanid” past was not really new in the late nineteenth century: Karim Khan Zand and Nader Shah had more than dabbled in such atavism – partially as a counterweight to Turkish traditions – and even the medieval Turkic dynasties themselves had celebrated the Shahnameh, to say nothing of the Zoroastrian sympathies of many participants in the earlier “Iranian Intermezzo”). In 1921 Reza Khan, commander of the Iranian “Cossack Brigades” (established by the Persian sovereign Nasser al-Din Shah in 1878 with Russian assistance) – who would have crossed the proverbial Rubicon had there been any rivers worthy of the name in Northern Iran – brought four thousand soldiers into the capital

od] for eroding Iran’s cultural authenticity, political sovereignty and economic stability” (Goncheh Tazmini, “To be or not to be (like the West): Modernization in Russia and Iran,” Third World Quarterly, 2018, p. 10). The accusation that he was a lackey of the Western powers is largely unjustified. The accusation that he helped impose Western culture on Islamic Iran is quite justified.  “Long live Iran!” (zende bad Iran) was a central rallying cry of the constitutionalists, and the refocus on mihan was unquestionably present in constitutionalist discourse. The patriotism of the Pahlavi period gestated during the constitutional era. So did the antiquiphilism: a 1914 postage stamp featured Darius I under the Zoroastrian farr o vahar (Amanat, Iran, p. 439). Even earlier, during the Qajar period, Iran’s only battleship was named “The Persepolis” (Amanat, Iran, p. 442). One might also note centralization as an aspiration common to these conflicting trends. The conflation of these two modes of “nationalism” goes back to the French Revolution itself (see Ansari, Politics of Nationalism, pp. 4– 8).  See, for a recent instance of this extremely common identification of the two trends, Matthew K. Shannon, “Reading Iran: American Academics and the Last Shah,” Iranian Studies 51: 2.

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and carried out his British-supported coup d’etat, eventually toppling the last Qajar king (Nasser’s great-grandson, Ahmad Shah) and assuming the throne in his place four years later in 1925. In tune with the rising nationalist fashion, Reza chose for himself and his dynasty the name “Pahlavi,” evoking the script in which pre-Islamic Sassanian Persian had been written, as well as the ancient champions of Iran or pahlavanan who had once legendarily played and fought in the North-Eastern region of the country known, at that remote time, as pahleh (more or less today’s Khorasan province).¹⁷³ The military man-turned-monarch was declared by his acolytes to be “of the purest Aryan stock,” his courtiers even putting about the rumor that Reza was descended from Darius, the third Achaemenid emperor. At the outset of his reign, Reza Shah’s first minister of court, the redoubtable Russophile-Francophile statesman (and boozer, gambler and womanizer) Abd al-Hosayn Taymurtash, established the “Society for National Heritage” (anjoman-e asar-e melli), which engaged over the ensuing decades in hundreds of artistic, architectural and literary ventures aimed at rebuilding a New Iran on the foundations of Ancient Iran – skipping demonstratively over everything that came in between.¹⁷⁴ Together with Iran’s most famous modern poet, Malek al-Shoʿara Bahar, and the above mentioned Saʿid-e Nafisi, Teymurtash founded the Daneshkadeh (“college”) association and journal, which focused on what one might call “sentimental history” or a “penchant for the ancient” (bastangaraʾi) – in a word: on the pre-Islamic period. He indefatigably promoted the cult of Ferdowsi and his Shahnameh (“Book of [pre-Islamic] Kings”), which rapidly rose to the status of “the epic national poem of Iran” (hamase-ye melli-ye Iran).¹⁷⁵ Together with Finance Minister Firuz Mirza Farmanfarma and Minister of Judicial Affairs Ali Akbar Davar, Taymurtash belonged to the “triumvirate” surrounding Reza Shah in the late 1920s and early 1930s, all three members of which were dedicated to the nationalist (and even, in varying degrees, the “Aryanist”) agenda. Their fourth wheel, so to speak, was Saʿid-e Nafisi, who averred that the Arabs “did not know how to wear clothes or build houses” when they had first entered Iran.¹⁷⁶ Education Minister Isa Sadiq “introduced school songs, patriotic holidays and nationalist themes” – based to a large extent on what he had witnessed in the American cities of Hackensack

 There are other explanations of the dynasty name, see, e. g., Amanat, Iran, p. 440.  See Talinn Grigor, “Recultivating ʻGood Taste’: The Early Pahlavi Modernists and their Society for National Heritage,” Iranian Studies 37:1 (March, 2004). Isa Sadeq, Foroughi, Teymurtash and Taqizadeh among other famous nationalists were members.  Hamase and melli are, ironically, both Arabic words. Mohammad ʿAli Foroughi was also highly instrumental in elevating the Shahnameh to this lofty status, see Ansari, Politics, pp. 104– 108.  Said-e Nafisi, “Jonbesh-haye melli-ye Iranian bar zedde tazian” in Ketab-e Dinshahi-ye Irani (Tehran: n.p., 1953), p. 14.

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and Detroit – “all of which made an ancient love of Iran into a modern nationalism.”¹⁷⁷ Bahram Shahrokh, son of Reza Shah’s Zoroastrian advisor Kaykhosroe Shahrokh, studied in Germany and supervised Radio Berlin broadcasts in Persian during this period. He pumped Aryanist ideas into Iran via the airwaves and became an enthusiastic Nazi sympathizer – possibly even a trainee of Joseph Goebbels. After the war Muhammad Reza Shah appointed him director of National News and Propaganda.¹⁷⁸ Even more pivotal to the construction of the nationalist narrative was scholar and politician Mohammad Ali-ye Foroughi (d. 1942), tutor to Ahmad Shah (the last Qajar monarch, reigned 1909 – 1925), both Reza Shah’s and his son Muhammad Reza Shah’s first prime-minister, and – like many other power brokers (and nationalists, and Westernizers) throughout the Pahlavi period – an active Freemason.¹⁷⁹ The keynote speaker at the coronation ceremony of Reza Shah in 1926, Foroughi repeatedly stressed the “pure Iranian stock” (pak-zadi, iran-nezhadi) of the new king – he hailed from the Mazandaran region which was “saved by its geographical isolation from foreign invasions and thus from miscegenation” – calling him “the reviver of ancient Persian monarchy” and “the heir to the crown and throne of Kiyan.” In his Sayr-e Hekmat dar Orupa (The History of Wisdom in Europe) – one of many works penned by this aristocratic author-turned-administrator – Foroughi summed up what he believed to be the fundamental difference between the Aryan and Semitic worldviews: [T]he religions that flourished in Greece, and indeed, among each and every one of the Aryan peoples, were all informed by one version or another of the doctrine of the Unity of Existence

 Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 67.  Reza Zia Ebrahimi, “Self Orientalization and Dislocation: The Uses and Abuses of the ʻAryan’ Discourse in Iran,” Iranian Studies 44: 4 (2011), p. 461. This appointment came despite Bahram’s attacks on Reza Shah near the end of his reign as a result of the king’s attempts to placate the British and avert the impending invasion.  Freemasonry has been a favorite locus of conspiracy theories in almost all Muslim countries over the past hundred years, with everyone from the “Father of Islamic Modernism” Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (al-Asadobadi) and the Young Turks of the Committee of Union and Progress to President Jamal Abd al-Nasser of Eyypt and President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan being accused of membership in the secret organization. But at least in the case of Iran, the link between the corridors of power and the Faramushkhaneh or Freemason Lodge was genuine, strong and longstanding, and involved movers and shakers from reformer-journalist Mirza Malkom Khan and statesman-historian Hasan Pirnia at the turn of the twentieth century, all the way down to foreign minister Abdallah Entezam (1953 – 6) and prime minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda (1965 – 77), not to mention important members of the royal family and perhaps even the Shah himself. Foroughi is rightly seen as a pillar of Pahlavism, but may have had a hand in convincing the British to depose Reza Shah – who had sent Foroughi’s son-in-law before the firing squad – in favor of his son Mohammad Reza.

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(vahdat-e vojud); whereas the Jews, and all those who derived their philosophical worldviews from the Torah [i. e., especially Christians and Muslims – Z. M.], held that God brought the world into being from absolute nihil and consequently that the Creator was a wholly separate entity from Creation, the relationship between them being construed as that between producer and produced (saneʿ va masnuʿ).¹⁸⁰

Foroughi made use of this thought-provoking (though abjectly simplistic) bifurcation to argue that in the Semitic mindset, the sons of Adam are perforce conceived as lowly and passive creatures, servants of their Maker, while according to the Aryan outlook human beings are part and parcel of the Godhead, as noble and powerful as the universe itself. The “submission” (islām) of men to a deity was, in Foroughi’s eyes, the root of all baseness. Though Foroughi’s nationalism – and that of the most intellectually sophisticated of his cohorts – was less race-based than culture-based, as Ali Ansari has shown,¹⁸¹ the line between the two was far from clear, especially in the pre-war period. High-school textbooks of the period proclaimed that “History now belongs to the narrative of the people of the white race. The white race has several branches, the most important of which is the Aryan one [to which] the peoples of Iran and Europe belong.”¹⁸² The appeal to the distant, pre-Islamic, imperial Persian past was ubiquitous. Jalal Al-e Ahmad wrote: I remember back then the German pharmaceutical company Bayer printed an illustration on its aspirin bottle of an Iranian woman who had taken to her bed – she was, of course, a ma-

 Foroughi, Sayr-e Hekmat dar Orupa, vol. 1, p. 138. Ironically, Foroughi here makes use of the Muslim mystical Arabic term for pantheism – waḥdatu l-wujūd – made famous by Muḥyī al-Dīn b. ʿArabī (d. 1240 CE). Interestingly, Patricia Crone echoes aspects of this thesis – sans the ideological implications thereof – in the conclusion to her Nativist Prophets: “To the monotheists the dividing line between God and the world he had created was replicated in the barriers between the angelic, human, animal, vegetable and inanimate realms of which the created world was composed. Each realm was separated from the others by ontological gulfs that nothing could cross: the divine could not become human [or vice versa]…in principle the categories were hermetically sealed…humans were special as God’s favourites, not by sharing in his essence. They were just his slaves…To the Zoroastrians, by contrast, the fundamental cleavage was vertical rather than horizontal. Divinity ran through this world…Like their counterparts in Greece and India the Zoroastrians were accordingly more given to seeing the categories of creation [in such a way as to perceive human beings as special] by virtue of their position in the spectrum of divinity, light and spirit… Zoroastrians saw [human beings] as having originated at the very top of the spectrum as divine beings; and they formed a part of [the] cosmos…” (pp. 455 – 456). This reading of the dichotomy between Semitic and Aryan cosmologies is certainly open to challenge.  Ali M. Ansari, “Iranian Nationalism and the Question of Race” in Litvak, Constructing Nationalism, pp. 101– 116.  Shakibi, Pahlavi Iran, p. 109.

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triarch of the motherland! (mam-e mihan) – her head lying on the breast of the king of that time, and Cyrus and Darius and Ardashir and all the rest of their ilk had descended from the heavenly awning to the vestibule – the Caspian Sea – to pay a visit to the sick. And what a shadow was cast over the whole gathering by the symbol of divine majesty (foruhar) floating above, and what flashing swords adorned the waists of their honors, and what spangles and pom-poms and glitter everywhere! That’s how it was then: even Bayer aspirin required the imprimatur of Ferdowsi.¹⁸³

Al-e Ahmad characterized this whole period under Reza Shah, which he experienced as a child, a teenager and a young adult, as one of zardoshti-bazi (“the Zoroastrian game”), hakhamaneshi-bazi (“the Achaemenid game”), shahnameh-bazi (the Shahnameh game) and, concurrently, “Islam suppression” (kubidan-e eslam).¹⁸⁴ The Khomeinists referred to it simply as dowre-ye khafaqan – “the Days of Suffocation.”¹⁸⁵ Reza Shah knew where he wanted to take the country, and he would brook no criticism. “The residents of Tehran,” he is reported to have said, “are invited to keep quiet.”¹⁸⁶ So were the residents of Qom.

The Fedora for the Turban Under the new Pahlavi regime the purview of Islam in society was rapidly and significantly curtailed, in part due to the inspiration of Mustafa Kamal Ataturk’s own

 Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Dar khedmat va khiyanat-e rowshanfekran (Tehran: n.d., n.p.), vol. 2, pp. 155 – 1566. Many prominent scholars have written about the nationalist ethos in early twentieth century Iran. The best place to start is probably Richard Cottam, Nationalism in Iran (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964); an important recent contribution is Meir Litvak (ed.), Constructing Nationalism in Iran: From the Qajars to the Islamic Republic (New York: Routledge, 2017).  He would go on to complain that the “West-toxic” outlook offered a conception of Iranian history as if “from the Sassanian Empire until the government of [Reza Shah’s] coup d’etat, only twoand-a-half days had elapsed, and even these in sleep” (Al-e Ahmad, Occidentosis, p. 23).  E. g., ʿAli Akbar-e Nateq-e Nuri, Khaterat-e Hojjatoleslam va l-Moslemin Nateq-e Nuri (Tehran: Markaz-e Asnad-e Enqelab-e Eslami, 1382), pp. 47– 48. Another term widely used to describe this period was (and still is) estebdad, “the Despotism.” “Reza Khan against Reza Jan” was also a popular description of the period: coercive king against dear imam. Ali Ansari and others have argued that the nationalism of Iranian intellectuals during this period was much more nuanced – and much less racist and aryanist – than was previously thought. As usual, all overarching assertions regarding sweeping megatrends may be, and in many cases should be, tempered by adducing contrary examples. Nevertheless, and despite the undeniable variety and complexity of positions on this issue among twentieth century Persian thinkers and leaders, the present writer perceives in this attempt to mitigate the power of Pahlavi era chauvinist Iraniyyat more than a little revisionism for its own sake.  Majd, Ministry of Guidance, Preface, p. 1.

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vigorous Westernization program in Turkey, to which Reza Shah was directly exposed while on a four week-long state visit to that country in 1934. The new king, it should be noted, did not begin his career as a secularizer. Hojjatoleslam va l-Muslimin Sayyid Hosayn-e Badla: Reza Khan’s disposition prior to his ascension to the throne was quite different from that which he assumed after his coronation. Before he became king he was commander of the Cossack Brigade (raʾis-e qazak-ha – an elite Persian force modeled on its Russian counterpart, Z. M.), and he affected piety. He built a dirge-reciting center (markaz-e rowzeh khani) for his troops wherein were held regular mourning sessions for the Imams, and in truth there was no more orderly and impressive display of chest-beating (sineh zani) anywhere in the country. I witnessed with my own eyes at the house of Aqa Seyyed Kamal-e Din Behbehani, brother of the late Aqa Seyyed Abd Allah Behbehani who was among the influential clerics in the constitutional movement…the arrival of a division of Cossack soldiers, under the supervision of Reza Khan, who were so orderly that not a hair moved on their heads, and who proceeded to perform the flagellation ceremony in striking unison, [some of them going so far as to] practice sword smiting on the forehead (qameh ham mizadand). When Reza Khan used to bring the chest-beaters to Ayatollah Behbehani’s house he would say, “These are your personal army” (inan qoshun-e shomah hastand). Even after he assumed the throne, he would make the pilgrimage to Qom to visit Ayatollah ʿAbd al-Karim Haʾeri (founder of the city’s famed howze-ye ʿelmiye seminary system – Z. M.)…and affirm: “I am your muqallid (follower, who must obey your decrees).”¹⁸⁷

But the Pahlavi monarch soon changed his tune (or showed his true spots). Some see the turning point in an event which occurred some three years after the advent of the dynasty. On the double occasion of the Iranian-Zoroastrian New Year (Nowruz) and “The Night of Power” (27 Ramadan, when the Qurʿan began to be revealed), the Shah’s wife Taj al-Muluk and several members of her family took a day trip to Qom, where they entered the Sacred Enclosure surrounding the grave of Fatemeh-ye Maʿasumeh (sister of the eighth Shiʿite Imam, ʿAli l-Riḍā). The ladies in the entourage, including the queen, reportedly let their head-cover-

 Najafi, Cheshm, p. 94. On the occasion of another one of Reza Shah’s early displays of piety, he strode with straw on his head in a Muḥarram procession “followed by his military band, which, to indicate that they were in mourning for Imam Ḥusayn, played their version of Chopin’s funeral march” (Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 226). He participated, as well, in a commemoration of sham-e ghariban or Night of the Oppressed (between the tenth and eleventh of Muḥarram), clad in black, candles in hand, beating his chest (Amanat, Iran, p. 438). In yet another instance, this time of “negative” devoutness, Reza Shah, when on army inspection tours, would sometimes call out: “Whore-wife Bahaʾis step forward!” (Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 238. Mottahedeh, who adduces this as an instance of the king “showing the mullahs who was boss” by tolerating the Bahaʾis, adds, “As long as he didn’t call them ʻwhore mother Bahaʾis’ they knew they were all right”).

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ings slip to one degree or another – or “wore transparent veils” – which transgression was duly reported by many appalled pilgrims to a cleric-custodian of the shrine named Muhammad Taqi Bafqi-ye Yazdi. This shaykh did not hesitate to reprimand and humiliate the offenders in public – according to one version he vociferated: “If you are Muslims, why are you dressed like that? And if you are not Muslims, why have you come to this place?” – and the royal entourage left the holy sanctuary in a huff and immediately contacted the palace in Tehran. Enraged, Reza Shah arrived the next day in an armoured vehicle and, surrounded by troops, strode into the mausoleum and beat and kicked the impudent clergyman senseless with his whip and boots in front of all and sundry.¹⁸⁸ Things went downhill from there, and by the mid-nineteen thirties the king and the Shiʿite ulama were at loggerheads as never before in the country’s history.¹⁸⁹ The severe reduction of the role and authority of religion and concomitant adoption of European norms and mores affected many areas of public life, most visibly and sensationally in the matter of the “uniform dress code” (qanun-e lebas-e mottahed ol-shekl), which included a ban on traditional costume and headgear for men and its replacement with the modern jacket-and-pants suit (kot shalvar) and “Pahlavi hat” (first a French kepi and later a fedora or chapeau).¹⁹⁰ In smaller towns and villages there was reportedly a pole in the central square upon which the “communal hat” was hung, and anybody who had reason to go to the nearby city would take it with him to avoid being fined or beaten. (Ethnic dress in general, including that of the Zoroastrian or Gabr community, was also

 Bafqi was imprisoned, freed through the intercession of Ayatollah Haʾeri-ye Yazdi, and banished to the Shah Abd al-’Azim mosque just South of Tehran, where Khomeini would visit him until his death in 1946 (Buchan, Days of God, p. 106). Farah Diba, Mohammad Reza’s third queen, was turned off to what little religion she had seen as a child by an incident in which an irate cleric had berated her for not covering her hair (cited in Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 89).  Unveiled women already protested on behalf of a Reza Shah monarchy in 1925, condemning “reactionary” mullahs (Amanat, Iran, 446). They were famously preceded by Babi heroine Tahereh (“Qurrat al-ʿAyn”), who regularly unveiled herself in public.  This decree had some half-hearted precursors, the earliest of which was a fiat issued by Muhammad Shah, the third Qajar sovereign, in 1839 (see Chehabi, Culture Wars, p. 22). This seems to have been addressed primarily to courtiers and was probably honored for the most part in the breach. Still, it set matters in motion. Iranians were urged, in addition, to listen to European music, play European sports, absorb European table-manners, etc. (see the excellent set of articles by Houshang Chehabi on these various campaigns in Iranian Studies, published during the years surrounding the turn of the Christian millennium). “Iranians,” urged Reza Shah, “must know that from the point of view of spirit, physical character, and talent they are not different from Westerners. The only difference is this hat…” (Shakibi, Pahlavi Iran, p. 119).

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banned under the same law: Europeanism trumped even Aryanism).¹⁹¹ Most notorious in this connection was, of course, the kashf-e hejab-e ejbari or “forcible removal of the veil” for women, which led, on top of general widespread malaise, to the uprising in Mashhad’s Goharshad Mosque (1935), suppressed by the forces of Reza Shah with significant loss of life (the date of this massacre now doubles as “Veil and Modesty Day” [ruz-e hejab va ʿeffaf ] in the Islamic Republic).¹⁹² In many cities policemen were sent to lie in wait outside of mosques and bath-houses in order to ambush emerging women and, Peter the Great style, doff and confiscate their head-coverings. Reza Baraheni recalls that In the mid-thirties Reza Shah tried to unveil the Iranian women by brute force. Whenever a woman walked outside, his police would tear the veil from her face and figure…Since there were no showers in Iranian homes, women had to go to a public bath. [In order to save her from the dishonor of being forcibly de-veiled] the husband would put his wife in a large sack and carry her like a bale of cotton to the bath. I remember from my childhood, when my father would carry his mother in the sack, empty his load in the bath and then come back for his wife, my mother. He once told me that Reza Shah’s policemen had asked him what it was that he was carrying. He had improvised an answer: pistachio nuts. The policeman said, “Let me have some,” and started tickling granny. First she laughed, and then she wiggled her way out of the sack and took to her heels. My father was arrested.¹⁹³

In his memoirs, Ayatollah Mirza Ali-ye Falsafi (d. 2006), whom we met in the preface to this volume, writes: I have profoundly bitter memories of the events surrounding the “removal of the veil” and the terrible crimes perpetrated by Reza Khan (after he became king – Z. M.) and his mercenaries against the women of this country and against the chaste reputation of the female

 Sir Claremont Skrine, World War in Iran (London: Constable and Co., 1962), p. 56 w/ illustration.  Rarely noted in this connection is that the mob in the mosque, whipped into a frenzy by Shaykh Mohammad Taqi Bohlul (a centenarian when he died in 2005), had lynched a government official prior to the sanguinary attack. Ayatollah Khameneʾi’s grandfather, Seyyed Hashem-e Mirdamadi (d. 1986, almost a centenarian himself ), was arrested for participating in the protests. The commander of the forces who carried out what amounted to this massacre – in which women and children were machine-gunned as well – ex-’Cossack’ Iraj Matbuʿi, who had become a senator by 1979, was shot by the revolutionaries at Evin prison. Abbas Milani claims that, contrary to most narratives, the issue that led to the unrest at Goharshad was male headgear, not female (The Shah, p. 57), the edict regarding which was proclaimed officially at the outset of 1936. Several other sources concur.  Baraheni, Crowned Cannibals, p. 52. “Government officials were ordered to stage tea parties and receptions and bring their (unveiled) wives with them. Many, from the Prime Minister downwards, pleaded diplomatic illnesses or even in some cases contracted temporary marriages with women willing to appear unveiled” (Buchan, Days of God, p. 109).

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members of the Muslim family (navamis-e moslemin). I witnessed scenes so awful that I was unable to stand by and do nothing. I will never forget how one day I saw an old woman who had dyed her white hair with henna and covered her head with a chador (full body drape) underneath which she also wore a ru sari (kerchief ) which in those days was called a charqad. Suddenly a vile policeman (pasban-e palid) sprung out of nowhere and ripped the chador off of her head, and she screamed in horror and shame. When he then proceeded to yank off the charqad as well, a chunk of her hair came out with it, and she howled in pain. The poor, disheveled, shamed old lady then collapsed on the ground and wept without cease. This scene has stayed with me always.¹⁹⁴

(It is interesting to compare passages like this with the assumptions made by so many present-day academics, who can speak in authoritative tones – as if citing a well-known or well-researched fact – about “the miserable condition of most women in Iran” under the Islamic Republic or Khomeini’s “infamous order compelling women to wear the chador”).¹⁹⁵ Ayatollah Khomeini himself reminisces vociferously: In the cities, in the towns, in the villages – atrocities of which the tongue dares not speak! Imagine! Imagine! We heard about things that one cannot even repeat! Outrages were perpetrated against our noble women that blacken the face of history! In Qom itself – the very hub of spirituality – you have no idea what filthy business they engaged in (cheh basati inha dorost kardand), dragging ladies out of their houses to go celebrate! They forced them to go to parties to celebrate their own disgraceful disrobement!¹⁹⁶

Yann Richard does not hesitate to call the forcible unveiling of Iranian women “a form of rape” that was “more deeply felt than any ideological attack against Islam.” Because this decree led to the sequestration – whether family-imposed or self-imposed – of many young ladies in their homes and their withdrawal from school and work settings, he argues that “the obligatory unveiling, far from contributing

 Mohsen-e Salesh, Yaran-e sadeq-e aftab (Tehran: Markaz-e asnad-e enqelab-e eslami, 1353), p. 249. A cynical writer would point out that Ayatollah Falsafi appears to be particularly preoccupied with the veil: it will be recalled that he declared the Shah’s referendum “an attempt to rip the veil off of Zaynab,” and that he himself removed a veil or two, and was caught red-handed doing so.  The first quote is from Sussan Siavoshi, “ʻIslamist Women Activists: Allies or Enemies?” in Jahanbegloo, Iran, p. 175. The title of the article speaks to its agenda. The second quote is from Afary and Anderson, Foucault, p. 112. The common, knee-jerk response that women (or men) must not be told what they can and cannot wear in either direction – and thus both Reza Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini were “couture tyrants” – ignores the simple fact that there exists no society on earth bereft of at least some sort of enforced dress code.  Sahife-ye Nur, 7: 76.

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to the emancipation of women, actually slowed it down.”¹⁹⁷ We should not, perhaps, be as creative as Leila Ahmed, who manages to turn the de-veiling decree on its head: In their stinging contempt for the veil and the savagery with which they attack it…[the rulers of Iran] reveal their true motivation: they are men of the upper classes assimilating to European ways and smarting under the humiliation of being described as uncivilized because “their” women are veiled…

Here Ahmed has deftly, and somewhat disingenuously, ascribed a chauvinist motivation to an act that was motivated to no small degree by a sincere desire to liberate women. Still, she is of course correct in asserting that coercive de-veiling was “only intelligible against the background of the global dominance of the Western world and the authority of its discourses.”¹⁹⁸ Ayatollah Khameneʾi: The person who took the greatest steps in the direction of subjecting Iran to the cultural – and therefore to the political and economic – hegemony of the West over Iran was Reza Khan. Imagine, by today’s standards, what a vile act this was: a country’s ruler forces an entire population to change its national dress overnight! And on what grounds? On the grounds that our traditional clothing precluded the possibility of us becoming educated! Really! (ʿajab!). Our greatest scholars, philosophers and scientists – Iranian geniuses who contributed to humanity’s progress in countless fields and whose works are still studied in Europe today – performed their experiments and wrote their immense tomes while wearing that very same traditional dress! How exactly do clothes prevent one from learning? What kind of talk is that? This was their ridiculous logic, and on the basis of that logic they changed the couture of an entire nation! They removed the chador from the women of our land. They said: “A woman wearing a chador cannot become educated, cannot cultivate expertise, cannot participate in the affairs of society (lit. ʻsocial activities,’ faʿaliyyat-e ejtemaʿi).” I ask you: after the removal of the chador, did the women of our country participate in the affairs of society? Was the opportunity af-

 Richard, Iran, p. 298, loc. 4817. Still Richard, being a Frenchman, is less politically correct and more opinionated than others. He calls chadors “hideous black sack-like garments” and also complains of the “sour smell of the scent with which [the Qom ulama] scrupulously smear themselves” (Shiʿite Islam, p. 9). He also refers to the “philosophical banality” of the sacred Shiʿite text Nahj albalāgha (Richard, Shi’ite Islam, p. 19). Such straightforwardness is preferable, in this writer’s eyes, to the subtler political positions that often hide behind the scholarship of many researchers. Of course, we have critiqued in this book what we see as tendentious writing on post-revolutionary Iran, but there is a difference between an author claiming objectivity whose entire approach is transparently dictated by an overwhelming ideological agenda (like Amir Taheri or Ali Rahnema) and an author like Yann Richard who strives for objectivity – a phenomenon that, despite it all, does indeed exist – but occasionally “lapses” into expressions of personal opinion.  Ahmed, Women and Gender, p. 165.

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forded them under Reza Khan and his son to participate in the affairs of society? Men couldn’t even participate in those affairs, let alone women! On that day when the women of Iran entered the arena of social affairs, and with their two strong hands pulled the men of this country after them onto the battlefield, they were wearing that self-same chador! ¹⁹⁹

Although the forcible removal of the veil was the most outrageous of the regime’s dress-code diktats in the eyes of much of the populace, banning the turban (amameh) and mandating the European fedora for all but the most senior ranking mujtahids came a close second. Ayatollah Hosayn Ali-ye Montazeri (slated to succeed Khomeini but disgraced just before the leader’s death) describes in his memoirs the “trial balloon” sent up by the first Pahlavi monarch, Reza Shah, to ascertain whether he could expect excessive trouble if the new law was passed: I was told that [the well-known cleric] Haj Aqa Reza Rafi had written an article in the World magazine entitled “How I became a Hat-Wearer” (chetor man kolahi shodam – evidently penned during what amounted to the Pahlavi interregnum or “Tehran Spring” in the mid-1940s, when such articles could be written – Z. M.). Above the text appeared two pictures, in one of which Haj Aqa was wearing a turban, and in the other of which he was wearing a bowler. The gist of the article was that Haj Aqa had been in Gorgan [in Northern Iran on the Caspian coast] with Reza Shah, and, as he explained, “I was be-turbanned (moʿammam). The king said to me, ‘We are returning to Tehran, and twenty-four hours later we are proceeding on-

 Khameneʾi, Jehad-e farhangi, pp. 34– 35. Ayatollah Khameneʾi has recently tried to tie the chador to Iranian nationalism – clearly more for sake of the chador than for the sake of Iranian nationalism – claiming that the women of the pre-Islamic Persian aristocracy wore something of the sort (opponents of the veil have always tried to show the opposite, inter alia via ancient numismatics). It would appear, however – again, contrary to the assertions of veil opponents in the Arab world – that it was specifically Arab women who covered up prior to the advent of Islam. We even have a Mishna (hailing from about the second century AD and presumably recording even older material) to the effect that “Arab women (here meaning: Jewish women of Arab lands) go out veiled” (ʿaraviyot yotzʿot reʿulot – Shabbat 65a. The medieval commentators explain that their heads and faces were covered, excepting only the eyes). For a particularly damning (and graphic) look at the status of women in Pahlavi Iran, compared to which the Islamic Republic almost resembles a feminist paradise, see Baraheni, Crowned Cannibals, pp. 45 – 63. On the other hand, Mohammad Reza Shah when crown prince wrote to his father in what certainly appears to be sincerity that “women’s acquirement of science and arts through education is the key to any nation’s progress and advancement” and “achieving such goals would be futile while shrouded by social deprivation” (Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 57), and it cannot be denied that during his reign Iranian women made significant strides in the direction of equality in a number of fields. “If our women continue to hide behind veils we shall not achieve our national aims” he would aver later (Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 247). The preamble to the constitution of the Islamic Republic, for its part, notes that “Women were conspicuous in every theatre of this great struggle. The sight of mothers with infants in their arms hastening to the scene of battle and towards the mouths of machine guns showed the decisive part played in the struggle by that substantial section of society.”

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ward to [the South-Western province of ] Khuzestan. During this entire trip you must accompany me as a hat-wearer (kolahi)’… So when we returned to Tehran I went together with Prince Akbar Sarem al-Dawleh to Lalehzar street and bought myself a suit jacket and pants and a bow-tie for five hundred tomans [and presumably a hat as well, which he fails to mention]. When I arrived at Court the present king [i. e., the then crown prince] Mohammad Reza commented: ‘Wow, that outfit really suits you!’… Reza Shah then set forth for Khuzestan and we were in his entourage. When we arrived at [the holy shrine city and Shiʿite learning center of ] Qom, the King said: ‘I have heard that Haj Shaykh Abd al-Karim [Haʾeri, founder of the Howzeh-ye Elmiye, the new seminary system in the city, and a premier mujtahid] is ill. Doctor Aʿlam al-Molk shall go and visit him and send him my best wishes, and you [i. e., Haj Aqa, the “hat wearer”] shall accompany him.’ I was deeply upset by the prospect of going to visit Haj Shaykh [Abd al-Karim] wearing a [Western] hat [and not a turban], but in the end I went, and after we had visited him and returned, Reza Shah asked the doctor, ‘What was His Honor the Shaykh’s reaction to Haj Aqa’s new couture?’ The doctor responded, ‘He had no reaction: we sat there for more than half an hour talking about everything under the sun (az zamin va aseman sohbat bemiyan amad) but regarding Haj Aqa’s new appearance the Shaykh said nothing.’ Reza Khan [that is, Reza Shah] responded: ‘Then it is clear that legislating an alteration of clerical garb will not lead to any real trouble,’ and as soon as he returned to Tehran he proclaimed the new ‘Unity of Appearance’ (ettehad al-shekl) and ‘Removal of the Veil’ (kashf al-hejab) laws.”²⁰⁰

Reza Shah miscalculated, at least in the long term. Indeed, even immediately after the new edict was issued reactions were quite fierce. The disaffection engendered among the clerical class as a result of this “uniform dress code” – which reportedly saw thousands of seminary students (and in many cases their teachers as well) hauled into police stations, literally “defrocked” and then thrown back onto the street bareheaded and in their underwear – was so intense that the most venerated Shiʿite religious figure of the early 1930s, the aforementioned chief mojtahed of the Qom college Ayatollah Shaykh Abd al-Karim-e Haʾeri, was himself roughed up in a back alley of the sacred city by irate seminary students and stripped of his own religious regalia for failing to intervene with Reza Shah against the new law.²⁰¹ In place of the traditional religious lifestyle and social organization that had characterized Iran for centuries, modern secular norms and institutions imported from Europe were propagated, sometimes at bayonet-point, and almost invariably “overnight.” Madrasehs were closed, mosques were emptied, Hosayniyyehs/Tekkiyehs were demolished and replaced by banks and government offices, and in general “ancient cities were subjected to the opprobrious indecencies of a tinsel

 Montazeri, Khaterat, p. 26.  Salesh, Yaran, p. 316. Years later an exiled Ayatollah Khomeini would urge all true Muslims in Iran to strip the “collaborationist” clerics of their turbans.

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westernization.”²⁰² The longstanding position of honor enjoyed by clerics in state and society was rapidly eroded (Khomeini transmits a story from his friend Hajj Shaykh Abbas-e Tehrani, who was denied taxi service during the reign of Reza Shah because the chauffer “refused to transport two classes of people: prostitutes and turban-wearers” [favahesh va moʿammamin]).²⁰³ The revenues from pious endowments (Arab. awqāf, sing. waqf ), a traditional source of income for ulama and religious institutions, were increasingly diverted to the state, and the criteria for assuming the office of judgeship, a mainstay of clerical influence, was altered to include a law degree from the recently established Tehran University.²⁰⁴ The multifaceted, ten day long Muḥarram commemorations of the martyrdom of Imam Ḥusayn and his family – centerpiece of Shiʿite theology and praxis – were severely restricted in time and in place. Shiʿite beliefs and rituals were made the butt of ridicule (and Western ideas and lifestyle portrayed as the proper focus of emulation) not just in state-sponsored journalism and literature, but, for instance, in the fledgling film industry as well. Abbas Amanat writes perceptively that The hasty introduction of new secularized institutions, with few exceptions, was marked by uncritical borrowing of Western models and misconceived positivist values, and it was often combined with contempt for Iran’s indigenous traditions and cultural mores.²⁰⁵

At the instance of figures like General Ahmad Nakhevan and Esmaʿil Merʿat (the latter a high level functionary at the Education Ministry), the Farhangestan-e Zaban-e Iran or “Iranian Language Academy” was set up (1935) with the express mandate of purging the myriad Arabic loan words that had crept into Persian over the centuries – easily half of the entire lexicon – and replacing them with an “authentic,” pre-Islamic-based Persian vocabulary, resulting in what one of the fiercest Islamophobes of the time, Ahmad-e Kasravi, wishfully referred to as

 Baraheni, Crowned Cannibals, p. 5.  Sahife-ye Nur, 4: 51. This reticence on the part of taxi-drivers to pick up clerical fares has been reported to rear its head when elements of the citizenry launch protests against the post-revolutionary regime (see Keddie, Modern Iran, p. 311). Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, on the other hand, is certainly exaggerating when he states that “clerics are routinely attacked and stabbed in the streets by angry anti-regime individuals” (“As Islamism Fades…”).  It is important to note that despite taking place “overnight” in historical terms (and sometimes even literally), the diminution of clerical authority and influence was a process. Reza Shah did not always ride roughshod over religious sentiment. Lip-service was often paid, and clerics were included as consultants for some time after the inception of the new dynasty in a variety of projects and institutions, not excluding political ones. But the trajectory was relatively clear even from the outset, and soon the erosion of the power of the ulama was a flagrant fact of life in Pahlavi Iran.  Amanat, Iran, p. 500.

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farsi-ye sareh (“pure Persian”) or zaban-e pak (“the immaculate language”) – before he was knifed to death by a Muslim militant.²⁰⁶ Though the overall project was an exercise in futility akin to attempting the removal of the massive French/Latin element from Germanic-based English, the efforts of the Farhangestan nevertheless bore some impressive fruit, and many of its neologisms are by now integrated seamlessly into the daily speech of Iranians. Navvab-e Safavi, leader of the underground Fadaʾiyan-e Eslam that dispatched the assassin who stabbed Kasravi, dubbed the Farhangestan the Farangestan, “the Academy of Europeanization.” He knew whereof he spoke: not only was the impetus to revive “authentic” Persian by jettisoning its Arabic accretions of Western provenance, the ability to do so had also to be garnered from that same occidental source, as in the case of the decipherment of old Persian cuneiform by Grotefend, Rawlinson et al, to say nothing of the fact that several of Iran’s most well-known nationalist literati (e. g., Bahar, and Kasravi himself ) took lessons in ancient Pahlavi script from Ernst Herzfeld, the German-Jewish archeologist resident in Iran between the two world wars. Much of what was (and still is) written in Persian about pre-Islamic Iran – from Moshir al-Dowleh’s History of Ancient Iran to the introductions to the classical texts edited by Mohammad-e Qazvini – was inspired by, and even directly translated from, the works of Western scholars. Sadeq-e Hedayat (1903 – 51) was perhaps Iran’s most celebrated twentieth century writer. After returning to Iran from a prolonged residence abroad, for the most part in Europe (an itinerary that characterized the early lives of a great many prominent nationalist intellectuals and politicians of the Pahlavi period, including Mohammad Reza Shah himself ), Hedayat began producing a series of short stories and plays that won him increasing fame. His plots and portrayals reveal a fierce disgust with Shiʿite Islam. In the short story “Talab-e Amorzesh” (“Seeking Forgiveness,” 1932), a seemingly pious group of Iranian pilgrims are on their way to Karbala (the burial place of Ḥusayn and one the three atabat-e aliyat – “celestial thresholds” or shrine cities – sacred to Shiʿism and located in Iraq), and they gradually reveal the reasons for their pilgrimage. One woman had murdered two infant sons of her husband’s second wife, and then poisoned the wife as well. She is terrified that her sins will not be forgiven, until the others reassure her. “God bless you, what do you think we’ve come here for?” asks one, a man who had been

 Foroughi headed the Farhangestan and was actually a moderating influence, whereas Esmail Merʾat at the ministry of education and General Nakhavan in the army were the real Persian purists (Kasravi, too, though at the beginning he had been more reserved on the subject). Overall the Farhangestan replaced several thousand words, many of which “took,” but the project could not make a serious dent in the Arabic element of modern Persian, as a glance at any current Iranian newspaper will immediately make clear.

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a driver, and had robbed and killed a wealthy passenger. Now he was going to Karbala to have the stolen money made lawful by a mullah (by means of giving him a cut). Another woman, married to her stepsister’s husband, had abused her stepsister to the point of crippling her, and then killed her on the way to Karbala. They smugly reassure her that, since they have made the pilgrimage, all will be forgiven: “Haven’t you heard from the pulpit that as soon as a pilgrim makes up his mind and sets off, even if his sins equal the number of leaves on a tree, he becomes good and pure?”²⁰⁷ Hedayat is not found wanting in the Arab-baiting department, either. His best known historical drama, “Mazyar” (1933), focuses on a ninth century CE Iranian feudal lord who rebelled against Abbasid caliphal authority. Just as Saʿid Nafisi would fashion Mazyar’s contemporary and fellow rebel, Babak-e Khorramdin (d. 838 CE), into the embodiment of Zoroastrian anti-Arabism in a work written some twenty years later (in the introduction to which Nafisi bemoans the “plunder of Iran by a band of barefoot, bareheaded, camel-riding, desert nomads” and mourns the “repression of the resplendent civilization of the Aryan race by the Semites”²⁰⁸), similarly, Hedayat turned the medieval Mazyar into a mouthpiece for his intellectual circle’s raging racialism and anti-Semitism (in the broadest sense of this latter term). This insurgent, according to Hedayat, launched his illfated uprising on the ancient Iranian festival of mehragan, associated in Avestan lore with the defeat of the Arab ogre-tyrant Dahhak-e Mardush by Kaveh the Blacksmith.²⁰⁹ Through his characters’ dialogues and soliloquies Hedayat makes known his aspiration toward cleansing the pure Iranian fatherland from “Semitic filthinesses” (kethafatha-ye sami), a misfortune the source of which was not just the Arabs but “the kikes, that nation worse than the Arabs” (juhudan, in qawm-e badtar az arab).²¹⁰ Indeed, in Hedayat’s rendering of the story, it is Jewish converts to Islam who, having joined the Iranian national cause in the form of Mazyar’s revolt, ultimately undermined and sold out the rebels to the “nose-bag-wearing” caliphs.²¹¹ It is also the polluting or diluting admixture of Semitic blood with IndoIranian-Aryan blood as a result of generations of intermarriage that accounts

 Blond, Arabs, p. 30.  Saʿid Nafisi, Babak-e Khorramdin: Delavar-e Azarbayejan (Tehran: Asatir, 1384 = 1955), pp. 7– 8: dastbordha-ye tamaddon-e derakhshan-e nezhad-e aryaʾi…  Nafisi, Babak-e Khorramdin, p. 99. Dahhak, it will be recalled, was not originally seen as an Arab, but, as it were, became one over time. The last Pahlavi monarch, for instance, refers to him as “Zahhak the Arab” in his Mission for My Country (cited in Milani, The Shah, p. 11).  First citation is from Hedayat, Mazyar, pp. 11 and 124; second from Hedayat, Mazyar, p. 98.  Hedayat, Mazyar, p. 110: tubrah, chapi agal…

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for the degradation of the Persian peoples (and thus Hedayat outdoes even Ferdowsi himself in his race-based nationalism, turning no less a paladin than Rostam – who, it will be recalled, was the product of mixed Iranian-Arabian parentage – into one of the ruiners of Iran, instead of its foremost savior).²¹² In Hedayat’s Parvin Dokht-e Sasan (Parvin, Daughter of Sasan, 1930), the Iranian royal heroine, having been captured by a barbarian Arab chieftain who urges her to convert to Islam and marry him, takes her own life rather than submit to the horrors of miscegenation.²¹³ He denounced Jews and Arabs for having “spread superstition, mainly through prophetic traditions (hadis)” that had a “negative effect on gender relations, nourished fatalistic ideas, and spread an overly melancholic attitude toward life,” whereas the rituals and festivals of Zoroastrianism were “valuable and pleasing” and “reminders of Iran’s glory days.”²¹⁴ Zoroastrianism, several seminal texts of which he translated into modern Persian, is described by Hedayat as the “white religion” (din-e sefid) and Semitic monotheism the “black religion” (din-e siyah).²¹⁵ Arab-Muslims are “snake-eating, lizard-devouring, mouse-masticating worshippers of Ahriman.”²¹⁶ Their savage cruelty, brought to bear on the Iranian population during the seventh century Arab-Muslim conquest, extends to – is epitomized by – their sadistic torture and killing of animals, and specifically dogs, sacred in Zoroastrianism but unclean according to Islam.²¹⁷ In his notorious (albeit, it must be admitted, hilarious) Tup-e Morvari (“The Pearl Cannon,” 1947), Hedayat combines all of these themes. In one passage, the Spanish Reconquista is encapsulated in the person of a Christian rebel for whom the author has concocted the comic name “Dos Merdalinos”: On the face of it, Dos Merdalinos’ motivation [for rising up against his Arab-Berber overlords] was his strong, sharp sense of patriotism. But after much research, we have arrived at the

 Hedayat, Mazyar, p. 95. As we pointed out before, authors such as Reza Zia Ebrahimi have cast doubt on the extent of what we call here Ferdowsi’s “race-based nationalism.”  Blond, Arabs, p. 36.  Farzin Vejdani, “Appropriating the Masses: Folklore Studies, Ethnography and Interwar Iranian Nationalism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 44 (2012), 507– 526, p. 514.  Blond, Arabs, p. 98.  Blond, Arabs, pp. 10 and 100.  Blond, Arabs, pp. 36 and 30. Dogs as pets were (and in many places still are) also a shibboleth distinguishing traditional from Westernizing Iranians, a phenomenon well reflected in Hasan-e Moqaddam’s early twentieth century play “Master Jaʿfar has come back from the West” (Jaʿfar khanaz farang omadeh) – with a pet dog. On the impure status of dogs in Islamic law see Z. Maghen, “Dead Tradition: Joseph Schacht and the Origins of ʻPopular Practice,’” Islamic Law and Society 10 (3) 2003, and Z. Maghen, “First Blood: Purity, Edibility and the Independence of Islamic Jurisprudence,” Der Islam 81 (1) 2004.

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conclusion that the impetus for [his solecistic, bombastic declaration of “Carthago DeLena!”]²¹⁸ may be attributed to the [Muslim enforced] ordinance of mandatory circumcision (qanun-e khatne-ye ejbari), in the context of which more than the norm of his male member had been cut off, and as a result he was afflicted with a complex d’inferiorite and [a compensatory] megalomania, to the extent of considering his own farts fragrant. Some say that this fellow practiced bestiality, and in revenge for the murder of his beloved dog he raised the flag of rebellion and standard of insurrection against the Arabs. It seems one of the commanders of the Arab army by the name of Ibn Qutayfa, who was a past-master at rotating water-wheels with the blood of infidels, was the guest of the caliph at Cordoba, and Fandaq, the canine concubine (sag-e sogali) of Dos Merdalinos, bit the honored guest’s calf and thereby incurred the punishment of death by torture. Still others maintain that since this gentleman (Dos Merdalinos) had a taste for the finer things of life, such as wine, painting, music, opera, sculpture and cleansing oneself with tissue paper after urinating or defecating (estenja ba kaghaz), whereas Islam forbad all these [civilized pursuits] and thereby hemmed him in and confined him to a nutshell, while at the same time introducing polygamy, temporary marriage, dirge recitation, ritual lamentation, eulogies, passion plays, weeping, wailing, mendicancy, cowering, surrender, fasting and howling (ruzeh va zuzeh), the worship of the dead, precautionary dissimulation (taqiyya), the institution of “permitting” [a divorced women to remarry her former husband by having her spend the night with a phony – or not so phony – paramour],²¹⁹ washing corpses with flowing water, and the advisability of tying the edge of one’s turban under one’s chin – because of all this [Dos Merdalinos] had said to himself, “These ugly, stinking, lizard-eating Arabs!…What did they bring us?” “Their faith is a hodge-podge of half-baked, contradictory ideas and beliefs stolen from previous religions, creeds and superstitions, and hastily cobbled together without any attempt at adapting them to one-another. [Shiʿite Islam] is the enemy of true human taste and culture, and its regulations are antithetical to the progress of all nations and peoples…a religion of the sword and of the beggar’s bowl…We [Andalusians] possessed civilization, wealth, freedom and flourishment, and we did not see poverty as a source of pride (faqr-ra fakhr nemidanestim). They took all of that from us and in its place brought us penury, despair, death-worship, weeping, begging, misery, obedience to a treacherous and despotic god, and various and sundry methods of ass-wiping. Their entire ethos is one of filth, vileness, profiteering, uncouthness, death and gloom…”²²⁰

 A deliberately botched rendering of Carthago delenda est – “Carthage must be destroyed.” Here Carthage sits in for the Arab and Berber empires of North Africa.  Hedayat wrote a whole book satirizing this institution entitled Mohallel.  Sadeq-e Hedayat, Tup-e Morvari, http://iran-paper.ir/Book/toop-morvari.pdf, pp. 7– 9 (last accessed 12/10/2022). There is an English translation of this book edited by Iraj Bashiri which is no doubt far more accurate and elegant than my translation here, but I do not currently have access to it. The Prophet Muḥammad is reputed to have said that “my poverty is my pride” (faqrī fakhrī).

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The text goes on and on in this vein (for “Andalusians” substitute “Iranians,” and note the strong Nietzschean undertones). Hedayat carried such ideas over into other works, primarily those composed during the reign of Reza Shah (who was deposed by the British, as we saw, at least partially for his Nazi sympathies). He never repudiated any of his writings on these subjects, including those of a highly anti-Semitic nature, even after the war when the extent of the devastation wrought by Hitler and the Holocaust became known, and up until his death by apparent suicide in 1951 (the choice of venue for which – Paris – was attributed by many, only half in jest, to Hedayat’s desire not to pollute sacred Iranian soil with his corpse, a major ritual contaminant according to Zoroastrianism). Hedayat’s oft-employed sobriquet for an idiot was: “a Shiʿite.”²²¹ Following the lead of Hedayat and others, many “mainstream” authors of the Pahlavi period (1925 – 1979) took aim at Arabs and especially at Islam, and lauded the ancient Aryans (though this is certainly not to imply that in all cases the greater part of their individual oeuvres focused on such themes).²²² In Sadeq-e Chubak’s Baʿd az Zohr-e Akhar-e Paʾiz (“The Last Afternoon in Autumn,” 1945) an elementary school pupil cannot concentrate on the teacher’s lesson in prayer performance because the prostrate position (sujūd) reminds him of how the baker’s apprentice sodomizes him.²²³ In the same writer’s Sang-e Sabur (“The Patient Stone,” 1966) the protagonist lashes out: Where are the Sassanian writings? Where is Rudaki’s Kalileh va Demneh? ²²⁴ Where are Beyhaqi’s works? And where are the hundreds of other things whose names we do not even know? I ask you, didn’t this country have anything? Did the Achaemenids, the Parthians and the Sassanians come from under a bush (az zir-e yek buteh amadand)? No books, no art, no economy, no religion, no army, no stories, no poetry, no buildings, nothing? Where are they all? Who destroyed it all? Bastards! (pedar sagha). The Arabs didn’t bring us anything. Whatever we had they destroyed.²²⁵

 Milani, Persian Sphinx, p. 110. On Hedayat in general, see Homa Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer (London: I. B. Tauris, 1991).  “The portrayal of the ʻArabs’ as backward Bedouins hostile to ʻauthentic’ Iranian culture,” writes Amanat, “was firmly incorporated into popular Iranian nationalist narrative and generally accepted by the majority of Iranians” (Amanat, Iran, p. 634). One might challenge the conclusion of this sentence.  Blond, Arabs, p. 42.  A 10th century CE versification of a Sanskrit-derived collection of animal fables, most of which is no longer extant.  Blond, Arabs, p. 44.

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The ruins of one of the four Achaemenid capitals, Susa, constitute for the poet Mehdi Akhavan-e Saless (Shush ra didam, “I saw Susa,” 1970) “this hoary, dark image of the glory and grandeur of old Iran, this second Persepolis, this high Aryan roof of the East (bam-e boland-e aryaʾi-ye khavar).”²²⁶ The Arab conquerors of Iran, according to Sales, are the devil: Though now the European corruption Playing a thousand tricks, makes frequent incursions, The Arab filth and disgrace (palidi va rosvaʾi-ye-e arab) is far more repulsive, far more corruptive is this old woe, Whatever praiseworthy, good and beautiful, Whatever pure and Ahuric,²²⁷ This old Ahriman has plundered and still plunders, Has killed, swallowed up, and still does so today.²²⁸

Some twentieth century Iranian nationalist authors gave more weight to anti-Arabism, others to anti-Islamism, but in general the two sentiments went hand in hand in much of the prose and poetry of the Pahlavi era. Historians, of course, were no exception to this rule, many contributing passionately to the chauvinist-nationalist, anti-Semitic trend. The renowned Fereydun Adamiyyat (d. 2008) asserted that “to the same extent that [Islam] was beneficial to a primitive society like that of the Arabian Peninsula, it was detrimental and destructive to Iran. [In place of the advanced cultural and intellectual pursuits that characterized pre-Islamic Persian society,] Iranians thenceforward frittered away their lives in discussions of the abrogating and abrogated verses of the Qurʿan.”²²⁹ Responding to Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s highly influential Gharbzadegi (Westitis, 1962) – which argued, in a nutshell, that the downfall of the Iranian nation was the result of its “cultural self-annihilation” (khodbakhtegi-ye farhangi) in the face of European and American influences – the nationalist periodical Ferdowsi located the destructive Western force closer to home, vociferating that On that black and evil day when the guards of the Madaʾen palace, observing the approach of the savage Arab hoards, cried out from the ramparts: ʻThe demons are coming, the demons are coming!’ (divha omadand, divha omadand), the germ of that bastard-born, fawning and

 Blond, Arabs, p. 53.  From the Zoroastrian god of good, Ahura Mazda.  Blond, Arabs, p. 53.  Fereydun-e Adamiyyat, Amir-e Kabir va Iran (Tehran: Sherikat-e Sahami-ye Entesharat-e Khwarizmi, 1334), p. 89.

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obsequious creature (i.e., Al-e Ahmad’s foreign-worshipping, “West-stricken” Iranian) was implanted in our land.”²³⁰

The Pahlavi sovereigns constructed an Indo-European bridge over the intervening, Semitic Middle East (Mohammad Reza Shah reminisced that “as a child, [I] always refused to read those pages in [my] history textbook that related to Persia’s defeat at the hand of Arab armies in the seventh century. I simply could not bear the humiliation. I tore those pages out of the book…”).²³¹ Twentieth century Iranians knew more and more about what was happening in France, England, Germany and the United States, and less and less about what was happening in the neighboring Arab and Muslim states. The dislocation proceeded apace.

A New Beginning Cyrus (circa. 599 – 530 BCE), founder of the Achaemenid dynasty and of the first world empire (the Persian Empire, 551– 333 BCE), was “introduced” by the nationalists about mid-way through the twentieth century to a populace that had basically never heard of him (neither Cyrus nor his Achaemenid, Seleucid or Parthian successors, save Darius, made their way into the Shah-nameh or other medieval Iranian literature). This forgotten figure was now made into the model for benevolent Pahlavi dictatorship (few phenomena are more starkly symbolic of the “collaboration” between Iranian nationalism, on the one hand, and Westernization, on the other, than the widespread fashion during the same period of naming male children Siroose, the corrupted French pronunciation of the Greek distortion of Cyrus’s Persian cognomen, Kurosh).²³² In 1965 Muhammad Reza Shah, second sovereign of the Pahlavi dynasty, added the title Aryamehr or “Light of the Aryans” to his already existing honorific, shahanshah (“King of kings”). In 1971 hundreds of heads of state and other dignitaries from around the world were flown into Persepolis – the spectacular ruins of the Achaemenid capital near Shiraz known by the Iranians as “the Throne of Jamshid” (takht-e jamshid) – for the celebration of “2,500 years of uninterrupted Iranian

 Cited in Motahhari, Khadamat, p. 147.  Amir Taheri, The Unknown Life of the Shah (London: Hutchinson, 1991), p. 218. Though Taheri, as we have seen, always needs to be taken with a grain of salt, this statement accords with sentiments expressed elsewhere by the second Pahlavi monarch.  For the introduction of Cyrus to twentieth century Iran and the uses to which the aura of this ancient monarch was put, see Menahem Merkhavi, National Symbols in Modern Iran: Identity, Ethnicity and Collective Memory (Albany: Syracuse University Press, 2019).

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Monarchy” (a historical inaccuracy if there ever was one). This unprecedentedly lavish and theatrical affair, ten years in the making (and catered lavishly by Maxim’s de Paris), saw prefabricated luxury chalets flown in from France in the holds of over one hundred Hercules C-130 military transports. Thousands of members of the country’s various security organs grew beards of varying lengths and donned colorful costumes in order to parade in front of the international panoply of august visitors as a sort of human timeline of Iranian history. At the incomparably lavish meals the only Persian dish on the menu was caviar.²³³ “Sleep soundly, Cyrus,” the Shah dramatically intoned during this festival whilst facing the nearby grave of the ancient Persian emperor, “for we are awake!” (asudeh bekhab, Kurosh, zira ma bidar hasteem).²³⁴ From the Shiʿite shrine city of Najaf in Iraq, whither he had been exiled by that same Shah almost a decade earlier, Ayatollah Khomeini railed furiously against the ostentation and waste of this “incomparably pompous, Israeli-organized, eighty million toman party,” thrown for foreigners “while so many Iranians go hungry.”²³⁵ How you (i.e., the Shah – Z. M.) go on about this ‘two thousand five hundred year-old kingdom’ of yours, how you boast and brag of this decomposed skeleton (i.e., Cyrus’s grave – Z. M.). You would have us exchange the sacred precepts of Islam for some long rotted bones!²³⁶

In 1975 the Queen, Farah Diba, hosted the Second International Conference of Mithraic Studies – which, from the less-than-discerning perspective of many devout Iranians, was virtually indistinguishable from a festive gathering of Zoroastrian fire worshippers – in the middle of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, causing

 Even Queen Farah Diba protested that the whole point of the event was to celebrate the renaissance of Iranian civilization, a point that was undermined by all the foreign food, music, décor, contractors, etc. She complained that in the eyes of her husband’s generation “whatever was European was good, noble, beautiful, praiseworthy. They thought that Iranian things were ugly, mean and open to condemnation” (cited in Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 163).  Or: Kurosh-e bozorg, aram bekhab, ma bidarim!  Sahife-ye Nur, 2: 362– 3. While the vast majority of Iranians were not “going hungry” at the time – largely thanks to the rapid development programs and generally sound economic policies of the Pahlavi regime – all of this pomp and hedonism unquestionably grated on poorer segments of the populace. Israelis and/or Jews are often accused by post-revolutionary Iranian-Shiʿite clerics of having a hand in creating the cult of Cyrus, among other reasons because the Bible lauds this Achaemenid king in Isaiah chap. 45.  Sahife-ye Nur, 1: 301. Tombs are, admittedly, a major pre-occupation of Shiʿites as well, as witnessed by their pilgrimages to the burial places of many Imams and their family members, the emamzadehs.

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even Western ambassadors to raise an eyebrow. A year later the Shah and his new Rastakhiz or “Renaissance” party (as of 1976 the sole legal party in the country) carried a measure through both houses of Iran’s rubber-stamp parliament to replace the Muslim calendar – which dates from the Prophet Muḥammad’s hijra (Pers. hejre) or emigration from Mecca to the city of Medina in 622 CE – with a new “monarchical” calendar that began with Cyrus’s supposed coronation in 599 BCE. Overnight all public institutions were instructed to change the designation of the current year from 1355 hejri to 2535 shahanshahi. ²³⁷ Aside from confusion and inconvenience, the new dating system produced considerable bitterness among religious circles (the first Pahlavi, Reza Shah, had already taken a step in the direction of calendar reform by prohibiting the use of the traditional Muslim lunar calendar – hejri-ye qamari – and substituting for it the hybrid “Islamic-solar” calendar – hejri-ye shamsi – a move that “Aryanized” at the same time that it Westernized, given the traditional association of Aryans with the sun and Muslims with the moon).²³⁸ On the ʿīd al-fiṭr (Holiday of the Break-Fast) following the declaration of the new “monarchical” calendar, Khomeini issued a fiery fatwa (religious decree) from Iraqi exile: …With the aim of weakening Islam and erasing its name, an insidious plot has been hatched to change the inception date of the calendar. This alteration is one of the greatest crimes perpetrated by the present filthy dynasty. All members of the nation (‘omum-e mellat) are hereby obligated to oppose this criminal calendar in every manner possible. Since this new system of dating represents a defamation of Islam, and a prelude to the eradication of Islam (moqaddame-ye mahv-e eslam), God forbid, therefore its use on the part of the public is forbidden, and is tantamount to providing support to a persecutor, an oppressor and an enemy of the justice-seeking religion of Islam.²³⁹

The Shah eventually backed down under enormous popular pressure and restored the (revised solar) Islamic calendar, but it was too little too late.

Counterpunch When Ayatollah Khomeini and his cadre of clerics and revolutionaries climbed to power several years later in 1979, they inaugurated the backlash against the prolonged campaign of Western-inspired Iranian nationalism that had, to their

 Rastakhiz also means resurrection, thus combining the return to the past with the drive toward the future.  Blond, Arabs, p. 58.  Sahife-ye Nur, 1: 311.

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minds, sought to instate a profane potpourri of criteria for communal identity – common blood, common language, common history, common territory – at the expense of the single sacred Islamic criterion of common faith (an enterprise that partook not just of the sin of innovation, in that it imported a modern European notion into Muslim life, but also of the sin of reversion, in that the tribal-racial-national basis for association, known as ʿaṣabiyya, is seen by Islam as the hallmark of ante-Muḥammadan, and anti-Muḥammadan, Arabian jāhilism). The era of comfortable coexistence between religion and nation, between Qurʿan and Shahnameh, that had characterized centuries of medieval and early-modern Iranian society was long gone, having been destroyed by the “take no prisoners” progressivism-cum-atavism of the late nineteenth and early-to-mid-twentieth century “Aryanists”: what had been for centuries an almost unconscious and virtually seamless amalgamation of pre-Islamic paragons like Jamshid, Rostam and Siyavosh with Muslim heroes such as ʿAlī, Ḥusayn and Imam Riḍā, had now become an either-or zero sum game. What traditionists perceived as this modern-day lapse into pre-Islamic paganism would now receive its long awaited comeuppance in the form of a no less uncompromising, radical-fundamentalist-Islamist ideology that anathemized all things Zoroastrian, secular, patriotic and Western (four decades before the revolution and two decades before Al-e Ahmad’s “Occidentosis,” Khomeini had already lashed out fiercely at the widespread Iranian predilection for adopting Western norms lock, stock and barrel. He went so far as to lambast local Persian doctors for practicing “European medicine,” calling this “a great act of treason against our country.”²⁴⁰ Eight decades later, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameneʾi’s ban on “untrustworthy” American and British Covid-19 vaccines partook of a similar attitude).²⁴¹ The “cultural revolution” (enqelab-e farhangi) of 1979 and beyond – admittedly far less bloody than its notorious Chinese counterpart – transformed the Iranian image of America from Excellent Exemplar to Great Satan; recalled from banishment many of the Arabic loan-words that had been (in most cases nominally) excised from Persian, and even added some new imports; subjected the university to the howzeh (under the slogan of “cross-fertilization” between the two insti-

 Khomeini, Kashf al-asrār, pp. 280 – 281. He laments the disappearance of traditional Iranian medicine – whose practitioners have been systematically pushed out by the government – and argues that modern techniques “have been proven not to cure most illnesses.”  https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2021/01/iran-coronavirus-vaccine-ban-khamenei-ukus-pfizer.html (last accessed 13/10/2022).

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tutions) and purged from the former all anti-Islamic elements;²⁴² and, in general, assigned Shiʿite Islam, maligned and despised by a sizable proportion the country’s intellectual and policy-making elite for decades, the central role (in theory if not always in practice) in reconstructing state and society along old-new lines. The three-headed Cerberus of Pahlavism – pro-Westernism, Aryan-Iranian anti-Arabism, and anti-Shiʿism/anti-Islam – had been slain. Just as traditional Semitic religion had become thoroughly distasteful in the twentieth century in the eyes of Europeanized, Aryanist, pseudo-neo-Zoroastrians from Akhundzadeh to Aleh Dalfak, so the “progressive-regressive” worldview of such “Ferdowsi worshippers” (“progressive” because of its modern Western trajectory, “regressive” because of its evocation of ancient Iran) was violently repellant to the howzeh or seminary graduates who overthrew the monarchy. Ayatollah Mahmud-e Taleqani, the eclectic theologian and revolutionary leader who died soon after Khomeini came to power, visited the city of Shiraz after a stint in one of the Shah’s prisons. Not long after arriving (narrated the senior cleric’s local host, Hajj Ahmad-e Sadeq), His Honor asked my son Naser, “What sights are there to see in this region?” Naser answered, “I will show you.” [After visiting some poor neighborhoods in Shiraz where Taleqani spoke passionately to the people], Naser took us to takht-e Jamshid (Persepolis, the ruins of the ancient Achaemenid capital known by Iranians as “the Throne of Jamshid”). I bought tickets. After we entered the site, His Honor asked, “What is this place?” I said, “Sir, this is the Plain of Ducks” (dasht-e morghab, the valley in which Persepolis is situated – Z. M.). As soon as he had gone up to look, he said, “But this is takht-e Jamshid! Why did you pay good ticket money to those traitors? So that you could come here and view the remnants of these long dead criminals? The remnants of the so-called ‘kings of kings’!!” (shahun-e shahan). I saw a tear form in the corner of his eye. He took off his glasses and said: “By God, I hear the awful sound of the bones of the slaves who built these colossi breaking.” And he descended the steps and walked out.²⁴³

Monarchy is frowned upon, if not explicitly forbidden, by Islam – “Kings, when they enter a country, despoil it, and debase the noblest of its people; thus do

 At present and for some time Western universities have themselves been undergoing “purges” of various kinds, designed to eliminate any and all outlooks that conflict with, e. g., feminism, democracy, freedom of sexual orientation, etc.  Lame’i, Hekayathaʾi as zendegi-ye Ayatollah Taleqani, p. 243. One detects in Ayatollah Taleqani’s words cited here the socialist leanings that characterized his discourse in general. The valley in which Persepolis is situated is called the Plain of Ducks because of a nearby stream. Ayatollah Khalkhali, one of the “hanging judges” of the revolution, wrote an essay condemning Cyrus (inter alia as a homosexual) and came close to demolishing Persepolis.

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they behave” (Qurʿan 27: 34)²⁴⁴ – and it was none other than Muʿāwiya, founder of the Umayyad dynasty (661– 750 CE) and arch-villain of Shiʿi historiography, who is reputed to have declared: “I am the first king in Islam” (ana l-maliku l-awwalu fi lislām). Umayyad conceptions of sovereignty and court rituals having been influenced by those of Byzantium, and those of Byzantium by those of Sassanid Persia, royal rule is associated in the Shiʿite mind not just with Sunni “persecution of ʿAlids” (naṣb), but with Christian-inspired “innovation” (bidʿa) and – most importantly for our purposes – with specifically Iranian jāhiliyya (the pre-Islamic “era of barbarism”). Abbasid absolutism (750 – 1258 CE), in time as great a nemesis of Shiʿism as the Umayyads had been, was even more directly indebted to ancient Persian traditions of kingship. When even some of the Shiʿite Būyids, perceiving their rule as a revival of Sassanid royal splendor, sought permission from the Abbasid caliph to assume the title of shahanshah, they were rejected by the great Sunni jurisconsult al-Māwardī because “only God is the King of kings” (they assumed the title anyway).²⁴⁵ The institution of hereditary monarchy was also at least partially inspired by these foreign or non-Islamic sources. Although Twelver Shiʿite tradition seems prima facie to be capable of digesting the phenomenon of patrimony when dealing with its own Imams, all but one of whom filled the position of his deceased father, the faith’s exponents insist that naṣṣ – divine appointment through designation by the previous imam – is the deciding factor, not pedar farzandi (father-son succession).²⁴⁶ In cases where such celestial providence is lacking, the dynastic principle

 Compare 1 Samuel, chapter 8.  Ibn al-Athīr, vol. 9, pp. 15, 23, 59.  E. g., Ayatollah Montazeri: “Hereditary heirdom (velayatʿahdi) is a characteristic of the monarchical system; we have no such principle in our [new post-revolutionary] constitution. Even our twelve imams, although they succeeded one another from father to son, were each identified and appointed by God and the Prophet (several traditions have Muḥammad name all twelve imams – Z. M.) and the legitimacy of each imam is not dependent upon his forbear (although the notion that each imam must appoint his successor is also widespread and must be factored into the equation – Z. M.): we do not have such a thing [as hereditary succession] in Islamic law” (Montazeri, Khaterat, p. 387). Thus Shiʿi ulama would reject Hamid Dabashi’s assertion that “the lineage of the Imams…continued seriatim, based on primogeniture, until the occultation of Muḥammad b. Ḥasan,” even though it more-or-less reflects the reality (Dabashi, introduction to translation of Gobel, Moderne, in Nasr et al [eds.], Expectation, p. 2). We cannot even really speak of that primogeniture already “predestined” by God, because (for instance) in the case of Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, the Twelvers believe that he designated Mūsā, and not his oldest living son Ismaʿil, as the next imam. The contradiction between Shiʿism’s allegedly high regard for kinship (alleged, among others, by Madelung at the beginning of Succession) and its critique of ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb for preferring Quraysh over non-Qurashites and Arabs over non-Arabs is grist for the mill of alJāḥiẓ (Asfarrudin, Excellence, p. 151). Indeed, in what is purported to be the lengthy, polemical cor-

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is considered bereft of validity. Ayatollah Khomeini put his own, quasi-modern spin on the subject: The monarchical system (regime-e saltanati) was an errant form of government from the beginning, an illogical form of government. Let me say a word about this. Suppose, hypothetically speaking, that all the nations of the world got together, and the people of each nation [unanimously or by clear majority] chose a ruler for themselves from amongst themselves. Fair enough: the people are perfectly within their rights to appoint such an individual, and that is what they did. These people who live at this particular point in time have every right to elect a leader for themselves. But what right do they have to choose a leader for the future, a hundred years hence, when these fellows [who made the original choice] are no longer alive? What right do you have to choose a ruler for your children and your children’s children who are not present among us [to voice their opinion]? Monarchy has always been hereditary. So let us say the state inaugurates royal rule (dowlat yek saltanati ra emzah kardand). How can the people justify the appointment of a custodian (sarparast) for the generations to come? Those future generations must choose for themselves! Therefore the system of monarchy has been fatally flawed from the outset…And it matters not [according to the monarchical system] what type of character the son of a royal father is; he is next in line, and must assume the throne! So we had Reza, and now we have Muhammad Reza, and then will come Reza again, and after that [no doubt] another blasted Muhammad Reza, and so it will continue!²⁴⁷

For Khomeini, legitimate authority must be conferred either by God through stipulation, as in the case of the Imams, or by the people through consultation, as in the case of temporal leadership: “The people comes and chooses a certain person by means of free elections (entekhab-e azad)…then, when four years have elapsed, that same people can either elect someone else or decide to retain the incumbent.”²⁴⁸ But authority that is neither divine-based nor popular-based – or, to put a finer point on Khomeini’s political philosophy, that is not a combination of both – is illicit and satanic.²⁴⁹ The fifty or so Zoroastrian sovereigns portrayed as “pivots of the universe” in Ferdowsi’s “Book of Kings,” whose farr or royal cha-

respondence between ʿAlī and Muʿāwiya the former’s claim is bolstered with the help of the argument that just as the descendants of Abraham were the rightful inheritors of his sacred prerogative, so the descendants of Muḥammad, the ahl al-bayt, are the rightful inheritors of his (e. g., alGharat, vol. 1, p. 195 ff ).  Sahife-ye Nur, 9: 120: “Reza, Muhammad Reza, Reza…”  Sahife-ye Nur, 9: 121.  “[The Shiʿi clerical establishment] has ever relied, in the spiritual realm, on God, and in the social realm, on the power of the people” (Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 24, p. 62). Motahhari is here opposing Shiʿi clerics to their Sunni counterparts who, he avers, rely not on the people but on the Sultan.

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risma derived no more from heaven (in Muslim eyes) than it did from earth, are thus far from positive figures in the eyes of Shiʿite clerics. Khomeini again: Iranian kingship (shahanshahi, lit. “king-of-king-ship”), from its inception until the present day, has blackened the face of history (ru-ye tarikh ra siyah kardand). Their horrible crimes have blackened the face of history. They made towers of heads; they would decapitate the people, massacre them, and then build a tower with their heads!²⁵⁰

Deeply embedded in the narrative of monotheistic history, argues Khomeini, is the imperative to resist monarchical tyranny and all that comes with it. From Moses, whom Allah commissioned to bring down the Egyptian Pharaoh, preeminent symbol of arbitrary rule (estebdad) and imperial arrogance (estekbar) in the Qurʿan; through the myriad Messengers of God (rusul, sing. rasūl) who consistently opposed the despots of their respective times; to the holy Imams who stood up intrepidly to the usurping Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs – all along the line, the pious have ever fought the princes. “The most obscene title in God’s eyes on the Day of Resurrection,” Khomeini quotes the Prophet Muḥammad as vociferating, “will be ‘the king of kings’” (malik al-mulūk). ²⁵¹ The “Imam” did not always condemn monarchy: in his first sortie into publicism and politics – Kashf al-Asrar (“The Revelation of Secrets”) written in 1943 – he stressed that “We have never attacked the Sultanate; if we criticized, it was a particular king, not kingship that we criticized.”²⁵² By the 1960s, however, Khomeini was invoking the 1906 constitution (that he decried) against monarchical despotism, and by the 1970s he was condemning the institution altogether as contrary to the principles of religion. (It is worth remembering, in this connection, that the concept of “the divine right of kings” as developed in medieval Europe promoted monarchical absolutism not just at the expense of democratic institutions such as parliament, but, first and foremost, at the expense of the church. Similarly, when Iranian monarchists of both the medieval and modern variety emphasized that “Royal power and religion are like two brothers” [padeshahi va din hamcho do barodarand], this did not always augur well for the ulama). It was not just their royal rank, however, that rendered the ancient Iranian monarchs (and their self-styled twentieth century legatees) odious in the eyes of

 Sahife-ye Nur, 2: 363.  Sahife-ye Nur, p. 371. Akhnaʿu l-asmāʾi yawma l-qiyāmati ʿinda llāhi rajulun yusammā maliku lamlāk. A well-known Shiʿite dirge for Ḥusayn contains the line: “To be your servant [O Ḥusayn] is a crown of pride, a crown that I would not bestow upon kings.”  Michael M. J. Fischer, “Imam Khomeini: Four Levels of Understanding,” in John L. Esposito, ed., Voices of Resurgent Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 166 – 167.

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the activist Muslim clergy. It was also their role as symbols of Iranian national pride. The Prophet Muḥammad and the scriptures he was vouchsafed opposed almost nothing so much as the pre-Islamic Arabian emphasis on ʿaṣabiyya (group loyalty based on shared descent) and ḥasab wa nasab (boasting of aristocratic genealogy). Both of these birth-based institutions – the ancestors, in a sense, of modern nationalism (from Latin “natio” = to give birth) – were ideally supposed to be replaced after the advent of Islam by the criterion of common creed (din): there was to be neither tribe nor nation, neither Arab nor Persian, but all were to be one umma (confessional community) under Allah and Muḥammad. Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi: Affinity based on skin color, blood, race and any other innate distinction – that is, any distinction that is not under one’s control (ghayr-e ekhtiyari) – is of minimal worth, whereas affinity based on common ideology, common moral values and common practical goals is of much greater worth – how much more so affinity based on common belief (iman).²⁵³

“The most noble among you from now on will be the most pious” announced the Qurʿan (Q. 49: 13) overhauling what had been the traditional criterion of social status, i. e., tribal or national affiliation (qabāʾil, shuʿūb), and replacing it with a ladder human beings could climb: faith. Muḥammad quipped, crudely but employing an apt metaphor: “Whoever is puffed up about his ancestral lineage, let him sink his teeth into his father[ʼs phallus]!”²⁵⁴ He also said: “Let all men dispense of their tribal pride (fakhrahum bi-aqwām), for [their pagan forefathers] are coals for the fire of hell, and they themselves [as long as they boast of their ethnic superiority] are more worthless in the eyes of God than the dung-beetles who push around malodorous filth with their noses (ji’lan allati tadfaʿu bi-anfiha al-natan).”²⁵⁵ Among the seven or ten deadly sins (kabāʾir), declared Allah’s Apostle, is “Arabizing

 Mesbah-e Yazdi, Porsesh-ha va pasokh-ha, p. 159.  Walī al-Dīn al-Tibrīzī, Mishkāt al-mas ̣ābīḥ (Lahore, Mālik Sirāj al-Dīn, n.d), vol. 1, p. 489: man taʿazzā bi-ʿaẓāʾi l-jāhiliyyati fa-aʿḍūhu bi-hinna abīhi wa lā taknū. Still, the importance of family connections and loyalty to (and care for, and honor of ) blood relatives was not completely undermined by Qurʾanic or Islamic tradition. Indeed, solicitousness for kin (ṣilat al-raḥim) is emphasized by Muslim scripture and tradition (it was one of the handful of emblematic precepts enumerated by ʿAlī’s brother Jaʿfar to the Ethiopian Najāshī as having been taught by the Prophet to the fledgling Muslim community – Ibn Hishām, Sīra, vol. 1., p. 196). One might say that this norm was reemphasized by the Shiʿa (see, e. g., Madelung, Succession, pp. 1– 3; Dakake, Charismatic Community, pp. 20 – 22; Haider, Shiʿite Islam, pp. 63 – 64; Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, pp. 96 – 98).  Sunan Abī Dāwūd, 2: 624. It should be noted that despite these vociferations against pride in ancestry, Muslim classical sources, Sunni as well as Shiʿite, regularly boast of the Prophet Muḥammad’s noble lineage (and that of his wife Khadija, among others).

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after the Emigration” (al-taʿarrub baʿda l-hijra), that is, re-affiliating with one’s tribe after having joined the Islamic faith.²⁵⁶ If the medieval Iranian literary movement known as Shuʿūbism made use of such statements and sentiments to attack the Arab sense of superiority, the latterday version of the same tendency preached now by the ayatollahs puts Persian pride between the crosshairs. Nationalism and patriotism of any kind are, on this view, meaningless and even sinful: states and other political or geographical (or social or economic or ethnic-based) entities are valuable only as vessels for the propagation and protection of the one true faith. (True, some medieval Islamic sources record the Prophet of Islam as declaring that ḥubbu l-waṭani min al-īmān, “love of homeland is part of faith,” but the meaning of waṭan in this context is closer to “place of residence” than to “country,” and most Muslim authorities reject the veracity of this report at any rate). Ali Shariʿati, the Iranian champion of radical renewal who helped make Shiʿism a vehicle for revolution, railed against the replacement of religion with nationalism, patriotism and historical nostalgia: A seventy-two nation war was stirred up amongst brothers, every nation put Islam aside and went astray after long forgotten stories, ancient ruins, rotten remains, the “fatherland”; they ripped God out of their consciousness and replaced Him with dirt! (khoda ra as yad bordand, khak ra bejayesh avardand).²⁵⁷

For Khomeini, nationalism was nothing less than the bane of the Muslim umma: A significant factor that has engendered the feebleness and helplessness of the Islamic countries and that is currently distancing them from one another and from the protective shade of the Noble Qurʿan, is this preoccupation with matters of race (nezhadbazi). This fellow is of the Turkish race, he must recite his prayers in Turkish! This one is Iranian, his alphabet must be such and such! Another guy is an Arab, ‘Arabism’ must rule him, not Islam! The Aryan race must rule [Iran], not Islam! The Turkish race must rule, not Islam! This ideology of racism (nezhadparasti), which is at the present time spreading and gaining ground and exerting influence among significant circles – it is like a bunch of kids playing a childish game, the leaders of the various nations pointing fingers and exclaiming, “You are

 Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, 6671. While some have accused Shiʿism of purveying – in direct contrast to the Islamic deprecation of the value of pedigree – an aristocracy of the blood in the form of veneration for the pure line of the imams, it should be remembered, among other things, that almost half of those imams were the offspring of slave-women – not all of them Arab – including the twelfth or Hidden Imam himself, whose mother was, according to legend, a Byzantine prisoner of war named Narjes (some versions of the story make her the daughter of the Byzantine emperor).  Ali Shariʿati, Yek jelo-ash ta binehayat sefr ha (Tehran: Bonyad-e Farhangi-ye Doktor Ali-ye Shariʿati, 1386 HS), p. 9.

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an Iranian! You are a Turk! You are – I don’t know – an Indonesian! You are this! You are that! You come from here! You come from there! Everyone is the ruler of his own country!” Heedless of the unifying hub of reliance (nokte-ye ettekaʾi) that all Muslims possess together. Alas! Alas! They have deprived and continue to deprive the Muslims of the world of this pillar of common dependence, of this focus of solidarity – and I do not know where the matter will end! Yes, the very racism that Islam came and drew a red line through, abolishing the distinction between black and white, Turk and Iranian (ajam), Arab and non-Arab, leaving piety (taqva) as the sole criterion [for classification and evaluation of human beings]…[as the Qurʿan states:] “Verily, the most aristocratic among you [from this day forward are not the worthiest genealogically but] the most God fearing” (Q. 49: 13). There are no ‘Turks’ or ‘Persians,’ there are no ‘Arabs’ and ‘Ajam’ – Islam is the touchstone, not these! This racism business is reactionary (ertejaʾi). They call us reactionaries? It is they who seek to return us two thousand five hundred years into the past [to the time of the Achaemenids]!²⁵⁸

As with most of Islam’s contemporary ailments, Khomeini sees the introduction of the nationalist notions that continue to impede the integration of the Muslim world as a Western plot, a plot to divide and conquer, or rather, to divide and avoid being conquered: There is no difference between two Muslims who speak two separate languages, between an ‘Arab’ Muslim and an ‘Iranian’ Muslim. It is probable that those elements that wish to prevent the unification of the Muslim polities have been propagating this [nationalist/racist/ethnicist] outlook among us. Yes, it is they who have proffered the issue of ‘Arab’ and ‘Ajam.’ And on the domestic scene, it is they who have insinuated the idea of [distinct ethno-national identities such as] Kurds, Arabs and Persians (fars). Inside our country (lit. “kingdom,” mamlekat) those who oppose [the fledgling Islamic Republic] have put about the notion of “Kurd” and “Lur” and “Turkoman” and “Baluch” and such as these, being well informed about these regions (because they – especially the British who infiltrated the Southern Iranian provinces – dominated such groups or had dealings with them in imperialist days – Z. M.). They reached the conclusion that were Islam ever to rise in its authentic form, and were that which Islam advocates (i.e., the abolition of ethno-national differences and the unity of the “Nation of Believers”—Z. M.) ever to come to fruition, then they (i. e., the Western powers – Z. M.) would be isolated, and the real power in the international arena would fall into the hands of the Muslims, whose total population is greater [than that of any other single collective in the world] and whose resources are more plentiful. For this reason they aim to create rifts on a grand scale between Arabs over here, Turks over there, Persians over here, and they therefore facilitate the growth, in the face of all Islamic logic, of this “Pan-Iranianism” and “Pan-Turkism” and the like. In this their goal is simultaneously to prevent the Muslims from uniting, and also to lead them away from true Islamic values [thus simultaneously depriving them of their two sources of strength: unity and right religion].²⁵⁹

 Sahife-ye Emam, 1: 377– 8.  Sahife-ye Emam, 11: 290 – 91.

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Khomeini’s preeminent student and the revolution’s most profound philosopher, Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari, although he was for the most part too sophisticated to buy into the conspiracy theories of his master (beyond occasionally paying them lip service), in this case echoed the “Imam” in seeing the injection of nationalist ideas as a Western machination: The notion of nationalism and racism (melliyat parasti va nezhad parasti)…attained to a position of influence among the nations of the East (mellal-e sharqi)²⁶⁰ through the vehicle of Imperialism. In order to implement a strategy of divida et impera (tafraqeh biandaz va hokumat kon), they saw no better way than to draw the attention of the diverse Muslim peoples and nations to their various peoplehoods and nationhoods and racial roots, and cultivate amongst them impassioned pride in fantasies. To the Hindi they said, “You are descended from these and those”; to the Turks they said, “Found a Young Turk movement and create the ideology of Pan-Turkism”; to the Arabs – who, more than any other people, are susceptible to the insinuation of such bigotries (taʿassobat)²⁶¹ – they said, “Go down the road of Arabism and Pan-Arabism”; and to the Iranian they said, “You are of the Aryan race, and you must separate yourself completely from the Arabs who are of the Semitic race.”²⁶²

Both of these senior clerics are echoing one of their heroes, the wandering philosopher and tireless anti-imperialist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani al-Asadobadi: Since the Europeans see that religious belief is the strongest tie binding the world’s Muslims together, they strive on the pretext of the battle against bigotry (taʿassub) to weaken this link, this belief, while they themselves represent the pinnacle of such religious-based bigotry. [British Prime Minister William Ewart] Gladstone is the reincarnation of the spirit of Peter the Hermit, and his government’s policies a continuation of the Crusades.²⁶³

 He has unwittingly accepted the transformation of the meaning of milla from religion to nation.  Motahhari sees the Arabs as more inclined to taʿaṣṣub – wagon circling and chauvinist pride in the face of the “other” – in a negative mirror image of the attitude classically attributed to the Arabs, scil., that their tribal cohesion and lineage (ʿaṣabiyya, ḥasab wa nasab) make them more aristocratic than those who surround them, bereft as these latter are of tribes and therefore of genealogical records.  Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, 14: 55.  Hamid Enayat, Sayri dar andishe-ye siyasi-ye ʿarab (Tehran: Moʾassase-ye entesharat-e Amir Kabir, 1394), p. 102. Richard Bulliet would point out insightfully in a paper presented in the early 1970s that the vision of secularism or “the restriction of religion to the areas of personal conscience and private observance” that Europeans sought to foist upon the Muslim Middle East “was neither a reflection of the political and social reality in the [European] ambassadors’, consuls, and advisors’ homelands nor a prescription that the ambassadors and advisors would feel comfortable giving to their own governments” (Methodists and Muslims, pp. 78 – 9).

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Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameneʾi, in his previous capacity as president of the republic, often visited the front during the Iran-Iraq war. In his informal orations to divisions of soldiers at various outposts, he harped repeatedly on the need to defend the religion of Islam, the values of Islam and the Abode of Islam against the satanic forces of Saddam Hussein and the West. After a speech in Dezful he was asked by a soldier whether they were fighting for their faith or their homeland (vatan). Khameneʾi placed his (at the time still uninjured) right hand over his left and replied: “They are one.”²⁶⁴ More recently, Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi, Chairman of the Imam Khomeini Foundation until his death in January, 2021, put the matter thus: Iran without Islam is not worth sacrificing oneself for. Were there an unbelieving government (hokumat-e kofr) in power in this country, then the country would have no value, and there would be no reason to give up one’s life in order to defend it. This country has value for us only in the sense that the laws of God and the teachings of Islam are facilitated by it and hold sway over it…Our fealty and passion must not be directed toward a territory confined within given geographical borders. Lebanon, Bahrayn, Gaza – these names hold no more significance for us than does “Iran”: it is only Islam that interests us (faqat eslam baraya ma ahammiyat darad).²⁶⁵

Mesbah-e Yazdi partakes here of a hoary tradition going back as far as (and beyond) the renowned Persian traveler-poet Naser-e Khosrow (d. 1074), who wrote: It was through religion that [Allah] caused the Arabs to excel the Persians in glory (moftakher shod Arab bar Ajam) until the Day of Reckoning; the irreligious man is base and worthless (khasis o bi-qadr), though [legendary Iranian King] Fereydun be his maternal uncle and [legendary Iranian King] Jamshid his paternal uncle.²⁶⁶

Neither nation nor patria matters: faith alone – Islamic faith – confers status, and it alone is deserving of fidelity. Ayatollah Khomeini may or may not have uttered

 Yekiyand. IRIB Mostanad, 03/11/2020. Over the years Khameneʾi has shifted a bit and is no longer averse to celebrating pride in Iranian-ness. His hand was badly wounded in a June 27th, 1981 assassination attempt carried out by the Mojahedin-e Khalq (who placed a bomb in the recording device on the podium), and remains unusable and limp. Despite a certain Shiʿite emphasis on the physical aesthetic – part of the tradition’s general aspiration toward perfection – which might make of such a deformation a disadvantage, Khameneʾi may be said to wear this mild misshapenness well.  Mardom Salari, 13/02/1390. Mesbah-e Yazdi goes on to place “nasyonalism” at the top of a list of dangers threatening today’s Iranian youth.  Naser-e Khosrow, Divan (Tabriz: n.p., 1340), p. 150. Khosrow was an Ismāʿīlī Shiʿite.

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the following statement verbatim, but it is unquestionably reflective of a major facet of his worldview: What is Iran? Iran is nothing but some mountains and some plains, some earth and some water. A true Muslim cannot love a country – any country. For his love is reserved only for his Creator. We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. Patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn (bogzar in zamin besuzad), let it go up in smoke, so long as Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.²⁶⁷

This focus of allegiance among the revolutionary Shiʿite clergy and their followers is not just different from that of the secular nationalists; it is antithetical. In the Shahnameh, for instance, Ferdowsi bewails the seventh century Arabian conquest of Iran: Bar Iraniyan zar geryan shodam Z Sasaniyan niz beryan shodam Derigh an sar-e taj va an takht o dad Derigh an bozorgi o farr o nezhad Kazin pas shekast ayad az taziyan Setareh nagardad magar bar ziyan For the Iranians I weep bitter tears For the Sasanians I am burnt up Alas for crowned head, for throne and for justice Alas for greatness, for splendor and race The future holds only defeat by the barbarian Arabs The stars shall revolve no more save over our misery²⁶⁸

In the eyes of both traditional and revolutionary Iranian Shiʿites, on the other hand, the Arab-Muslim invasion of Iran was the greatest moment in their country’s history, the temporal watershed between previous savagery and the subsequent onset of civilization. Ayatollah Motahhari found his Iranian national pride in the ease and alacrity with which, almost a millennium and a half earlier, his

 For a brief discussion of the provenance, and possible fabrication, of this quote, see Rasmus Christian Elling, “Matters of Authenticity: Nationalism, Islam and Ethnic Diversity in Iran,” in Negin Nabavi (ed.), Iran: From Theocracy to the Green Movement (New York: Palgrave, 2012), p. 84, n. 28. As we shall see in an ensuing chapter, Ayatollah Khomeini played the nationalist card, as well, castigating the government in the 1960s and 70s for insulting the honor of Iran and selling off the country’s resources. Still, he could vociferate that “Before Islam, the lands now blessed by our True Faith suffered miserably because of ignorance and cruelty. There is nothing in that past that is worth glorification. We will break all the poison pens of those who speak of nationalism, democracy, and such things.”  Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, p. 796.

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countrymen had succumbed to the power of the new faith, and soon became its premier exponents: The people of Iran, among all the nations that accepted Islam, enjoyed a special distinction: no other nation jettisoned its former worldview (nezam-e fekri) with such rapidity and so little resistance, and opened the doors of its heart with such fervor, ardor and seriousness to the ideas and beliefs of the new religion. In the words of [Reinhart] Dozy, the famous Orientalist, “The most important people that converted [to Islam] were the Iranian people; it was they who set Islam on a strong and sturdy foundation, not the Arabs.”²⁶⁹

Here we are witness to a common conception actuating the revolutionary thinkers of contemporary Iranian Shiʿism, self-contradictory at first glance, until the contradiction rather neatly resolves itself. Their Persian national pride is present and accounted for, and manifests itself even in braggadocio about the superiority of Iranians to Arabs, at the same time as they celebrate the defeat of the Iranians at the hands of those same Arabs. The solution to this apparent paradox is that the Iranians knew a good thing when they saw it, succumbed to it without hesitation (an exaggeration), and subsequently served it with unparalleled devotion and talent (not an exaggeration); whereas the Arabs failed to recognize the greatness of Islam, had to be fought tooth-and-nail for decades by the nascent Muslim community until they bowed to Allah’s sway, and never tendered the contributions to the new faith that the Persians did. Iran’s glory lay in its surrender: “The Shahnameh has a happy end” (shahnameh akharash khosh ast).²⁷⁰ A celebrated Qurʿanic verse has Allah postulate a historical “What if?”: “And had We revealed the Scripture to a non-Arab (ʿajam, literally “a mute” or “a barbarian,” a term generally considered to refer to Iranians) who then recited it unto the Arabs, they would not have believed in it” (Q. 26: 199 – 200). Commented the sixth Shiʿite Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq: “Indeed, had the Qurʿan been bestowed through a nonArab/an Iranian, the Arabs would not have believed in it; as it was, however, the Qurʿan was given through an Arab – yet the Iranians believed in it!”²⁷¹ Again: Persian pride is a product of this nation’s willingness to forego its time-honored, indigenous belief system in favor of an imported, imposed one. (Indeed, for Ayatollah Motahhari, as we saw above, Islam was specifically not “imposed” on the Iranian population. Seasoning his pious humility with a bit of Persian swagger, Motahhari

 Motahhari, Majmu-eye Athar, 14: 151.  This popular Persian aphorism supports many meanings besides the one given here, scil., that the Arab conquest of Iran, with which the great epic concludes, was a blessing. The original intent of the saying is obscure.  Motahhari, Majmu-eye Athar, 21: 268.

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argues that had the Sasanian armies wished they could have crushed the invading Arab tribes with little ado. That they did not do so, then, can only be attributed to the fact that the native people were blessed with the perspicacity to be profoundly enamoured of the faith that those tribes brought with them in their saddle bags). It was the innate Iranian “moral sense, justice-centered spirit, and quest for freedom” that led the inhabitants of this country to unhesitatingly adopt the ethical and egalitarian laws of Islam.²⁷² A widely circulated hadith has it that Muḥammad once warned his followers (somewhat anachronistically, since the Prophet did not live to see the Muslim invasion of Persia): “I swear to God that I foresee a day when these very Iranians that you are currently battling in the name of Islam, will battle you to make you Muslims.”²⁷³ The Qurʿan threatens that “God will replace [those who go back on their religion] with a people He loves and who love Him” (Q. 5: 54) and that “If you turn away, He will replace you with another people, who will not be the likes of you” (Q. 47: 38). In both cases Shiʿite preachers and politicians in today’s Islamic Republic regularly adduce hadith and tafsīr (prophetic/imamic statements and scholarly exegeses) to show that the “people” intended in these verses are the Persians, the “nation beloved of God” (mellat-e mahbub-e khoda).²⁷⁴ Iran is, as it were, the New Israel. One fundamental argument repeatedly brought to bear by Motahhari in his Khadamat-e Motaqabel-e Eslam beh Iran (The Mutually Beneficial Relationship between Islam and Iran) is that the whole notion that Iran was subdued and subjugated by the Arab Muslims disintegrates if we shift the angle of view. The opposite is, in fact, the case: never in history before or since was there such an Iranian efflorescence as in the several centuries following the Islamic conquest. Those who claim otherwise are looking at the question only from the point of view of race, as opposed to from the far more important point of view of culture: ideas, philosophy, art, literature, spirituality, morality. As Motahhari puts it, tongue-in-cheek, “As far as such ethnically focused scholars and pundits are concerned, the problem was not that the bloodthirsty Umayyad general Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf slaughtered tens of thousands of innocents; their problem is: Why didn’t an Iranian slaughter them instead of an Arab?!”²⁷⁵ Motahhari describes the widespread perception that “the invasion and conquest of Iran by the Muslim Arabs was a disaster of epic proportions for our country on a par with the depredations of Alexander or the Mongols”; that “the sack of  Meir Litvak (summarizing manifestations of a burgeoning post-revolutionary trend of thought), “God’s Favored Nation,” p. 4.  Motahhari, Khadamat-e Moteqabel, p. 105.  For several examples see Litvak, “God’s Favored Nation,” pp. 7– 8.  Motahhari, Khadamat-e Moteqabel, p. 317.

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Iran by the Arab Muslims reduced Persian urban civilization to smoldering ruins”; that “if the people of Iran after the onset of Islam…attained a lofty intellectual and cultural state this was thanks to their racial characteristics (khasise-ye nezhadi) and ancient pre-Islamic culture”; and that “Islam’s only contribution was to afford a two century interruption of this cultural and intellectual flow.” He states baldly (writing in the early nineteen seventies) that “among Iranian and non-Iranian scholars there exists not a single one who does not subscribe to this thesis,” which is “taken up with much gusto by those pushing a particular agenda for propaganda purposes.”²⁷⁶ He devotes many a chapter to rebutting this pervasive outlook. At one point this most philosophically inclined of the Iranian revolutionaries – who for the most part evinces considerable admiration for aspects of preIslamic Persian culture – states (in not so many words) that prior to the advent of Islam Iranians wrote virtually nothing of any worth: only with the admixture of Arabic could Persian become a vehicle for philosophy.²⁷⁷ He also marshals a great deal of evidence to buttress his claim that Iranians on the whole welcomed Islam with open arms, and that the stronger and more independent Iranian dynasties became, the more they Islamized rather than the less. The other side of the same coin also constitutes a major motif of the ill-fated ayatollah’s book: the enormous, overwhelming contribution of Iran to the development of Islam, in a plethora of essential fields, a claim well known by his time in Western academic circles but which Motahhari made popular (though he did not pioneer it) in Persian. At one point he cites an anecdote in which the Umayyad caliph Hishām son of ʿAbd al-Malik (d. 743 CE) asks a scholar at his court whether he is well versed in the identities of the presiding Muslim jurists or fuqahāʾ in the various cities of the Islamic empire. Upon receiving an answer in the affirmative, the caliph proceeds to test his interlocutor’s knowledge: “Who is the chief jurist of Medina?” Answer: “Nāfiʿ.” Caliph: “Is he a client (i. e., a non-Arab, meaning a Persian) or an Arab” (mawla hast ya ʿarabi)? Answer: “A client.” Caliph: “Who is chief jurist of Yemen?” Answer: “Ṭāwūs b. Kaysān.” Caliph: “Is he a client or an Arab?” Answer: “A client.” And so the interrogation continues for dozens of towns, and one by one the chief jurists thereof are identified as Iranians. Finally the caliph asks: “Who is the chief jurist of Kufa?” Answer: “Ibrāhīm al-Nakhaʿī.” Caliph: “Is he a client or an Arab?” The scholar hesitates for a moment and then answers: “An Arab.” The caliph smiles: “At least there is one Arab!”²⁷⁸ Condescension toward Arabs on the part of Iranian ulama is often expressed through backhanded

 Motahhari, Khadamat-e Moteqabel, p. 143.  Motahhari, Khadamat-e Moteqabel, pp. 137– 138.  Motahhari, Khadamat-e Moteqabel, p. 315.

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compliments, like that of Ayatollah Tabatabaʾi, who praised the Prophet Muḥammad and his Companions for having achieved so very much despite having been raised “among a people who possessed no learning and had no taste of civilization.”²⁷⁹ Presidential advisor and former minister of intelligence, Ali-ye Yunesi, explained that “Everything that encounters Iran improves. When Islam reached Iran, it shed Arabism, racism and nationalism, and Iran received pure Islam (Eslam-e nab-e Mohammadi).”²⁸⁰ Khomeini, Ayatollah Motahhari’s teacher, celebrated the subjugation of the infidel Sassanian Zoroastrians by the armies of Islam (even though these last were dispatched by the second caliph, ʿUmar son of al-Khaṭṭāb, abhorred by the Shiʿites), praising the Arab occupiers for “bringing the laws of God to lawless infidels.”²⁸¹ “[The nascent Muslim nation] rose up,” he vociferated, “and after first cleansing the Arabian Peninsula of its tyrants (taghiha), turned to the conquest of Byzantium and Iran…in order to rid those lands of the satans and the satanic culture that ruled them.”²⁸² Indeed, pride in the Muslim conquest of Iran runs so deep among the religious portion of the Persian citizenry – and especially amongst the motaʿahhed or “[revolutionarily] committed” section thereof – that a recent trend has seen scholars in Qom striving to transfer the credit for the Arabian invasion of Iran to none other than the founder and most venerated figure of Shiʿism itself: In the conquest of Iran the plans laid by Imam ʿAlī were central, and in many of the most important battles Imam Ḥasan and Imam Ḥusayn played highly significant roles…Thus we see that the opinion of ʿAlī [uttered in the war council regarding the most effective manner in which to attack Iran] was adopted. Close scrutiny of the lofty words of our master ʿAlī, of his statements concerning the courageousness of the Iranians and his mapping out of the blueprint for the expedition, demonstrates that although the invasion of Iran took place during the tenure of the second caliph (ʿUmar), the original designer of the campaign (tarrah-e asli-ye maydan) was His Excellency ʿAlī.²⁸³

This paragraph is excerpted from a book tellingly entitled Sources of Iranian Pride (Eftekharat-e Iraniyan): Iranians should be proud, in other words, that their coun-

 Tabatabaʾi, Shiʿite Islam, p. 149.  Litvak, “God’s Favored Nation,” p. 4.  Sahife-ye Nur, 1: 294.  Sahife-ye Emam, 11: 185.  Mohammad Lag Ali-ye Abadi, Eftekharat-e Iraniyan (Qom: Entesharat-e Madares, 1384). Note the residue of national pride in the statement regarding Iranian courageousness, and indeed this book does not ignore pre-Islamic achievements.

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try was subjugated…by none other than ʿAlī.²⁸⁴ In the same vein, when Saddam Hussein styled the war he launched against the fledgling Islamic Republic in 1981 “a second Qādisiyya” – referring to the confrontation (636 CE) in which an Arab army decisively defeated the forces of Sassanid Persia – Ayatollah Khomeini retorted that (a) it was highly ironic for the atheistic Iraqi dictator to seize on the example of a battle fought for principles that were so alien to his own, and (b) what was more important, Qādisiyya was an incomparable blessing for Iran.²⁸⁵ In 2009, Iranian protégé Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah, leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah, denied that Iranian civilization existed at all: today’s Iran was created by Arabs, he averred, and its culture is thoroughly Muslim.²⁸⁶ Indeed, a group of several score Arabs, the linear descendants of ʿAlī (scil., the Imams) and their numerous relations, constitute the focal point of the Iranian-Shiʿite spiritual experience, and the demise and burial of two of these Arabs on Iranian soil – the eighth Imam ʿAli l-Riḍā, around whose grave rose the city of Mashhad, and his sister Fāṭima the Impeccable (Fateme-ye Maʿsumeh), around whose grave rose the city of Qom – represent the premier Iranian claim to fame in Muslim clerical eyes, and the sole basis for the sacredness of Persian soil. When the daughter of the venerated Ayatollah Taleqani (d. 1979), Aʿzam-e Taleqani (d. 2019) – an “Islamist-Feminist” who has for years contested the requirement of masculinity (rujula) for Iranian presidential candidates – founded a newsletter, she called it “The Message of Hagar” (payam-e Hajjar), after the mother of the Arab race. The honorific sayyid – indicating one’s descent from a sacred Arab family – is borne proudly by Shiʿites in Iran, including the current Supreme Leader. Islam is not, in short, reconcilable with Iranian ethno-centric melligaraʾi, nationalism, or vatan-parasti, patriotism. “This rebellion,” insisted Ayatollah Khomeini referring to the mass uprising of 1979, “is not a nationalist rebellion. This rebellion is a Qurʿanic rebellion, this rebellion is an Islamic rebellion.”²⁸⁷ When the same senior cleric was asked by an American reporter, on the Air France flight that took him home at the height of the revolution, “what he felt upon returning to Iran,” the octogenarian cleric disdainfully replied: hichi – “nothing.”

 The first imam and fourth caliph also won the Iranians over by his fairness in administration (as opposed to ʿUmar’s oppressiveness – Litvak, “God’s Favored Nation,” p. 5).  Saskia Gieling, Religion and War in Revolutionary Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), p. 108.  Tamar Elam Gindin, Hatov, Hara ve-Haʿolam (Ramat Gan: Modan, 2011), p. 9. More than one “committed” revolutionary cleric raised an eyebrow at this blatant characterization.  Takeyh, Last Shah, p. 241.

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Arrogance and Innocence Finally, and in many ways most significantly, the ideology of Iranianism – whether in its ancient, medieval or modern forms – is anathema to the revolutionary clerics because of the societal ethos and philosophical outlook that permeates its texts and is preached with its assistance. Returning to the motivations behind Nietzsche’s choice of Zoroaster as his mouthpiece, we might suggest that more than just the purported German-Iranian historical connection was at work. Even more fundamental, perhaps, was Nietzsche’s notorious accusation that Semitic religion had undermined the pristine “aristocratic value equation” – according to which “the powerful, beautiful, joyous, and noble” are tantamount to “the good and right” – and replaced this equation with the dark and diseased system of ethics that Nietzsche dubbed Semitic “slave morality” – according to which the wretched, the poor, the ugly and the feeble inherit the earth. No one who reads Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh can fail to remark upon the ultra-Iliadic quality that pervades its fifty-some thousand stanzas, the overwhelming majority of which are focused adoringly on the high-born, the strong-bodied, the beautiful, the boastful, the merry, the affluent, the exuberant.²⁸⁸ The Turanian princess Tahmina has “ever craved [Rostam’s] massive shoulders, your arms and your massive breast,” while the Afghan Princess Rudabeh plays Rapunzel with Zal, imploring him: “Warrior’s son, hero-fathered, let your lion’s chest expand, then reach out with your elephantine forearms and take hold of my long, jet-black hair…” The noble protagonists of the Shahnameh, on the rare occasions when they are not out winning glory on military campaigns, are “always engaged in polo, archery, wine-bibbing or the chase.”²⁸⁹ They spend their days “cup in hand and with joy in their hearts as worshippers of the fruit of the grape…happily quaffing the ruby liquor from goblets of

 Which text, the Iliad or the Shahnameh, contains material more offensive or antithetical to pious Muslim sensibilities? The former is more polytheistic than the latter – Zoroastrianism always hovering around the border between dualism and monotheism, while Homer’s epic is chock full of (riotously behaving) gods – but the latter affords an exiguous role to Ahura Mazda, who puts in an appearance quite rarely, whereas in the former the divine beings are involved in and control virtually everything. The scarcity of divine intervention and religious ritual in the Shahnameh – and in its source texts and derivative works – is the main reason most scholars speak of “two strains of transmission [of Iranian pre-Islamic history]: on the one hand the epical (heroic) secular tradition cultivated by the minstrels, storytellers and chroniclers, and on the other the religious tradition carried by the priests” (Schoeler, “National Amnesia,” p. 505). Although somewhat similar reasoning famously led biblical critics to (what is in this author’s eyes) the hastily concocted Documentary Hypothesis – according to which the Pentateuch is an amalgam of at least four different sources – in the case of Iranian tradition the bifurcation rings truer.  Reuben Levy, The Epic of the Kings, pp. 66, 45, 61.

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crystal until their heads are in a maze.” For these brash, reckless, Randian “ideal men” life is one long, intermittent series of razm o bazm, “fighting and feasting.” And as often as they chase game, they chase women, who are regularly described by the Shahnameh in terms like these: Mehrab has a daughter in the women’s quarters of his palace who is more radiant than the sun. From head to toe she is white as ivory; her face is a very paradise and for stature she is as a cypress tree. Above her silvern shoulders two musky black tresses curl, encircling them with their ends as though they were links in a chain. Her mouth resembles a pomegranate blossom, her lips are cherries and her silver bosom curves out into breasts like pomegranates. Her eyes are like the narcissus in the garden and her lashes draw their blackness from the raven’s wing. Her eyebrows are modeled on the bows of Teraz powdered with fine bark and elegantly dark. If you seek a brilliant moon, it is her face; if you long for the perfume of musk, it lingers in her tresses. From top to toe she is paradise gilded; all radiance, harmony and delectability.²⁹⁰

The ethos pervading this great work was perhaps best epitomized by the man who penned its first thousand or so distiches (prior to being murdered by his own slave), Abu Mansur Daqiqi (d. 977 CE): “Ruby lips and the strains of the harp, rust-colored wine and the cult of Zoroaster” (lab-e yaqut rang va nale-ye chang may chun zang va kish-e zardoshti).²⁹¹ It would be hard to overestimate the chasm that separates the worldview underlying portrayals such as these from the system of ideas and way of life that characterize the Shiʿite seminary (howzeh) that produced the ayatollahs of Iran. The one asserts the privilege of blue-blooded aristocracy; the other insists on the socio-spiritual equality of all believers. The one is captivated by corporeal stature and physical prowess; the other virtually ignores the body and focuses on the mind and spirit. The one celebrates and flaunts outward beauty as a prize to be won at almost any cost; the other displays little or no overt interest in the human aesthetic, and strives to conceal pulchritude whenever possible. The one revels in freedom; the other is emphatically restrictive, and sees the highest station of human achievement as that of ubudiyyat, “slavery” (to God). The one admires boastfulness; the other esteems self-marginalization. The one thrills to the adventures of eros; the other enjoins modesty and chastity. The one commends merriment; the other enshrines heavy-heartedness. The one praises laughter; the other cultivates tears. The one basks in life; the other glorifies death. The one is

 Levy, p. 40.  Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, p. 9.

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in the major key, the other in the minor, and little if any harmony is possible between them.²⁹² It is no coincidence that most, if not all, of the qualities or predilections that we have just ascribed to the Weltanschauung of Shahnameh Aryanism are also applicable (to generalize liberally) to the outlook and lifestyle of the modern secular West (which latter is, after all, in many ways a product of a similar experiment during the Renaissance involving the circumnavigation and increasing circumscription of Christianity in favor of the concomitant revival of Greco-Roman paganism, to say nothing of the various particular European nationalisms that performed comparable maneuvers in their own parochial contexts during the Romantic period). Not for nothing did the revolutionary clerics of 1979 perceive the “Iranianism” (Iraniyyat) fostered under the Pahlavis to be in league with the “cultural imperialism” (tahajom-e farhangi) purportedly waged by Europe and

 In what is otherwise a perspicacious review, Rudolph Matthee praises Reza Zia Ebrahimi for setting the record straight in his The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism and demonstrating that the Shahnameh “essentially espouses an Islamic worldview” (Perspectives on Politics, Nov. 1917, p. 1166). Though Ebrahimi does challenge the widespread notion that Ferdowsi’s magnum opus is an antiIslamic work, I for one did not understand him as making the claim that Matthee here ascribes to him, nor would I have found it credible had he done so. Shaul Shaked refers to the “pessimistic motifs of the Shahnameh” that may result from the influence of Manichean attitudes prevalent in Persian culture that “completely delegitimized the life of this world, of material existence” (Shaked, Hebrew introduction to Kagan translation, p. 29). If by the first half of this claim Shaked means a certain fatalism informing parts or most of the epic, similar to the moira that characterizes, e. g., much of the Iliad, then the description rings true. If the intent is an overall teleological awareness of impending doom, comparable in some senses to the mood that may be said to pervade the Old and New Testaments, this is also plausible: Ferdowsi unquestionably cultivates an atmosphere of inevitable disastrous denouement in many individual tales as well as in the grand narrative, which ends in the Arab conquest. But if Shaked finds most or even many of the stories of the Shahnameh themselves dolorous, I cannot agree with him. Jamshid, Salm, Tur, Iraj, Sohrab, Siavosh, the two Rostams and other ill-fated figures notwithstanding, I find as much comedy as tragedy in the pages of the Book of Kings. As for the latter part of Shaked’s assertion – that the idealistic-gnostic otherworldliness of Manicheism may have impacted on the Shahnameh – I, for one, do not see strong evidence of such an impact. On the contrary, it is nothing if not a this-worldly text. The ethos of Shiʿism, on the other hand, may perhaps be summed up best by a report that ʿAlī “refused to recognize certain visitors as being members of his party, although his doorkeeper Qanbar had so announced them, because he did not see on them the distinguishing features by which one recognizes true adherents of the Shiʿa: bodies attenuated by privations, lips parched with thirst, and eyes bleary from tireless weeping.” “Our feast days are our assemblies of mourning,” intones a Shiʿite poet, and “More touching than the tears of Shiʿites” has become an Arabic proverb (all cited by Goldziher, Introduction, p. 179). Not for nothing did Reza Shah essentially replace the banned Shiʿite mourning procession with a parade known as karvan-e shadi, “Caravan of Joy,” to celebrate…the king’s birthday (Chehabi, Culture Wars, p. 30).

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America against Islam. Hasan-e Taqizadeh’s (in)famous list of recommendations for the salvation of the Iranian nation – published in 1921 in the aforementioned Kaveh journal on the cusp of the coup of Reza Khan – comprises two main categories of prescriptions: (1) “The revival of the ancient traditions and customs of the Iranian nation” and “The preservation of the national language, meaning Persian, from corruption”; and (2) “The taking and accepting without reservation of the principles, manners and customs of European civilization,” “The external and internal, body and soul (zaheran va batenan, jesman va rohan) adoption of European identity,” “The implementation of complete equality between religions,” and “The cultivation of political freedom and equality (democracy).”²⁹³ In the triangle of ideologies competing for the hearts and minds of Iranians during the modern period, then, backward-oriented nationalism (mihan-parasti, bastangaraʾi) and forward- (and Westward‐) looking “progressivism” (taraqqi-khahi, farangi-maʾabi) have for the most part allied with one another against the third contender in the arena: Shiʿite Islam. The battlelines between these rival camps have not, it is true, at all times and in all cases been drawn as clearly as we have made them out to be so far (and scholars such as Aghaie, Vejdani, Siavoshi, Tavakkoli, Mirsepassi and Reza Zia Ebrahimi have devoted instructive studies to the blurring of these lines, adducing examples in which Islamism and nationalism in Iran have managed to find quite a few modi Vivendi).²⁹⁴ Sometimes nationalism could entail not affinity for, but rather hostility to, Westernization, or at least to the West; at other times progressive forces actually cooperated with religious forces (e. g., in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 – 11 and in the Islamic Revolution of 1979); on still other occasions it was Islamism and patriotism that fought shoulder to shoulder (and long before the advent of modern “isms,” allegiance to Shiʿite Islam, far from being in opposition to allegiance to the Iranian fatherland, often went hand in hand with it, especially as a means of offsetting the Persian patria from the surrounding Sunni polities, the Ottoman Empire chief among them). A list of the exceptions to the schematic diagram of alliances and antagonisms offered over the last several pages would go on for many pages more. Several examples of the seemingly paradoxical alliance of mutually antithetical trends are, however, worth noting, in order to grasp the multi-faceted complexity characterizing the relationship between these competing – and sometimes collaborating – worldviews, and avoid the trap of oversimpli The entire list is cited by Ansari, Politics of Nationalism, pp. 62– 63. The fourth prescription in the selected list as I have ordered it here actually reads: “Iran must externally and internally, body and soul, become European.” On Taqizadeh see especially Homa Katouzian’s enlightening “Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh: Three Lives in a Lifetime,” in Katouzian, Iran, pp. 55 – 76.  All writing in Aghaie and Marashi, ed., Rethinking.

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fying our subject. We offer the following examples of prima facie “strange bedfellowship” in no particular order: (a) Iranian Shiʿism, while theoretically opposed to the principles underlying Iranian nationalism and therefore purportedly unperturbed by the fact that it is a religion that venerates, almost to the point of apotheosis, a family of Arabs (the ahl al-bayt), at the same time rarely remarks directly upon the Arab pedigree of ʿAlī and the Imams, and indeed, often portrays them as Iranians (especially in art); (b) Nationalists like Ahmad-e Kasravi and even the Pahlavi Shahs, though Westernizers, ultimately sought Iranian political independence from the West; (c) Islamists like Shariʿati and Khomeini reproduced almost verbatim the atheistnationalist Akhundzadeh’s criticisms of the excessive attention granted by traditional Muslim clerics to legal minutiae; (d) As Alexander Grinberg has shown, for Navvab-e Safavi, founder of the Fadaʾiyan-e Eslam, Iran was in many ways synonymous with Islam, and Islamism and nationalism were not necessarily at loggerheads;²⁹⁵ (e) In his widely acclaimed Yeki bud yeki nabud (Once upon a time, 1921), renowned nationalist litterateur Muhammad Ali Jamalzadeh raged against Western imperialist interference in Iranian affairs, and in his no less celebrated Farsi shekar ast (“Persian is sugar,” 1921) a simple peasant, Ramazan, is bewildered not only by the Arabic-laden parlance of a mullah – “He doesn’t even know our language!” – but by the highfalutin Persian spoken by a European educated Iranian (like Jamalzadeh himself ); (f ) Ahmad-e Kasravi (d. 1946), fierce nemesis of Shiʿism (and religion in general), was nevertheless highly enamoured of the Arabic language, and was in some ways “the first Iranian to criticize modernism and Eurocentrism.”²⁹⁶ He was also critical of aspects of “Shahnameh fever”; (g) The Islamic Republican regime has become the purveyor of Persification, preventing the various ethnic groups that crowd the country from exercising their right – enshrined in the post-revolutionary constitution and championed by many “reformists” – to teach and conduct provincial business in their mother tongues (and this even though Ayatollah Khameneʾi is half Azeri). Here are conservative Islamists acting as linguistic nationalists; (h) The atmosphere informing the “Nights of Poetry” that preceded the 1979 revolution was anti-Pahlavi, but also, on many occasions, anti-Islamic;

 Alexander Grinberg, “Pre-Revolutionary Islamic Discourse in Iran as Nationalism: Islamism in Iran as Nationalism” in Litvak, Constructing Nationalism, pp. 203 – 216.  Rajaee, Islamism, p. 51.

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(i)

In Islamic Republican election campaigns of the second decade of the new Christian millennium slogans like “All together for Iran!” (hameh ba ham baroye Iran!) are becoming increasingly prevalent; (j) During televised commemorations of the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war, bechodored narrators are wont to intone that they died “in defense of the soil of their homeland” (dar defaʿ az khak-e vataneshan); (k) Intellectuals close to the Pahlavi court, and the Pahlavi sovereign himself, did not balk at coopting the anti-Westoxication discourse of leftists and Islamists in order to take the wind out of their sails and delegitimize democracy as an inauthentic foreign implant (this paradox is utilized by Ali Mirsepassi in his latest work to argue counterintuitively that it was the Pahlavi rejection rather than adoption of modernity that led to the dynasty’s downfall – an intriguing theory that the present writer finds ultimately untenable);²⁹⁷ (l) The powerful poet Mahdi Akhavan Sales was anti-Pahlavi and pro-democratic, but also anti-Arab and pro-Zoroastrian/Mazdakism; (m) The Westernizing, nationalist politician Hasan-e Taqizadeh (d. 1970) began by supporting the “purification” of Persian from its “noxious” Arabic element (in the context of the above-mentioned Farhangestan), then performed a volte face and opposed the same idea with vigor; (n) The famous scholar and historian Fereydun-e Adamiyyat (d. 2008), though a fierce Iranian patriot, promoter of Zoroastrianism and rabid anti-Semite, at the same time railed against the West that had given him so many of his research and theoretical tools – making him an anti-Western aryanist; (o) Upon returning to Iran after many youthful years abroad, the future Pahlavi prime minister and unrestrained Westernizer Amir Abbas Hoveyda felt “joy at the sight of my own country, a country I had come to love from the pages of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh…” but also “sorrow at the thought that foreign (American and British) forces are now stationed on my country’s borders”;²⁹⁸ (p) The progressive and Western-inspired Constitutional Revolution was led, as we have noted, in large part by Shiʿite clerics; (q) Ayatollah Khomeini delivered, and Ayatollah Khameneʾi still delivers, congratulatory speeches to the Iranian nation on the ancient Zoroastrian New Year of Nowruz. Indeed, Nowruz has been (more or less successfully) Shiʿitized, and is now celebrated by the Islamic Republic as “the day upon which Allah vouchsafed to mankind the right of dominion over the earth,” “the

 Ali Mirsepassi, Iran’s Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), esp. Chapter Two.  Milani, p. 86.

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day upon which the Prophet Muḥammad lifted Imam ʿAlī on his shoulders so he could smash the idols that filled up the Kaʿba,” and the like. The Pahlavi Iranian national anthem, Ay Iran! – full of patriotic, “blood and soil” sentiment and empty of religion – is sung regularly to this day by Islamic Republican military choirs, even as they parade in front of Ayatollah Khomeini’s massive sepulcher. Many Iranian Islamists took (and still take) inordinate pride in the disproportionate Persian scholarly contribution to their religion, including its Sunni aspect (as we have seen more than once; Jalal Al-e Ahmad, author of Westoxication, was one of the more illustrious proponents of this view), and a hadith or tradition currently enjoying much vogue in such circles quotes the response of ʿAlī son of Abi Talib to a group of Arabs who scolded him for keeping company with the aʿjām or Persians: “Be aware,” admonishes the first Shiʿite Imam, “that just as you Arabs unsheathed your swords and fought until you brought these Persians into the light of Islam (during the first Muslim conquests in the 7th century CE – Z. M.), so a day will come in the future when the Persians will unsheathe their swords and fight until they bring the wayward Arabs back into the light of Islam”; As we saw, some “religious nationalists” (melligari-diniha) have adopted the old theories of Gobineau, E. G. Browne, Henri Corbin and others (mostly discarded by present-day academia) to the effect that Shiʿism itself was a disguised Iranian nationalist reaction to the Arab invasion, thereby transcending the Islam-Patriotism divide; The Imams themselves are descendants, according to most versions of the Shiʿite narrative, of Ḥusayn’s marriage to the Persian princess Shahrbanu, daughter of the last Sassanian Emperor Yazdegerd, so they are not pure – or rather impure – Arabs after all (Iranian royalty held a preeminent place in the eyes of the pre- and post-Islamic Arabs: for example, the Prophet Muḥammad’s fellow Qurashite tribesmen sought to upstage him at the outset of his evangelistic mission by distracting his public – whom he was regaling with Judeo-Christian biblical anecdotes – with stories of Iranian-Zoroastrian kings of yore); Some modern and post-revolutionary “secularists”²⁹⁹ in Iran (perhaps foremost among them Ali Shariʿati) are, as they themselves see the issue, anticlerical but not anti-Islamic;

 We somewhat confusingly employ the term “secularism” throughout the present volume in two rather contradictory senses, following the same confusion that informs the general use of this designation in English parlance. Whereas it can be employed to indicate an antireligious po-

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(w) Many Iranian intellectuals harbored negative feelings toward Arabs, while, at the same time, holding the (written) Arabic language in the highest regard (again, the distinguished authors Al-e Ahmad and Ahmad-e Kasravi are prime examples); (x) The second Pahlavi monarch, the Westernizing and secularizing autocratic nationalist Mohammad Reza Shah, often made gestures to the religious institution (as his father had also done, at least at the beginning of his reign), played a central role in establishing the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (1969), and even claimed to have been visited on one occasion by the Hidden Imam; (y) No less fierce a critic of Shiʿite Islam than Mirza Aqa Khan-e Kermani was eager to prop up Source of Emulation Mirza Hasan-e Shirazi as a tool with which to confront Qajar tyranny and Naser al-Din Shah’s parade of concessions to European companies. Here an anti-religious nationalist sides with a Shiʿite divine against an Iranian monarch; (z) The revolutionary Islamism of Khomeini, Shariʿati, Motahhari, Montazeri, Beheshti, Taleqani, Bazargan and other figures was, of course, at least in some ways a product of the Iranian exposure to modern and/or radical European ideologies and the merging of these with Islamic themes and imperatives; (aa) The blow to Iranian pride occasioned by the failure of Prime Minister Mossadeq’s oil nationalization campaign and the purportedly CIA-assisted coup that overthrew him in 1953, led to a “nationalist” reaction amongst the Iranian populace that was specifically anti-Western, and increasingly pro-Islamic (a combination of sentiments that would eventually drive the revolution of 1979). Here Islam works with Iranianism against the West; (bb) Senior clerics are often at the forefront of campaigns to defend Persian against the inroads of foreign (though admittedly not Arab) terms, and former President and current Supreme Leader Khameneʾi himself once upbraided the Iranian pilots of his executive jet for communicating in English with the Tehran airport tower (very much in the tradition of his anti-hero, Reza Khan, who once had a local Khuzestani functionary dismissed because he used English terms of measurement in a telegram to the capital [“He was fired for a ʻfoot,’” quipped a foreign journalist]);³⁰⁰ (cc) When a party of Khomeini’s followers came to him soon after his accession to power with a proposal to defuse the intra-Muslim dispute over whether to sition, it originally referred, in its Christological usage, to the notion that religion and state should be separate. In Shariʿati’s case, the latter meaning is intended.  Reza Niyazmand, Reza Shah az tavallod ta saltanat (Maryland: Bonyad-e mottaleʾat-e Iran, 1996), vol. 1, p. 382).

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refer to the body of water separating Iran from Saudi Arabia as the “Persian Gulf ” or the “Arab Gulf ” by renaming it the “Islamic Gulf,” the rahbar (Supreme Leader) reportedly replied: “It is the Persian Gulf.” (dd) Ayatollah Muhammad Hosayn-e Tabatabaʾi, mentor of an entire generation of clerics (many of a revolutionary Islamist stripe) made a goodly number of nationalist-sounding statements about love of country and the services that Islam could perform for Iran. He also, on occasion, praised aspects of Zoroastrianism. All of these and a host of other deviations from the gross breakdown of forces or attitudes offered in the previous analysis – that is, the adversarial relationship between nationalists and Westernizers, on the one hand, and Islamists, on the other – point up the pitfalls involved in any such attempt at all-encompassing classification: in matters of this sort, nothing is ever so clear cut. Still, by the time of the Islamic Revolution, as we argued above, positions had become sufficiently polarized for distinct schools of thought and ideological camps to congeal, and demarcate their borders from one another. The excesses of the Westernizing and secularizing nationalists had pushed the Shiʿite traditionists to their own unprecedented extremes, and little room was left for compromise or overlap (or at least acknowledged overlap) between the camps. As the Pahlavi dynasty had sought to purge Iranian public life of its centuries-old Shiʿite coloring, the Khomeinist regime now set about excising almost all of the nationalist elements from the educational curriculum: elementary, junior high and high schoolers in the Islamic Republic rarely if ever meet Jamshid, Kaveh, Kay Qubad, Shirin or even Anushirvan in the classroom (and if and when they do, it is almost always in the guise of moralizing or metaphorical anecdotes in poems by Saʿdi and the like). The hero Rostam and his many friends from the Shahnameh have all but disappeared from the media, from official frameworks and from the public sphere in general, replaced by Ḥusayn and the ahl al-bayt (members of Muḥammad’s family, especially the Imams). Pre-Islamic elements that the authorities have not been successful in removing (e. g., the Nowruz holiday) have been duly “Islamized.”³⁰¹ Arabic is back since the revolution, with nary a speech or even news program beginning without Qurʿanic citations and Shiʿite liturgical passages. The state is referred to either as “The Islamic Repub-

 Here, however, it is important to distinguish between two prevalent meanings of “nationalism”: (a) the positive ideology that elevates an ostensible tribal or racial unit – a group of people purportedly related by natio or “birth” – and actively propagates its myths, history, folkways, and seeks to supersede other loyalties that are transnational or ethnic (i.e., less encompassing than the whole nation or country), and (b) the negative ideology of chauvinist nationalism that demotes all those who belong to other human groupings to inferior status.

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lic of Iran” (jomuri-ye eslami-ye iran), “The Islamic Republic” (jomhuri-ye eslami) or “Islamic Iran” (Iran-e Eslami) but rarely just as “Iran” (though this may be changing: the official slogan of the 2021 presidential elections was “Together for Iran!” [ba ham baraye Iran]). When religio-political figures make use of terms like Iraniyyat (Iranianism) with a positive valence, they do so not in order to oppose this notion to Islam, of course, but rather as a weapon with which to battle the feared disintegration of their “mosaic” polity into ethnically-based autonomies (Kurds, Lurs, Baluchis, Azeris, etc.) – the wet dream of Western regime-change advocates for decades. While there is no denying the ongoing struggle in post-Khomeini Iranian politics between those who support “permanent revolution” – for whom the interests of radical pan-Islamism remain paramount – and the more pragmatic advocates of what is tantamount to “Islamism in one country” – for whom the interests of the Iranian nation-state take precedence, nevertheless, this dichotomy of views has not led to the rise among the purveyors of the latter tendency of anything remotely approaching the Aryanist anti-Arabism or secularist anti-Shiʿism preached under the Pahlavis (such sentiments are found today only on the fringes of the opposition). Indeed, it is an open question whether the “Iran Firsters” within the ranks of the regime can truly be characterized as such. Mir Hosayn-e Musavi, for example, leader of the Green Movement and considered a paragon of the “Iran first” faction, declared during a speech in mid-2009 (several months after the “stolen” election) that The Iranian nation was the nation most deserving of examining His Excellency ʿAlī’s life and turning it into the model for it[s own society].”³⁰²

There is, at first glance, a clear statement of Iranian superiority here: the Iranian nation, Musavi is saying, was deemed most worthy from among all of the nations in the world (including the Arabs). Most worthy of what, however? Most worthy of receiving the greatest of gifts: the opportunity to derive the principles of pure Muḥammadan Islam (eslam-e nab-e Mohammadi) from the words and deeds of ʿAlī – an Arab – and what is more, the privilege of thoroughly revamping (what we thought, based on the first part of Musavi’s statement, was) Iran’s own incomparably meritorious national existence along the lines of this new, foreign-based ideology. What began as apparent praise of the nationalist position, ends up being its burial (just as we saw previously with Ayatollah Motahhari). A quarter of a century

 Emphasis mine. Communique, 15 Azar, 1388: mellat-e Iran shayestetarin mellat bud keh beh zendegi-ye hadhrat-e Ali negah konad vah an ra mashyi-ye khod qarar dehad.

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earlier, as president of the Islamic Republic, Musavi made his position on nationalism perfectly clear: The concept of basing ourselves on a pre-Islamic, Iranian system of values; the trend of harking back to the history of the Achaemenids, the Sassanids and the other ancient dynasties of Iran prior to the Islamic conquest – these approaches were insinuated into our indigenous culture by Western agents in order to de-Islamicise the country. They stressed “blood and soil” (khun va khak), the mainstays of nationalism. The celebrations of [medieval author of the Shah Nameh Abu l-Qasem-e] Ferdowsi’s thousand year anniversary in 1934 and the attempt to purge Persian of its Arabic element were Western conspiracies (towteʾe-haye gharbi) bent on eradicating Islam. [Westernized elements] at the same time dug up the ruins of Persepolis, buried in the earth for millennia, in order to conjure up a pseudo-history and force our people to take pride in it. But that history was irrelevant to Islam. It was a history that had perished thousands of years ago.³⁰³

Given statements like these (which harbor a strong Khomeinist ring) – and there are dozens more where they came from – it is certainly difficult to attribute Iranian chauvinist-nationalist sentiments to Mousavi. At the other pole of the political spectrum, former President Ahmadinejad, together with his closest (and most controversial) advisor, Esfandiyar Mashaʾi, was increasingly cast during his second term by pundits inside and outside of Iran as the leader of a neo-nationalist trend that upset many “conservative” clerics.³⁰⁴ “Ahmadinejad and Mashaei,” wrote BBC Persian political commentator Alireza Ahmadian, “started to glorify ancient Iran and promoted a new kind of twisted nationalism by talking about ‘the School of Iran’ rather than ‘the School of Islam.’”³⁰⁵ Scholar and commentator Reza Aslan echoed: [T]hose who oppose the clerical regime in Iran and who yearn for a more secular nation that looks for inspiration in the glories of its Persian past instead of its Islamist present may have an unexpected champion in their corner: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.³⁰⁶

Spurred on by similar accusations leveled at Ahmadinejad by internal Iranian rivals looking for a noose with which to hang the controversial executive and his men, a plethora of foreign analysts and pundits took up the “Ahmadinejad the Iranian nationalist” theme. But they had little to go on, and in truth, the previous  Taheri, Persian Night, p. 380, note 16.  The accusations against Ahmadinejad and the “deviant trend” were mostly based on political rivalry – see Nasrin Alavi, “Iran: An Elite at War,” https://www.e-ir.info/2011/05/31/iran-an-elite-atwar/. Last accessed 10/10/2022.  Alireza Ahmadian, “Ahmadinejad and Khamenei: End of a Love Story,” Foreign Policy Association, 5.30.13.  Reza Aslan, “Missing Mahmoud,” Council on Foreign Relations, 06/12/2013.

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president was very far from fitting such a bill. Ahmadinejad, if anything, was the most recent leader of the “permanent revolution” party: while certainly not ignoring domestic concerns, he nevertheless almost single-handedly gave new momentum to the classical Khomeinist principle of “exporting the revolution.” This principle focuses not on Iran but on the entire Muslim umma and beyond; put another way, it sees and values Iran as the cradle and spearhead of an international Islamic awakening. Ahmadinejad: The solution to the problems of the world is the return to Islam. The only way for humanity to save itself is by returning to Islam (tanha rah-e nejat-e bashariyyat bazgasht beh eslam ast). Islam considers all people equal. Islam opposes all forms of oppression, aggression and the imposition of poverty upon the [developing] nations (tahmil-e faqr bar mellatha)…Today the entire human community is leaving behind [the era of superpower dominance and spiritual emptiness] and entering on a new phase…Some imagine that this transformation is only taking place within the bounds of the Islamic world. That is a grave mistake. In the worlds of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and even in places that are seemingly bereft of religion, this metamorphosis is plain to see. In gathering after gathering in countries around the world, when we speak about the need to return to God, to the Prophets, to justice and to divine values, I see people who have spent the last eighty or ninety years in a certain atmosphere (i. e. communism, and perhaps also modern secularism in general – Z. M.) starting to weep, the tears streaming down their faces. When I ask them “What’s the matter?” they answer: “By God, you have spoken the very words in our hearts! It is this that we want!” We are now on the threshold of this transformation: what is our duty in the face of these momentous developments? The whole world knows that the standard bearer of this type of worldview (parchamdar-e in noʿ negah be jahan) is the Iranian nation and the Islamic Revolution. Today, then, our mission is to clarify and consolidate this world-redeeming ideology, and breakdown its components into various delineated subsections in order to prepare it for effective transmission to the entire international community. This is the historic expectation of the world community from the Iranian nation (entezar-e tarikhi-ye jameʿe-ye bashari az mellat-e Iran), and it is not an unwarranted expectation. With the grace of God, our country is possessed of the capability, both in its universities and in its religious seminaries, to meet this challenge and put the entire world on the road to prosperity and the worship of God (tamam-e donya ra dar rah-e kamyabi va khodaparasti bogzarim). It can be done.³⁰⁷

Ahmadinejad certainly displays – in this and scores of other similar disquisitions – a high level of patriotism: he situates Iran at the center of the world, saddling it with the responsibility to lead all humanity toward a better future. But no less immediately evident from his words cited here is the singular factor that grants Iran such special status: its function as the launchpad for pan-Islamism, which movement will eventually (if followed to its logical conclusion) render separate national

 Concatenation of a speech delivered at Friday prayers in Gambia, 9 Tir 1385, and a speech delivered to Basijis in Mashhad on 5 Mordad, 1387, both found on the president’s website.

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entities, including Iran itself, obsolete and even anathema. The former president’s emphasis on the grand mission of Iran as an emerging superpower, both in the Middle East region and in the world at large, is part and parcel of the Khomeinist vision of transnational upheaval, and whether or not it evokes in the consciousness or unconscious of its exponent or his audience the ancient glories of the oikumene-engulfing Achaemenid empire, it is the Islamist motivation and character of the enterprise that is uppermost and manifest at all times. It is indicative of the confusion reining in the field of Iranian studies that propagandist-posing-as-analyst Amir Taheri, who shares with the above-quoted commentators Ahmadian and Aslan a fierce opposition to the Islamic Republican regime, has the following to say on the subject of Ahmadinejad’s purported nationalistic outlook: The machinery of state [in post-revolutionary Iran] is trying to reimpose its supremacy, including in the ideological field, where it emphasizes Iranian nationalism as opposed to Khomeinist pan-Islamism … That would mean the state’s final absorption of the revolution, and the start of the long-promised but so far elusive Iranian Thermidor … One man who is determined to prevent this from happening is Ahmadinejad, the first of the six Islamic Republic presidents who wishes to put the state at the service of the revolution, not the other way around. ³⁰⁸

Here Taheri, for whom veracity and accuracy are nowhere near as important as whatever agenda he is pushing at a given moment, has nevertheless come closer to the truth than Aslan, Ahmadian and the other observers who came under the influence of the “hype” put about by Ahmadinejad’s rivals that he had embarked on a “deviant” (enherafi) path of nationalism-at-the-expense-of-(pan)-Islamism. The only correction needed to Taheri’s over-arching assessment is that in fact, the first five presidents of the Republic were no less dedicated to exporting the revolution than he was. When, after much acrimonious negotiation with the British Museum, the “Cyrus Cylinder” – discovered among the ruins of Babylon in 1879 by an expedition sponsored by that same museum and containing a declaration by the ancient world conqueror in old Persian cuneiform script – was finally brought to Tehran in 2010, the event of its “unveiling” was indeed attended by Ahmadinejad, Mashaʾi, Hamid-e Baqaʾi and others of the chief executive’s inner circle who had been branded by their opponents as “nationalists” (and consequently as “deviants” [monharef ]). But when an actor playing Cyrus, and another one playing Kaveh the Blacksmith (who, it will be recalled, defeated the Arab-born tyrant Dahhak in the mists of Shahnameh prehistory), approached the president in front of the

 Taheri, Persian Night, 275.

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hundreds of spectators and almost a dozen television cameras, these historical figures reverently bowed low before him. Ahmadinejad, for his part, descended from the podium toward his venerable well-wishers from bygone days and dramatically draped a kafiyyah – an Arab headdress – around each of their necks.³⁰⁹ On Nowruz (the Iranian-Zoroastrian New Year) of 2011 the same president had intended to visit Persepolis, but cancelled his trip in the wake of an outcry from the “principlist” wing of parliament.³¹⁰ Similarly, Ahmadinejad’s successor in office, Hassan-e Ruhani, quoted Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh near the end of his much anticipated United Nations address in 2017 – but crowned his oratorical effort with a verse from the Qurʿan. Member of the Guardian Council Ayatollah Abbas-e Kaʿbi acknowledged the greatness of Cyrus, and explained that that is why, were he to be resurrected today and witness the heights to which Islam has brought Iran, he would convert immediately.³¹¹ Mehdi-ye Bazargan, first prime minister of the Islamic Republic who resigned over his opposition to the takeover of the American embassy, put the matter succinctly: “I want Islam for the sake of Iran; Khomeini wants Iran for the sake of Islam.” At present and for the foreseeable future, then, the geographically foreign implant – i. e., Shiʿism, with its origins in Arabia and Iraq – has and will continue to have the upper hand in Iran over the temporally foreign implant – i. e., Aryanism, hailing from primeval times. Indeed, in this epic modern kulturkampf between rival Iranian ideologies, Shiʿism has bested two opponents fighting largely in tandem: indigenous nationalism and foreign-fed Westernization – no mean feat. Despite rampant claims to the contrary, Iranian society as a whole is colored today (as it has been colored for quite a few centuries past) to a greater degree by Shiʿite Islam than by either the country’s pre-Islamic Zoroastrian heritage or the lifestyle of the modern West – or even by both of these combined. And this holds true a fortiori for the members of the clerical establishment, who are the premier subject of our study: for them neither Iranianism nor modernism presents serious intellectual or emotional challenges; Shiʿite Islam is their life.

 “Kurosh va kave-ye ahangar dar marasem-e muze-ye melli moqabel-e Ahmadinejad zanu zadand,” Fars, 05/21/2011.  Homa Katouzian, Iran: Politics, History and Literature (London: Routledge, 2013), p. xviii. This despite the fact that the Nowruz holiday has largely been accepted and Islamized under the Islamic Republic (it was the day Noah’s ark finally landed, it was the day on which ʿAlī smashed all three hundred sixty idols in the Kaʿba, it was the day of ʿAlī’s investiture at Ghadīr Khumm, etc.). Ahmadinejad’s predecessor in office, Mohammad-e Khatami, did visit Persepolis. So did President Rafsanjani.  Tzimt, Iran, n. 289.

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Resurrection? Nationalism is far from dead in Iran. The winter of 2017– 18, for instance, witnessed a widespread series of relatively small demonstrations, ranging from several hundred to several thousand participants. These protests – which, unlike their much larger predecessors in 2009, took place for the most part in the midsize, rural towns of the Iranian hinterland – were initially triggered by economic frustration: a video that went viral depicting young nouveau riche Iranians flaunting their ostentatious, hedonistic lifestyles (many of them in bathing suits imbibing wine on their yachts),³¹² followed by the deliberate release by President Rouhani’s office of his conservative opponents’ budget proposal – which earmarked vast sums to religious seminaries and to Iranian military proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen – combined to enrage certain poorer, peripheral segments of the population, first in cyberspace and then on the street. But venting about the standard of living and foreign spending (na ghazeh, na lobnan, janam fedaye iran – “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon, my life is devoted to Iran!”) soon gave way to what is, from the regime’s perspective, a far more anxiety-producing set of slogans, all of them captured on film. Angry crowds in the Western city of Hamadan dared to shout in unison: “Death to the Islamic Republic!” while in Qom itself – the worldwide nerve-center of Shiʿite learning – hundreds chanted “Clerics go home, free Iran!” (Like the inhabitants of “college towns” everywhere, Qomis are “divided in their feelings toward mullahs”).³¹³ In Isfahan, Ahwaz and elsewhere the unthinkable was heard: “Reza Shah (the westernizing, modernizing founder of the Pahlavi dynasty and fearsome nemesis of the mullahs), your spirit lives!”; “O King of Kings (referring to the Pahlavi monarch, either father or son, or even to the ancient Iranian emperors), return to us!”; and “Death to Khameneʾi, Long live Pahlavi!” In Shiraz, Kerman, Kashan and Khorramshahr, the cry went up: “Darius take heed, listen, Anushirvan: Turban-wearers have taken over Iran!” In Kerman emboldened marchers gave voice to the unprecedented sentiment: “Neither mosque nor Qurʿan – Cyrus, Shahnameh, Iran!” (na masjed, na Qurʿan, Kurosh, Shahnameh, Iran). In Semnan and Qazvin the slogan of choice was no less extraordinary: “We are scions of the Aryan race, not descendants of camel raiders!” Similar sentiments were voiced in demonstrations – triggered by (moderate) economic woes indirectly caused by the re-imposition of sanctions by the Trump administration – in the summer of 2018 in the capital and elsewhere. More and more young people  Most of these were posted on an Instagram account opened in 2014 known as “The Rich Kids of Iran,” in imitation of the more internationally famous “Rich Kids of Instagram” account opened in 2012.  Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 13.

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flock to the tomb of the founder of the Achaemenid dynasty to celebrate “Cyrus Day” (29 October), thumbing their nose at the Islamist regime’s anti-jāhilism (to such an extent that the Pasdaran-e Enqelab or Revolutionary Guard has impeded access to that site on that date since 2017). Cyberspace is also the site of resurgent nationalism: the Persian Internet is currently crowded with nativist slogans such as: “I am not a true Iranian, because the Arabs have taught me to teach my children that what a dog says is not vaq vaq but pars pars – which is the name of my country!”³¹⁴ Akbar-e Khorramdin and Iran-e Musavi, an elderly couple who murdered their own grown children and daughter-in-law between the years of 2011– 2020, spewed paragraphs of anti-Arab vitriol at their interrogation and trial, the husband noting that he had chosen the last name Khorramdin – and his son’s name Babak – in honor of the medieval Iranian rebel against ArabIslam.³¹⁵ In short, the nationalist dimension of the Iranian psyche – ever-present throughout the country’s long history, ebbing or flowing during different eras – has endured despite decades of indoctrination and suppression by the ayatollahs, and is now resurfacing among segments of the populace.³¹⁶ It is, in this its latest incarnation, largely a liberal nationalism (despite the occasional Aryan-racist overtone), neither etatist nor chauvinist, and therefore combines easily with rationalism, individualism and universalism. As such, it speaks to the increasingly prevalent desire among many present-day, Internet-obsessed young Iranians to “hook up” with the rest of the world, to forego the struggle to export the revolution and join the community of nations as a “normal” polity at peace with its counterparts. This, added to the current nationalist wave’s emphatically anti-religious character, opens the door – as it did under the Pahlavis – to cooperation with modernizing and westernizing forces (the modern West being, after all, in many ways the font of both secularism and nationalism). Thus it came as no surprise that many in Europe and the United States were particularly excited by this recent brand of unrest. Quite a few hailed it – ignoring the dismal fate of so many pre-

 This despite the fact that dogs are semi-sacred to Zoroastrianism, and semi-profane in Islam. For a helpful review of the utilization of nationalist themes by regime figures in recent years (including clerics and the Supreme Leader himself ), see Ayatollahi Tabaar, Religious Statecraft, pp. 293 – 304.  https://per.euronews.com/2021/05/19/. Last accessed 04/10/22.  See, e. g., Ayatollahi Tabaar, “As Islamism Fades…”, and Musa Najafi, “Ayatollah Khameneʾi va taqviyyat-e hoviyyat-e melli-ye iranian,” Sharq, 8.1.21, in which the author strives to show that the Supreme Leader’s strategies have contributed significantly to the boosting of Iranian national pride (which, of course, is argued by his circle to tally in every way with Islamism).

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vious prophecies of this ilk – as the beginning of the end for the Islamic Republic. The regime itself is well aware of the danger: We have to show young people that we’re here to protect Iran as a nation, not just the Islamic Republic as an idea. Young people pull away from us because they see the regime as alien to the history of Iran. We have to show them that we also care about Iran…In our films and in our television series, all we’ve done is show our young people that we think about religion all day and cry for our martyrs. No one aspires to that – to be mourning all the time! No wonder they don’t see that we are also nationalistic. Our story to them has always been a religious one…Look at how everyone seems to be naming their children after Shahnameh characters…And the farvahar has become like the Christian cross! People wear it around their necks and put it on their key chains!³¹⁷

But the nationalist-sounding protests have not been very representative, at least judging by their comparatively small size. Nor have they lasted for more than a week or so at a time. While the economic and political consequences of the U. S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, Pers. Barjam), accompanied by the reimposition of severe American sanctions on the Islamic Republic, may well increase public animosity toward the clerical regime in Tehran, it is highly doubtful that such opposition will burgeon out of control (and so far the regime seems to be weathering the new sanctions rather well – even on the purely economic level – as it always has). Secular Iranianism is a simmering ember that has glowed continually under the Islamic Republic, and occasionally it ignites and sends up a flare. But it does not hold a candle to the religio-revolutionary or even just traditional religious glue that maintains and motivates Iranian state and society, and which has brought the Islamic Republic a stunning set of victories over its Sunni challengers in recent years.

The Grand Old Flag The victory of Shiʿism over its ideological competitors in Iran is not solely a function of the revolution of 1979 and the Islamic Republic’s subsequent indoctrination campaign, nor even of Khomeinism as a whole. A more fundamental set of factors is also at work here. Backward looking nationalism and forward looking progressivism both lack certain crucial ingredients that religion in general, and the Shiʿite

 One of the regime’s “cultural producers” at a strategy meeting, cited by Narjes Bajoghli, Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), loc. 1834– 6. The reader will recall that the farvahar or farr o vahar is the ancient icon representing the divine charisma of the Zoroastrian god of light, Ahura Mazda.

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creed in particular, harbor in abundance, ingredients which have allowed confessional systems to survive, thrive and revive themselves for millennia, while trends like nationalism (and even secularism) appear to have run out of steam after a single century (at least in the Middle East). One of these ingredients is unquestionably a living theology and spirituality: there is neither mystery at which to marvel nor divinity to which to appeal in the sibling systems of mihanparasti (patriotism) and nogaraʾi (modernism): both are thoroughly grounded – double entendre – in mundane realism.³¹⁸ One can pray to Ḥusayn or to his great-great-great-great-great granddaughter Fatemeh-ye Maʿsumeh for assistance or intercession, but not to pre-Islamic Iranian paragons like Rostam or Fereydun, nor to Western icons like Richard Rorty or Kim Kardashian. Another advantage unavailable to the relatively newfangled notions of love of country, on the one hand, and liberalism, on the other, is antiquity: these worldviews, no more than several generations old in the Middle East, have a hard time competing with a time-hallowed tradition that extends back even further than ʿAlī and Muḥammad (whose tenures, after all, are seen by Islam as a seamless continuation and culmination of a course pursued by all the prophets who had preceded them, beginning with Adam). “In the rivalry between the dead,” wrote Foucault, standing between the Abd al-Azim shrine and Reza Shah’s mausoleum, “the son of the imam wins, every Friday, over the father of the king.”³¹⁹ But more important than either of these advantages is a more practical “edge” possessed by Shiʿism in this contest. Neither a past filled with glory and mythology, nor a present blessed by democracy and technology, are able to provide human communities with the essential ingredient of daily content, with the consuetudinary praxis that serves so effectively to fuse lifestyle with doctrine. The ersatz rituals that have been created by nationalist regimes – anthems, commemorations, symbols, rallies, conscription and military drills – are no match for the hoary rites of religion, inter alia for the simple reason that the former invade the individual existence of the average citizen on a comparatively rare basis (once in a lifetime, once a year, once a month)³²⁰ whereas the latter are in play numerous times each day (prayer, ablutions, study, abstention from proscribed things, and specifically in Shiʿism: near-quotidian lamentation for the martyrs). The ceremonies of nationalism are also more akin to staged spectacles than genuine individual or collective experiences: they exude artificiality and forcedness, and ring hollow and feel ready-made in comparison with the “authentic,” incrementally evolved cult  There is, albeit, a romanticist element in nationalism.  Afary and Anderson, Foucault, p. 50. The Shah Abd al-Azim shrine is built around what is reputed to be the grave of a great-great grandson of Imam Ḥasan.  In the case of saluting the flag, contact admittedly occurs once a day.

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of (for instance) the Imams. This is unquestionably the case with respect to Iran: the etatist ethos cultivated by the Pahlavis, their half-hearted nods to long-dead Zoroastrianism and their pompous promotion of the “Great Civilization” (tamaddon-e bozorg) – none of this had much to offer in terms of meaningful and regularly encountered content with which to fill up, and give meaning to, people’s personal and corporate lives.³²¹ (Western readers may parry that the abject lack of such “content” in the daily existences of the populace in post-industrialized societies is in no way detrimental to the staying power of those societies or the states that host them: witness the Western powers! This writer would riposte that the increasing lack of this essential element has already begun to take its ultimately lethal toll on those states and societies, with North-West Europe and the United States leading the pack down the road to emptiness, disunity and eventual disintegration. But such a discussion is beyond the scope of this study). For their part, the “rituals” of the contemporary, secular West – such as watching a spectator sport, tuning in to a favorite television program, taking the family to the neighborhood fast-food restaurant, going camping or skiing, engaging in a hobby – may well be more “genuine” (because more enjoyable and more tailored to personal taste) than the parades and pageantry of statism, but they are for that very same reason more individual in nature, and thus cannot successfully serve to unite a national community. They also, for the most part, revolve around relatively immediate and mundane, not to say hedonistic, human needs, and therefore lack the level of profundity and transcendence necessary for the cultivation of lasting allegiance (citizens may be willing to fight and die for their flag, but not for their favorite sports team or restaurant chain). By the same token, it must be admitted that the rituals engendered by the Islamic Revolution of 1979 itself are not delivering the goods to a much greater degree than their nationalist predecessors did. As with the ubiquitous commemorations instituted by revolutionary regimes everywhere in the modern period, the newly minted holidays (ayyam Allah) that now crowd the Iranian calendar from Farvardin (the first month of the Persian year) to Esfand (the last) already ring hollow for many, and have seldom succeeded in burrowing down into the recesses of popular consciousness. “Islamic Republic Day” (12 Farvardin); the anniversary of the 1964 “rehearsal” uprising (15 Khordad); Jerusalem Day (4 Shahrivar); Martyr Hosayn Fahmideh Day (also known as Teenagers’ Day, commemorating the self-sacrifice of a thirteen year old boy who exploded himself under an Iraqi tank in 1980,  “The problem was that for the masses the calls of return to authenticity of culture and ancient forms that rationalized Pahlavi Westernization did not strike a personal chord. The state’s conception of authenticity was an ancient one that did not form part of the masses’ everyday culture and norms” (Shakibi, Pahlavi Iran, p. 124).

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8 Aban); Struggle against Arrogance Day (commemorating the takeover of the American Embassy or “Nest of Spies” in 1980, 13 Aban); the “Ten Days of Dawn” (celebrating the victory of the 1979 revolution, 12– 22 Bahman); “Unity Week” (dedicated to cooperation between Shiʿism and Sunnism, 22– 29 Esfand) – these and other recently created commemorative occasions have been observed with decreasing enthusiasm over the years. By the middle of the second decade of the Islamic Republic’s career, students and military recruits had often to be bussed to the sites of celebrations in order to fill out parades or fill up mosques, halls or stadia on such occasions, where they would (and still do) mumble in unison the requisite slogans, often with demonstrative lack of interest.³²² Of course, the phenomenon of state festivals and ceremonies losing their hold on the popular mind (or never gaining it in the first place) is not unique to the Khomeinist regime, and denizens of most dominions around the globe can point to national holidays that have either lost their luster or deteriorated into little more than opportunities for an outdoor barbecue. But whether the reasons for the decay of revolutionary rituals in Iran are the common universal ones, or specific to the Islamic Republic, or a mixture of both, the upshot remains that this component, too, of the present-day Iranian experience – a component lacking in daily praxis, at any rate, no less than its Pahlavi nationalist counterpart – is unable to provide the consistent sense of active affiliation with community and society that Shiʿite ritual still can and does for a great many Iranians. Indeed, in recent years politicians and preachers in the Islamic Republic have found it necessary to lay heavy stress on the calendrical correspondence (even when it is not very close) between the innovative latter-day “revolutionary” observances and the more traditional Shiʿite birthdays and death-days of Imams and the like in order to infuse the proceedings with the appropriate ardor. The nationalist cult and the revolutionary cult that replaced it – and all the more so the two cults combined, as is sometimes the case today – may well be able to elicit sufficiently strong emotions among segments of the population to justify, under dire circumstances, the ultimate self-sacrifice in defense of ideology and/or the realm. But just as Iranians could not be induced prior to the revolution to devote their daily existences to embodying or celebrating Pahlavi nationalism, they have not been convinced to do so since then in the case of Khomeinist revolutionism: one may die for one’s flag, but one does not live for it. Many Iran observers to the effect that one “way out” for the Islamic Republic in dealing with threatening secularizing trends among the Iranian populace is “the transition from a theocratic-authoritarian to a nationalist-

 This is not to say that a new generation raised upon these new-fangled rituals will not therefore make them a success; they might, but my guess is that traditional Shiʿism will still prevail.

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authoritarian regime.”³²³ This is an understandable assessment, but is predicated on the widespread, cynical notion that all that matters to the leaders of the Khomeinist cleritocracy is holding on to the reins of power (indeed, even this goal will be undermined by such a transformation, which will rapidly unseat the ruling religious doctors in favor of a military junta. Thus, this prediction is based, as well, on the no less pervasive conception, discussed above, that the IRGC already steers the Iranian ship of state). That which many Iranians, to this day, are willing to live for, and live out, on a daily, sometimes even hourly, basis is traditional Shiʿite Islam, which, as a system of ritual, belief, study and practice is set up and geared to facilitate just such regular “hookings up” to the historical heritage lacking in the other proposed loci of loyalty delineated above. Much has been said and written about the way in which the Iranian Revolution transformed Shiʿism, and this cannot be denied (and will be discussed in some depth further on). But the central achievement of the Islamic Revolution and Republic has not just been to modernize tradition, but more than anything to traditionalize modernity, bringing what essentially remains the “old time religion” back to the fore and providing it with a mechanism for propagation unmatched at any time in Islamic history. In other words, and paradoxically, the chief beneficiary of revolutionary Khomeinism has been the conservative Shiʿism that Khomeini fought on many levels. This happened, among other reasons, because radicalism perforce burns itself up in a relatively short time, whereas religion is built to last.

The Sum of its Parts None of this is to say that “genuine” Iranian culture is limited to the law and lore of Shiʿism. The culture of a people is the product of a gradual accretion over years, decades, centuries and millennia, the later layers superimposed upon, but rarely suffocating, the earlier ones. The ancient pahlavans of the North-Eastern Khorasanian plains are admittedly still present in the Iranian consciousness, as are (at least some of ) the Achaemenid monarchs of the Southern Fars (Pars) region (whence Farsi or Persian) and the many colorful occupants of the Sassanian throne at Ctesiphon (Tisfun) in the West. Moreover, eight hundred years of Sunni-Muslim rule (from the 7th through 15th centuries); six hundred years of Sunnism as the majority faith (from the 9th through 15th centuries – it took the Iranians some two hun-

 file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/Cultural_Heterogeneity_in_Post_Revolutio.pdf (last accessed 10/ 10/2022).

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dred fifty years to convert en masse); and generation after generation of some of the most important Sunni scholarship in the Muslim world carried out in Arabic by Persian-speaking ulama – all of this, too, could not help but leave its mark on the Iranian mindset, and indeed, Iran’s Shiʿite clerics frequently cite the theological, philosophical, juridical and exegetical works of Sunni luminaries, and not solely for polemical purposes (Sunni scholars rarely return the favor). Aryanism/Zoroastrianism and Sunnism, then, must be factored into any consideration of what constitutes present-day Iranian culture. There is also poetry. The lilting stanzas (and biographical adventures) of the medieval Persian poets – Rudaki, Daqiqi, Nezami, Ruzbehan, Naser-e Khosrow, Attar, Ibn Balkhi, Hafez, Khayyam, Rumi, Shams-e Tabrizi, Saʿdi, Jami (to name just a few of the most famous) – are ever on the lips of Iran’s citizens, religious or otherwise, and together form a vast, variegated and profound cultural layer of their own.³²⁴ Persian classical poetry functions as a sort of “state within a state” in Iranian society, an elevated plain of consciousness to which everyone from atheists to ayatollahs periodically repairs to escape from the daily drudge (or from the dirt of politics). So central and vital is the role played by sheʿr (the Arabic-derived term for poesy) in Iranian life that each camp in the tripartite ideological struggle repeatedly described above endeavors mightily to call the immortal bards and versifiers to their colors. Secular modernists happily paint the poets as hedonist heretics: Bar khiz bota biya z bahr-e del-e ma Hal kon bejamal-e khishtan moshkel-e ma Yek kuzeh sharab ta beham nush konim Z an pish keh kuzeha konand az gel-e ma Arise, O idol! Come hither for the sake of our hearts Solve our dilemmas with the power of your beauty Let us drink wine together from a jug made of clay Before our own clay is used one day in order to make jugs³²⁵

 Persian medieval poetry is regularly declared, by Iranians and foreigners, to be the finest in the world. Academics, as well, wax enthusiastic about its extreme merits: Shaul Shaked, for instance, asserts that in terms of “poetic intonation, conciseness of expression and musicality” Persian poetry “has virtually no counterpart in the history of world literature” (Shaked, Shahnameh, p. 36). The best introduction to this genre in any European language, though penned by one of the few Iranologists to cast doubt on the literary worth of the Shahnameh, is Edward Browne’s Literary History of Persia in four volumes.  Omar Khayyam, Rubaʿiyyat, 3: 86. The idol here is a woman, and an immense amount of such poetry is devoted to wine, sometimes as metaphor, sometimes not (see Goldziher, Muslim Studies, vol. 2, passim).

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Seminary graduates emphasize the poets’ spirituality and devotion to Allah: Jahaniyan hameh gar manʿ-e man konand az eshq Man an konam keh khodavandegar farmayad Even if all the world’s denizens Seek to stop me from loving (the divine) I will do nothing Save what God has commanded³²⁶

And nationalists and patriots lay stress on the medieval minstrels’ love of country: Dast az damanam nemi darad Khak-e Shiraz va ab-e Roknabad Khosha tafarroj-e no ruz khaseh dar Shiraz Keh bar kand del-e mard-e mosafer az vatanash Never shall I forfeit the earth of Shiraz Nor despair of imbibing the waters of Roknabad How much better to stroll on Nowruz in Shiraz Than for a traveler to tear his heart from his homeland³²⁷

The Persian poets can indeed be made to be all things to all men, which is one reason why their collective oeuvre cannot provide a solid foundation for social living or even for the construction of a common ideology. The other reason is that like nationalism, liberalism and revolutionism, literature, whether poetic or prosaic, obviously lacks the component of consistent commandment, the dimension of law regularly applied or ritual regularly performed. Hafez, Rumi, Saʿdi and Khayyam are all consummate masters of their art whose lyrics transport the reader/declaimer to a transcendent plain of elegance, passion, wittiness and profundity; it is a rare educated Iranian, whatever his or her affiliation, who cannot recite entire sections of their work by heart. But poetry obviously cannot run society, or even hold it together. Sufism, too, especially of the theosophical (ʿirfān) or illuminationist (ishrāqī) variety, has exerted a heavy influence on diverse segments of Iranian society over the ages, including even the same Shiʿite ulama who – especially since Muḥammad Bāqir al-Majlisī, the “sufi killer” (d. 1698) – have made it their business

 Hafez, Divan, 2: 171. See the young Khamanei’s energetic defense of Hafez’s religiosity: http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndNkjLHiOss&feature=related  Saʿdi, Golestan, p. 59.

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to root out the practitioners of this potentially heterodox strain of Islam.³²⁸ Many of the above-mentioned poets were mystics as well, with the towering figure of Muḥyiyyu l-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) reigning sovereign simultaneously over the confederated realms of metaphysics, Gnosticism and verse. The institutionalized version of Sufism served for centuries as one of the premier organizing principles of Islamic collective life everywhere. Multi-tiered (and more often than not nominal) membership in the local Sufi “order” or “lodge” (ṭarīqa, khanqa, ribāṭ, zawiya – depending on the region), presided over by a charismatic spiritual “guide” or “elder” (murshid, pir, shaykh) who functioned as the “channel to the divine” on behalf of his flock, provided in many cases the only effective link between the Muslim masses – illiterate, ignorant and usually lax – and their faith. Indeed, it was just such a mystical brotherhood, as we saw, that transferred its allegiance from Sunnism to Shiʿism, raised an army of devoted novices (murīdun) and hangers-on, and conquered Iran for Shiʿism at the beginning of the sixteenth century CE. This was the Safavid Sufi order turned Safavid royal dynasty, its “guides” doubling as kings (until the latter office upstaged and then finally obscured the former). Sufism, then, as a religious philosophy or as a socio-political and even military force, was no stranger to Iran, and elements of its esoteric worldview have continued down to

 Other powerful Shiʿite exponents of the period shared the cognomen “Sufi-kosh,” including even Mohammad-e Behbehani in the 19th century. The ostracization of Sufis partook of the Twelvers’ eternal and bitter struggle against the esoterically and eschatologically oriented “extremists” (ghulāt) within their own camp. The paradox is well summed up by Mottahedeh: “Sufis found supporters in all parts of society, even among madresehs; but the madresehs also produced their most bitter and determined enemies. The teachers and students in madresehs recognized in the Sufi a person who claimed spiritual authority without passing through their long curriculum of knowledge, and therefore, some of them said, an amateur and an imposter as an interpreter of Islam” (Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 148). Much earlier, the Shiʿite theologian Haydar Amoli (d. 1385 CE) complained that despite the fact that “both groups have one and the same origin” and “drink from the same fount,” no Muslim sect “has vilified the Sufis as much as the Shiʿites have done or railed against the Shiʿa as much as the Sufis have done” (cited in Richard, Shiʿite Islam, p. 56). As ʿAlī’s father Abū Ṭālib once put it in another context, “the worst of enemies are those closest to one another” (aʿda l-ʿaduwwi l-aqāriv – Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allah b. Hishām, al-Sīra al-nabawiyya [Cairo: Maktabat al-Ṣafā, 2001], vol. 1, p. 194). Ayatollah Khomeini, teacher of gnosis (ʿerfan) at Qom and Najaf who tirelessly quoted Mulla Sadra (“Master of the Theosophists”) and his ilk till the end of his life, nevertheless watched with indifference as Sufi lodges in Iran were closed one after the other in the wake of the revolution. Mulla Sadra was himself in his own time, and still is today, anathemized by many Shiʿite clerics. For the position that – we might say, paraphrasing the Ethiopian Najāshī – Shiʿism and Sufism are two rays emitted by the same lamp, see S. H. Nasr, Sufi Essays (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972), as well as Henry Corbin’s challenging but fascinating (and sometimes fantastic) oeuvre. Sufis are persecuted to this day in the Islamic Republic, especially the Neʿmatollahi and Gonbadi Order.

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the present day to inform Persian culture in general and influence the thought of important intellectual circles, not excluding those of the clerics (Ayatollah Khomeini taught courses on aspects of Muslim mysticism for several decades at Shiʿite seminaries in Iran and Iraq, though this activity was admittedly frowned upon by many of his colleagues). All of this notwithstanding, Sufism (Arab. taṣawwuf, Pers. tasavvof ) is clearly no longer, if it ever was, a sufficiently pervasive or powerful presence in the Iranian Volkgeist or general Islamic socio-cultural order to warrant consideration as a candidate for basic organizing or motivating principle. Even at the height of their influence during the high Middle Ages (and although they unquestionably facilitated the spread of Islam to the furthest reaches of sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia), Sufi orders served, in the long run, not to deepen but rather to render increasingly shallow most Muslims’ already superficial connection to their faith. The Sufi emphasis on the bāṭinī (inner, esoteric) as opposed to ẓāhirī (outer, exoteric) aspect of Islamic tradition – a predilection shared to a large degree by Shiʿism, even of the “orthodox” Twelver variety – paradoxically engendered dereliction and superstition among the masses, because it peddled a religion practiced vicariously through the spiritual “axis,” “pivot” or “pole” (quṭb), the saintly Master who maintained constant contact with the divine on behalf of his followers, securing for them as surrogate the ever-flowing benefits of his trickle-down baraka (blessing, bounty). The average adherent, who was in most cases at any rate only tenuously tied to the association, could therefore justify his own religious neglect and nescience by claiming a sort of piety by proxy. Moreover, even the elite circle of devotees who were serious about their Sufism, who were genuine disciples of their mystical master and followed him in his quest for unity with the “Beloved” – even these sincere and knowledgeable practitioners did not and (in the few places where they still flourish) do not harbor any ideas and institutions that could be of assistance in maintaining a cohesive national identity. This is so not only as a result of the obvious problem – that the esoteric theosophy of these elite initiates is by definition unsuitable for wide distribution – but even more because the nature of Sufi teachings itself is utterly antipodal to the subsistence of separate religio-national communities: Muslim taṣawwuf, like the mystical strains of most other faiths the world over, is philosophically geared toward the blurring of lines between diverse cultures and creeds (one famous Sufi simile envisions water, symbolizing divine love, poured into glasses of different tints, symbolizing the multifarious faiths; another has the celestial luminescence radiating downward into the human world where it is refracted through the prism of the firmament into several colors. God’s Truth is one: it is construed or configured variously by the religions of the world, each in its own legitimate way). On the practical plain, as well, Sufism has at most times and places through-

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out Islamic history been a force for syncretism (or at least, it has not been a force for rigorous, orthodox exclusivism). Shiʿism has also shone a greater ability overall to resist the charms of taṣawwuf specifically because of the similarities between these two spiritual schools of thought: unlike Sunnism, Shiʿite religion is already suffused with bāṭinī esotericism³²⁹ and the charismatic authority and divinehuman mediating role of the imams: its adherents have little need for the mystery, leadership or intercession of qotb, murshid or pir. Sufism, in short, though its attraction for, and influence on, Iranian consciousness still echoes – and though it has revived as a “fad” among certain segments of Iranian youth in recent decades – is singularly unqualified to draw borders around the Persian or Shiʿite community and demarcate who belongs and who does not. Finally, in this survey of candidates for effective underlying principle of Iranian collective life, we might mention briefly the more tangible trappings of national culture: the particular Iranian sights (art and architecture), sounds (music), tastes (cuisine), textures (textiles) and smells (the Persian word for “garden,” bustan, is composed of bu meaning “fragrance” and stan meaning “place”) – all of these as well as the manners (especially taʿarof, the practiced art of over-politeness), attire, humor, body language, business style (especially chaneh zadan, the fine art of bringing down the price), social narcotics (especially taryak, opium, known locally as hazrat-e vafur: “His Excellency Lord Pipe”), climate, topography, class hierarchies, leisure activities and a wide range of other national idiosyncrasies must not, of course, be overlooked or discounted as defining aspects of the unique Persian ethos. The influential novelist and publicist Jalal Al-e Ahmad mused as he embarked on a journey abroad: I could think of nothing but the soup which would be prepared at home after I had gone – the soup with the long thin noodles which my sister would cut, the bowls full of mint with the marks of burning on them which would be sent to my relatives, and the party and the feast that would be held at home in honor of the occasion, and finally the prayers that would be said at the party for my safe return. Well, that is Iran. And those are her customs: the vegetable pilaf with fish on the eve of Nowruz, the New Year’s display of seven things that begin with the letter “s” (haft sin), the rice soup, the samanu, the noodle soup, and a thousand other things like them. Customs that at first seem silly, useless, trivial; but which in reality are created by and conform to the pattern of that special Iranian life (shive-ye zendegi-ye Irani-ye makhsus) – Oh Iran, Iran!³³⁰

 It is important to note, however, that today’s Twelver ulama generally prefer to avoid the use of the term bāṭinī to describe any aspect of their doctrine, and many employ it as a pejorative for Ismāʿīlīs and Sufis.  Blond, Arabs, p. 4

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Just as the poet Saʿdi could not bear to leave Shiraz (see above), so Al-e Ahmad began missing the special ambience and mise en scène of Iran even before his departure. Poetry, mysticism and the more mundane trappings of Persian culture, then, constitute indispensable elements of Iranian identity, and into this same mix must be thrown the history of the pre-Islamic princes and pahlavans; the residue of seven centuries of Sunnism; the impact of over a hundred and fifty years of Westernization and modernization; the struggle (especially after the Constitutional Revolution) to achieve genuine democracy; and, since 1979, the dynamics of third world revolutionism. All of that having been said, what we will argue over the ensuing pages – and, in a sense, what we have been arguing throughout most of this book so far, in a less direct fashion – is that in terms of the capacity to both hold society together and motivate it to move in a given direction, none of these elements of Iranianness can come close to the immense power over Persian society still wielded, despite it all, by Shiʿite Islam.

Chapter Seven: Shiʿism – Problems of Perception and Presentation Any attempt to relate the seminal stories and describe the formative figures of the Shiʿite faith ought to be preceded by at least a brief discussion of the problems involved in such an enterprise, as well as of the present author’s chosen method of dealing with those problems. Not all categories of such problems merit equal treatment in the context of the present study, however, especially since most of them are of little or no concern to today’s believing Shiʿites, and we wish to avoid the pitfalls of irrelevancy into which “critical” academic studies of the Middle East and Islam have so often tumbled. Thus we might write an entire book – and entire books have in fact been written – about the manifold doubts concerning the authenticity and reliability of seminal Shiʿite texts; about the genuine provenance, philological history and extent of originality (as opposed to appropriation from previous and surrounding traditions) of those same fundamental texts; about the degree to which Shiʿite sacred historiography concerning the events of a given period represents legend rather than reality; about whether the Shiʿite “take” on early Islamic history is revisionist or tendentious in nature, and if so, whether it is more so or less so than the countervailing Sunni renditions; about the point in time at which Shiʿism coalesced as a clearly defined movement within Islam, and whether the impetus for its emergence was initially political or religious; and about a host of other questions in this vein, the answers to which (when they are obtainable with any degree of precision) are of a surety essential prerequisites for obtaining an accurate picture of “what really happened,” but are in general not very helpful for deciphering the mindset of today’s Shiʿite devotees. In the eyes of these last, the stories that Shiʿism tells about its own origins, annals, heroes, virtues, norms and ultimate destiny are, in their current recensions (with allowances for varying versions), quite simply The Truth – the only truth, or at least the most important truth, in existence. No amount of academic investigation purporting to uncover dissonant or alternative (or previously upheld) verities to those enshrined by contemporary Shiʿite tradition has ever resonated with the tens of thousands of clerics and tens of millions of lay-people who cling tenaciously in our era to the Imami faith. Variants of Shiʿite or Islamic history that Western scholars regard as more veracious or plausible than the currently accepted religious rendition – even when such variants are based in part or even wholly on close readings of early Shiʿite sources themselves – hold little interest for today’s ayatollahs and their followers. True, the clerics have on occasion devoted a modicum of effort to parrying the claims of particularly renowned occidental investigators of their sect, especially https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-010

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when (as in the case of Princeton Professor Hosayn Modarressi, who doubles as a high-ranking mujtahid) the “erring” savant hails from their own ranks. Widely influential Western theories that challenge the religious outlook in a more general way, such as that of evolution, also come in for somewhat regular attempts at refutation or cooptation, an operation strongly underwritten by the intellectual “antibodies” that were engendered during the twentieth century life-and-death kulturkampf against the inroads of the Enlightenment. But for the most part, the potentially unsettling results arrived at by means of various “critical” approaches to the study of Shiʿism are simply ignored by the faith’s leaders and followers. When the need is felt to adduce proof for the veracity of Shiʿite sacred teachings, resort is had to those teachings themselves, thus forming a closed system. As Christian missionaries of an earlier generation were wont to quote Jesus to the effect that “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life…” (John 14:6) and then challenge their listeners by asking: “Would Jesus lie?”, so prooftexts for the mediatory or quasi-divine status of the Shiʿite Imams are most often culled by medieval and modern exponents from “infallible” statements made by the Imams themselves, like that attributed to the sixth descendent of ʿAlī, Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, who testified that “We Imams are the Rope of Allah, of which the Qurʿan enjoined: ‘Hold fast to the Rope of Allah…’” (Q. 3:103), or from the mouth of ʿAlī himself, who (for instance) affirmed that The knowledge of the past and future is all found in the Qurʿan; the whole of the Qurʿan is encapsulated in the Chapter of Praise¹; the whole of the Chapter of Praise is epitomized in [the opening verse] Bismillāhi l-raḥmāni l-raḥīm (“In the name of God the Compassionate the Merciful”); the whole of the Bismillāh verse is contained in the dot under the initial letter B; and I (ʿAlī) am that dot.²

No confirmation for such catechisms is sought from “empirical” sources beyond the closed system of belief, just as no refutation of the validity of a traditional notion would ever be accepted from such outside sources. What Western-inspired scholarship regards for the most part as an accumulated store of religious fables and fantasies – Shiʿite tradition – is infinitely more present and powerful in the eyes of those who sincerely (or even perfunctorily) confess the creed of ʿAlī than what Western-inspired scholarship regards as rigorously attested historical reality. Myths, here as elsewhere, are stronger than facts.

 Sūrat al-Ḥamd, another name for Sūrat al-Fātiḥa or “the Opening Chapter” with which the Qurʾan begins.  Hashem-e Rasuli-ye Mahallati, Zendeganiye amir ol muʾminin (Qom: Daftar-e nashr farhang-e eslami, n.d.), p. 513.

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Our method in this section, then, of handling such objections as are thrown up by academic research to the “orthodox” narratives and doctrines of Shiʿism will consist for the most part in following the lead of the subjects of our study and, in a word, ignoring those objections. There is, however, one category of outside challenges that we shall in no way ignore: those advanced – with relentless consistency from the second Islamic century down to the present day – by the exponents of Sunnism, against what these exponents see as the heretical beliefs and practices, and spurious historical accounts, of the Shiʿite cult. The attacks of Sunni scholars and preachers on Shiʿism, the concomitant assaults of Shiʿi scholars and preachers on Sunnism, and the ensuing parries and ripostes vigorously volleyed back and forth between the two camps down the generations comprise all told an ongoing polemic that in many ways lies at the very heart of the Shiʿite faith. While both Sunnism and Shiʿism coalesced as distinctive strains within Islam more or less synchronically, and to a large degree in response to one another, a variety of factors – chief among them the Party of ʿAlī’s persecuted minority status – led Shiʿism in particular to constitute itself in large measure in reference, and in contradistinction, to the worldview and version of events advocated by the opposing Sunni camp. The Shiʿite classical narrative is as much an argument as a story, as much a litigation as a chronicle, as much a defense (and offense) as a memoir; and the villainous disputant against which these efforts are directed is, at almost all times and in nearly all places, neither Jew nor Christian nor Zoroastrian nor pagan nor Epicurean nor Zionist nor critical Western academic researcher, but solely the Sunni rival. Shiʿite historiography is a multi-generational, tear-jerking saga framed as a thesis – or, perhaps better, an antithesis – and nearly every anecdote and vignette composing that historiography is either covertly or blatantly agendaladen. Protest against the actions and ideology of the majority party is woven into the DNA of Shiʿism; one might even say that polemic is the engine that drove, and the rudder that guided, the development of this sect and its literature over the centuries. Shiʿism may be instructively viewed as the negative of Sunnism – so much so, that the most well known answer that Shiʿite jurisprudence provides to the question “What to do if there is no Shiʿite jurist (man lā yaḍuruhu l-faqīh) in the vicinity to whom to repair with a legal question?” is: “Consult a Sunni jurist, and do the opposite of what he says.” Shiʿism may be seen as the anti-Sunnism – or at least more so, at any rate, than Sunnism may be helpfully conceived as antiShiʿism (though of course from a Shiʿite perspective exactly the opposite is the case: Shiʿism represents the original, authentic Islam, against which the upstart perversion known as Sunnism rebelled and persists to this day in rebelling). The reader should therefore prepare for the fact that the Shiʿite “Grand Narrative” recounted in the coming pages will be peppered with both subtle allusions and unambiguous

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pronouncements designed to bolster the image of the imams and their supporters and besmirch the reputations even of figures profoundly revered by Sunnism. We shall not try to balance this picture (though we will occasionally tell the Sunni side of the story in the notes): we are, after all, intent on representing “the point of view of the ayatollahs,” or in other words, the world according to Shiʿism. The final preemptive caveat in this introduction to the classical story of Shiʿism involves intra-Shiʿite diversity and controversy. In terms of understanding the mindset of Iran’s clerical leadership perhaps no issue is of greater significance than this “domestic” dispute. The evolution of Shiʿite theology was (and continues to be) a long and turbulent process involving an ever-present – albeit intermittently surging and ebbing – struggle between opposing polarities along a wide variety of theological, ideological and political spectrums: quietism versus activism, ecumenism versus exclusivism, rationalism versus occultism (or traditionalism), legalism versus antinomianism, conservatism versus radicalism, institutionalization versus charisma. The characterization or classification of a given school of thought in Shiʿite history is complicated by the need to determine the position of its exponents along more than one of these spectrums, often yielding less-than-smooth results (the Zaydī sub-sect of Shiʿism, for instance, may be viewed at one and the same time as “activist” – it led a revolt against the Sunni-oriented Umayyad dynasty in 740 CE – and “ecumenical” – it advocated, contrary to the pervasive Shiʿi position, respect for the first two caliphs venerated by Sunnism, Abū Bakr and ʿUmar).³ Despite the complexity involved in any such attempts at categorization, however, Twelver Shiʿite tradition itself has evolved a limited set of termini technici for dealing with internal doctrinal tension, most of which may themselves be subsumed under the Arabic designations for two overarching approaches.⁴ The first of these approaches is known as tafwīḍ (lit. “delegation”), and may be defined in a nutshell as the notion that the imams and their prophetic predeces-

 “Zayd al-Shahīd” – Zayd the Martyr (as he is referred to even by many Twelver writers and speakers) was the son of the fourth imam, ʿAli l-Sajjād Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn (d. 712 CE). Zayd led an uprising in the Iraqi city of Kufa – erstwhile capital of ʿAlī – against the Umayyads in 740 CE, which was crushed within the year. Those who recognized the line of Zayd’s descendants, as opposed to those of his brother Muḥammad al-Bāqir, as imams are “Zaydī” Shiʿites. They are less militant religiously than the Twelvers – i. e., less critical of the ṣaḥāba (Companions of the Prophet) in general and the shaykhān (Abū Bakr and ʿUmar) in particular – but more militant politically: they hold that an imam who does not draw the sword in order to unseat the (Sunni) usurpers is no imam. This combination of Islamic ecumenism and activism tempts one to see characteristics of Zaydism in Ayatollah Khomeini. An excellent exposition of the spectrum of Zaydī worldviews, far more probing than most, may be had from Najam Haider’s Shiʿi Islam.  The following discussion is indebted to Hossein Modarressi’s Crisis and Consolidation in the Formative Period of Shiʿite Islam (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1993).

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sors, though not themselves full-fledged embodiments of the divine (as many “extremist” Shiʿite splinter groups claimed), were commissioned by God – who “delegated” His omnipotence to them for the purpose – to create and maintain all beings in the universe, to provide those beings with laws, and to abrogate those laws in favor of new ones when they saw fit.⁵ (It goes without saying that the purveyors of this position believed that the members of the ahl al-bayt – the Prophet Muḥammad and his linear descendants the imams – could and did perform miracles, communicate with heavenly beings, know the future and the secrets of the unseen, continue to exist beyond their bodily deaths, and the like). They are possessed of wilāʿu l-taṣarruf, a term that essentially translates to dominion over the entire cosmos. The only difference between the imams and Allah according to this outlook is that the former’s power is derivative, whereas the latter’s is original. The second approach, representing what is essentially tafwīḍ’s countervailing tendency, came to be known in Imami Shiʿi circles as taqṣīr (lit. “shortcoming”), that is, the propensity to over-moderate the characterization of the prophets and imams, depriving them of any and all traits that smacked of the supernatural (including ʿiṣma or “immunity from sin and error”) and conceiving of them as nothing more than the most learned and righteous individuals of their respective ages (ulama abrarun atqiyāʾ). Sometimes champions of this camp went further still in their underestimation of Shiʿism’s sacred paragons, even maintaining that the imams’ knowledge of Islamic law (sharīʿa) was not as thorough as that of their jurist contemporaries. The two terms tafwīḍ and taqṣīr – sometimes conflated with the more general ifrāṭ (exaggeration) and tafrīṭ (underestimation) – and their referents evolved in active contradistinction to one another. The muqaṣṣirūn (practitioners of taqṣīr) perceived their opponents the mufawwiḍūn (practitioners of tafwīḍ) as having imported the heresies and exaggerations of the deviant ghulāt (“extremist”) sects into the ranks of “orthodox” (eventually Twelver) Shiʿism,⁶ while the mufawwiḍūn for their part accused the muqaṣṣirūn of selling the sacred-

 A latter day advocate of similar ideas was Shaykh Ahmad Ahsaʾi, founder of the nineteenth century Shaykhi movement, which in turn produced the Babi movement, which in turn produced the Bahaʾi movement. On the other hand, certain tafwīḍī-sounding notions show up in the massive compendium of al-Majlisī, the Biḥār al-anwār, e. g., the imams as the motivation for or conduit of creation. This use of the term tafwīḍ should not be confused with its employment in the sources as the antithesis of jabr (predestination), where it indicates human free will.  For centuries and down to the present day, many Twelver clerics have given voice to the notion that Ismāʿīlīs and other Shiʿi ghulāt (a rubric which often subsumes Sufis as well) are “worse than the Sunnis.” See, for the longstanding, relentless Imāmī campaign against those seen as Shiʿi “extremists,” Z. Maghen, “Occultation in Perpetuum: Shiʿite Messianism and the Policies of the Islamic Republic,” Middle East Journal 62 (2) 2008.

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ness of the imams short and even of harboring Sunni proclivities.⁷ At different times in Shiʿite history and in different places across the Shiʿite world one or the other of these tendencies has enjoyed preeminence, and the constant tug-ofwar between them continues on a number of related plains down to the present day. A premier example of this rivalry at work may be had from the realm of worship: does Shiʿite law enjoin (or even permit) the insertion into the introductory testimonial preceding the Muslim call to prayer (adhan) – viz., “I bear witness that there is no God but God, and I bear witness that Muḥammad is the Messenger of God” – of the additional clause “and I bear witness that ʿAlī is the Friend of God” (ashhadu anna ʿAlīyyan waliyyu llāh)?⁸ Those who have advocated the incorporation of this sentence since the medieval period have been branded by their opponents as mufawwiḍūn (or even as ghulāt, schismatic “extremists”), while those – especially the learned ulama of the sacred city of Qom in Iran – who argued early on that this additional phrase represented a heretical innovation that undeservedly elevates ʿAlī to the spiritual status of the Prophet Muḥammad, were castigated by the exponents of the first group as muqaṣṣirūn, as minimalist Shiʿites who failed to give the great Imam his due. The debate on this subject raged for centuries, with sometimes one, sometimes the other position gaining the upper hand and influencing the liturgical practice of most Shiʿite communities. By the modern period the tafwīḍī version of the ritual had become mainstream, and today – despite intermittent protests still voiced here and there by prominent Shiʿi jurists – it has been adopted all but universally; those who stubbornly omit the once controversial phrase are quickly accused of Sunni leanings. The trajectory followed by the dispute over the augmented ādhān (call to prayer) is in many ways representative of an overall trend in Shiʿite doctrinal history, in which “heterodox” ideas gradually, and despite a plethora of setbacks and reversals, manage to insinuate themselves into “orthodox” dogma, often via the conduit of accretions to popular belief which eventually force the hand of even the most dogmatic scholars and ideologically stalwart clerics. Thus, for instance, the notion of the Imams’ unmitigated “immunity from sin or error” (ʿiṣma), or the belief in the possibility of a particular Imam’s “occultation” (ghayba) instead of death, both of which had their origins among tafwīḍī and ghulāt circles (and both of

 The middle ground between these two extremes is shifty and relative: the Nuṣayrīs, for instance, traditionally regarded the Twelvers in general as muqaṣṣira, because they do not deify ʿAlī.  Shiʿism also insists that the words “Come to the best of works” (ḥayyā ʿalā khayri l-ʿamal) be added to the ādhān. A Fatimid caliph – affiliated with the Shiʿite sub-sect of Ismāʿīlism – reportedly had the tongue of a pious Sunni muʾadhdhin ripped out, and then had him tortured to death, for refusing to add this phrase (Goldziher, Introduction, p. 207, n. 109).

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which were initially the butt of fierce Imami or “orthodox” censure), were nevertheless incorporated before the end of the third Islamic century into the core of the Twelver Shiʿite creed, and have remained an integral aspect thereof ever since. Similarly, stories involving the Imams’ performance of miracles or knowledge of the future were ubiquitous in early “extremist” texts and probably also in medieval Shiʿi folk imagination, but they were for the most part absent from, or even overtly denied and censured in, the classical works of medieval Shiʿite luminaries like Ibn Bābawayh (d. 992 CE) or Shaykh Mufīd (d. 1022 CE). Despite this, such miracle stories gradually crept into the “orthodox” canon, eventually to be found on almost every page of Shiʿism’s most authoritative and all-encompassing latter-day encyclopedia, the Biḥār al-anwār (“Oceans of Lights”) penned by Muḥammad Bāqir al-Majlisī (d. circa 1700). Instances of the opposite trend may also be adduced: Ḥusayn’s martyrdom at Karbala, portrayed for more than a millennium by many popular Shiʿite sources as a deliberate, Christ-like sacrifice by an Imam who knew ahead of time the terrible fate that lay in store for him, has been reconstrued in contemporary Shiʿism – especially among twentieth century reformist and revolutionary circles (partially relying on the outlook of venerated classical luminaries like al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā, d. 1044 CE) – as a more human and activist, not to say political, attempt to restore sovereignty over the Muslim umma to its rightful possessors (this old-new reading, of course, was wielded by the reformists/revolutionaries to upend traditional Twelver quietism, and in that sense may be seen as the opposite of taqṣīrī moderation: it all depends on the angle from which we examine such phenomena, and on how we choose to define these rather elastic terms). Likewise, Shiʿite supremacist approaches, such as the traditionally heavy emphasis on ʿAlī to the point of “upstaging” Muḥammad, or the vitriol poured out by preachers and “threnody-reciters” (rawzeh-khanan) on the Prophet’s wife ʿĀʾisha or his immediate successors (and Sunni sacred heroes) the caliphs Abū Bakr, ʿUmar and ʿUthmān, have been considerably muted (taqṣīr), most of all by the Khomeinists who seek to export their revolution to the Islamic world at large (sudur-e enqelab dar sath-he jahan). Thus does the tafwīḍ-taqṣīr pendulum swing back and forth in connection with a variety of important issues from the inception of the Shiʿite movement at the dawn of Islamic history and down to our own time, presenting a formidable challenge to anyone who purposes to give an overview of Shiʿism’s internal “story” or fundamental theology. The current writer’s chosen method for meeting that challenge, for negotiating the straits between the Scylla of tafwīḍī apotheosis, esotericism and exclusivism and the Charybdis of taqṣīrī mundanity, rationalism and ecumenism, is to strive to present Shiʿism’s narrative as it is currently conceived among the religion’s premier interpreters, the mujtahids of the seminaries and their increasingly numerous students. Amongst these there does exist, albeit, a

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modicum of discord concerning various elements of Shiʿism’s “grand narrative” – on top of differences of opinion regarding legal, doctrinal and political/social/strategic matters – but today more than ever (thanks to the communications and information revolutions no less than to the Khomeini revolution) a large measure of general consensus reigns in such circles on most subjects of spiritual-historiographical significance.⁹ In the following exposition, this consensus will be treated as the contemporary middle ground, and the extremes to either side of it construed as beyond the pale in either the tafwīḍī or taqṣīrī direction, and consequently excluded. Thus, for instance, although there exist within the vast gamut of Shiʿite traditions collected over the centuries a version of the Fāṭima story which has the future second “Sunni” caliph ʿUmar son of al-Khaṭṭāb actually burn this daughter of the prophet to death hard on the heels of her father’s demise; and although the assertion may be found in half a dozen of the tens of thousands of dirges and hadith reports surrounding the Karbala incident that the female prisoners of the ahl al-bayt or Prophet’s family, having been stripped naked by their Umayyad captors and forced to ride bareback on dromedaries, were saved from disgrace when their mounts promptly spouted a second hump to cover their passenger’s shame, thereby bringing into being the Bactrian camel; despite the presence and perhaps even prevalence of such narrations at different times and places over Shiʿite history, they and their ilk will not be incorporated into the story of Shiʿism’s “sacred time” as we recount it below, for they are no longer accepted by the authorized dispensers of Twelver doctrine. At the same time, however, we will also strive to avoid what may be described as the opposite pitfall: the attempt to cobble together a “moderate” and “rational” version of the Shiʿite narrative, “moderate” in the sense that it sidesteps the virulent incrimination of Sunni sacred figures that always was, and continues to be, integral to Shiʿism’s take on Islamic history, and “rational” in the sense that it tones down to nonexistence the mythical or miraculous elements of the traditional tales in order to present a more palatable product to “enlightened” Western audiences. Such a presentation deracinates Shiʿism and depicts it inaccurately. It unjustifiably deemphasizes the polemical aspect of the faith, and lays stress on the terrestrial at the expense of the celestial, all of which is a recipe for grave distortion. The latter point, concerning miracles, deserves a rather lengthy digression. It is a commonplace among modern Western scholars of religion that they unconsciously adopt a dubious intellectual bifurcation, championed inter alia by many  The achievement of this consensus or equilibrium may be viewed as one among many instances of what Richard Bulliet perceptively called the centrifugal “Big Crunches” – which so often follow the centripetal “Big Bangs” – of Islamic history and theology (see Bulliet, “Islamic Reformation,” pp. 7– 12).

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of the medieval scholastics themselves (Arabic: mutakallimūn), a bifurcation between what we might call the “rational supernatural” and the “irrational supernatural.” Belief in the existence of God, in His creation of the universe ex nihilo, even perhaps in His occasional deflection of nature from its accustomed course (i. e., His capacity to perform miracles, at least “back then,” that is, during a religious community’s “sacred time”) – these dogmas are considered by such scholars to be the “legitimate” and, as it were, “logical” or “sensible” dimensions of a given faith’s theology, the creed in question’s “high culture,” its “authorized version”; whereas, on the other hand, crediting the miracle stories of saints and holy men, or the utility of imprecations or amulets issued by the same, or assigning magical or demoniacal powers to various objects, actions or formulae – such notions are for the most part consigned to the category of “popular superstition.” Although the researcher himself may be an avowed atheist, the former conceptions appear somehow worthy, proper, and even comparatively sophisticated in his eyes, while the latter seem base and silly. This dichotomy between what is viewed, and for the most part valued positively, as lofty metaphysics and “responsible” religion, and what is viewed, and for the most part decried, as folk fantasy and spiritual recklessness, also partakes of the Protestant – and Wahhabi¹⁰ – distaste for the establishment of intermediaries or intercessors between men and God (e. g., the priesthood or saints) and of these reform movements’ antipathy to the sanctification and empowerment of entities other than the Deity Himself (e. g., relics, icons, sepulchers). Holiness and divine power, according to this astringent monotheist (and ultimately rationalist) outlook, inhere in God alone – not in people, places or things – and thus belief in the salvific potency of a sacred well, or in the baraka (favor, grace) emanating from the person or resting place of a revered ascetic, or in the efficacy of consulting the scriptural codex as an oracle (Arab. istikhāra), or in the beneficial effects of wearing a garment of a given color – such beliefs are not only considered ludicrous, they are seen to comprise the sin of witchcraft and even (especially in the Wahhabi and Calvinist worldview) downright polytheism (Arab. shirk).¹¹

 “Wahhabi” is a nickname for the followers of the Arabian scholar Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (d. 1792 CE), whose ideology, carried across the peninsula by the arms of the Āl Saʿūd tribe, led ultimately to the creation of Saudi Arabia with its particularly severe, iconoclastic and anti-Shiʿi brand of Islam. The adherents of this school/sect/movement prefer to style themselves “unifiers” or “monotheists” (muwaḥḥidūn).  A number of important Shiʿite reformers of the twentieth century, including Shariat Sangalaji and Kasravi, adopted Wahhabi positions, especially those which militated against the notion of holiness inhering in entities other than God. Ali Rahnema, as we shall see below, has been directly

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All or most of the factors delineated above – the Greco-rationalist bent of Muslim, Christian and Jewish medieval Thomism; the puritanic reductionism of the disciples of Martin Luther (in sixteenth century Europe) and Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (in eighteenth century Arabia); to say nothing of the scientific positivism informing Western modernity – have combined in varying configurations to engender what purports to be a “rational” approach among contemporary academic scholars to the depiction and evaluation of religion in general. In the specific case of Islamology, this tendency has been buoyed up by the fact that the Qurʿan is notably free from the mention of miracles (they are found almost exclusively in the biblically-inspired portions of the text), the premier exception being the miracle of Muslim scripture itself, the lofty quality of the literary composition of which is considered beyond human capability (iʿjāz al-qurʾan). The relative dearth of supernatural violations of the natural order that characterizes Islam’s holy book (and also, to a certain extent, the Hadith literature) has served the positivist predilections of both Muslim reformers (the most famous of whom, Egyptian Grand Mufti Muhammad Abduh, claimed, for example, that the jinn or genies of Islamic tradition were in fact microbes) as well as Western students of the Muḥammadan creed, ensuring that the readership of both types of exponents has remained largely unexposed to the more “fanciful” elements of the faith. This dichotomy between “authentic” or “realistic” theology, on the one hand, and what is perceived as bizarre occultism and foolish quackery in the guise of religion, on the other, is the fundamental premise underlying the latest study by the highly influential Iranologist Ali Rahnema, entitled Superstition as Ideology in Iranian Politics (Cambridge, 2011). The author’s transparent agenda in this surprisingly well received work is to tag the Islamic revolutionary regime, especially in its most recent guise at the time (under erstwhile president Mahmud Ahmadinejad), with the stigma of irrationality and arbitrariness, and thereby justify the campaign to topple that regime and/or prevent it from obtaining nuclear capability.¹² The clerical establishment running Iran (so Rahnema’s argument essentially goes), having undiscerningly adopted the mass of superstitious tenets and contra-reasonable methodologies (re‐)injected into mainstream Shiʿism by the great seventeenth century CE jurist and encyclopedist Muḥammad Bāqir al-Majlisī,¹³ is consequently in-

and indirectly influenced by these reformers, who were anathemized by the mainstream Shiʿite clerical establishment.  Rahnema also throws in the Shah’s superstitious predilections as an introduction, and to make it seem like he is playing fair (and because he is genuinely opposed to autocracy).  This theory has its roots in earlier perceptions of Majlisī’s character and influence, such as that of Laurence Lockhart, who saw him as “an extremely bigoted mujtahid” and a “rigid and fanatical formalist,” itself a description drawing on the turn-of-the-century assessment of E. G. Browne (see

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capable of thinking in logical terms and is ipso facto unreliable, unpredictable and despotic: To the extent that Majlisī’s writings include illogical superstition, their popular acceptance accustoms people to internalize non-rational causal relations and become alien or averse to reason-based arguments and outcomes… Majlisī’s ideology, which educates people to trust and believe in the validity of superstitious ideas in the name of religious correctness, helps the acceptance of and sustains the legitimacy of absolutist regimes. Superstition does not rely on logical or common sense explanations, since it establishes bridges and relations between causes and effects in conflict with worldly natural laws… Concepts such as checks and balances, accountability and transparency belong to domains where rational expectations and logical or reasonable relations are accepted as norms and respected.¹⁴

There is much to criticize in this and the many other analyses that punctuate the pages of Rahnema’s book: the nineteenth century Ingersollian (or eighteenth century Woolstonian, or twentieth century Kasravian) immaturity that deifies reason and logic and insists that all significant human endeavor be conducted and judged solely on the basis of such criteria;¹⁵ the crudely reductive assessment of the almost immeasurably complex and often paradoxical role played by “magic” in the framework of religious lore and experience; the painfully literalist critique of the folk customs that have accumulated amongst Shiʿites over the centuries and have often been incorporated into the “official” cult by influential jurist-authors (Rahnema goes so far as to engage on several occasions in a virtual debate with these last, treating the reader to step-by-step empirical refutations of the notion that – for instance – wearing a certain color will make one wealthy); and especially the simplistic and hackneyed extrapolation from belief in the supernatural to the breakdown of causal thinking:

Newman, Safavid Iran, Preface). Western scholars of the Middle East and Islam have a long history of preferring skeptical philosophers to pious traditionists. Modern Iranian Shiʿite reformers themselves have made Majlisī and his Biḥār the butt of their censure and ridicule, most of them without having done more than peruse short sections of the massive work.  Rahnema, p. 195 – 7.  Robert Ingersoll (d. 1899) was an American writer and orator who lived during the “Golden Age of Free Thought” and penned, among other works, a critique of the morals of the Bible entitled Some Mistakes of Moses. In truth, Ingersoll was a deep soul, whose commentary on scripture was neither shrill nor unbalanced, and was often cogent and compelling. We made his name a negative-sounding adjective here because he represents, to some extent, an outlook that expects human belief systems to “make sense” across the board, and if and when and where they do not, delegitimizes them. Thomas Woolston (d. 1733) was an English “deist” theologian who reinterpreted all “irrational” sections of the Bible allegorically – as Egyptian Chief Mufti Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) tried, to some extent, to do for the Qurʾan.

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Once superstitious arguments with their nonsensical causal relations creep into the religious belief system, the pious common folk become obliged to coordinate and manage their lives according to unreasonable rules of behavior.¹⁶

The contrary is, of course, generally true: people (religious or otherwise) who credit the notion that black cats are bad omens still open doors by turning their handles, and people who are convinced that fingernails must be buried after they are cut, or that Thursday is an inauspicious day to get married, or that imams are able to predict the future, still for the most part seek their livelihoods by going to work, take medicine when they fall ill, and prosecute wars with the help of weapons and intelligence gathering. Rahnema’s baseless assumption that human life is governed by a level of meticulous (not to say foolish) consistency that impels those who subscribe to “illogical” religious rites to proceed illogically in their daily affairs as well – and, by undisguised implication, also in their domestic and foreign policy making – is characteristic of his superficial argumentation throughout the work. But the most egregious and specious dimension of Rahnema’s thesis in this regard is the very notion itself – widespread, as we said, as much among scholars and intellectuals as in popular thought – that one can instructively divide human belief systems into the opposing categories of “rational religion,” on the one hand, and “superstitious religion” on the other. “In this book,” explains Rahnema, “beliefs and practices found (sic) and performed on the basis of an irrational cause-and-effect relation is (sic) considered superstitious.”¹⁷ [Superstition] involves belief in those irrational causal relations that are argued to be possible because of religiously justifiable arguments attributed to the interventionist agency of God or someone claiming some sort of representation, appointment, delegation or trusteeship from Him.¹⁸

In this single solecistic sentence Rahnema has swept every prophet and holy figure of the Semitic faiths – from Moses, Joshua, Elijah and Isaiah; to Jesus, Paul, the Church Fathers and the Christian saints; to Muḥammad, ʿAlī, Ḥusayn and the Imams – into the wastebasket of “superstition,” since, of course, every one of these venerated paragons and dozens of others like them claimed just such “representation, appointment, delegation or trusteeship from [God]” and all of them to a man were perceived by their followers (in yet another of Rahnema’s convoluted formulations of the criteria for defining superstition) to “have the power to call

 Rahnema, p. 239.  Rahnema, p. 5.  Rahnema, p. 6.

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successfully upon and obtain God’s powers to intervene in the natural order.”¹⁹ Moses split the sea and Muḥammad split the moon, Joshua ordered the sun to stand still and ʿAlī asked Allah to reverse that same orb’s direction, Elijah called down fire from heaven, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, and St. Francis cleansed lepers and cured the blind – these and hundreds of other classic instances in which sacred personages are purported to have “call[ed] successfully upon and obtain[ed] God’s powers to intervene in the natural order” represent an integral and central element of Jewish, Christian, Sunni Islamic and Shiʿi Islamic theology. There is no way to excise such cornerstones of the monotheistic creed without undermining the entire Semitic religious edifice, such that what Rahnema has done in these passages is nothing less than to summarily subsume the founding hagiographies of all organized religion everywhere under the rubric of “superstition.” Strangely arrogating to himself the authority – which he explicitly and categorically denies to the clergy he so fiercely reviles – to expound upon what is orthodox and what is heterodox according to the three major occidental confessions, Rahnema affirms that The pious can believe that God may intervene in the material world in mysterious ways. But such a position does not necessitate the belief that He is in need of agents or things in the material world [to] which to delegate His powers, in order to carry out His design, and represent Him. The notion of intercession and the role of a holy personality as intermediary between human beings and God open the door to granting powerful agency to particular individuals, only indirectly in relation with and connected to God.²⁰

Again, the author has, in one fell swoop, delegitimized and condemned as “superstitious” the canonized chronicles and received theologies of the three major monotheistic religions, all of which envision – and allocate seminal and fundamental roles to – “holy personalities” who function as “intermediaries between human beings and God” and “carry out His design and represent Him.” “No one cometh to the Father but by me,” announced Jesus (John 14: 6). Perhaps the most central tenet of Shiʿite Islam – summed up by Ayatollah Javad-e Lankarani – is that “love of God is achieved solely through love of His prophets and His imams; without this, love of God is impossible” (bedun-e an hargez mohebbat-e khoda emkan-pazir nemibashad).²¹ All of the great prophets, revered priests and venerated saints who are celebrated in the scriptures and traditional lore of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other important faiths hallowed by the hand of history are hereby placed  Rahnema, p. 9.  Rahnema, p. 10.  Ayatollah Javad-e Lankarani, http://fazellankarani.com/persian/articles/8390/. Last accessed 23/ 07/2021.

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on Rahnema’s list of spiritual undesirables. Nor does our latter-day would-be Russelian stop there. According to Rahnema’s classification, not only individuals who are seen to enjoy a special relationship with God, but indeed, the very notion of the supernatural itself is beyond the pale of genuine religion: [t]he claim to “happenings” resulting from alterations in the natural course of events, alien to and inexplicable by rational and scientific means, can be labeled as superstition.²²

Of course, every miracle recorded in every literature revered by every community of believers throughout human history answers to this all-encompassing definition of “superstition,” as does, for that matter, the divine act of creation itself, which proceeded in a manner incongruent with Rahnema’s aforementioned demand for “rational cause-and-effect relations” (the biblical God, after all, merely uttered the words “Let there be light,” and there was light: He lit no fire and closed no electrical circuit; or, in the Muslim version, He merely commanded “Be!” [kun], and creation came into being). Dimly aware of this last problem, the author later qualifies his sweeping linkage of the miraculous to the superstitious in a lonely, incongruous passage by conceding that On a personal and private level, individuals can believe in the idea that God could alter the natural course of events [without earning condemnation by Rahnema as “superstitious”]. Belief in different degrees of Providence resulting from His autonomous will and design is part and parcel of faith and does not imply a superstitious outlook, unless Providence is assumed to be non-autonomous and induced by mortals and things.²³

Ignoring the other deficiencies that beset this statement (such as the author’s affirmation that the faithful individual is permitted to credit the idea of celestial wonder-working “on a personal and private level,” which presumably lets out every preacher and prophet who ever sought to spread the Good Word and every group of public worshippers in history, as well), we focus solely on the usage “induced”: Rahnema removes from the domain of right religion and relegates to the realm of base superstition the principle that divine intervention can be or has been “induced” by human beings, because this does not fit well with what his quasi-scholastic, neo-rationalist outlook tells him a deity must be, to wit, “autonomous.” Here the author, speaking as it were for God, has perhaps finally attempted a slightly subtler, though no less spurious, argument. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, we might tease out this argument by distinguishing between prayer – which is a request that God step in and wreak a marvel of one kind or  Rahnema, p. 12.  Rahnema p. 12.

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another – and, say, an imprecation or amulet – which (we may assert in Rahnema’s name) is perceived to somehow force God’s hand and presumes to “control and channel” divine power to particular human ends.²⁴ If one believes in the latter possibility, one is superstitious. This claim brings us back to the outset of our examination of Rahnema’s thesis, an investigation upon which we embarked in order to point up the absurdity of the pervasive tendency among modern students of religion to distinguish between the rational and anti-rational dimensions of the religious experience. The above argument is a ringing example of such absurdity, for Rahnema is asserting, in a nutshell, that belief in an all-powerful deity who runs the universe upon His own caprice is somehow a rational belief, whereas belief in a deity who is, albeit, exceptionally powerful in general but who can also, on occasion, be influenced and even “coerced” by human agency (a belief explicitly or implicitly held by virtually every extant faith) – this latter is an anti-rational belief. I will leave it to the reader to ponder the question: Which version of rationality or positivist logic fully supports a belief system according to which an eternal, supernatural entity mysteriously runs a world that it created ex nihilo, but, at the same time, categorically rejects a belief system according to which human agents may have an impact on the actions of that supernatural entity? Rahnema presents his muddled bifurcation from yet another angle: “personal” supernatural or spiritual-mystical experiences that have historically “cleared the vision and illuminated the heart of ordinary men”²⁵ are legitimate, says he, because they involve a “one-on-one relation between human beings and God with no official intermediaries to render services or draw benefit from the success of the results obtained…”²⁶ In other words, Rahnema – who yet again presumes to the all-encompassing, as it were metaphysical expertise to pronounce upon what is and what is not acceptable in the eyes of God – has consigned to the category of purveyors of base superstition every spiritual “intermediary” from the Catholic priest who administers a sacrament to the Hassidic Rebbe or Sufi Sheikh who functions as a conduit for divine baraka (grace, blessing) to the pastor, Imam or marjaʿ who receives regular tithes from his followers. From all of the above, culled primarily from the book’s introduction, it appears quite clearly that the polemic conducted between the covers of Rahnema’s Superstition as Ideology in Iranian Politics plans to build upon a rejection and denigration not only of “folk religion,” but of the lion’s share of the seminal stories told by

 Rahnema, p. 11.  Rahnema, 13.  Rahnema, 13.

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the classical sources of the Semitic faiths. Put another way, the author seems to have it in for two separate phenomena: (1) what he sees as elements of popular religion that have unconscionably gravitated from the periphery to the central mainstream in recent times, and (2) – what involves no small measure of self-contradiction on the author’s part – elements that were already central to the various religions’ narratives and belief systems in ancient times, and have continued to be so without interruption down to the present day. All of these elements should ideally be discarded (leaving what, exactly?) according to Rahnema’s outlook. As it turns out, however, contempt for the legends of old and the magic-tainted theurgy of today, disdain for miracles ancient and contemporary, does not describe the whole of Rahnema’s critique of religious thought and praxis. The author cites Benedict Spinoza – whose bona fides as an authoritative exponent of religious Orthodoxy may certainly be called into question – to the effect that “heathen superstition may be summed up as respect for ecclesiastics,”²⁷ an idea that later gained prominence, and ingress into Iranian consciousness, through the offices of the French revolutionaries. Rahnema then goes on to decree that Reciting a set of prayers chosen by the clergy and said to produce supernatural material results due to their intrinsic capacity to move God to approve such results are also exercises in superstition.²⁸

This last statement, which manages all at once to disparage and delegitimize the contents of the established prayer books of every religion known to the present writer, removing every supplication from the Hail Mary to the Shemonah Esreh (Rabbinically prescribed Eighteen Benedictions) to Zoroaster’s Gathas to the duʿāʾ istisqāʾ (Muslim Prayer for Rain) from the domain of legitimacy, is particularly revealing in its unveiled hostility to “the clergy” (Spinoza’s hated “ecclesiastics”). For Rahnema not only casts out of the enlightened realm of right religion, and into the abominable darklands of superstition, any society in history that has “accept[ed] a leader as divinely selected and supported”²⁹ (such as the Pope, the Dalai Lama, a Shiʿite Imam, Moses, etc.); he also emphatically adopts the antagonism of revolutionary Shiʿite theoretician Ali Shariʿati (whose biography he previously wrote) to the ulama as the purveyors of a corrupted “Safavid Shiʿism” shot through with superstition and ecclesiastical abuse: Rahnema, like Shariʿati (and the Bahaʾi, and many others), advocates a clergy-free Islam (a position easy enough for well-off intellectuals to take, for they have the learning and leisure to at

 Rahnema, 10, emphasis mine.  Rahnema, 14.  Rahnema, 14

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least attempt to access the sacred sources themselves, but much harder on the working man or peasant, who is simply lost without the mediating offices of a minister).³⁰ Altogether, Rahnema rejects the spiritual validity of pretty much every notion and institution that makes up traditional religious experience, Shiʿite or otherwise: The fact that the pious come to believe in objects, words and mortals possessing powers capable of moving the Divine to effect supernatural outcomes for their individual benefits, reflects an unconscious state of idolatry.³¹

Rahnema’s aforementioned reference to, and general reliance upon, Spinoza finally lets the cat out of the bag. For as it turns out, this scholar-cum-Iranian oppositionist (like so many of his kind) is not merely what we might call, oxymoronically, a “Wahhabi Shiʿite” or a “Protestant Shiʿite” or even some sort of “Reformed Shiʿite”; he is, rather, nothing less than a dyed-in-the-wool atheist – or at best a deist – for whom the tenets of every form of Shiʿism, taqṣīrī or tafwīḍī or otherwise, represent a hindrance to the good order and progress of humankind. He is the very “anti-religious modernist” that he so disingenuously critiques in his own conclusion. As with Amir Taheri, for whom “the [Islamic Republican] regime’s aim … is to defeat the ideology of the Enlightenment by leading humanity back to a medieval way of life in which religion … provides the organizing principle of society”³² – so for Rahnema, Islam is utterly anathema, despite the half-hearted lipservice he pays in scattered fashion to imaginary reformed or reconstructed versions thereof. Rahnema’s clumsy conflation of a plea for rational religion – which constitutes, at bottom, nothing less than a thoroughgoing rejection of religion in all of its forms – with a call for the reinstatement of a putative pre-Majlisite Shiʿism unbefouled by the vast gamut of notions and practices that he subsumes under the rubric of “superstition,” is a perfect illustration of the thoroughgoing failure of Western-educated Iranian secularist exiles to grasp the true nature of the faith that they have long since jettisoned from their lives (and would very much like to jettison from the lives of the compatriots they left behind). No medieval or modern Shiʿite luminary that has earned Rahnema’s largely uninformed respect by purportedly combating tafwīḍ (the notion that Allah delegates his authority to the Imams) and ghuluww (exaggerated assessments of the abilities of the Imams) would ever grant his respect in return to this twenty-first century academ-

 The most persuasive argumentation I have come across on behalf of the integral and essential role of clerics in the religious experience is John Brown, Misquoting, chap. 5 and passim.  Rahnema 14.  Taheri, Night, 12.

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ic incongruously preaching a “reasonable” Shiʿism shorn of miracles, devoid of divine-human intercessors, bereft of clerics, deprived of relics, and lacking efficacious prayer and almost everything else that makes the faith of Shiʿism (or any other faith) what it is. No reason-ridden Uṣūlī scholar-jurist – whom Rahnema may consciously or unconsciously see as his ally – would hesitate to declare this condescending academic an out-and-out infidel. At any rate, since Rahnema has consigned a good part of the contents of present-day Twelver Uṣūlism (the brand of Shiʿism that reins in Iran today) to the tenebrous domain of “superstition,” one cannot expect to come away from his study with any significant level of comprehension of the worldview of today’s Iranian Ayatollahs – and one does not. Not even the wishy-washy, wide open likes of Abd al-Karim Soroush or Mohammad Mojtahed-e Shabestari – both contemporary Iranian “religious philosophers” whose extremely liberal interpretations of Shiʿism have made them the darlings of Western researchers while anathemizing them in the eyes of the Shiʿite ulama and their believing flocks – not even they would sign on to the vulgar definitions and gross distinctions proffered by this free-thinker posing as a religious reformer (posing, in turn, as an objective scholar). Ali Shariʿati himself, of whom Rahnema is so enamoured, would unhesitatingly perform the baraʾa – the Shiʿite rite of complete disassociation – from the worldview of this contemporary proponent of Compteanism. The leaders of the Green Movement, in which Rahnema places his hopes for a new Iran, would immediately perceive his pseudo-Shiʿi “Salafism” for the pure gharbzadegi – Westitis – that it is. Rahnema represents no one in Iran (or elsewhere) who has any profound understanding of, let alone connection with (or, for that matter, interest in), Shiʿism. Homing in on his more particular prey, Rahnema finally gets around to deploying the unhelpful dichotomies he has so laboriously established in order to illuminate the Iranian political scene of his day. He compares the approach of former president Muhammad Khatami, who “employed and propagated a rational, balanced and modern Islamic discourse blending the ethical and spiritual message of Islam with enlightenment, humanism and universalism” with the approach of his successor in office, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who “ushered in a new era of supernatural, inexplicable and abnormal ideas, befogging the minds of Iranians” and “promoted unreasonable notions in the name of religion.”³³ Leaving aside, again, the ludicrousness of expecting a religion to be informed only by reasonable notions; and leaving aside the question whether Rahnema is actually claiming that Khatami himself does not believe in the “supernatural”; and leaving aside the fact that the majority of the “inexplicable” and “abnormal” ideas purportedly purveyed

 Rahnema 36 – 7.

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by Ahmadinejad were tied to belief in the Hidden Imam-Mahdī, a central principle of Orthodox (even pre-Majlisī) Twelver Shiʿism; leaving all that aside, we will only remark – in concluding this lengthy but necessary effort to debunk the assumptions underlying Rahnema’s misleading polemical treatise – that the remaining analyses of the book’s real anti-hero, Ahmadinejad himself, are entirely based on the clichéd gossip, hackneyed hearsay and yellow journalism that always blew the previous president’s statements and activities out of proportion (most notoriously his enthusiastic but, in the end, thoroughly benign – and essentially metaphorical – assertion that he felt as if he were enveloped by a halo whilst speaking at the United Nations).³⁴ Ahmadinejad’s administration, argues Rahnema – basing himself on a handful of (mostly unconfirmed) individual anecdotes – single handedly suffused large portions of Iranian society with a wild brand of apocalyptic messianism that sent it down a deviant course: The frenzied and phantasmical so-called religious culture that came to reign during Ahmadinejad’s presidency ushered a flurry (sic) of bizarre and occult happenings. Regular reports of unusual events mirrored a state of hysteria among certain segments of the population.³⁵

This description goes beyond the borders of wild exaggeration and enters the territory of sheer nonsense. It certainly corresponds to no public reality anywhere in Iran. The remainder of Rahnema’s opus, which consists primarily of an attempt to mine al-Majlisī’s Biḥār al-anwār for traditions that fit the author’s indefensible definition of “superstition,” is hardly more edifying (especially because in his eagerness to dig up drivel, Rahnema evidently failed to read thoroughly or properly even the exiguous amount of material that he cites. Had he done so, he would have discovered that Majlisī is often critical of the hadiths that he himself chose to include, in many cases because he finds them to be…unreasonable). Superstition as Ideology in Iranian Politics is the consequence of putting one’s scholarship in the service of propaganda.³⁶

 As Reidar Visser points out in connection with the Sadrists of Iraq, statements that smack of radical Mahdism are not necessarily so. In many cases these partake of an overall tradition of speaking of the Mahdī and anticipating (and yearning for, and even aspiring to) his advent that is “orthodox” in every sense (Visser, “Mahdism, Neo-Akhbarism and Usuli Orthodoxy: Examples from Southern Iraq,” in Ridgeon, Shiʿi Islam, pp. 117– 119). Claims by Mohammad Reza Shah regarding encounters with imams are well known.  Rahnema, 61.  Rahnema’s ideas did not arise out of a vacuum, and in order to understand his crusade against “superstition” and his distaste for the role played in Iranian Islam by clerics, one has to go back not just to Shariʿati, but to the likes of Sabeti, Al-e Ahmad, Kasravi, Shariat-Sangalaji, Hakamizadeh, Nurbakhsh, Kermani, Talebov, al-Afghani, the Bahaʾi, Freemasonry, Nietzsche, the French Revolu-

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As we argued in a previous chapter, all religious societies (and, for that matter, all secular societies), navigate a meandering and vicissitudinous path between the Scylla of irrationalism and the Charybdis of rational thought. Most religious beliefs and institutions involve a finessed amalgamation of these two elements: the nature and actions of the deity are conceived in terms that include both the violation and the confirmation of the law of cause and effect; the jurists make use of rigorous logic to build their arguments and counter-arguments concerning subjects such as how many pebbles should be thrown at the pillars (representing the devil) in Mina or under what conditions prayer will be efficacious. Devout adherents themselves vary in the weight they give to the more rational or irrational aspects of their faith. Some accept the spiritual potency of a given artifact – for instance, a tablet of compressed Karbala soil upon which to prostrate oneself (turbah, mohr) – while rejecting that of an evil eye or zodiac sign. Others credit miracle stories from the distant past but not those from the recent past or the present. Debates still rage in Shiʿite clerical circles surrounding the extent of infallibility that characterized the imams of yore (tafwīḍ versus taqṣīr). A hojjatoleslam or ayatollah can discourse eloquently on camera about the various stages of the afterlife or Eschaton, and later in the week vociferate against the silliness, indeed the virtual heresy, of those who claim to have met and talked with the dead (when Tehran preacher Kazem-e Sediqi – of “earthquake” fame – conveyed to his television audience the anecdote according to which the deceased Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi [d. 2021] opened his eyes and smiled at the washer of his corpse, some of his clerical colleagues praised him. Others excoriated him for purveying such nonsense on air, one declaring his intention to “forthwith change my will such that it indicates that if I open my eyes while being washed for burial, I am to be immediately rushed to the hospital”).³⁷ The entire gamut is part of religion, the “higher” as well as the “lower,” the “reasonable” supernatural as well as the “unreasonable” supernatural;

tion and even (especially in the case of his battle on behalf of rationality in religion) the anti-Akhbārism of the Uṣūlī tradition. Nor should we forget Ignaz Goldziher, for whom Shiʿism was “a particularly fecund soil for absurdities” and who maintained that “the objective observer may regard even the moderate Shiʿi doctrine of the imams as extravagant” (Goldziher, Introduction, p. 186). Or, for that matter, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, whose “antipathy to [the Muslim mystical tradition] was shared in the nineteenth century by would-be modernizers who felt that Sufism had become a shameful sink of superstitious practices and beliefs” (Richard Bulliet, “Islamic Reformation or ʻBig Crunch’: A Review Essay,” Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 8 [2009], p. 12). The Pahlavi Shahs themselves spoke on occasion of a “spiritual” Islam purified of superstition and the machinations of mullahs. Such an investigation of Rahnema’s sources of inspiration is, however, beyond the scope of our discussion.  “Edame-ye vakoneshha beh ezharat-e emam jomʿe-ye movaqqat-e Tehran,” Mardom Salari, 10/1/ 2021.

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and, as we have seen, Shiʿite history has been witness to more than one case of the latter metamorphosing into the former, the foremost example being the occultation of the Hidden Imam himself. When seeking to understand today’s Iranian Islam, all facets of the phenomenon must be taken into account, and there is little point in handing out grades: as scholars ours is not to approve of some aspects or versions of Shiʿism and denounce others.

Part Two: Reading the Islamic Republic

Chapter One: Shiʿite Sacred Time – The Origins of the Conflict All cultures and creeds evolve narratives, and they do so – in varying degrees – with the help of preceding narratives. Israelite cosmology drew on Sumerian and Babylonian sources, Buddhism absorbed and reinterpreted Hindu lore, and Christianity adopted and augmented the Biblical canon. Islam, however, did something significantly different from what these three religions, and many others, did: it appropriated the Judeo-Christian tradition – that is, recast that tradition as its own – and then transformed it almost beyond recognition. This bears further explanation. For Christianity the Bible, with all its purported harbingers and foreshadows of the advent of Christ, nevertheless remains the story of the Jews. The Church may have seen itself as the “new Israel,” but that did not preclude – indeed it actually necessitated – the previous existence of an “old Israel.” And at least partially because the Old Testament was perceived as recounting the career of the Jews and not of the Christians, the latter felt no need to tamper with it, and left it intact. Islam took a different approach. While Muslim tradition originally saw itself as little more than a vehicle for the conservation and perfection of the Judeo-Christian tradition, it soon became dissatisfied with this consummative role. It was not enough to be the culmination: Islam quickly discovered that it needed to encompass the beginning and the middle as well as the end. Already in its formative years, therefore, the new Arabian religion began to project itself backwards onto the whole gamut of Semitic historiography, reinventing every hero of the Biblical canon – from Adam, Noah, Abraham and David to Zachariah, John the Baptist, Mary and Jesus – as a Muslim. Muḥammad was no longer the founder of Islam: he was now its final prophet, the last in a line of no less than 124,000 or even 240,000 Muslim Messengers of Allah stretching back to the beginning of time. Unlike Judaism and Christianity, which had never tampered in any serious fashion with their termini a quo, Islam had rendered itself immemorial.¹ The root cause, or at least immediate instrument, of this metamorphosis in Islamic self-perception may be sought in several factors, one of which is definitional. The earliest and most basic connotation of the word islām – the literal meaning of which is “submission” – was “monotheism.” When what appears to be the oldest

 There are admittedly certain Jewish midrashim in which, for instance, Shem or his father Noah – and even Adam – are assigned “Jewish” characteristics, but these are few and far between and never come close to influencing Judaic doctrine or the religion’s overall historical outlook. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-011

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stratum of the Qurʿan calls Abraham a muslim it intends by this that as opposed to his father, family and community, who were all pagan idolators, Abraham was a believer in the one God. This “generic” usage of the terms islām and muslim was superimposed by Arabic tradition back onto Hebrew tradition without inducing any tension or contradiction to speak of, for it comprises a thoroughgoing acceptance of the Biblical and Christological worldview. These designations – islām and muslim – were not yet specifically identified with the particular divine dispensation vouchsafed by Allah to the inhabitants of seventh century Arabia. The next stage – or perhaps a parallel stage – in the semantic development of the term “Islam” saw it employed in reference to that very seventh century dispensation, to the new revealed religion communicated specifically through Muḥammad to the Arabs. If according to the previous, original conception Muslims gained precedent and pedigree by conceiving of Islam as essentially nothing more than Judeo-Christianity and of themselves as latter day Judeo-Christians, in this new conception the smooth Judeo-Christian continuum was ruptured in order to carve out a separate and defined Islamic identity. But there was a downside to this independent Islam, this Islam with a capital “I” that was limited in time and had begun only in the seventh century CE. For it was, as now conceived, a late-comer on the monotheistic scene. It was construed, even by its own adherents, as a tardy enrollee in an ancient and venerable association, and its purveyor, the Prophet, as an epigone of more illustrious predecessors whose stamp of approval – gained, inter alia, through a miraculous journey to the Seventh Heaven – was constantly and even obsessively sought. Islam was now a separate and demarcated religion unto itself, but it was, as a result, the tail-end of the marvelous story of the “People of the Book” (ahl al-kitāb), or more accurately, it was the third People of the Book. Arab-Muslims, from this point of view, had to be content to perceive themselves in a rather modest light, as the late-sleepers who had finally awoken – last in line after everyone else – to the truth and the light of monotheism (something akin to the way medieval European Franks or Visigoths saw themselves vis a vis Christianity). But as Muslim fortunes rose and Muslim arms conquered far and wide – and as relations with the Christians and especially with the Jews soured beyond repair – this conception of history, and of the place therein of Islamic religion, could hardly endure. Increasing Muslim confidence led to a finessed combination of the two prevalent meanings of Islam – islām (general monotheism) and Islam (Muḥammad’s Revelation) – in such a way that now, instead of the latter deriving from the former, the former derived from the latter. The switch was subtle, but significant. Muslims ceased viewing themselves as latter day Judeo-Christians, or even as the successors of the Jews and Christians, and began envisioning the Jews and Christians of yore – or at least the pious paragons among them – as early Muslims.

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The Semitic monotheistic continuum from Adam down to Muḥammad was preserved intact, but this time by virtue of an unbroken chain of Muslim prophets and kings: “Muslim” not just in the sense of believing that “there is no God but Allah,” as in the original import of the term, but now also – regardless of the chronological paradox – in the sense of believing that “Muḥammad is (i. e., will be) His Messenger.” Abraham became Ibrāhīm, was transported by Muslim tradition down to Mecca to build the Kaʿba, and inaugurated all of Islam’s major religious practices, including the khamsat arkān or “five pillars”: shahāda (testimony), ṣalāt (daily prayer), zakāt (charity tax), ṣawm (Ramadan fast) and ḥajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). Noah became Nūh and refused to touch wine (in the Bible he invented this beverage and was the first to get drunk); Moses became Mūsā and performed the Islamic ablutions (wuḍūʾ and ghusl); David became Dāwūd and composed his psalms (zabūr) in a mosque; David’s ill-fated servant Uriah, and the latter’s murderer Joab, charged into battle shouting “Allāhu akbar!”² Jesus became ʿĪsā, was never crucified, and will return to lead the Muslims against their enemies at the End of Time. Islam had co-opted the Judeo-Christian heritage, and now that Muslims considered both Old and New Testament history to be their own, they naturally felt the right, indeed the necessity, to take liberties with it: the stories were changed, and in many cases the original plot was excised and a whole new tale inserted. This “free and creative” approach to the tradition they had taken over was facilitated by the way in which they had encountered it: not as a formal canon or set of texts, but in bits and pieces, mostly by word of mouth. But whatever the factors involved, and regardless of which elements of the process were deliberate and which circumstantial or accidental, the end result was what can only be described as a full-fledged Muslim rewrite of Judeo-Christian – which at the time was tantamount to world – history. Post-modern scholars of (and apologists for) Islam have evolved a whole set of nebulous terms and phrases, premier among them “intertexture,” in order to avoid direct speech about this simple fact, but any detached and unmuddled study of the source material cannot but acknowledge – with or without an accompanying value judgment – the phenomenon of the cobbling together of a Muslim arch-narrative by means of the appropriation and radical reorientation of the considerable Judeo-Christian material at the disposal of Muslim exponents. Islam had created its own version of history, its own new world.³  Both Joab and Job are known in classical Muslim literature as Ayyūb.  This appropriation and thoroughgoing rewrite of the historical traditions encountered by Islam – a rewrite that was itself sometimes lifted from other (e. g., Apocryphal or Gnostic) literatures – did not stop with Judeo-Christianity. Iranian imperial chronology also went under the knife, as did important Greek traditions and personalities (Khomeini, writing in the 1940s, places Empedocles at

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So thoroughgoing was this hegira to a novel religio-historical reality that whoever dared defend the veracity of the original Judeo-Christian narrative was hereafter accused of “deviation” (inḥirāf ). More than a few authoritative Muslim sources, for instance, assert that the first verse of the Torah is “There is no God but Allah and Muḥammad is his prophet.” It has always been, and remains to this day, an exercise in futility to show a devout Muslim a copy of the Pentateuch opened to the first page in order to confute this claim: he or she will confidently and unhesitatingly declare that the Torah currently in possession of the Jews – no less than the Evangel currently in possession of the Christians – was long ago “corrupted” (taḥrīf ), and scarcely resembles the authentic ancient document revealed by God to their people. Indeed, a great deal of what the Old and New Testaments recount concerning their protagonists – that Jacob stole the birthright from his brother Esau, that David slept with Bathsheba, that Jesus claimed he was the Son of God – is cited by Muslim classical sources as irrefutable evidence that those texts have been heavily tampered with, since the idea that holy prophets of Islam would do or say such things is considered preposterous and blasphemous.⁴ The ex post facto “conversion” of monotheism’s major figures to the Islamic religion did not remain limited to those figures; it was soon expanded to encompass all people at all times everywhere. For this purpose the Muslim notion of fiṭra was called to the colors. Fiṭra might be translated with most effect as “the natural disposition of all things in existence,” or alternately as “natural law” or even “basic instinct.” In the Islamic worldview the primordial and fundamental predilection – the fiṭra – of everything on earth and in heaven is to submit to the will of the one the court of King David, from whom the former acquired all his wisdom – Embathokles faylasuf-e bozorg dar zaman-e Davud-e Nabi bud va hekmat-ra az u amukhte ast – and Pythagorus at the court of King Solomon – Kashf al-asrār, p. 32. [Empedocles was transformed by many medieval Muslim – and even some non-Muslim – authors into a sort of founder of Neo-Platonism, when he was not granted the status of Father of Greek philosophy as a whole]. This reworking is, ultimately, in the fine tradition going all the way back to Origen, Clement and other Church Fathers – and all the way forward to Roger Bacon and the Franciscan friar-schoolmen – who claimed that the great Greek philosophers had learned their art at the feet of Moses and Solomon).  Camilla Adang (Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996]), usefully differentiates between the earlier Muslim writers who cultivated and transmitted such views, and later Muslim writers who were somewhat better informed and were more faithful in their descriptions of previous dispensations (especially Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism) than their predecessors. Nevertheless, this more faithful approach never caught on, was soon overwhelmed by the surging river of tradition, and remains submerged to this day. Khārijites and Muʿtazilites are described as having perceived the Joseph story and the imprecations of Muḥammad against his enemies respectively as evidence that the Qurʾan had been tampered with, as well (Goldziher, Introduction, p. 173).

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God. Now, since such “submission” is also the literal meaning of the term “Islam,” fiṭra and Islam are considered virtual synonyms in the Muslim lexicon. It is with this equivalence in mind that Islamic tradition approaches a famous statement attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad: No person is born except in a state of fiṭra (mā min nasama wulida illā ʿalā fiṭra); it is his parents who make him a Jew, or a Christian, or a Zoroastrian, or a polytheist.⁵

Here, as elsewhere, fiṭra is taken to indicate Islam, and the message of this prophetic tradition or hadith is therefore: all human beings are born Muslims, but many of their parents lead them astray into other faiths. Jews and Christians are simply “deviant” Muslims (again: inḥirāf ). Ontogenesis recapitulates philogenesis: just as Islam had metamorphosed in the Muslim mindset into the original religion of humankind, as we saw above, so Islam became, on this new view, the original religion of every individual human being in the womb. Islam now engulfed the world temporally – by retrojecting itself back to the outset of history – and spatially – by extending itself to all the planet’s inhabitants. (One consequence of this overall attitude is what might be instructively described as a particularly ambitious, because nothing less than global, form of Muslim “irredentism”: jihad is not about conquering the world for Islam, it is about re-conquering the world for Islam, and, in the process, urging and inducing the population of the world to return to its original spiritual affiliation). Since, as we saw, whatever source is perceived as contradicting the Qurʿan or other sacred Islamic literature is immediately pronounced phony or distorted (taḥrīf ), there is no effective way to critique or even draw the attention of Muslims to the profound “transformations” described above. The Islamic worldview is a hermetically sealed system, self-sustaining and self-defensive. No amount of outside “evidence” will impact upon it, because such evidence has inevitably and by definition been tampered with. In this manner, Islam forged a new perspective on reality and set up the protective apparatus required to maintain that perspective ad infinitum. In the case of Shiʿite Iran, however, history holds a further development in store that we must now examine. Not long after Islam had rewritten the Judeo-Christian epic, Shiʿism rewrote the Islamic epic. The supporters of Muḥammad’s cousin and son-in-law ʿAlī as the most worthy successor to the Prophet saw the failure of the Muslim majority to back their candidate as nothing less than the end of Islam: the spark of true religion was, albeit, carried in the breasts of ʿAlī’s descendants (the imams) and their few, scattered followers from that time forward, but as far as the world stage and  Muslim, Qadar, 25; Ibn Ḥanbal, 3, 402.

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daily existence was concerned, the Shiʿites believed that the faith of Muḥammad had died in its infancy. Early Islamic figures deeply revered by Sunni tradition (the tradition of some eighty-seven percent of the Muslims in the world today) such as the “Companions of the Prophet” (ṣaḥāba), including three out of the four “Righteous Caliphs” who succeeded Muḥammad (al-khulafāʾ al-rāshidūn), Abū Bakr, ʿUmar and ʿUthmān; Muʿāwiya, the founder of the Umayyad dynasty (661 CE); and, for instance, the well-known Abbasid ruler Hārūn al-Rashīd, of Arabian Nights fame, are all execrated by Shiʿism as traitors to the cause, usurpers, oppressors, even apostates. Just as Islamic sources had reached back and retroactively altered the status of primeval Jews and Christians, or at least their virtuous leaders, turning them into Muslims, Shiʿite sources reached back and reevaluated the merits of the members of Islam’s seminal generations, turning the vast majority of them into infidels. Shiʿite literature recounts the story of Muḥammad and the rise of Islam in a significantly different manner than Sunni literature. The two sects disagree not only on the interpretation and evaluation of the facts, but in many cases on the facts themselves. Scores of events crowd the pages of Shiʿite texts that Sunnism has never heard of (the Shiʿites would say: that Sunnism suppressed), including a purported assassination attempt against the Prophet himself by the aforementioned Abū Bakr, ʿUmar and ʿUthmān, foiled at the last moment by a flash of lightning which revealed the ambush and the identities of the would-be assassins. Questions like where, and surrounded by whom, Muḥammad died, and what he said on his death bed, are hotly contested by the two branches of Islam, and every statement and action of the Prophet is grist for the mill of each side’s propaganda machine. Even the pre-Islamic Arabian ancestors of Muḥammad’s tribe (Quraysh) and clan (the Banū Hāshim) are enlisted in the struggle to delegitimize the opposing strain of the faith. As Islam had retrojected itself back to the beginnings of Judaism, claiming Abraham as a Muslim and harbinger of Muḥammad (and back to the beginning of time, claiming Adam as a Muslim – and harbinger of Muḥammad), Shiʿism retrojected itself back to the beginnings of Islam, claiming Muḥammad as a Shiʿite, a partisan of ʿAlī.⁶ It is true that Shiʿism’s assertion that it in fact represents the genuine, original strain of Islam, and that in point of fact Sunnism constitutes the deviation, holds more historical water than the Muslim assertion that Islam represents the bona fide, original Semitic monotheism (though it is not impossible  Indeed, as we shall see immediately below, Shiʿism, like Islam in general, retrojected itself back to biblical and pan-human (and meta-human) history as well. The sixth imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq said: “May God be my witness! There was never a prophet nor an angel who did not profess the religion of our love (i.e., the love for the imams)” (cited by Corbin in Nasr et al [eds.], Shiʿism, p. 174).

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that the religion of Muḥammad revived certain pristine elements thereof ). There are more than a few instances in which Shiʿite law or lore, as opposed to its Sunni counterpart, preserves what is probably the earlier, more authentic Islamic institution or conception (such as the right to contract “temporary marriage” [zawāj almutʿa] or the premium placed on kinship [iḥsānu dhi l-qurbā]). Nevertheless, on the whole, the evidence of massive Shiʿite revisionism is overwhelming. The Shiʿite classical canon is rife with pseudepigrapha – late texts falsely ascribed to early figures – and although all medieval Islamic parties put words in the Prophet’s mouth (that is, invented aḥādīth or traditions), no one excelled at this like the Shiʿa. ʿUmar, whom the Sunnis venerate as the second “Righteous Caliph,” is made by Shiʿite sources, on the one hand – several years after heading up the supposed failed attempt on Muḥammad’s life – to cynically undermine the dying Prophet of Islam’s wish to name a successor, who would have been ʿAlī. On the other hand, he is depicted as pledging allegiance to that same ʿAlī, who has, he admits, “been appointed by the Messenger of God as the master of all Muslim men and women.” And on the third hand, he is shown by certain Shiʿite sources kicking ʿAlī’s wife and Muḥammad’s daughter Fāṭima in her belly while she was pregnant with “Mohsen,” causing her to miscarry (ʿUmar then, say several texts, proceeded to burn her house down). Shiʿism, in its historiography, is polemicism incarnate: it is well-nigh impossible to find descriptions or narratives in its historical-mythical literature that were not forged or at least employed for the purpose of eulogizing Shiʿite and incriminating Sunni heroes. It can be said of the Shiʿite classical canon, more than that of other traditional or religious literatures, that there is little history for history’s sake to be found in it. Agenda is everything.⁷ Moreover, just as Islamic tradition accused Judaism and Christianity of “corrupting” (taḥrīf ) their scriptures, many strains of Shiʿite tradition accuse Sunnism of corrupting Muslim holy writ (taḥrīf al-Qurʿan), and specifically of “suppressing over five hundred words of the revealed text, including the sentence ‘Verily, ʿAlī is the guidance.’”⁸ In certain, more or less mainstream, Shiʿite classical sources we read that ʿAlī himself was asked about the apparent non sequitur between the first and second elements of a sentence contained in the third verse of the fourth

 As one instance among hundreds, Ali is shown time and again in classical Shi’ite literature performing deeds or experiencing phenomena upon witnessing which figures of all sorts, including Jewish rabbis and Christian monks, comment: “By God, no one has ever [sat under that tree, drank from that well, managed to ride that camel, etc.] who was not either a prophet or the legatee of a prophet…”  Goldziher, Introduction, 109. For those more “moderate” exegetes who did not level the accusation of actual taḥrīf al-Qurʾan at the Sunnis, see Meir bar Asher, Scripture and Exegesis in Early Imāmī Shiism (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999).

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chapter of the Qurʿan: “If you fear you cannot do justice to orphans – marry such women as seem good to you, two or three or four…” The first Imam (ʿAlī) replied that this discontinuity marks the seam with which two parts of scripture were sown together after no less than one third of the sacred document’s original verses had been excised.⁹ Even those Shiʿite exponents, medieval and modern, who reject such claims as instances of their own sect’s “exaggeration” (ghuluww), still occupy themselves with the re-vocalization and/or re-interpretation of countless Qurʿanic passages in the direction of the Shiʿite cause, and most subscribe to the belief that although ʿAlī’s name is never mentioned in the Qurʿan, approximately three hundred of this sacred document’s verses refer indirectly but incontrovertibly to him. If Islam took the reigning Judeo-Christian historiography and transformed it into a new and often unrecognizable narrative, Shiʿism took this novel Islamic narrative, in turn, and made putty out of it, using it as a base upon which to construct an even newer narrative – indeed, an entire new world – of its own. All religions forge worlds. Indeed, it is ironic that that institution most closely associated in the mind of man with conservatism – religion – constitutes in truth the locus of some of the most radically creative literary, intellectual, moral and ideological enterprises humankind has ever undertaken. Among these enterprises, or at least, among those pursued in the framework of Semitic monotheism, Islam’s reworking of Judeo-Christian sacred historiography is in many ways the most creative of all. For while the Hebrew Bible is, at least in large part, based on actual events that had transpired; and while Christianity was content to adopt (the pre-Advent segment of ) its historical narrative ready-made from the Hebrew Bible; Islam’s (pre-Muḥammadan) historical narrative did neither of these things: it neither relied on facts nor accepted a pre-cast description of those facts rendered verbatim by others. Rather, it invented episodes more or less from scratch – inserting them into the appropriated Judeo-Christian tradition – or played fast and loose with already extant anecdotes and accounts, metamorphosing them into something new and original. And if Islam employed all of these creative methods to form a new narrative, Shiʿite Islam went on to forge a new narrative within that new narrative, to carry out a revision of the revision (though, it should not be forgotten, the Shiʿites themselves argue that it is the other way around: Sunnism revised and distorted the original, veracious narrative, which corresponds to the Shiʿite version). The purpose of this new narrative was, more than anything else, a polemical one, directed at the rival, Sunnite position.

 Muhammad Hadi Maʿrifa, Ṣiyānat al-Qurʾan min al-taḥrīf (Beirut: Dār al-kutub, 1981), p. 158.

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Thesis – Antithesis Islam, then, is a house divided. It is divided not only along ethnic, national, linguistic or socio-economic lines, but – in a far more profound and lasting manner – along religious lines. Sunnism and Shiʿism are not merely two separate sects (the former constituting some eighty-seven percent of the Muslim world population, the latter approximately eleven percent); in certain significant areas they are nothing less than thoroughgoing antipodes of one another. The schism between them is not the result of differing emphases in legal, ritual, historical or even theological matters – such differences can be found in great numbers, after all, between various juristic and theological/philosophical schools within Sunnism itself – but rather of violently and diametrically opposed attitudes to the most fundamental, momentous and sacred subjects. Were one to approach an even mildly devout and knowledgeable Sunni Muslim and throw out for his or her consideration the name “Abū Bakr” – the first caliph (khalīfa) or successor of the Prophet Muḥammad – the following highly positive associations would in short order fall off of the lips of one’s interlocutor: Abū Bakr al-Siddiq, the Faithful, the sole member of the Prophet’s entourage who immediately accepted the veracity of his master’s fantastic Night Journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and the subsequent ascent from there to the seventh heaven (al-isrāʾ wa l-miʿrāj); Abū Bakr al-Karīm, the Generous, who spent almost all of the considerable sums at his disposal in support of the largely indigent fledgling Muslim community; Abū Bakr the first male Muslim, second in conversion only to the Prophet’s own wife Khadīja; Abū Bakr the father-in-law of Muḥammad, whose daughter ʿĀʾisha, though some forty-five years her husband’s junior, became the Prophet’s most beloved wife; Abū Bakr al-Wāfī, the Loyal, Muḥammad’s lone companion during his long and arduous hijra, his flight or emigration from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE, and the referent of the Qurʿan’s “second of the two who were in the cave” (thāniyu l-ithnayni idh humā fi l-ghār) where Allah’s Apostle and his “sidekick” hid from the Qurashite posse sent out to pursue them; Abū Bakr the Devout, who was named to lead the prayers in the Prophet’s stead when Muḥammad was laid low by his final illness; Abū Bakr the Restorer and Saviour of Islam, who resolutely prosecuted the “wars of apostasy” (ḥurūbu l-ridda) in order to bring the refractory tribes back into the fold of the faith after Muḥammad’s death – these and many more descriptions of this effusive ilk would comprise a Sunni Muslim’s reaction to hearing Abū Bakr’s name mentioned. No less laudatory and reverent – indeed, probably a good deal more so – would be the response to the evocation of the name of the second of the “Two Elders” (shaykhān) or immediate successors of the Prophet, ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, in many ways the St. Paul of Islam, who also presided over most of the fledgling faith’s lightning conquests.

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If, on the other hand, one were to utter the syllables “Abū Bakr” or “ʿUmar” within earshot of an even partially pious adherent of Shiʿite Islam, the story would be different – one hundred and eighty degrees different. If he or she is able to speak freely, as opposed to engaging in taqiyya/kitmān or “prudent dissimulation” (an expedient employed by Shiʿites when they fear persecution by the Sunni majority), the name of this paragon of Sunnism will be followed by a string of fierce execrations, including “enemy of God,” “May Allah curse his bones,” “vile usurper,” “bastard,” “dung be upon him” (al-samādu ʿalayhi), “hyprocrite,” “satan” and the like. Abū Bakr is credited by Shiʿite lore with assembling a “hit squad” that included ʿUmar and the Prophet’s third caliphal successor ʿUthmān, to lie in ambush and assassinate Muḥammad at the Harsha Pass outside of Mecca (lightning struck at the moment of truth and revealed their faces to the Prophet, and this event is alluded to – say several Shiʿite exegetes – in the Qurʿan: “[The wicked are] like a rainstorm in the sky, wherein is darkness, thunder and the flash of lightening…As often as it flasheth forth for them, they walk therein” (Q. 2: 19 – 20)). Abū Bakr is roundly vilified for begetting and raising a daughter – none other than the aforementioned ʿĀʾisha – who purportedly betrayed her husband the Apostle of Allah by committing adultery with a young swashbuckler.¹⁰ Abū Bakr’s most common nickname in Shiʿite texts and on the tongues of the Shiʿa to this day is qunfudh, which means “hedgehog.” ʿUmar, the second caliph of Sunni Islam and revered as al-fārūq (“the Discerner” between good and evil, an epithet of the Qurʿan itself in slightly different form [al-furqān]), comes in for even harsher treatment amongst Shiʿites. “ʿUmar qammār wa khammār,” they jeer at him: “ʿUmar the gambler and winebibber!” (both acts constituting kabāʾir or mortal sins in Islam). He is accused  The notorious hadith al-ifk or “calumnious affair” took place when the Muslim forces were returning from a campaign (according to some versions against the Banū Muṣṭaliq tribe) and ʿĀʾisha, at the time perhaps twelve years old, was inadvertently left behind in the desert. A young Muslim knight named Ṣafwān b. al-Muʿaṭṭal al-Sulamī was bringing up the rear and rescued her from a cruel death, chivalrously placing her on his mount and accompanying her back to Medina on foot. The appearance of the Prophet’s wife entering town after sunset with a young man – she being married to a husband some forty years her senior – activated the rumor mill, and ʿAlī urged Muḥammad to divorce ʿĀʾisha. In the end a revelation from on high established the nubile maid’s innocence, in the process enshrining forever the requirement that no less than four witnesses must perceive the locus coitus itself in order to convict a couple of adultery. ʿĀʾisha’s resentment toward ʿAlī burned for decades afterward, and may have motivated her to rebel against his caliphate in the Battle of the Camel (657 CE). ʿĀʾisha is maligned by many Shiʿite sources, but perhaps not so many, and not so severely, as is often claimed. In Majlisī’s Biḥār al-anwār, the preeminent anthology of Shiʿite tradition compiled by a scholar with Akhbārī (and therefore strong antiSunni) leanings, she functions more than anything as a witness to Muḥammad’s many declarations of affection for and appreciation of ʿAlī (and occasionally as a critic of her father Abū Bakr’s policies), and thus comes across to a certain extent as a reliable transmitter.

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of kicking the Prophet’s daughter and ʿAlī’s wife Fāṭima the Resplendant (al-zahrāʾ) in the belly when she was pregnant and causing her to miscarry, and of licentiously lifting the skirts of ʿAlī and Fāṭima’s daughter (Muḥammad’s granddaughter) Umm Kulthūm when she was but a lass. In the context of the Shiʿite practice known unabashedly as sabb al-ṣaḥāba or “Insulting the Companions [of the Prophet],” ʿUmar’s and Abū Bakr’s names are written upside down in religious texts; are scrawled on the soles of new shoes after which the wearer treads on manure; and are replaced by a wide variety of sobriquets, including jibt wa ṭāghūt, the names of two demons in Q. 4: 51, and uff wa tuff, “dirt behind the ears and dirt under the fingernails.” An ancient Shiʿite prayer, ascribed (anachronistically) to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib himself, reads, in part: O God! Curse the two idols of Quraysh (ṣanamay quraysh – i. e. Abū Bakr and ʿUmar), its two devils, its two tempters, its two false ones (ifkayha), and curse their two daughters (i. e. ʿĀʾisha and Ḥafṣa, both wives of Muḥammad known among Sunnis as ummahātu l-muʾminīn or “Mothers of the Believers”). Curse these two evildoers who violated Your command, denied Your revelation, repudiated Your favor, rebelled against Your messenger, overturned Your religion, distorted Your scripture, undermined Your laws, abolished Your mandates (abṭala farāʾiḍak)), disbelieved Your signs, opposed Your loyal friends and supported Your sworn enemies, destroyed Your land and corrupted Your worshippers. O God! Curse these two and their supporters, for they have torn down the house of Your Prophet, and ploughed under his door (radama bābahu), and brought down his roof, and brought his heavens down to his earth and his lofty heights to his lowest depths, and his outside to his inside, and they have extirpated his family (istaʾṣala ahlahu) and exterminated his helpers and executed his children, and banished his trustee and heir (i. e., ʿAlī himself ) from his pulpit, and denied his prophethood, and associated other gods with their Lord. O God! Plunge them into everlasting hell!!! (khallidhumā fī saqar).¹¹

One should perhaps try to imagine a sect of Christianity that, while affirming its belief in the divinity of Christ, has constructed its liturgy, theology and historical narrative around the resentment, delegitimization and systematic vilification of Peter, Paul and the Apostles in general. On the holiday of Ghadīr Khumm, Shiʿite Muslim mothers traditionally baked hollowed out ginger-bread men in the shape of Abū Bakr, ʿUmar and the third successor in line ʿUthmān, filled them with honey and handed them over to their children who proceeded to stab the doughy figures over and over and then imbibe the honey through the resultant holes as a symbol of sucking the blood of the three “righteous” Sunni caliphs.¹² ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, who presided as caliph over the Arab conquest of Iran in the early 640s CE, is often called by Persian Shiʿites “ʿUmar b. al-Ḍaḥḥāk” (this  http://www.alhak.org/vb/showthread.php?t=19444. Last accessed 12/10/2022.  Donaldson, Customs of the Shiʿa, p. 86.

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last referring, the reader will recall, to the demon-monster of Arab pedigree who usurped the Iranian throne from King Jamshid and who fed the brains of Persian children to the snakes growing out of his shoulders until he was bested by Kaveh the Blacksmith; the implied anti-Arabism representing no small paradox for a sect that, as we have pointed out more than once, virtually worships a semi-divine pantheon of fourteen Arabs).¹³ On the day that ʿUmar was assassinated (by a daggerwielding former Persian prince and Daylamite soldier named Abū Luʾluʾa Firoz), many Iranian Shiʿites celebrate – despite the disapproval voiced (rather perfunctorily) by their own high ranking clerics – ruz-e ʿUmar koshun/kushan/koshan or “Murder of ʿUmar Day” (9 Rabīʿ al-Awwal) during the course of which large bonfires are built and the second caliph is burned in effigy, after which the children stand around the ashes and urinate upon the embers to extinguish them, all the time chanting ʿUmar ʿUmar ooo Sag Pedar ooo ʿUmar atish gerefteh Koonesh shepeesh gerefteh ʿUmar ʿUmar ooo His father was a dog ʿUmar has caught fire ʿUmar has hemorrhoids.¹⁴

Indeed, some of the Islamic Republic’s important mujtahids are quite open in their support of such vituperation of the Sunni caliphs: Ayatollah Mohammad Hosayniye Shahrudi, Chairman of the Expediency Council (majmaʿ-e tashkhis) until his death in 2018, declared the ninth of Rabi’ al-Awwal “a day of joyous celebrations” in an article entitled “The Killing of ʿUmar b. al-Khattab, God’s Curse be Upon Him.”¹⁵ Even pan-Islamists like Ayatollah Motahhari, who regularly write ringing exhortations to Muslim unity and condemn those “extremists” who give rise to

 A Khārijite criticized the Shiʿite position thus: “They hang their religion on an Arab clan and aver that attachment to that clan lets them dispense with good works and escape punishment for evil” (cited in Goldziher, Introduction, p. 182). Admittedly, as we noted earlier, the Dahhaak figure was not originally associated with Arabs.  This holiday, which had seen a serious drop in its observance over the twentieth century but has gained a degree of popularity again since the re-eruption of the Sunni-Shiʿi conflict after 2003, is celebrated on the twenty-sixth day of the Muslim month of Dhu l-Ḥijja. Shepesh or shepeesh is more accurately translated as lice. Either way, it is not a nice song.  Litvak, Know Thine Enemy, p. 144.

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intra-Islamic rifts with their negative rhetoric,¹⁶ no less regularly belittles Sunni sacred figures, styling Abū Bakr, ʿUmar and ʿUthmān, for instance, “the so-called Righteous Caliphs” (be-estelah al-khulafa al-rashidun).¹⁷ In the areas of law and ritual the differences between Sunnis and Shiʿites are quite minor, but what differences there are magnified out of all proportion. Shiʿite jurists, for instance, have ever held that the permission given by Muḥammad to his sexually frustrated soldiers during the conquest of Mecca (630) to take “temporary wives” (zawāj mutʿa) remains permanently on the books, and thus we read in the memoirs of not a few Shiʿite talebe (seminary students) about a long day of sacred study, followed seamlessly by an hour-long “marriage” contracted and consummated in a seedy part of town. Sunnism sees Muḥammad’s consent to this practice as an emergency exception to the otherwise eternal prohibition (the situation was dire: the soldiers had threatened to castrate themselves), and Sunni preachers never tire of describing their Shiʿite counterparts as “patrons of prostitutes.” On the other hand, a grammatical disagreement regarding the correct vocalization of a single letter in a Qurʿanic verse (Q. 5: 6) has led Sunnis to scoop up additional water and wash their feet during the pre-prayer purification ceremony known as wuḍūʾ, whereas Shiʿites use the moistness left on their hands from the previous washing of the lower arms in order to merely wipe their feet. This discrepancy may not loom large in the eyes of a secular Westerner, but Muslims on both sides have always taken it very seriously. Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, the sixth Shiʿite Imam, declared that a certain octogenarian had “wasted sixty or seventy years in inefficacious prayer because he washes what God commanded him to wipe” (yughsilu mā amara llāhu bi-mashihi).¹⁸ Today in Syria or Iraq the “wrong” wuḍūʾ can get one killed. What is the origin of this virulent dichotomy of views, of this yawning, unbridgeable chasm and unextinguishable antagonism that has burned for centuries between Sunnis and Shiʿites, and the flames of which soar higher and wax hotter today than ever before in Islamic history? What seminal events turned Muslims against Muslims almost immediately upon the emergence of the new religion onto the world stage, and continued to reverberate in the hearts and minds of be-

 For one example among literally hundreds, see Motahhari, Ashnaʾi ba Qurʾan, Tafsīr Sūrat Anfāl, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 26, pp. 330 – 331.  E. g., Motahhari, Khadamat-e moteqabel, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 16, p. 245.  Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī, al-Istibṣār fīma khtulifa min al-akhbār (Najaf: n. p., 1906), p. 64. The related conflict over al-masḥ ʿala l-khuffayn – wiping over shoes instead of taking them off – was one of three polemics that Jaʿfar’s father, Muḥammad al-Bāqir, was unwilling to side-step by means of taqiyya (prudent dissimulation).

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lievers in both camps for centuries to come? The burden of the present chapter is to tell the Shiʿite side of the story. Western scholars of Islam have long debated the question at what point in early Muslim history one may speak of the emergence of an identifiable trend known as tashayyu‘ or Shiʿism.¹⁹ Should this movement’s consolidation, or perhaps even its origins, be traced back to the doctrinal elucidations introduced by the fifth and sixth Imams, Muḥammad al-Bāqir and his son Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, who lived in the middle of the eighth century CE? Or should its beginnings rather be sought in the impact of the shocking slaughter of Ḥusayn and his family by the forces of the Umayyad caliph at Karbala (680 CE)? Or in the bitter experience of ʿAlī’s own brief term on the caliphal throne at Kufa in Iraq (656 to 661 CE), during which period the designation shīʿat ʿAlī (“ʿAlī’s partisans”) apparently first came into use?²⁰ Or in the terrible irony of the rehabilitation and ascent to power of members of the Umayyad clan, precipitated by the election of one of their number, ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān, to the caliphate?²¹ Or in the fierce succession dispute after the Prophet Muḥammad’s death between muhājirūn (“immigrants” from Mecca), anṣār (“helpers” or Medinan hosts) and a handful of supporters of ʿAlī’s right (632 CE)? Might the onset of Shiʿism be pushed back even further, to events that occurred during Muḥammad’s own lifetime, such as the Prophet’s purported appointment of ʿAlī as his successor either after the “Farewell Pilgrimage” (631 CE) or much earlier still in the context of Muḥammad’s “initial admonition” to the members of his extended family (613 CE)? Or even, perhaps, to altercations between cliques and clans within the Quraysh tribe several generations before the Apostle of Allah was born?²² This ongoing Western scholarly debate, as interesting as it may be for the historian, harbors little or no significance for believing Shiʿites, whether they be clerics or laypersons. In their eyes – that is, in the predominant view evinced by the religion’s medieval classical sources and also by its “orthodox” exponents from

 One should differentiate in the context of this question between the emergence of the trend of tashayyuʿ, which in many cases indicated little more than an inordinate fondness for the Prophet’s lineal descendants, and the bifurcation of Islamdom into separate, demarcated, mutually hostile camps of Shiʿa and Sunni, a development which many would assign to a period centuries after the demise of Muḥammad.  See Etan Kohlberg, “Early Shiism in History and Research” in E. Kohlberg (ed.), Shiism (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2003). Specifically, the “Second Oath of Allegiance” (bayʿa) reportedly tendered to ʿAlī by thousands of his supporters after the egress of the Khārijites may be perceived as a seminal moment (see Dakake, Charismatic Community, pp. 60 – 63).  This was Goldziher’s position (see Introduction, p. 169).  One of the earliest and best scholarly treatments of this question was penned by Marshall Hodgson, “How did the Early Shiʿa become Sectarian,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 75 (New Haven: Yale, 1955).

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that time until the present – the origins of the Shiʿite creed are to be found far earlier than any of the above options: in the period that predated the creation of the cosmos.²³ Indeed, Shiʿite tradition asserts that the very universe was brought into being in the first place solely for the sake of their belief system, or more specifically, for the sake of the “five pure ones” (Muḥammad, Fāṭima, ʿAlī, Ḥasan and Ḥusayn) and their nine descendants (the Imams), who are the objects of that belief system’s adoration: Abū Hurayra (a Companion of the Prophet Muḥammad) reported that Allah’s Apostle (i.e. Muḥammad himself ) said: “When God created Adam and breathed His spirit into him, Adam turned and looked to the right of the heavenly throne, and there he saw five apparitions (khamsat ashbāḥ). Adam wondered, ‘O Lord, can it be that there were human beings created before me?’ God replied, ‘No.’ ‘Then who are those over there whose names (sic.) I see?’ asked Adam. God said, ‘Those are five of your descendants, were it not for whom I would not have created you, nor would I have created the Garden, the Fire, the Throne (al-ʿarsh), the Footstool (al-kursī), the heavens, the earth, the angels, the demons (jinn), or human beings.’”²⁴

The emergence out of Adam’s loins, almost a hundred generations further on down the line, of these anticipated spiritual übermenschen is, claim the sources of Shiʿism repeatedly, the ultimate purpose and goal of creation (and in the somewhat circular conception common to most religious cosmologies, their mission once they emerge onto the stage of the world is to, in their turn, serve and benefit all aspects of that same creation). In recognition of their provenance in the Godhead, the “People of the Mantle” (ahl al-kisāʾ, after the cloak Muḥammad would drape over his daughter Fāṭima, son-in-law ʿAlī and two grandsons Ḥasan and Ḥusayn) were named after Allah: For these five I have broken off names from My own [ninety nine] names (shaqqaqtu asmāʾan min asmāʾī): I am known as Maḥmūd (the Praised One) and here is Muḥammad; I am known as al-Aʿlā (the Loftiest) and here is ʿAlī; I am known as al-Fāṭir (the Creator) and here is Fāṭima; I am Dhu l-iḥsān (the Beneficent) and here is Ḥasan; I am al-Muḥsin (the Charitable) and here is Ḥusayn.²⁵

While every son and daughter of Adam and Eve was by nature endowed with the heavenly spirit – the divine “inspiration” that was the “breath of life” – the “Fourteen Infallible Ones” (Arab. arbaʿat ʿashara maʿṣūm, Pers. chardah-e maʿsum) are

 On this see Etan Kohlberg, “Some Shiʿi Views of the Anti-Diluvian World,” Studia Islamica 52 (1980).  Biḥār 27, section 10, hadith 10. Henry Corbin discourses intriguingly on the “synchronism” that replaces chronology and anachronism on the “plane of imamology” (Nasr, Shiʿism, pp. 172– 174).  Biḥār, 19.1.6.

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portrayed as nothing less than emanations and incarnations of the pristine celestial luminescence that preceded the onset of time: The Messenger of God (i.e. Muḥammad) said: Allah, the blessed and exalted, formed myself and ʿAlī five hundred thousand years before the creation of the world from a single beam of heavenly radiance…which was extracted from the light of Allah’s Sublimity and Majesty. This is the light of His Divine Essence (nūru lāhūtiyyatihi), the light that was revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai, but that Moses could not endure, so that he fell as one thunderstruck and fainted dead away.²⁶

This nūr Muḥammadī or “Muḥammadan light” was eventually (at the onset of creation) inserted into the sperm of Adam – styled a prophet (nabī) by Muslim tradition – was thence transmitted to the ovum of Eve, was subsequently ensconced in the seed of their son Seth (nicknamed hibat Allah, “gift of God” and Adam’s divinely appointed waṣī or “trustee”), and was thereafter dispatched down the generations of man, flowing “from pure loins to pure womb” (min ṣulbin ṭāhirin ilā raḥimin ṭāhir)²⁷ and repeatedly clothed in corporeal form by “secret clay taken from beneath the heavenly Throne.”²⁸ On the foreheads of the sainted women who were privileged to be inseminated with this empyrean phosphorescence shone the letters of the names of the future Imams, and from the lower backs of their venerable husbands issued voices incessantly glorifying God.²⁹ The “immaculate drop” (nuṭfatun naqiyya) that contained the essence of what would eventually become the hallowed “People of the House” (ahl al-bayt) – unsullied by the ritual pollution accompanying the sexual act (janāba) or the spiritual pollution accruing to pre-Islamic idolatry (danas) – was carried down the generations by the paragons of the common Semitic monotheistic heritage in cycles of prophet (nabī) to trustee (waṣī) and back again. Shiʿite (and Sunni) tradition speaks of no less than 124,000 such “couples” (only a few of them actually named) that preceded the ultimate pair, viz., Muḥammad and ʿAlī. This transmission of the primordial essence and luminescence down the ages until it was invested in – indeed, transformed into – ʿAlī and his nuclear family, did not proceed in silence. It was accompanied by a great deal of “commentary,” or more specifically, by a lengthy series of harbingers concerning the final destination of this numinous current and the divine right of its intended receptacle, in the

 Biḥār, 35.1.12 and 24.  Biḥār, 37 p. 18.  Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, “Seul l-homme de Dieu est humain: Theologie et anthropolgie mystique a travers l’exegese imamate ancient,” Arabica 45 (Paris, 1998).  Biḥār, 35.1.15.

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form of what one might call “sacred graffiti.” The initial inscriber is Allah Himself, the first words of Whom to Adam upon creating him are not “Be fruitful and multiply” or “Of all the trees of the garden thou mayest eat save one…” – as in the Bible and Qurʿan – but rather “Whoever opposes ʿAlī’s prerogative will go to hell, and whoever supports him will go to heaven…”³⁰ Gabriel saw the names of the five “People of the Mantle” (ahl al-kisāʾ) written on the foot of the divine throne seventy thousand years before creation,³¹ and the same names were emblazoned on rays of light emanating from that throne from the very beginning of time.³² On the gates of heaven Allah affirmed in writing that “ʿAlī is Muḥammad’s brother from a thousand years before the world began,”³³ and the caligraph “ʿAlī is the Friend of God” (ʿAliyyu waliyyu llāh) decorates all eight doors of Paradise.³⁴ On the back of the divine throne is etched an exegesis, or more accurately an assertion followed by a proof-text: “I [God] sent ʿAlī to assist Muḥammad, as it is written (Q. 7: 34) ‘He it is who has propped you up with His support’ (huwa lladhī ayyadaka binaṣrihi).”³⁵ A similar inscription is found carved into the trunk of “the Lote Tree of the Uttermost Boundary” (sidrat al-muntahā) in the seventh heaven, and was seen there by the Prophet during his ‘Night Journey’ ascent: “’I [Allah] supported Muḥammad with his vizier” (the angel Gabriel, Muḥammad’s travelling companion on that occasion, explains that “his vizier” refers to ʿAlī).³⁶ When it came time for the more mundane task of creating the world, a primordial pact (mīthāq) was sealed between God and humankind – or God and the prophets – regarding their future recognition of the walāya of ʿAlī: it was a precondition of their coming into existence.³⁷ Allah left a signature of sorts on every being – animal, vegetable or mineral – that He fashioned, which read: “ʿAlī is the Commander of the Believers” (ʿAliyyu amīru l-muʾminīn),³⁸ while the angels were all made with “ʿAlī is the Righteous One” branded between their shoulder blades.³⁹ Nor did God neglect to emboss ʿAlī’s name upon the sun.⁴⁰ Following in their Lord’s footsteps, the carriers of the primeval nūr left their imprint across time and space:

 Biḥār, 27.10.22.  Biḥār, 27.11.1.  Biḥār, 27.10.11.  Biḥār, 27.10.2.  Biḥār, 27.10.24.  Biḥār, 27.10.3.  Biḥār, 27.10.5.  Dakake, Charismatic Community, pp. 145 ff. Such traditions are reminiscent of the midrashic take on the theophany at Sinai and the Sufi take on yawm alastu.  Biḥār, 27.10.1.  Biḥār, 27.10.25.  Biḥār, 27.10.21.

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King David engraved his sword with the slogan “There is no blade but Zulfiqar” (dhu l-faqār, ‘the Serrated’ or ‘the Two Pronged,’ given to ʿAlī by Muḥammad from the booty of the battle of Badr) and his shield with that slogan’s continuation, “and there is no young warrior but ʿAlī” (lā fatan illā ʿAlī);⁴¹ and as for Moses: From Abū Saʿīd, from ʿAbd al-Razzāq, from Maʿmar, who said: [the Umayyad Caliph] Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik (d. 743 CE) dispatched me from the Land of Ḥijāz [in South West Arabia] to the land of Shām (Syria), and I set out. When I arrived in the Balqāʾ region (in Transjordan) I saw a black mountain, and upon it were scrawled gigantic letters that I could not read, and I was taken aback. Presently I entered Amman, the capital (qaṣaba) of Balqāʾ, and sought out an expert at deciphering tomb inscriptions. I was directed to a very old man, and we rode together back to the mountain. When he saw the towering letters gracing the slope, he exclaimed “Amazing! It is in Hebrew!” and he translated it for me into clear Arabic. It read: “There is no God but Allah, Muḥammad is His Prophet, and ʿAlī is His Friend: O God! Pray for these two.” And it was signed: “Mūsā b. ʿImrān” (Moses son of Amram).⁴²

Moses, in other words, saw more than his own people’s future in the Promised Land from the heights of Mt. Nebo; he saw the investiture of ʿAlī by Muḥammad as the leader of the “New Israel” (as the Muslim umma, and the Shiʿites in particular, are more or less conceived by the earliest sources), and left a record of his vision for posterity. As we noted above, earlier on another mountain – Sinai – the light that dazzled Moses and made him faint was the nūr Muḥammadī. ⁴³ According to a hadith transmitted from his predecessors by the eighth imam ʿAli lRiḍā: When Noah was in danger of being inundated, he invoked God by invoking our [i. e. the imams’] cause (or our right) and God saved him from inundation. When Abraham was cast into the fire, he invoked God by invoking our cause and God caused the fire to become a harmless coolness. When Moses opened a path into the sea, he invoked God by invoking our cause, and God made the sea dry land; and when the Jews wanted to kill Jesus, he invoked God by invoking our cause; then God saved him from death and raised him up to Himself.⁴⁴

Arab-Islamic genealogical tradition generally traces itself back to and intersects with Biblical lines, and most classical Muslim writers on the subject view Muḥammad’s Quraysh tribe as deriving from Ibrāhīm/Abraham via Ismāʿīl/Ishmael, one of whose descendants, ʿAdnān, was the eponymous ancestor of the ʿAdnānite or Northern “Arabized” Arabs (mustaʿribūn), as opposed to the Qaḥṭānite or “pure”

   

Biḥār, 27.11.3. Biḥār, 27.10.20. Biḥār, 35.1.24. Cited by Corbin in Nasr, Shiʿism, p. 174.

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Southern Arabs (al-ʿāriba) ostensibly descended from Noah’s great-great-great grandson Joktan/Qaḥṭān. One of ʿAdnān’s descendants was named Fihr (“tall rock”), and nicknamed Quraysh (perhaps “little shark”),⁴⁵ whence the designation of the tribe he is credited with founding, which, under his sixth generation descendent, Quṣayy b. Kilāb, established its hegemony over the South-West Arabian town of Mecca at the outset of the sixth century CE. The word for “tribe” in Arabic is qabīla, and the medieval Muslim linguists connected this with the cognate term muqābil meaning “parallel” or “opposite,” explaining that Arabian tribes habitually divided up into two main factions that faced, and feuded with, one another. In the case of the newly sedentary Quraysh, this intra-tribal rivalry expressed itself in the consistent competition between, at first, Quṣayy’s two sons ʿAbd Manāf and ʿAbd al-Dār and their respective allies (the muṭayyibūn or “Perfumed Ones” versus the aḥlāf or “Confederates”); then later, between ʿAbd Manāf ’s sons Hāshim and ʿAbd al-Shams (who were reputedly born as Siamese twins attached at the forehead and separated by the sword, which instrument of war from that time forward would ever come between them⁴⁶); and finally, in the period just before Muḥammad’s birth, between the Banū Hāshim and the Banū Umayya clan, the latter founded by ʿAbd al-Shams’s son Umayya. Thus Banū Hāshim versus Banū Umayya. Meccan topography resembles a bowl, with the ḥarām or “sacred enclosure” surrounding the pre-Islamic cubic shrine-edifice known as the Kaʿba at the lowest point in the middle (so much so that local historians record that on quite a few

 It is somewhat counterintuitive that Fihr, or any other nomadic denizen of the seventh century Arabian desert, would be nicknamed “little shark” (qirsh is Arabic for shark, the vocalization “ooay” is the Arabic diminutive, thus quraysh translates as “little shark” or “sharky”). Other suggestions on the part of Arab-Muslim linguists concerning the significance of this sobriquet derive it from the same root’s fifth verbal form – taqarrasha – meaning “to gather,” because the tribe was gathered together in the sixth century CE from the different Middle Eastern lands whither they had scattered in order to conquer Mecca from the Khuzāʿa tribe; or from the eighth verbal form – iqtarasha – which means to hoard money and property, as the Quraysh – whose name reminds the imaginative etymologist of Croesus, symbol of wealth in Greek mythology and Qorah/ Qarun, symbol of wealth in Judaic and Islamic legend – became prosperous merchants after assuming control of Mecca (a city that most, but not all, scholars agree lay along a major trade route). I would suggest another source for the tribal cognomen: the Talmud cites an exegesis of the name of Joqtan’s son Hatzarmavet (Genesis, 10: 26; in Arabic ḥaḍramawt referring to the South Eastern portion of Arabia) to wit: “This is a place called The Province of Impending Death, where the people wear clothes made of paper and eat leeks (qraysha, spelled in Hebrew and Aramaic with a “k” not a “q” but so is the word for “shark”) and expect death on a daily basis“ – a pretty good description of aspects of Bedouin life. In Herodotus, Strabo and elsewhere we find not a few peoples name after their staple victuals: perhaps in the case of the Quraysh tribe it may also be true that “you are what you eat.”  Abbas Qommi, Zendegani-ye chahardah-e maʿsum (Tehran: Golshan, 1386), pp. 11– 12.

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occasions due to flood, pilgrims actually swam seven times around the sacred structure instead of circumambulating on foot).⁴⁷ The population during the period in question lived in dwellings arranged in rough concentric circles with the currently dominant clan or faction occupying the positions closest to the Kaʿba and monopolizing what was essentially the ḥajj (pilgrimage) concession: the keys to the holy sanctum and the right to feed (rifāda) and dispense water to (siqāya) the devotees who came to worship (and/or the bedouin businessmen who came to engage in commerce). Because the domiciles of the less powerful and influential families were located on the upper periphery or in the suburbs, they were known by the appellation “the Outlying Quraysh” (quraysh al-dhawāhir – whence the name of the recently assassinated chief of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri), whereas the group with the political, social and economic upper hand, who lived in the most (literally but not figuratively) depressed section of the city, were called “the Lower Quraysh” (quraysh al-biṭāḥ). These last, due to their prestigious hieratic status as minions of God’s House (bayt Allah, as the Kaʿba was known even before the advent of Islam) were also styled ahl al-bayt, “the People of the House,” a term that would be thoroughly transformed and accorded unparalleled significance by the Shiʿa (see below). The jockeying for the more honorable (and lucrative) of the two positions was a constant feature of Meccan tribal life, and at the time of Muḥammad’s birth, the clan to which he belonged, the Banū Hāshim, occupied “the cheap seats,” among other reasons as a result of the ill financial fortune of the man who stood at its head, Abū Ṭālib, the future Prophet’s uncle and ʿAlī’s father. Returning to the Shiʿite theological narrative, now that we have set the genealogical and geographical mise en scene, the pristine light – forged by Allah fourteen thousand (or forty thousand, or seventy thousand, or five hundred thousand) years before the world began – that was purveyed by the exceptional male and female scions of Adam and Eve from creation and through the inception of North Arabian history, made its way down the Qurashite family tree. Eventually it reached the ranks of the above-mentioned Banū Hāshim clan, bifurcating upon egress from the person of Hāshim’s son ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib and entering into two of his children – Hāshim’s grandchildren – simultaneously: ʿAbd Allah, father of Muḥammad, and Abū Ṭālib, father of ʿAlī. Muḥammad and ʿAlī may be said therefore (to paraphrase the metaphor once employed by the Ethiopian Najāshī regarding Christianity and Islam) to have “emerged from a single lamp.” These two are of a piece, they are each other’s “twin” (ṣinw),⁴⁸ to such an extent that one “extreme” (ghālī) Shiʿite sect would later claim that Gabriel was originally commissioned to convey God’s

 This occurred most recently in 1941.  Biḥār, 35.1.15.

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revelation to ʿAlī, but mistook Muḥammad for him since they were as alike as two crows (yushbihuhu kamā yushbihu l-ghurābu li-l-ghurāb, thus the name of the group: al-ghurābiyya. Another such sect, the ʿUlyaniyya or Dhammiyya, went so far as to rebuke [dhamma] the Prophet for having usurped ʿAlī’s prerogative).⁴⁹ Indeed, as we shall see below, the Prophet and his cousin are often perceived even by more mainstream or “orthodox” Shiʿite sources as essentially the same being. As we noted in the introduction to Part Two, virtually all positively evaluated Old and New Testament figures are described by Islamic tradition as “Muslims,” the significance of which term ranges among differing periods and authors from mere “monotheists” all the way across the spectrum to full-fledged “believers in the (future) mission of Muḥammad” (or in other words, from those who confess only the first clause of the Islamic Testimony or shahāda: “There is no God but Allah,” to those who accept its continuation as well: “and Muḥammad is His Prophet”). When it comes to the Messenger of Allah’s immediate Arab forbears, however, the issue of their religious affiliation is more acute and problematic, especially among the Shiʿa. Some early sources stress the fine, uncrossable line between pre-Islamic polytheistic Hashemites and those who had heard the “Good News” from Muḥammad’s lips and believed in it (a particularly painful example being the Prophet’s own mother, Āmina bt. Wahb, for whose soul he once attempted to pray while at her graveside, whereupon he received a censorious revelation from Allah to the effect that “it is not proper for the Apostle of Allah and the believers to pray for the forgiveness of idolators even though they are near of kin, for it is clear that they are denizens of hell-fire” – Q. 9: 113).⁵⁰ Other sources are less severe, and credit important pre-Muḥammadan members of the Hashemite clan, and sometimes even other Qurashites, with adhering to the raw, generic form of monotheism known as ḥanīfiyya, or to the largely synonymous millat Ibrāhīm, the religion – literally “the Word” – of Abraham. For Shiʿites this latter category – ḥanīfism – is insufficient when it comes to defining the status of the Prophet’s and his cousin ʿAlī’s parentage. That Muḥammad’s father, ʿAbd Allah, was a Muslim in the full sense of the word (even though

 This tendency even appropriated for itself on occasion the Qurʾanic method of utilizing the experiences of Muḥammad’s prophetic predecessors as foreshadowings of his own career. The Shiʿite heretic Muḥammad b. ʿAli l-Shalmaghānī (d. 934), for instance, styled Moses an imposter because he arrogated to himself the mission that was originally assigned to Aaron (Goldziher, Introduction, p. 185, n. 53). The Nuṣayrīs would take a (comparatively) more balanced tack, arguing that Muḥammad is the outer veil concealing the inner, divine ʿAlī.  “The prototype for this [attitude] is the Qurʾanic Abraham, who prayed for his father ʻuntil it became clear to him that [his father] was the enemy of God’” (Q. 60: 1; Dakake, Charismatic Community, p. 20).

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he died before his son was even born) is taken by Shiʿite tradition as a given, but like much else that is assumed or taken for granted in this way, and thus does not need to be vociferously argued – the best example being the apostleship and extreme merit of the Prophet Muḥammad himself – this “fact” is less central to Shiʿite hagiography and historiography than the need to establish beyond the shadow of a doubt that ʿAlī’s father, Abū Ṭālib, converted to the new faith prior to his demise. Vocal chords and later pens were exercised to the utmost in proving this point (disputed by the majority of Sunni historians and traditionists), and perhaps the strongest argument – though far from an infallible one – is that Abū Ṭālib’s wife, Fāṭima bt. Asad (not to be confused with Muḥammad’s famous daughter of the same first name) was probably the second female Muslim, converting soon after Muḥammad’s own wife Khadīja. Since Qurʿanic law expressly forbade Muslim women to remain married to unbelieving men (witness, inter alia, the Prophet’s insistence that his own daughters Ruqayya and Umm Kulthūm be divorced from his other uncle Abu Lahab’s sons ʿUtba and ʿUtayba, as these last clung to their pagan creed), had Abū Ṭālib persisted in his polytheism (or, perhaps, even in his ḥanīfism), Fāṭima could not have remained married to him as she did. But if ʿAlī’s father accepted Islam, why is there no record of this? Why did Abū Ṭālib himself not announce to all and sundry this momentous decision of his? Shiʿite sources are ready with a riposte (an anachronistic one) to this parry, as well. Abū Ṭālib, they argue, was availing himself of the Shiʿite prerogative of taqiyya (“prudent dissimulation”) – which given the chronology is here being characterized (like most Shiʿite institutions) as an authentic, pan-Islamic prerogative – in order to protect himself from the wrath of his relatives and the community at large. He was a closet Muslim: From Jābir b. ʿAbd Allah, who said: the Messenger of God, may God’s peace and blessings be upon him, told me that when he ascended to heaven after the Night Journey from Mecca to Jerusalem, he saw the names of [Muḥammad’s grandfather] ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, Abū Ṭālib and [the Prophet’s own father] ʿAbd Allah written on the legs of a throne made of light. He asked the keeper of this throne how these three had received this honor, and he answered: “They merited this because of their fulfillment of two obligations simultaneously: believing in secret and affecting unbelief in public” (kitmānuhumu l-īmāna wa idhhāruhumu l-kufr – not long after its inception, the right among Shiʿites to practice taqiyya evolved into a veritable duty, and here Abū Ṭālib et al earn points for carrying it out – Z. M.).⁵¹

In other hadith-based anecdotes that take up this question, Abū Ṭālib is shown employing taqiyya on his deathbed in order to convert to his nephew’s faith without arousing the ire of his cohorts: he held up six fingers then three, sixty-three in ab Biḥār, 35.1.12.

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jadiyya/jafr or gematria (where letters stand for numerical values) spelling out ilāhu aḥadun jawād, “God is One, Magnanimous”; or he voiced the Islamic creed in Ethiopian: asdin limusafa qatalaha… ⁵² Abū Ṭālib and his wife Fāṭima bt. Asad were both pedigreed members of the Banū Hāshim clan, and ʿAlī’s pure Hashemite bloodline on both maternal and paternal sides is advertised proudly by his Shiʿite advocates as unique in Qurashite annals (though shared, logic dictates, by his three brothers) – again, it should be noted, diverting the central focus away from Muḥammad, who could not claim this genealogical merit. No less unique, and far more pregnant with symbolic meaning, was the purported manner of ʿAlī’s birth. His mother, Fāṭima bt. Asad, was, as we said, a ḥanīf (monotheist) even before the advent of Islam. While midwifing at the birth of the future Prophet, she saw a blazing light emanate from his mother Āmina’s womb and illuminate the entire East and West, and realizing that this meant that the newborn would conquer the inhabited world, she was comforted to hear from her husband Abū Ṭālib the prognostication that she herself would later bear the conqueror’s legatee (waṣī).⁵³ After the boy Muḥammad had been orphaned of father, mother and grandparents by the age of eight, she and Abū Ṭālib were privileged to serve as his foster parents for over a decade and a half (though the Prophet was prevented by Allah from praying at his biological mother’s final resting place, as we saw above, he reputedly threw himself into Fāṭima bt. Asad’s grave and was only with much difficulty and after a long period convinced to come out. Some sources have him sleep there overnight, and according to others he waited till the angels of death Nakīr and Munkar came to administer their “examination,” and when Fāṭima did not know how to answer their question “Who is your Imam and walī [master]?” Muḥammad whispered the answer in her ear: “Your own son!”).⁵⁴ Although ʿAlī was born to the “blue-blooded” couple of Abū Ṭālib and Fāṭima bt. Asad only several years after Muḥammad had already left their care, this common upbringing reinforces the claim that the two were not just cousins but brothers (years later, immediately after the Muslim emigration or hijra from Mecca to Medina, the Prophet commanded the members of his flock to choose “brothers in Islam” from amongst the ranks of the “community of believers,” and Muḥammad took advantage of the opportunity to cement this already powerful fraternal bond by declaring ʿAlī his own brother in Islam). When Fāṭima travailed, she headed straight for the Kaʿba to pray and circumambulate, and a vast collection of Shiʿite texts agree upon what happened next: the

 Biḥār, 35/3/18.  Mahallati, p. 12.  Mahallati, p. 14.

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stone walls of the Kaʿba opened up, enveloped Fāṭima, and closed again upon her, after which she endured an easy labor inside the holy edifice – assisted by the likes of Mary mother of Jesus and Āsiya, pious wife of Pharoah – and gave birth three days later to the son she would have named “Asad” (after her father) or “Ḥaydar,” both of which mean “lion,” were it not for a heavenly voice that instructed her to call him ʿAlī, after God’s own appellation al-Aʿlā, the “Most High.”⁵⁵ According to other versions of the story, the Prophet arrived on the scene, placed the traditional partially chewed date in the newborn’s mouth – a symbolic transfer of knowledge and authority – and gave him his name.⁵⁶ ʿAlī, the mawlud-e kaʿbeh, was the only child ever born in bayt Allah alḥarām, ⁵⁷ in the “Ancient House” (al-bayt al-ʿatīq), the sanctum sanctorum of the Hejazi Arabs, the most well-known name of which – al-Kaʿba – connects it indelibly to the Israelite shrine in the desert wilderness styled ha-kuba in the Book of Numbers.⁵⁸ Over a quarter of a century later he would enter that same structure in the wake of the Muslim conquest of Mecca, and would smash with his own strong hands every one of the three hundred and sixty idols that had come over the years to crowd his hallowed birthplace. All of this harbours added significance when we recall the aforementioned Shiʿite transformation of the term “People of the House” from its original denotation: the clan residing closest to the Kaʿba and privileged to serve therein, to its subsequent meaning: the linear descendants of ʿAlī (more so than of Muḥammad, for as we shall see further on, charismatic figures tracing their lineage back to ʿAlī and one of his later wives – not Fāṭima the daughter of the Prophet – were still considered by some Shiʿites to be Imams and members of the ahl al-bayt: for most early Shiʿites, it was the Ṭālibid line, i. e., that of ʿAlī’s father Abū Ṭālib, that counted). Whereas the focus of worship and hub of group loyalty in pre-Islamic times had been a physical building and the cult surrounding it, and although this remained the case to a large degree among Sunni Muslims (or gradually metamorphosed into a focus on sacred literature and ritual), for Shiʿites the static structure and geographical center – and, to an extent, the sacred literature – was replaced close to the outset by a living, human lodestar and his progeny.⁵⁹ The story of ʿAlī’s birth inside the Kaʿba and his emergence

 Biḥār, 35.1.10 – 15.  Haider, Shiʿite Islam, p. 56.  Biḥār, 35.1.7.  Numbers 25: 8.  Imams are often designated “the speaking Qurʾan” (and the Qurʾan “the silent Imam”). The Qurʾan continues as a living word of God due to the presence of the imams. “Many Shiʿi scholars (especially Ismāʿīlīs and Twelvers)…consider the family of the Prophet the living embodiment of the Qurʾan” (Haider, Shiʿi Islam, p. 36). One of the tawwābūn (“penitents” who sacrificed themselves

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therefrom into the world serves as a powerful metaphor for this identification and transition. Just as ʿAlī’s parents had adopted Muḥammad at eight years of age, Muḥammad and his wife Khadīja adopted ʿAlī when he was six. Abū Ṭālib’s financial situation went from bad to worse due primarily to a prolonged drought – a decline in fortune that occasioned the previously discussed deterioration of position of Muḥammad’s Banū Hāshim clan vis a vis the rival Umayyads – and the future Prophet and his uncle ʿAbbās agreed to lighten Abū Ṭālib’s economic load by taking one child off his hands each: ʿAbbās took Jaʿfar (later to achieve fame as a Muslim martyr and ancestor of a messianic pretender) and Muḥammad chose ʿAlī. The Prophet is said to have loved ʿAlī more than any of his children (i. e., his four daughters), and treated him like the son he never had. “ʿAlī is to me,” he was wont to effuse, “as my soul is to my body” (ʿAliyyu minnī ka-rūḥī min jasadī) – an adumbration of the later Shiʿite notion that ʿAlī is the inner (bāṭinī) truth to Muḥammad’s (or the Qurʿan’s) outer (ẓāhirī) truth, which itself partakes of the overall phenomenon to which we have alluded more than once thus far: that for Shiʿism, though most of its present-day exponents would be reticent to admit as much explicitly, ʿAlī is in many ways even more important than Muḥammad himself. On a popular level, “the pious [Shiʿite] public resorts in droves to ʿAlī as intercessor, as he is closer to humble believers than Mohammad and a real intermediary between this world and heaven.”⁶⁰ ʿAlī’s position is, however, complex in this regard. His immanence is matched only by his transcendence: I am the Sign of the All Powerful. I am the First and the Last. I am the manifest and the Hidden. I am the Face of God. I am the Hand of God. I am the Side of God…⁶¹

Soon after Muḥammad received his first prophetic revelation on the “Mount of Mercy” (jabal al-raḥma) on the outskirts of Mecca in the year 610 CE, he was joined in his new dispensation by his wife, the successful businesswoman fifteen years his senior Khadīja bt. Khuwaylid. On this point all strains of Islam are in agreement; the question is, who was the third Muslim? We saw that Sunni tradition almost unanimously claims that this distinction goes to Abū Bakr, the future first caliph (some dissenters argue that it rather belongs to Zayd, Muḥammad’s freedman

in battle to atone for having abandoned Ḥusayn) addressed his Umayyad opponents as “destroyers of the Sacred House” – a double entendre referring simultaneously to the holy edifice and the Prophet’s descendants (Dakake, Charismatic Community, p. 94).  Richard, Shiʿite Islam, p. 20.  al-Raḍī, Nahj al-balāgha, cited in Henry Corbin, En Islam Iranien: Aspects Spirituels et Philosophiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), vol. 1, p. 96.

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and, for a time, adopted son).⁶² For Shiʿites the second male Muslim was without question ʿAlī: “The Prophet received his spiritual office on Monday,” they quote Muḥammad’s personal servant Anas b. Malik as affirming, “and ʿAlī accepted the faith on Tuesday” (buʿitha l-nabiyyu yawma l-ithnayni wa aslama ʿAliyyun yawma l-thulathāʿ).⁶³ The Prophet’s uncle ʿAbbās informed a customer in his shop that the three figures the latter had seen genuflecting in front of the Kaʿba were Muḥammad, Khadīja and ʿAlī, “the only people in the world to practice this rite.”⁶⁴ Nor is this the sole honor or honorific bestowed upon ʿAlī by Shiʿites that reminds us of the Sunni characterization of Abū Bakr: Abū Dharr al-Ghifārī said: I heard the Messenger of God say the following words to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib: “You are the first one to have believed in me, and you will be the first one to clasp my hand on the Day of Resurrection. You are the Greatest Faithful One (al-ṣiddīq al-akbar – Abū Bakr’s sobriquet with superlative added) and you are the Discerner (al-fārūq – ʿUmar’s nickname) by means of whom the Truth is separated from Falsehood. You are the Chief (yaʿsūb) of the Believers just as mammon (māl) is the Chief of the Infidels. And you are my brother, and my vizier, and the best of those that I leave behind, and you shall fulfill my promise.⁶⁵

Three years after he began receiving revelations from On High, Muḥammad was instructed by his Maker to “admonish your closest kin” (wa andhir ʿashīrataka l-aqrabīn – Q. 26: 214), that is, expose them to your new belief system. Widely extended families being the order of the day in Arabia, the Prophet took this to mean the Banū Hāshim clan in its entirety, and invited them all to a repast (an event known as yawm al-dār, “the Day of the Home”). One of his uncles, Abu Lahab, disrupted the proceedings by telling an off-color joke and dispersing the crowd before Muḥammad had a chance to speak (he is consigned to everlasting hell for this and other crimes in the Qurʿan), but the Prophet persisted and assembled the same audience the following night. He addressed them:

 For a Copernican look at Zayd’s place in the Islamic foundation narrative – arguing that neither Abū Bakr nor ʿAlī but rather this temporarily adopted son was the originally intended successor to the Prophet Muḥammad – see David Powers, Zayd (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). This book builds, inter alia, on meticulous arguments concerning the coalescence of the notion of Muḥammad as “the Final Prophet” (khaṭīm al-nabiyyīn) in the same author’s Muḥammad is not the Father of any of Your Men: The Making of the Last Prophet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).  Mahallati, p. 47.  Mahallati, p. 46.  Mahallati, p. 46. Ḥusayn is often called a ṣiddīq son of a ṣiddīq (Dakake, Charismatic Community, p. 94). Ali is regularly designated by these cognomens, which the Sunnis reserve for the first two rashidun caliphs: “I am the great siddiq, and the first faruq; I prayed seven years before Abu Bakr did” (Ibn Abi al-Hadid, Sharh Nahj al-Balagha, vol. 4, p. 206).

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O children of [grandfather] ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib! By God, I know of no young man among the Arabs who has brought to his people something better than what I bring you now. For I bring you the blessings of this world and the next, and I have been commanded by God the Exalted to call you to [this Truth]. And whosoever among you will assist me in this matter, will be my brother, my legatee (waṣī) and my successor (khalīfatī).⁶⁶

This invitation or challenge of Muḥammad’s was met with a deafening silence: no one was ready to throw his lot in with an upstart who sought to overturn the established doctrines, customs and social structure of such a conservative community as this, no matter how much they might respect the speaker on a personal level. ʿAlī, however, though only about thirteen years of age at the time, was not hesitant in the slightest. “I will help you!” he cried, jumping up. But the Prophet already knew that his adolescent cousin was in his corner, and hadn’t convened the meeting (or so he thought) to garner his support. “Sit down!” he ordered, and turned again to his more senior guests. When they showed themselves as reticent as before, ʿAlī again offered his services, and was again told to take his seat. Upon being disappointed a third time, Muḥammad turned to ʿAlī and affirmed in the presence of all and sundry: “Here is my brother, my legatee and my successor: hearken unto him and obey him!” (the guests thereupon began jibing Abū Ṭālib that he had just been instructed by his nephew to obey his own son!).⁶⁷ This anecdote is flaunted by Shiʿite tradition as proof positive that all the way back in the beginning of Muḥammad’s prophetic career, he made arrangements for its end, for the leadership of what would become the Muslim umma after his death. ʿAlī’s appointment as future caliph coincided exactly with the first public preaching of Islam as a religion. This appointment is, in other words, an essential tenet of the Muslim faith. The story of ʿAlī’s life from this point forward until the death of the Prophet some twenty years later in 632 CE, is presented by Shiʿite sources as a long litany of demonstrations that he is worthy of the position to which Muḥammad appointed him. These milestones on the way to (what should have been) his caliphate or successorship to the Prophet are legion, and range from truly momentous events to minor hints dropped here and there on various occasions. The first major occurrence of this sort after ʿAlī’s public “ordainment” as the Prophet’s successor in front of the Banū Hāshim clan, came approximately seven years later. After Mu-

 Many Sunni sources, as well, contain versions of this anecdote, including the oldest surviving biography of the Prophet, al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya (whose author was, however, sometimes accused of ʿAlid leanings). Sunni exegetes argue away the problematic implications thereof in a variety of ways.  Mahallati, p. 61.

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ḥammad’s loyal wife Khadīja and his uncle and protector Abū Ṭālib both died in 619 CE – which was thus designated “the year of sadness” (ʿām al-ḥuzn) – the fortunes of the severely persecuted, no more than one-hundred-strong Muslim community ebbed even further. In the following year, when a group of pilgrims from the Northern town of Yathrib fell under Muḥammad’s spell at the annual ḥajj, he conceived the idea of relocation. In 622 CE he realized this idea in the form of the hijra, the “flight” or “emigration” of the Muslim believers to Yathrib (which subsequently became known as Medina). He sent his flock first, remaining behind until all were safely out of town. When he departed himself, Muḥammad was indeed accompanied on the journey (as the Sunnis boast) by none other than Abū Bakr, but first of all the latter had not been invited: Abū Bakr heard about the whole matter from ʿAlī, went running after the Prophet (thereby nearly leading the Meccan posse right to him), frightened his master with his footsteps so that Muḥammad ripped a shoelace and stubbed his toe (!), and ultimately almost gave them away in the cave where they hid due to his excessive cowardliness and nervousness (which is why, the Shiʿites claim, a revelation had to be sent down through the Prophet to calm Abū Bakr: “Do not be distressed, for God is with us!” [Q. 2: 207]).⁶⁸ More importantly, however, as the Prophet had prepared to leave Mecca he asked ʿAlī to perform a singular service: to lie in his bed bundled up in his sheets so that no one would suspect that the leader of the Muslims had left. As it turned out, the Meccan aristocracy had chosen that night for an assassination attempt against the Messenger of God, and handpicked seven warriors from seven different clans to do the dirty deed (so that no one clan would incur the blood revenge or thaʾr). When they arrived at Muḥammad’s abode under cover of darkness, there are at least two versions of what happened next. According to the first of these, the attackers pelted the prone figure with rocks through the windows, but ʿAlī endured the interminable lapidation and did not budge so as not to reveal the ruse. He thus sacrificed himself for the Prophet and for Islam as Ismāʿīl and Jesus had done in their time and as Ḥusayn would do in the future. According to the second version, the assassins peered through the windows to ascertain that their victim was at home, and they saw… Muḥammad. The recensions of the story that convey this version are coloured by varying levels of the intimation that Muḥammad and ʿAlī are, in truth, the same person.⁶⁹ Perhaps no proof of ʿAlī’s worthiness was more cogent than the fact that the Prophet affianced him to his favorite daughter, Fāṭima – whose sacred stature

 Mahallati, p. 70.  Mahallati, p. 72.

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amongst the Shiʿa is in many ways equivalent to that of Mother Mary in Catholicism – and performed the wedding ceremony himself (both Abū Bakr and ʿUmar had asked for her hand and been refused). In time she was to bear her husband two sons, Ḥasan and Ḥusayn (whose name means “little Ḥasan”), the “two Princes of Paradise” (sayyidā shabābi l-janna) who were the apple of Muḥammad’s eye and upon whom he doted constantly (they would become his only surviving grandchildren). One vignette among literally hundreds – found in Shiʿite and also Sunni Hadith collections – has the Companion Jābir b. ʿAbd Allah enter the Prophet’s abode without knocking, and find him down on all fours with his two grandchildren on his back, as he neighed and snorted and exclaimed “Oh what a great camel your camel is, and oh what a wonderful load you two are!”⁷⁰ Another anecdote shows Muḥammad leading the prayers in his own mosque (masjidu lnabī) in Medina in front of hundreds, possibly thousands of worshippers. When he prostrated himself and pressed his forehead to the ground in the sujūd, the entire congregation of course followed suit. But while he and they were down in that position, the toddlers Ḥasan and Ḥusayn made their way through the crowd and leapt onto the Apostle of Allah’s back. Their grandfather was so pleased with this that he remained prostrate for a good fifteen minutes (normally this part of the prayer cycle [rakʿa] lasts no more than fifteen seconds) so as not to disturb their game, and of course the congregation followed suit. When services were over some of the high-ranking Companions (ṣaḥāba) remonstrated with their imam (here indicating “prayer leader”) for causing many a bad back among the worshippers, and Muḥammad retorted that the play of his two grandchildren was worth more in the eyes of Allah than the prayers of all current and future Muslims combined.⁷¹ ʿAlī’s heroism in battle was legend, and his role in the initial campaigns that put Islam on the map – Badr (624 CE), Uḥud (625 CE), Khandaq (627 CE), Khaybar (628 CE) and the conquest of Mecca (630 CE) – was decisive. In the duals that invariable preceded Arab military engagements he felled scores of Qurashite and other champions, and in the actual fray that followed twice or thrice that amount – this despite his self-description as being, even at a young age, “short, fat, bald, cross-eyed and chicken-legged” (a far cry from the artistic portrayals of him ever since).⁷² On his famed sword Dhu l-Faqār he scratched what was originally a legal clause: “a Muslim shall not be killed for the sake of an unbeliever” (lā yuqtalu muslimūn bi-kāfir), evidently reading “by an unbeliever” instead. Widows wept

 Niʿma l-jamalu jamalukumā wa niʿma l-ʿadlu antumā!  Mahallati, p. 73.  Mahallati, p. 87.

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bitterly over their husbands killed in war, until they discovered that they had been killed in combat with ʿAlī, which was a great honor. Shiʿite (and Sunni) sources abound with vivid descriptions of ʿAlī’s dual combats, perhaps the most momentous of which was his duel to the death with the fearsome, giant Qurashite warrior ʿAmr b. ʿAbd al-Wudd at the Battle of the Trench (627 CE): ʿAmr advanced with the group [of Qurashites] who had come out with him. He raised his standard so that his position could be seen. When he saw the Muslims, he and the cavalry with him stopped. ‘Is there anyone who will engage me in single combat?’ he called out…Where were Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, Ḥudhayfa and all the Companions of Muḥammad, may God bless him and his family, on the day of ʿAmr b. ʿAbd Wudd? He called on them to fight in single combat and all the people drew back in fear, except ʿAlī, peace be on him…The [man who would later become] Commander of the Faithful (i. e., ʿAlī) advanced towards him. ‘Go back, cousin,’ ʿAmr told him. ‘I don’t want to kill you’…‘Dismount and fight me!” ʿAlī replied. ʿAmr laughed and said: ‘This is not the course that I thought an Arab would desire of me. I am unwilling to kill a noble man like you. Moreover, your father was a bosom companion of mine. Go back, you are just a young man. I only want to fight the two older men (al-shaykhān) of Quraysh, Abū Bakr and ʿUmar.’ ‘But I want to fight you,’ retorted ʿAlī, peace be on him. ʿAmr became angry and dismounted…The dust rose up around them so that I (the narrator) could not see them. But then I heard the words Allāhu Akbar! coming out of the dust and I knew that ʿAlī, peace be on him, had killed his rival. [Ibn ʿAbd Wudd’s] companions fled with the horses jumping over the trench…When ʿAlī, peace be on him, killed ʿAmr b. ʿAbd Wudd, he cut off his head and took it and threw it before the Prophet, may God bless him and his family. ʿAlī struck a more powerful blow than any other in Islam: the blow that killed ʿAmr b. ʿAbd Wudd.⁷³

The details of cutting off the head (an uncommon practice in Arabian warfare), ʿAlī’s relative youth, the opposing forces lined up on two sides of a depression, the fact that after the dual combat (which took place in that depression) the larger battle was never joined, the palaver before the fight, the picture of Ibn ʿAbd Wudd’s companions fleeing afterward – all of these elements are reminiscent of the story of David and Goliath. (To this should also be added the hyperbolic characterization of ʿAlī’s coup de grace as “a more powerful blow than any other in Islam”; after all, ʿAlī killed dozens of Qurashite and other champions throughout his career, including twenty-two at the decisive Battle of Badr alone [624 CE]). The text itself steps in to ensure that we make the connection: “Jābir [b. ʿAbd Allah] said: ‘I do not know how to describe ʿAlī’s killing of ʿAmr except with the words which God used to tell

 Shaykh al-Mufīd, Kitāb al-Irshād, pp. 65 – 70.

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the story of David and Goliath, where He, may His affair be exalted, says: “So by the permission of God they routed them and David killed Goliath” (Q. 2: 251).’“⁷⁴ ʿAlī, Shiʿism’s “David,” similarly distinguished himself during the reduction of the powerful Jewish town of Khaybar in the North (628 CE), sowing death on all sides and, as commander of the forces, single-handedly smashing the massive gate that protected the city and lifting and using that gate as a shield for the remainder of the hostilities (afterwards it took ten men to drag the gate back to its place). ʿAlī presided over the mass execution of the males of the Jewish tribe of Banū Qurayẓa (627), and fought bravely in the conquest of Mecca (630). After the latter town was taken, the Muslims with their leader Muḥammad performed what would come to be called “the Farewell Pilgrimage” (ḥajjatu l-widāʿ), because it was the Prophet’s last. At the conclusion of that pilgrimage (631 CE) the pilgrims made their way to a resting place at an oasis named “the Pool of Khumm” (Ghadīr Khumm). There, Muḥammad, standing on a hastily erected platform made of camel saddles, raised ʿAlī’s hands high, and declared in no uncertain terms, with virtually the entire umma as his witness: “Whoever acknowledges me as his master, this ʿAlī is his master as well (man kuntu mawlāhu fa-hādhā ʿAliyyun mawlāhu – or in poetic Persian translation: har kas ra manam mola va dust, ibn ʿamam Morteza molaye ust. The historicity of this incident is accepted by most Sunni authors, and the argument revolves around the elusive intent of the term mawlā). O God! Befriend those who befriend ʿAlī, and be the enemy of his enemies!”⁷⁵ As we shall see forthwith, however, his enemies were already waiting in the wings to pounce.

Anatomy of a Schism The Prophet Muḥammad, born around 570 CE, brought the theologically monotheistic and socially egalitarian religion of Islam (“Submission”) to his tribe, the Qur-

 For the even closer identification in Islamic tradition of the Prophet Muḥammad with King David, see Z. Maghen, “Intertwined Triangles: Remarks on the Relationship between Two Prophetic Scandals,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 33 (2007), and Z. Maghen, “Davidic Motifs in the Biography of Muḥammad,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 35 (2008).  For an in-depth discussion of the sources and interpretations of the Ghadīr Khumm incident from Shiʿi and Sunni perspectives, see Dakake, Charismatic Community, Chapter Two. The Sunnis explain away this tradition by interpreting the word mawla to mean “friend,” and the continuation: “Oh God, befriend (wallī) those who befriend him” would seem to support this reading. The Shiʿa not only understand mawlā to mean “master” – certainly the more common usage of the term – but connect it via the common root to walāya, the centerpiece of their faith. The holiday known as ʿīd al-ghadīr or eid al-velayat, celebrated on the eighteenth of the month of Dhu l-Ḥijja, commemorates this event.

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aysh of Mecca, soon after receiving his first “revelation” (waḥy) at the age of forty.⁷⁶ A decade of indefatigable proselytizing netted him barely a hundred believers, and these were severely persecuted by the pagan Qurashite leadership, intent on protecting the polytheism and “class consciousness” of their ancestors.⁷⁷ In 622 Muḥammad and his faithful emigrated northward to the city of Yathrib, subsequently renamed Medina, where the Prophet’s ideas had recently struck roots and spread (the Islamic calendar is reckoned from the date of this hijra or emigration, 2022 AD/CE corresponding roughly to 1443 AH).⁷⁸ The new Muslim state fought a series of battles against the Messenger of Allah’s former tribe – Badr (624 CE), Uḥud (625 CE) and Khandaq (627 CE) – ultimately emerging victorious and marching back into Mecca essentially unopposed in 630 CE. Virtually all of Arabia came to pay homage. Muḥammad then sent letters out to the region’s potentates, including the Sassanid Khosroe Parviz, whom he urged to “accept Islam or be responsible for the sins of the magi.” Khosroe, the story goes, ripped up the letter, and in requital had his kingdom (and his entrails) ripped from him.⁷⁹ Upon Muḥammad’s death two years later a dispute arose: who should lead the Muslim “nation of believers” (Arab. ummatu l-muʾminīn) after the passing of Allah’s Final Apostle (Arab. khātimu l-anbiyāʾ)? A minority of Companions (Arab. ṣaḥāba, the first generation of Muslims) claimed that the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law (and foster son and foster brother),⁸⁰ ʿAlī son of Abū Ṭālib – married to his beloved daughter Fāṭima and an uncompromising pietist – was the most qualified individ-

 The traditional rendition of Islam’s early history – from the emergence of Muḥammad’s Qurashite tribe through the Prophet’s own biography and the procession of events from his death until the middle of the Umayyad period (c. 700 CE) – has been called into question by many Western scholars. Their conclusions – some going so far as to deny the historicity of the entire Arabianbased narrative – have, in turn, been severely criticized by Muslim and other Western researchers. In what follows we largely side-step the many dimensions of this ongoing polemic.  The Arabian tribes of the South-Western Ḥijāz region were more commonly henotheists: believers in a supreme deity (in this case Allah) surrounded by a pantheon of lesser gods and goddesses.  The Qurʾan banned intercalation, such that the Muslim year is genuinely lunar, consisting of 354/5 days, and the months and holidays circumambulate through the four seasons.  Khosroe – together with almost every prince of the royal family – was executed on the orders of his own son, Sheroe, who then assumed the throne as Kavad II. This massacre stripped the already ailing and exhausted dynasty of competent future rulers, and is seen by many as the beginning of the Sassanid Empire’s end.  When ʿAlī’s real father, Abū Ṭālib, fell on hard times, Muḥammad relieved his uncle’s burden by taking the child into his home and raising him to manhood (Abū Ṭālib had done the same for Muḥammad when he was orphaned). In the incident immediately after the emigration to Medina known as the ukhuwwa/muʾākhāt or “brothering,” in which all Muslim believers were assigned a brother from a clan other than their own, ʿAlī (according to several versions) was paired with the Prophet himself (other versions claim that ʿAlī was paired with the Anṣārī Sahl b. Ḥunayf ).

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ual for the position. His backers would eventually compile a dissertation’s worth of arguments to support this claim, including ʿAlī’s qarāba (close kinship to Muḥammad), sābiqa (precedence in accepting Islam), service to the faith on and off the battlefield, incomparable religious erudition, and the assertion that the Prophet had stipulated in no uncertain terms, and on more than one occasion, that ʿAlī and no other was to succeed him. “ʿAlī,” he had repeated in in dozen different ways, “is my successor in authority over you while I yet live and after my death; whoever is insubordinate to him is insubordinate to me (ʿAliyyun khalīfatī ʿalaykum fī ḥayātī wa mamātī fa-man ʿaṣāhu fa-qad ʿaṣānī).”⁸¹ At the same “Farewell Pilgrimage” that concluded with Muḥammad’s hearty recommendation of ʿAlī to the believers, the Prophet had been sitting on his favorite camel, Qaṣwāʾ, on a ridge overlooking the Plain of Arafat (where the worshippers stand in reverence of Allah for an entire day). Then and there it was that the Final Revelation from his Lord was “sent down” upon him. So weighty was this last communication from heaven that the knees of the poor dromedary buckled and it collapsed to the ground. God announced: “Today I have perfected your (pl.) religion for you, and have completed bestowing My favor upon you, and am satisfied that Islam should be your religion” (Q. 5: 3). For Shiʿites the juxtaposition of this revelation to what they regard as the unequivocal appointment of ʿAlī to succeed Muḥammad at the Pond of Khumm made all the sense in the world, especially if the latter occurred first (which their sources claim it did). No sacred dispensation designed to govern a burgeoning community is complete – or even viable – until arrangements are made for its continuation, for a smooth transfer of spiritual and temporal power, and specifically, until an apparatus is put in place to ensure the perpetual shepherding of the flock on the part of those most qualified to carry out that mission. The Prophet had always appointed an executor in his stead when he was absent (e. g., on campaign); a fortiori that he would have deemed it necessary to do so on the brink of his final, permanent absence. Only after it had been made clear to the Muslims that Muḥammad’s successor was to be ʿAlī (argue Shiʿite exponents), could Islam be said to have been “perfected.”⁸² The day upon which this event took place – 18 Dhu l-Ḥijja on the Muslim calendar – was elevated by the Būyid dynasty, which ruled most of Iran during the tenth century CE, to the status of a major holiday, and is still celebrated as such today.⁸³

 al-Futūḥ, vol. 2, pp. 282– 283.  Iḥqāq al-ḥaqq, 16:31, bāb 6 and passim. The verse in which Muḥammad is admonished to “Convey that which has been revealed to you by your Lord, and if you do not, you will not have fulfilled your mission” (Q. 5: 67) is similarly interpreted by Shiʿites to refer to the information that ʿAlī was to be the Prophet’s successor.  Brunner, Islamic Ecumenism, p. 9.

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Now that Islam had been fulfilled through the appointment of ʿAlī, the religion’s premier Messenger had fulfilled his task, and could join his ancestors in heaven (or at least those of them, it will be recalled, that had left polytheism for “Ḥanīfism,” that rudimentary form of monotheism that attracted a select set of Arabian seekers prior to the onset of Islam). The Prophet died in the early summer of 632 CE, at sixty three years of age, after fighting for several years the effects of a morsel of poisoned mutton served to him – so certain traditions aver – by a Jewish woman at Khaybar seeking vengeance for the murder of her family by the Muslim forces. Sunni sources have him lying in his final moments on his favorite wife ʿĀʾisha’s lap – or on her breast (lit., “between her navel and her neck”) – as she massaged his teeth with the miswāk or rough wooden toothpick he so adored. Shiʿi sources have him expire in ʿAlī’s arms, the weeping Fāṭima doting upon her father, after having breathed his sacred spirit into his son-in-law’s mouth through a kiss. As Muḥammad had lain on his death bed, so the Shiʿi (and even certain Sunni) texts tell us, he asked to be brought pen and paper so that he could “write them a writing with the help of which they will never go astray from the straight path” (this, despite other traditions that assert in no uncertain terms that Muḥammad was a nabiyyun ummī, an illiterate prophet, and couldn’t write a thing. Perhaps he intended to dictate). One of the Companions (ṣaḥāba) turned to leave the room and do his Master’s bidding, when ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, the future second caliph (and Sunni hero par excellence) blocked his egress. “The pain of his illness has made the Prophet delirious,” he is reputed to have explained (cynically, from a Shiʿite perspective). “At any rate, we already have the ‘writing’ he is referring to: the Noble Qurʿan, and the Word of God should be enough for you” (for Shiʿites, who invented the concept of imamic and prophetic infallibility [ʿiṣma] and take it more seriously than Sunnis, the notion that Muḥammad could have uttered nonsense due to delirium is absurd).⁸⁴ A fierce argument then ensued between those who supported ʿUmar’s position and those who vociferated, “Have you all gone mad?! Get the Messenger of God pen and paper as he expressly ordered you!” Voices were raised as were fists and eventually swords, and finally the din and pandemonium overcame the Prophet and he bellowed, “Get out of my sight, all of you!! (qūmū ʿannī kullukum).” Years later ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿAbbās, Muḥammad’s cousin and the most learned Muslim of his generation (who had clear ʿAlid proclivities) would say: “Verily, all of the troubles that afflicted the Muslim nation from that day forward came upon us because the Messenger of God was prevented

 The Shiʿites further argue that when Abū Bakr himself was dying and was about to appoint ʿUmar his successor, he fainted due to the severity of his last illness, and yet his notary on that occasion, ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān, did not stop the proceedings.

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from writing that writing.”⁸⁵ What would he have written? Shiʿite doctrine asserts, without the slightest doubt, that he would have officially proclaimed ʿAlī and his descendants the leaders of the Muslim community from that day forward, thus providing Islam with the best possible leadership and averting decades and centuries of fitan (sing. fitna): schisms, heresies and internecine warfare. Prevented from issuing his command in written form, Muḥammad made a supreme effort, sat up on his bed and stated clearly for all to hear: I leave behind me with you two weighty things (thaqīlayn): if you hold fast to them you will never afterward fall into error (in tamassaktum bihimā lan taḍallū): the Book of God – one end of which is with you and the other with Allah – and my descendants, the People of my House (ʿitratī ahlu baytī); and these two shall not be parted from one another until they arrive together at the [heavenly] Pond.⁸⁶

It is interesting to note that there is a Sunni version of this same hadith, in which the “two weighty things” are “the Book of God and the tradition of my exemplary conduct” (sunnatī – which is, essentially, why they came to be called “Sunnis”). Just as the meaning of the term ahl al-bayt had, as we saw in the previous chapter, undergone a profound transformation among the Shiʿa from its original import: “the clan that lives close to the Kaʿba,” to its new referent: “the linear descendants of Muḥammad,” so here, Shiʿism has replaced a relatively stable and static institution (the prophet’s genuine sunna cannot change after he is dead, and was eventually reduced to writing in the form of hadith) with a set of dynamic, potentially volatile individuals. It is in many ways instructive to conceive of the Sunni-Shiʿi schism as, at bottom, one of sunna (precedent, tradition) versus ʿitra (charismatic human leadership). One is backward looking, the other forward looking; one is conservative, the other progressive; one tends toward calm and establishment, the other toward agitation and revolution. It would be an exaggeration and simplification to characterize the entirety of the Sunni and Shiʿite systems according to this breakdown, but it is important to keep this dichotomy of underlying principles in mind. Muḥammad’s personality and message were powerful enough to enable him to accomplish that which nobody before him – and no one since – had or has been able to accomplish: the unification of the Arabs. Meccan and Yathribian (i. e. Medinese) Arabs, Northern (ʿAdnānī) and Southern (Qaḥṭānī) Arabs, settled and nomadic Arabs – all had bowed their heads to the Prophet’s leadership by the end of his life. But literally the moment he was gone, every group returned to its corner and dug in for battle, and the division and headless chaos that had

 Manāqib Ibn Shahrāshūb, 12: 19 – 20.  Kulaynī, 2: 135, Kitāb 6, hadith 28.

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traditionally characterized the Arabian Peninsula burst back on the scene. This resurgence of jāhilī (pre-Islamic) politics took place on the macrocosmic level – with the mass irtidād (backsliding, apostasy) of the Arab tribes, accompanied by the renunciation of their treaties with the Muslims – and on the microcosmic level, within the city of Medina itself. There, even before the Messenger of God had given up the ghost, the solution that was the Muslim umma began to resolve itself into its component parts, especially muhājirūn (immigrants from Mecca) and the two large tribes that made up most of the indigenous Medinan anṣār (supporters, helpers, hosts): Banū Aws and Banū Khazraj. The leaders of the muhājirūn gathered at the house of one of their number, Abu ʿUbayda b. al-Jarrāḥ, while the representatives of the anṣār assembled where they had traditionally assembled, even before the advent of Islam: in the saqīfat Banī Sāʿida, the roofed edifice of the Banū Sāʿida clan. Moments after Muḥammad’s death, messengers came at top speed to each venue to relate the devastating news. When ʿUmar heard the messenger’s words, he rose, drew his sword and threatened anyone who dared claim that the Prophet had gone the way of all flesh with immediate execution. “He has left us temporarily, like Moses who went up the mountain, and we must wait patiently until he returns,” he insisted. But Abū Bakr’s cooler head prevailed. He went out, viewed the corpse, returned and exhorted: “He who worships Muḥammad – Muḥammad is dead. But he who worships Allah – Allah is alive and everlasting (huwa l-ḥayyu lqayyūm).” Ringing words, but Abū Bakr’s next step was not quite so noble. According to the renowned historian al-Yaʿqūbī (d. 897 CE) – a nominal Sunni but with pronounced Shiʿi sympathies⁸⁷ – the Prophet’s matchlessly loyal lieutenant suggested to his brother in Islam, ʿUmar, that they immediately head for the abode of ʿAbbās, Muḥammad’s uncle and the current seigneur of the Banū Hāshim clan (who did not convert to Islam early enough to become influential), and offer him what amounted to a bribe. They would grant him and his descendants a portion of the authority over the umma (nation of believers) if he would see to it that ʿAlī was deprived of the same (in the event, al-ʿAbbās did not accept the deal, but several centuries later his posterity would rule much of the Muslim world for six hundred years, as the Abbasid dynasty).⁸⁸ This, say the Shiʿa, shows the true face of the shaykhān, the “two old men.” After the two returned from their failed mission to the house of Abu ʿUbayda, another messenger burst into the house bearing news no less troubling than Mu-

 As explained earlier, up until the tenth Christian century and even beyond, Sunnism and Shiʿism were more of a spectrum than a divide.  Tārīkh al-Yaʿqūbī (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Malik Fahd al-Waṭaniyya, 1413), vol. 2, p. 124.

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ḥammad’s demise for those gathered there. The anṣār, he informed them, had been meeting at the saqīfa for many hours now in an attempt to choose a successor for the Prophet from amongst themselves. They had reached an advanced stage in their deliberations, and were about to settle on the chief of the Banū Khazraj tribe, Saʿd b. ʿUbāda – who functioned in Medina since the advent of Islam as the head of the anṣār in general – as the best man for the job. The muhājirūn did not need to hear any more: they immediately set out for the saqīfa, burst inside, and demanded to know what their co-religionists were up to. An eloquent speaker from among the anṣār rose to answer them, saying: We are the helpmeets of Allah and the divisions of Islam. And you, O muhājirūn, you are a part of our spiritual family and you have come to live amongst us…

At this point ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb bellowed out: “See how they conspire to usurp from us our rightful authority!” The representative of the anṣār concluded his speech, and in the meantime ʿUmar’s fury had reached a fever pitch. He rose to pour out his rage upon the crowd, challenging all comers to a duel to the death on the spot, but Abū Bakr stayed him, sat him down, and spoke gently in his stead: O Helpers! You are more than deserving of all the praise that your speaker has heaped upon you. You are our brothers in Islam and our partners in religion. You have assisted us, hosted us, protected us, fought for us – may Allah reward you with a great reward! But we muhājirūn are the first Muslims, and amongst the Muslims our abode is in the center, our lineage is the purest, and we are closer to the Prophet – may God have mercy upon his soul – than anyone in terms of blood relationship (qarāba). So we are the commanders (umarāʾ) and you are the deputies (wuzarāʾ). After all, the Arabs will not recognize any authority that does not emanate from the Quraysh tribe, and you are well aware of the Messenger of God’s famous statement: “The leaders are from Quraysh tribe” (inna l-aʾimmata min al-quraysh). There I implore you, O people of the anṣār – do not seek to usurp from your brothers the muhājirūn what God has bestowed upon them! In this spirit, I present before you two candidates, each the worthiest of men: choose whichever finds favor in your eyes. On my right is ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, the strong arm of Islam, for whom the Prophet prayed, “Strengthen him in his faith!” And on my left is Abū ʿUbayda b. al-Jarrāḥ, whom the Messenger of God dubbed “the guardian of this community” (waṣiyyu hādhihi l-umma). Choose one of these as your next ruler!

At that moment, however, both men whom Abū Bakr had put forward as worthy candidates leapt from their places and cried in the his direction: “While you still live among us, Abū Bakr?! We would not dare to rob you of your rightful place. You, who are ʻthe second of the two who hid in the cave’ (from the Qurashite posse together with the Prophet during the hijra to Medina).” Now one of the anṣār rose from his place and offered a compromise: “O Quraysh! Let us place over ourselves two rulers, one from our ranks and one from yours.” ʿUmar immediately responded, “How ridiculous! Two swords cannot fit into a single scabbard!” At this

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point voices were raised on all sides and a wide ranging brouhaha erupted throughout the saqīfa, in the course of which swords were drawn, insults were hurled and long buried blood feuds were exhumed. Just as nothing less than an intra-Islamic civil war looked imminent, ʿUmar took the initiative, moved toward Abū Bakr and more or less commanded: “Put out your hand, O son of Abū Quḥāfa!” Abū Bakr, startled, did as he was bidden, and ʿUmar took his hand in his own and at the top of his lungs conferred upon his brother in Islam the bayʿa, the traditional Arab oath of fealty to a new tribal chief. In the wake of this impressive demonstration, Abū ʿUbayda also approached Abū Bakr and swore allegiance, and as if on cue the entire contingent of muhājirūn present at the saqīfa rose immediately afterward and tendered their loyalty. At that point, the Banū Aws – one of the two tribes that comprised the anṣār – consulted hurriedly among themselves, and came to the conclusion that it was better to support the candidacy of Abū Bakr than that of Saʿd b. ʿUbāda, the chief of their traditional Medinan pre-Islamic rival, the Banū Khazraj. They, too, therefore, ran en masse to Abū Bakr and clasped his hand. In the rush and pandemonium to confirm the new caliph (from the Arabic khalīfa meaning “successor”), the many participants of the saqīfa trampled upon and (according to certain sources) crushed to death the same Saʿd b. ʿUbāda. “They have killed Saʿd!” shouted one of the Banū Khazraj. But ʿUmar parried with a twinkle in his eye, “Allah has killed Saʿd.”⁸⁹ Finally the Khazraj themselves, anxious, as it were, not to miss the train as it pulled out of the station, clamboured aboard and rushed pell mell to recognize Abū Bakr. Several problems immediately jump to the fore when reading this description of the events following the death of the Prophet Muḥammad. For the Shiʿa, these problems are so flagrant and severe that they invalidate the very office of the caliphate (as it is understood and revered by Sunni Islam). First and most important of all, who is missing from this entire colorful and violent scene at the saqīfa? The answer is clear: ʿAlī, son of Abi Talib. And where was he? ask the Shiʿites, and they answer, based on the most reliable (Sunni as well as Shiʿite) sources: ʿAlī was where any truly believing Muslim, let alone the Prophet’s cousin, son-in-law, foster brother and best friend, should be: at his master’s side in his final moments and afterwards, guarding, washing, purifying, enshrouding, and in the end burying his body in the ground and pronouncing the fātiḥa – the first chapter of the Qurʿan which also functions as a funeral rite – over the grave. Unlike the remainder of the ṣaḥāba (Companions of the Prophet) who had hurried to jockey for political position even before the corpse of the great leader was cold (so the Shiʿa view the mat-

 The story as told here is based on a concatenation of versions from Biḥār, 23: 145/9, and Iḥqāq alḥaqq, 8: 107.

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ter), ʿAlī had demonstrated at one and the same time his genuine love of Muḥammad and his noble disinterest in the reins of power. The remaining “Companions of the Prophet” (if such they could really still be called under the circumstances) not only shirked their duty to their supposedly beloved leader, they also went ahead and made momentous decisions without one whose absence rendered those decisions null and void (i. e. ʿAlī). In this manner had the corrupt, ungrateful, cynical movers and shakers of the Muslim community abandoned their prophet, while simultaneously shunting aside the man that Muḥammad had called “my legatee, my executor and my successor.” Once [months after the saqīfa incident] Abū Bakr met ʿAlī on one of the streets of Medina. ʿAlī glared at him, and Abū Bakr responded, “By Allah, I never sought the office of the caliphate and I well know that I am unworthy of it!” ʿAlī asked, “Then why did you accept the position?” The caliph replied with a Prophetic hadith: “God does not allow my [i. e., the Muslim] community to unanimously agree on an error (inna llāha lā yujmiʿu ummatī ʿalā ḍalāl) – it was the will of the people!” “Am I a part of the community?” ʿAlī shot back. “Yes,” admitted Abū Bakr. “And what of the group of those [Companions] who remain aloof from you (imtanaʿū ʿalayka), including such holy personages as Salmān, ʿAmmār, Miqdād, Abū Dharr and Ibn ʿIbāda?” “They, too, are part of the community,” admitted Abū Bakr.⁹⁰

Moreover, the political savvy and cunning of Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, Abu ʿUbayda, ʿUthmān and their cohorts left no doubt in their minds that the new dispensation – that is, the successorship of Abū Bakr – would never be safe and stable unless the bayʿa was received from one man in particular: ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib. All of the oaths of all of the Companions – anṣār and muhājirūn combined – were worth next to nothing without the approval, or at least acceptance, of ʿAlī, for the simple reason (aver the Shiʿites) that all knew that the position of successor was supposed to be his. With this in mind, the leading Muslims made their way from the saqīfa to the Prophet’s Mosque (masjid al-nabī) in the middle of Medina, where they publicly announced the fact of Abū Bakr’s caliphate, and sent messengers from there to find ʿAlī and bring him to the mosque to render obeisance to the new ruler. ʿAlī, who knew nothing at all of the events that had transpired in the saqīfa, was stunned and indignant, and refused the summons. ʿUmar urged Abū Bakr to act quickly and decisively, and the new caliph, together with ʿUmar and some fifty armed men, made their way to the house of Fāṭima, Muḥammad’s daughter and ʿAlī’s wife. There the members of the Banū Hāshim clan – natural upholders of the rights of ʿAlī – were already gathering, together with other supporters such as the well-known Ṭalḥa, even though he belonged to Abū Bakr’s clan, the Banū ʿAdī. Stranger still, none other than Abū Sufyān – longtime ultra-nemesis of the Prophet  Biḥār, 66: 29, no. 1.

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Muḥammad (until he converted just before the Muslim conquest of Mecca) and father of Muʿāwiya, future nemesis of ʿAlī – showed up at this juncture to support the claim of ʿAlī. The soldiers surrounded the house, and ʿUmar threatened to set it on fire over the heads of its residents if ʿAlī did not emerge and give them what they wanted: his stamp of approval. ʿAlī did not come out, but his wife Fāṭima did, and she was beside herself with rage. Fāṭima al-Zahrāʾ (the Resplendent), one of the Prophet Muḥammad’s four daughters with his first wife Khadīja, enjoys a special status among all Muslims. Her father doted on her, consulted her, taught her special wisdom, and declared on more than one occasion that “Fāṭima and I are of a piece” (inna Fāṭimata biḍʿan minnī). After the Prophet’s death, Fāṭima was the mirror through which the bereft believers could look and behold their beloved Messenger of God. She and her husband ʿAlī were, in a sense, Islam’s First Couple, Islam’s holiest couple. Their piety and their poverty were the stuff of legend. They owned a single garment between them, so that only one of them could go out at a time during the day, the other remaining at home naked; at night they made use of that same piece of cloth together as a blanket (once when ʿAlī gave away to a beggar the only tiny morsel of food they had between them for the day, Fāṭima got fed up and threw her husband out of the house. Muḥammad found him later sprawled in an alleyway fast asleep and covered in dust, and yelled “Wake up, O Father of Dust!” – in Arabic “Abū Turāb,” a nickname that stuck). Fāṭima was one of the Holy Five, a member of the ahl al-kisāʾ or “People of the Mantle,” that is, Muḥammad’s nuclear family that sheltered (metaphorically and literally) under his cloak. She was the mother of the Prophet’s only surviving grandchildren, Ḥasan and Ḥusayn. When she emerged from her house to confront Abū Bakr, ʿUmar and their gilt entourage, all took a step back in awe. “Criminals!” she excoriated them. “You left us alone with the body of the Messenger of God to go off and pursue your worldly ambitions. You deliberated and decided without involving those most worthy of being involved in such decisions, and without taking our God given rights as the Prophet’s family into account. By Allah, if you do not get out of here this instant, then with my hair disheveled and in front of the entire community, I will address my plaint to God Himself!”⁹¹ This threat to throw all her considerable spiritual weight on the scales and appeal directly to Allah for assistance was frightening in the extreme even to the gruff and fearless likes of ʿUmar, and he commanded the forces to retreat. Abū Bakr made due without obtaining the bayʿa from ʿAlī, which the latter only agreed to give when his beloved Fāṭima passed away six months later, bitter and broken in spirit.

 Biḥār, 15: 46 – 9.

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Beyond the flagrant fact of ʿAlī’s absence from the deliberations that resulted in the ascendency of Abū Bakr to the caliphate, and the appalling manner in which his rights and merits were ignored, Shiʿite tradition points to other aspects of the momentous events at the saqīfa that rendered the outcome thereof illegitimate – indeed, sinful and heretical – from an Islamic perspective. First of all, Shiʿite exponents take fierce exception to the violent, hurly-burly, almost arbitrary fashion in which the choice of successor to Muḥammad was made – a choice that, given the size of the shoes which the caliph was meant to fill and the inordinate extent to which the very future of the umma and its religion depended upon the qualities of the leader elected, should have been accompanied by profound seriousness. The scene and developments at the saqīfa, after all, resembled nothing so much as a cross between heavy trading on the stock market floor and a bar room brawl, with every party haranguing the crowd at the top of its lungs, seeking to be heard, with curses and execrations flying this way and that, and with the surging sea of the mob moving now in this direction, now in that, and finally charging headlong toward a given target with all the wildness and panic of a bolting stallion, crushing anyone who stood in its way. And as on the market floor, when a respected and powerful broker makes a show of buying up a particular stock, others around him follow suit, creating a stir that ripples out still further in widening concentric circles as all the surrounding brokers turn their attention to the center and wonder with burgeoning agitation what those who are buying know that they themselves do not. This frantic commercial activity in turn drives the value of the stock in question higher and higher, attracting yet more buyers and leading the brokers who have yet to invest to fear that they will miss the boat – and so they rush to buy as well. Thus does the vicious cycle propel itself with exponentially increasing rapidity, until all and sundry are swept up in the frenzy and neither logic nor reason plays any role. Just so, in the Shiʿite view, did events unfold at the saqīfa: ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, at the time Islam’s undisputed strong man, threw his considerable weight behind Abū Bakr in a sudden, dramatic act, pledging loyalty to him in the clear view of all the assembled Muslims. His immediate circle at once did the same, and before anyone knew what was happening – and for all the wrong and cynical (or at least irrelevant) reasons – the entire hall full of squabbling cliques, clans and interest groups was sucked into a vortex of submission to a man who was, in the last analysis, not much more than a compromise candidate whose primary appeal lay in his lack of affiliation with either of the two major rival camps within the Quraysh tribe, the Banū Hāshim and the Banū Umayya (he was of the less prestigious Banū ʿAdī, and thus, on top of his other faults, thoroughly bereft of any notable qarāba or familial propinquity to the Prophet). So the Shiʿites see the situation. Salmān al-Fārisī, the Zoroastrianturned-Christian-turned-Muslim who advised Muḥammad to build a trench

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around Medina to defend against the Quraysh and would later cut such a large figure amongst the Sufis, Druze and others, is reputed to have scolded the Companions of the Prophet (ṣaḥāba) after the incident of the saqīfa in his native Persian, exlaiming: kardid va nakardid! By this he meant (depending on the interpretation) either “You have done [well to elect a leader] but you have not done [well in that you used the wrong criteria],” or “You have done [as the Israelites did in rebelling against Aaron] but you have not done [as your Prophet instructed you to do at the Pool of Khumm].” Indeed, for the Shiʿa, even if the saqīfa episode had not involved mass pandemonium, demagoguery and mob psychology – even if it had proceeded in an orderly and decorous fashion and concluded with what amounted to a fair, “democratic” election (a characterization of the affair that many modern and even several medieval Sunni sources promote with vigor) – even in such a case Shiʿite sensibilities would have been shocked. The idea that a mass of men, for whom reaching a consensus naturally entails seeking the lowest common denominator, can constitute a worthy authority for selecting the individual with the requisite moral and spiritual traits to carry forward the work of a prophet – of the Prophet, the most noble of them all – this idea is anathema to the Shiʿite mindset, which is why (as we shall see in the following chapter) they preferred and enshrined the notion of naṣṣ, divine appointment. Such momentous decisions must be left up to Allah. “Just as the prophethood of Muḥammad was established based on the will of God, so must the successorship of his successor be established based on the will of God.”⁹² Sunnism advocates bayʿa, the collective human confirmation of the caliph’s office; Shiʿism advocates wilāya, loyalty to the divinely appointed imam. For the Shiʿa the saqīfa also represents the epitome of Sunni (or rather, protoSunni) hypocrisy. If the Sunni justification is a “democratic” one, and Abū Bakr’s caliphate represented the will of (at least the most important echelons of ) the community of believers, then what could they possibly do with the method by which Abū Bakr’s successor, ʿUmar, was chosen, only two years thereafter? For Abū Bakr convened no assembly and consulted with few or none of the ṣaḥāba prior to simply appointing ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb caliph of all the Muslims by fiat (not a few Shiʿite texts point, in this connection, to what they believe to have been the symbiotic, “I’ll scratch your back you scratch mine” dimension of ʿUmar’s original support for Abū Bakr’s candidacy).⁹³ When ʿUmar himself was lying on his death Rahnavard: Name-ye azad andishan-e Iran, no. 36, Summer 1373.  From a Sunni perspective this is pure prevarication. At the saqīfa, they aver, ʿUmar appealed to those present – the important ṣaḥāba – to grant the oath of fealty (bayʿa) to Abū Bakr as he himself had just done; on his death bed, Abū Bakr appealed to those present – the important ṣaḥāba – to grant the oath of fealty to ʿUmar.

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bed ten years later (644 CE), victim of the dagger of an embittered Persian prince/ slave, he commissioned six Companions to deliberate after his own demise for three days and decide upon a worthy successor to the office of caliphate. Six Muslims (eventually a seventh was added to break a possible tie) out of tens if not hundreds of thousands of believers: “democracy” this was not. ʿUmar’s commission settled on ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān, a relatively weak personality who was – worse still – a member of the same Banū Umayya clan that had opposed the Prophet tooth and nail while he was alive. ʿUthmān was assassinated in 656 CE primarily as a result of the bitterness created by his numerous acts of nepotism which had placed in strategic posts the children of the erstwhile enemies of Muḥammad, for whom neither religion nor just rule was a top priority. After ʿUthmān’s grisly murder (he was virtually disemboweled while sitting and reading the Qurʿan) carried out by disgruntled believers from the provinces, a large contingent of Muslims for whom ʿAlī symbolized a purer, less corrupt Islam raised him high upon their shoulders and bore him to the Prophet’s mosque, where they and the majority of believers present crowned him the fourth caliph. In other words, of all of the early successors to the Messenger of God, ʿAlī’s election was the most “democratic” by far – a fact rarely if ever acknowledged by Sunni Islam. The hypocrisy, assert the Shiʿa, is almost palpable. Why was ʿAlī passed over in the first place, at the time of Prophet’s death? Why did even those Companions who well knew that he was the best man for the job nevertheless acquiesce in the upshot of the tohu bohu at the saqīfat Banī Sāʿida? ʿAbd Allah b. ʿAbbās [cousin of the Prophet and most learned Muslim of the second or tābiʿī generation] met ʿAlī and the latter asked him: “Why did you give the bayʿa to Abū Bakr, even though you of all people are well aware that the Messenger of God appointed me as his successor (istakhlafanī)?” Ibn ʿAbbās answered, “I am aware of that, of course, but the people were all gathered together and they chose Abū Bakr and I was among them – what was I to do?” Replied ʿAlī: “That was the self-same excuse used by those who worshipped the Golden Calf!”⁹⁴

The answer to this question provided by Shiʿite theology and lore is crucial to a comprehension of Shiʿism’s self-understanding. It turns on the universal human tension between the ideal and the practical, between that which remains straight despite the exigencies and pressures of reality, and that which bends to that reality.

 Biḥār, 67, 4: 5. This refers to Hārūn or Aaron, but a Muslim text – especially a Shiʿite text – cannot say so explicitly because prophets are considered to have ʿiṣma, that is, to be protected from sin and error, and Hārūn was a prophet according to Muslim tradition.

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One of the premier traits that Muslim historiography ascribes to the Quraysh tribe, in particular, and to Arabian jāhilī aristocracy in general, is ḥilm, defined negatively as a lack of hot-headedness, positively as moderation and a willingness to compromise. This outlook on life characterized the religious aspect of pre-Islamic Arabian society, as well, especially in that its polytheistic theology and law sat rather lightly on the adherents thereof. Probably the most well-known figure of pre-Islamic North Arabian or Ḥijāzī society was the prince named Imruʾu l-Qays, and probably the most well-known story about Imruʾu l-Qays is this one: Imruʾu l-Qays was sitting with his comrades in his tent, gambling and drinking. A messenger arrived on a swift camel, dismounted and approached him: “A man of the Banū Khuzāʿa has killed your father!” he apprised the prince. “His blood cries out to you to be avenged.” Imruʾu l-Qays looked up from his game, drunk: “Today we drink, tomorrow we avenge” (al-yawmu khamrun wa ghadan amrun), he said. On the morrow, when he had sobered up, he took up the divining arrows and cast them into the sand before the god Hubal, asking whether he might go now and avenge his father’s murder. The answer came back, “no.” Again he cast the arrows, and again they came up “no.” A third time he cast the arrows, and still the response of the god was “no.” Imruʾu l-Qays picked up the divining arrows, held them in a bunch in his hand, approached the [statue of the] god, smacked it across the face with the arrows and exclaimed: “If it had been your father, you son-of-a-bitch, you would have said “yes”! – and went off to avenge the murder.⁹⁵

As merchants, the Qurashites valued stability above almost everything else, and ḥilm was therefore essential to their pursuit of happiness (the institution of thaʾr or blood revenge and its accompanying vengeful emotions may seem at first glance to foster the very opposite of such stability, but in truth this “law of the desert” preserved a relative peace and equilibrium between tribes that recognized no central government that might establish and maintain order). Ḥilm was the diametric antithesis of radical idealism or consistent, dogmatic, unswerving devotion to a given creed. It required rather flexibility, diplomacy, or in a word: the art of politics. It is for this reason more than any other that the Meccan aristocracy opposed the new religion brought by Muḥammad with such ferocity: not just because it represented profound social change, but because it was comparatively strict, demanding, and serious, placing at the center as it did the One God Allah who saw all and may not and could not be tricked, bamboozled or ignored (as Imruʾu l-Qays ignored the decree of Hubal). Islamic rules and regulations were more or less set in stone (“more or less” because the tendency toward rukhṣa or leniency was and remains quite strong in the Islamic worldview, to such an extent that not only later jurisprudents but at the outset even God Himself is seen in the

 Kitāb al-Aghānī, 22: 67.

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Qurʿan and Hadith reversing His decisions and modifying or abrogating prescriptions according to the requests and requirements of the Muslim community. Still, the sharīʿa or Islamic law, even in the fluid early days of its enactment from On High, as it were, was far more exacting and left far less room for maneuver than the norms of jāhilī bedouin or urban society). All of this having been said, it must be remembered that Muḥammad himself, with all of his religious fervor and pioneering legislation, was nevertheless a fullfledged product of the same Arabian pre-Islamic milieu that we have been describing – he lived within it and participated wholly in its way of life for a good forty years until he began having his epiphanies – and his personality and individual ideology was therefore deeply colored by that milieu’s notion of ḥilm, and the same may be said of his closest Companions and right hand men (with the exception of ʿUmar) – but not of ʿAlī, as we shall see. In episodes such as the Pact of Ḥudaybiyya (628 CE) with the Qurashite enemy on the eve of the conquest of Mecca, when Muḥammad allowed the words “Messenger of God” to be effaced from his signature – over the stringent objections of his amanuensis ʿAlī – so as to appease the opposing camp; or at the conquest of Mecca itself less than two years later, when the remaining pagans of the Quraysh tribe suddenly “saw the light” of Islam and cued up in long lines to convert, and ʿAlī urged that their insincere turnabout be ignored and they all be beheaded on the spot, the Prophet received a revelation: When the victory of Allah cometh and the conquest, and you see the people coming in droves in order to enter into the religion of God, then praise your Lord and ask forgiveness from Him [for them], for He is always willing to accept those who repent (Q. 101).

On the basis of this revelation (which from a critical point of view is the same as saying on the basis of his own inclinations), Muḥammad pardoned and accepted the conversion of the entire group of Meccans (forgiving them, he said, as Joseph had forgiven his brothers). This group, until the day prior his implacable foes, was indeed to buoy up the political-military fortunes of the Muslim umma in the near future, but was at the same time to severely damage its spiritual fabric (again, from the Shiʿite point of view). In these and many other cases we are witness to Muḥammad’s softer side, to his diplomacy, to his willingness to compromise purity of doctrine for the sake of larger goals. Not so his cousin and son-in-law ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib. ʿAlī, it will be remembered, became a Muslim not at forty or fifty, like the Prophet and the other three “righteous caliphs” (al-khulalfāʾ al-rāshidūn, Abū Bakr, ʿUmar and ʿUthmān), but at the age of twelve. By the time of Muḥammad’s death he had been a Muslim for the greater part of his life, and this fact – combined, no doubt, with the idiosyncratic

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predilections of his own personality – rendered him, as we have already seen in the few examples enumerated above, unbending. ʿAlī was the Islamic zealot par excellence. He brooked no compromise (until he was forced to at the Battle of Ṣiffīn, as we shall see, and lived to regret it), tolerated no corner cutting, made exceptions for no individual, no matter how high on the totem pole. In a word, there was in him no trace of what detractors would call flexibility and supporters would call corruption. In 631 CE he was appointed commander of a force sent out to the Christian Arabs of the South Arabian town of Najran in order to collect from them the “fifth” (khums) that they had been remiss in remitting to the Prophet. He accomplished his mission, and on the way back rode ahead to bring the good tidings to the Messenger of God who was about to don the iḥrām (the two piece woolen garment worn by pilgrims) and participate in his final ḥajj. When he met the Prophet he was dismayed to discover that the latter had brought the number of sacrificial animals required for a combination of two pilgrimage rites, ḥajj and ʿumra, whereas ʿAlī had assumed that they would only be performing the former ceremony and had not brought a sufficient number of victims with him. Muḥammad tried to assuage his ashen-faced cousin and offered to share his animals with him for the purpose, but ʿAlī remonstrated (to the Prophet himself!) that this was contrary to the laws of Islam regarding the pilgrimage: one was duty bound to sacrifice only one’s own animals. When the division that he had led to Najran came into view, ʿAlī received a further blow to his religio-legal sensibilities: the soldiers had taken the gold and silver breastplates that the Najranians had given as tribute and had donned them, making for an impressive, glittering display of Muslim supremacy that Muḥammad found quite pleasing. But ʿAlī was furious: the law stated that the “fifth” was not to be touched until it was forwarded to the Prophet, who would then divide it among his followers as he saw fit. He berated the deputy commander unsparingly, and forced the soldiers to doff the breastplates and return them to the camels, leaving a disgruntled division to murmur against him for days.⁹⁶ On another occasion, that of the aforementioned assassination of ʿUmar by a Persian slave, ʿAlī again played the part of indomitable purist. The slave, a former Iranian prince by the name of Abū Luʾluʾa Firoz, had (according to the most common of the many versions of the story) complained to the caliph about mistreatment he had received at the hands of the governor of the Eastern provinces, Mughīra b. Shuʿba, but had not received from him the redress he felt he deserved. Enraged, Abū Luʾluʾa approached ʿUmar from behind as he turned his back to lead the congregation in prayer, and stabbed him twice before he was overcome

 Ibn Abi l-Ḥadīd, Sharḥ Nahj al-balāgha, 13: 56 – 61.

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by nearby worshippers. ʿUmar lingered through the night and died the next morning. The evening before the murder, ʿAbd al-Rahman the son of Abū Bakr had been walking down a street in Medina, and – he now recalled – had seen the assassin, Abū Luʾluʾa, in the company of two other Persians, Hurmuzan and Jafina, the three of them whispering in a corner. When ʿAbd al-Raḥmān passed by they abruptly ceased their conversation, and a dagger dropped to the ground from under the cloak of Jafina. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān had thought nothing of it at the time, but now reported the incident to the murdered caliph’s grieving son, ʿUbayd Allah. Upon inspection, ʿUbayd Allah discovered that the description ʿAbd al-Raḥmān had given him of the dagger matched the weapon used to kill his father, and without seeking any further evidence, he drew his sword, sought out Hurmuzan and Jafina, and disemboweled them both. ʿUbayd Allah was accused of murder, and the new caliph, ʿUthmān, remanded him to ʿAlī for judgment, for no one knew the law better than ʿAlī did. ʿAlī pointed out that according to the Qurʿan two witnesses are required to convict a perpetrator of a crime (the category of circumstantial evidence does not exist in Islamic law), and since ʿAbd Allah b. Abī Bakr had been the only witness to the alleged tripartite Persian conspiracy, that meant that ʿUbayd Allah son of ʿUmar had killed two innocent men. Since both murdered men were Muslims (Persians recently converted to Islam), and the Qurʿan stipulates that “he who kills a believer intentionally shall abide in hell fire forever,” ʿAlī ruled that ʿUbayd Allah be executed. Now, anyone viewing the circumstances from a more – shall we say – political or politic angle would have realized that the idea of putting to death the son of the celebrated caliph-hero ʿUmar hard upon the heels of the murder of his father, and for the “crime” of slaking his and the populace’s thirst for blood revenge against a gang of lowly (and most probably guilty) Persian foreigners – that this idea would not go over very well with the umma (nation of believers). ʿUthmān, the more experienced and diplomatic man, saw this truth immediately and annulled ʿAlī’s verdict, freeing ʿUbayd Allah and paying out of his own pocket the dia or blood money to the families of Hurmuzan and Jafina. But ʿAlī never forgot, and when he himself became caliph over a decade later, sent for ʿUbayd Allah in order to carry out the death sentence, upon which ʿUbayd Allah fled to Damascus and joined Muʿāwiya’s forces in the campaign to undermine ʿAlī’s caliphate.⁹⁷ ʿAlī, indeed, undermined his own caliphate as a result of his puritanical “stubbornness”: upon gaining the reins of power – which he insisted time and again that he did not seek – he immediately set about dismantling the nepotistic appa-

 Mahallati, 245. There are, admittedly, other versions of this story in which ʿUmar is the stringent party and ʿAlī convinces him to pardon Hurmuzan, who is ever grateful.

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ratus created by his predecessor, issuing decrees for the recall of the unworthy, corrupt governors of numerous provinces in what was by now (656 CE) a sprawling Islamic empire that included Arabia, the Fertile Crescent, Iran, Egypt and much of North Africa. In most cases the replacements were accomplished without resort to force, but in the case of Muʿāwiya, son of Muḥammad’s long time enemy Abū Sufyān, who held sway in Damascus, the case was different. ʿAlī had been warned repeatedly by advisors and adversaries alike at the inception of his caliphate that Muʿāwiya should be left alone, since he had amassed much power in Syria and could become a serious thorn in ʿAlī’s side. Muʿāwiya himself even offered to tender allegiance in the form of the bayʿa if he were confirmed in his Damascus governate. But ʿAlī refused to compromise, as usual, and as a result made an inveterate enemy out of Muʿāwiya (though his father, it will be recalled, had supported ʿAlī’s cause, at least for a brief moment). Employing a two pronged strategy of aggressive propaganda and military conquest, Muʿāwiya ripped the caliphate from ʿAlī in short order (five years) and founded the Umayyad dynasty (661 CE) ruling from Damascus. Before doing so, however, Muʿāwiya participated in a lengthy correspondence with ʿAlī that has come down to us, during the course of which he admitted on more than one occasion that you are, of course, in every way and according to every standard and criterion more deserving of and qualified for the position of successor to the Messenger of God than I am, but I am more skilled in the arts of war and diplomacy, I know how to deal with people (muʿāmalāt alnās) better than you do, so I am the best choice for this umma. ⁹⁸

This dichotomy between idealism and pragmatics would color the intra-Islamic rivalry for rule for decades and centuries to come. The Prophet Muḥammad had encapsulated within himself both the ideal and the real, the sacred, spiritual aspect of the human condition and the profane political aspect, the sacerdotum and the imperium. What the saqīfa incident symbolizes for Shiʿism is nothing less than the violent and heretical separation of church (mosque) and state, the latter handed over to smooth apparatchiks like Abū Bakr and the following caliphs, the former – reduced from a roaring flame to a glowing ember – guarded and tended from that time forward by pious saints, chief among them ʿAlī and his descendants the Imams. Put succinctly, for Shiʿism true Islam was murdered at the saqīfa, only twenty some years after its birth, and ever since has awaited its resurrection, to be carried out by the final descendent of ʿAlī and Fāṭima, the Imam Mahdī who will return some day from “occultation” (ghayba) and “fill the world with justice

 Iḥqāq al-ḥaqq, 2: 34.

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to the extent that it is currently filled with injustice” (yamlaʾu l-arḍa qisṭan wa ʿadlan kamā muliʾat jawran wa ẓulman). There were additional devastating and therefore formative experiences in store for the early Shiʿites – especially the resounding martyrdom of ʿAlī’s son Ḥusayn at Karbala in Iraq (680 CE) and the trials and tribulations of the remaining ten Imams and their supporters – all of which played a seminal role in the creation of the Shiʿite ethos and outlook, all of which served to mold the Shiʿite mind and break the Shiʿite heart. But none was so fundamental to the formation of Shiʿite consciousness, doctrine and theology as the tragedy of the marginalization of ʿAlī. From this debacle Shiʿism derived its pessimistic outlook, its suspicion, nay hatred, of the powers that be, and its disparagement of what we today would call democracy. But more than anything the saqīfa experience inserted deep into the DNA of Shiʿite religious culture – which, even before the “disappearance” of the Hidden Imam (approx. 873 CE) was already being fleshed out and consolidated by a learned academy of ulama – two essential principles. First, that religion must ever pursue the ideal (especially the ideal of the reunification of church and state) even if it cannot in most cases reach that ideal; and second, that the pursuit of the ideal must be entrenched and, as it were, reified and routinized in a set of all-encompassing regulations. This achievement was laid, without too much anachronism, at the doorstep of ʿAlī himself.

The People of the House After Muḥammad’s death, the majority of influential Muslims, displaying the traditional Arab penchant for pragmatism (not to say democracy),⁹⁹ settled on a diplomatically astute candidate acceptable to most if not all parties: Abū Bakr son of Abū Quḥāfa, Muḥammad’s closest advisor and father-in-law (and himself one of the earliest Muslims: whether he became a believer before or after ʿAlī did is a question hotly debated on the Internet to this day along sectarian lines). Abū Bakr got the job, but the “Faction of ʿAlī” (Arab. Shiʿat ʿAlī, or Shiʿa for short: “Shiʿites”) never forgot the insult and never abandoned the cause: from that day forward they would oppose the preponderance of their co-religionists who sought

 By which we intend what appears to have been the collective character of tribal decision making in pre-Islamic Arabia and the primus inter pares position of the chief. The Shiʿa, on the other hand, would eventually be possessed of “an attitude of mind which refuses to admit that majority opinion is necessarily true or right” and would engage in a “rationalized defence of the moral excellence of an embattled minority” (Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982], p. 18).

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their spiritual guidance solely from Muḥammad’s (and his Companions’) tradition (sunna, whence their denomination: “Sunnis”) by insisting that such guidance must be sought as well, indeed primarily, from his lineal descendants, the ahl al-bayt or “People of the [Prophet’s] House.”¹⁰⁰ Abū Bakr, on his deathbed in 634 CE, appointed another of Muḥammad’s right hand men – ʿUmar son of al-Khaṭṭāb – to succeed him, yet again (from Shiʿism’s perspective) passing over the worthier candidate.¹⁰¹ Indeed, ʿUmar’s qualifications, aver the Shiʿites, were so far below those of ʿAlī that the caliph had to consult him on countless legal and spiritual matters: “Were it not for ʿAlī,” ʿUmar is reputed to have said, “I would have perished.” In order not to “break the stick of Muslim unity” (shaqqu ʿaṣa l-muslimīn), ʿAlī gave his imprimatur to these two “usurpers” (ghāṣibūn), and even prayed behind them (a fact utilized in Shiʿite circles to this day to justify worship services led by an allegedly vice-laden emam-e jomʿeh or Friday congregational prayer-leader). ʿAlī stepped aside and would bide his time for a quarter of a century until his turn came at the helm, thereby becoming the exemplar of patient waiting (Arab. intiẓār, Pers. entezar) for Shiʿites throughout the ensuing generations. ʿUmar served ten years as caliph – during which time he supervised the crucial stages in the conquest of Iran – before being assassinated by a disaffected Persian  There is much scholarly debate to this day over the question when the terms Sunni and Shiʿite came into hardened use, and when the sects they refer to fully consolidated (a good starting point when investigating this question is Marshall Hodgson’s “How did the Early Shias become Sectarian?” [JAOS, 75: 1955]). Certainly we cannot speak of defined opposing camps of Shiʿa and Sunna until at least the late eighth century CE. Ahl al-bayt, literally “The People of the House,” was a pre-Islamic term originally referring to that clan of the Quraysh tribe in Mecca that lived closest to, and functioned as the servitors of, the cubic shrine known as bayt Allah or “The House of God” (a.k.a. the Kaʿba). The Shiʿites transformed this term to signify “The People of [the Prophet’s] House,” i. e. Muḥammad’s family (sans his wives) and descendants. In Persianized Arabic the ahl al-bayt are sometimes referred to as sadat-e ʻalavi or khandan-e nobovvat.  Shiʿites see a back-room conspiracy here, since ʿUmar was the one who had nominated Abū Bakr for the position in the first place at the Saqīfa, and also because the much touted “democratic” method of choosing the leader that had supposedly characterized Abū Bakr’s election was suddenly nowhere to be seen. Since that time Shiʿites have been unmatched conspiracy aficionados, and nowhere more so than in today’s Iran (especially, but in no way exclusively, in the post-revolutionary regime’s official propaganda organs), where the combination of modern-day imperial and super-power interference in Persian affairs with historic Shiʿite suspiciousness and the sect’s justifiable persecution complex has made the proverbial towteʿeh – “conspiracy” – the most common explanation of nearly every major negative development in the country. Hadi Matar’s 2022 attempted murder of Salman Rushdie, though occasioning pride among some Iranians and shame among others, was by elements of both groups attributed to a Republican Party conspiracy – connected to the claims that John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump are in danger of assassination in retribution for the killing of Ghassem-e Solaymani – designed to blacken the name of Iran and undermine the recently re-activated nuclear talks.

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slave, setting up as he lay dying a seven-man consultative committee (shūra) to decide the identity of his replacement. Though ʿAlī son of Abū Ṭālib was on the committee, and was initially preferred by it for the caliphate, what the Shiʿa see as an underhanded last minute demand that ʿAlī swear to uphold the precedents of his two predecessors in office – a condition that this idealistic Muslim purist could in no way accept – tilted the scales in favor of ʿUthmān son of ʿAffān. ʿUthmān was a staunch Muslim¹⁰² who, however, belonged to the Banū Umayya or Umayyads, the clan of the Quraysh tribe that had spearheaded the fierce resistance to Muḥammad’s message for almost twenty years (before deciding to join those they could not beat when the Muslims took Mecca in 630 CE). Worse yet, ʿUthmān was not as strong a personality as either Abū Bakr or ʿUmar, and was consequently cajoled by his fellow Umayyads – the new and in many cases not very sincere converts – into appointing them to prestigious and lucrative posts in the provinces of the expanding Islamic empire. His nepotism came back to haunt him in 656 CE when Muslim military delegations from those provinces, chafing under the oppressive exactions of their unscrupulous governors, arrived in Medina and surrounded the residence of the caliph, who was ultimately assassinated by a party from among them that included Abū Bakr’s own son. Finally, it was to be ʿAlī’s turn at the helm. While ʿAlī was not implicated in this regicide, which eventually led to the first fitna or civil war in Islamic history, the fact that the excited throng of Muslims subsequently hoisted him onto their shoulders and enthroned him as the next caliph – coupled with his own refusal to give up the assassins, who had taken refuge in his camp – provided a pretext for Muḥammad’s widow ʿĀʾisha to take up arms, unsuccessfully, against ʿAlī in the “Battle of the Camel” (656 CE).¹⁰³ More ominously, the then strongman of the Umayyad clan, Muʿāwiya son of Abū Sufyān, launched from

 In Shiʿite eyes ʿUthmān was anything but a solid Muslim, but there is no way to tell this tale taking both camps’ mutually antithetical ideologies fully into account. For a scholarly characterization of the Sunni take on ʿUthmān and the first fitna, nothing surpasses Wilfred Madelung’s The Succession to Muḥammad.  The battle received this name because ʿĀʾisha supervised the hostilities from her covered litter on the back of a camel, surrounded by devoted followers. Some say that she did so in order to remind ʿAlī of an event that transpired over thirty years earlier known as hadith al-ifk (“The Affair of the Calumny”), when the youthful wife of the Prophet was inadvertently left behind as the Muslim army returned from a campaign. A handsome young knight happened upon her and saved her from death, but the arrival of this pair in Medina after dark did not look good, to say the least, and the rumor mills ran overtime. ʿAlī advised Muḥammad that he must divorce ʿĀʾisha forthwith, but the Prophet ultimately received a revelation from On High requiring no less than four witnesses to convict in cases of alleged adultery, and ʿĀʾisha was reunited with her husband. She never forgave ʿAlī.

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his governorship in Damascus a relentless propaganda campaign against the new caliph, in the course of which ʿUthmān’s bloody shirt, together with the severed fingers of the hand that his Christian wife had extended in an attempt to protect him, were paraded around the Middle East and shown to shocked crowds (to this day pirahan-e Osman kardan or “doing ʿUthmān’s shirt” means “propagandizing” in Persian). This “soft power” offensive was augmented by a military one, which culminated in a ferociously fought battle (657 CE) between the two forces at Ṣiffīn on the West bank of the Euphrates river, a battle that was abandoned in mid-fray in favor of arbitration (tahkim, hakemiyyat), which itself produced no tangible results.¹⁰⁴ The fateful “arbitration” in question took place in the North Arabian desert between the envoy of ʿAlī and the representative of Muʿāwiya, scion of the (proto-Sunni)¹⁰⁵ Umayyad clan and ʿAlī’s rival for the leadership of the fledgling Muslim nation. Less than two months earlier (in July, 657 CE) ʿAlī’s forces had been on the verge of routing Muʿāwiya’s army during the Battle of Ṣiffīn (in what is now the town of Raqqah in northern Syria), when the Umayyad commander’s chief advisor, ʿAmr son of al-ʿĀṣ, instructed his troops to hoist leaves of the Qurʿan on their lances, signifying a plea on their part to cease this internecine Muslim blood-letting and resort to “judgment according to the Word of God.” Reluctantly, and under pressure from the lukewarm elements in his own camp, ʿAlī acceded, and a date was set for the arbitration that would purportedly employ Islamic legal criteria to decide between the two contenders for the caliphate. Muʿāwiya chose his plenipotentiary wisely: the same ʿAmr who had cooked up the “scripture on spears” ploy,¹⁰⁶ and who was renowned throughout the region as dāhiyat al-ʿarab, “the sly fox of the Arabs,” was the perfect man for the job. ʿAlī’s choice of emissary, again influenced by the importunity of the more half-hearted elements in his party, was less auspicious: Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī was feeble, naïve and not entirely convinced of the justice of his commander’s cause.¹⁰⁷ When the

 This “arbitration” was the occasion for a well-known deception on the part of Muʿāwiya’s plenipotentiary, ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ, which helped undermine ʿAlī’s stature.  Although the seminal events that created the rivalries and animosities that would eventually divide Islam into Sunnis and Shiʿites took place in Muḥammad’s time and several decades afterward, Muslims did not divide up along strict sectarian lines until at least a century-and-a-half later. Thus Muʿāwiya and the Umayyad caliphs are “proto-Sunnis.”  To this day Qurʾan bar nayzeh or “scripture hoisted on spears” is a Persian expression sometimes equivalent to “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” and other times referring to political-diplomatic legerdemain in general. The Islamic Republican media employ it regularly to refer to the deceptive tactics of the regime’s detractors.  The writer of these lines is convinced – though he cannot marshal any hard evidence – that the fierce disdain in Shiʿite tradition for Abū Mus l-Ashʿarī, who was too bland a figure to function

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two negotiators met in the town of Dūmat al-Jandal in northern Arabia (or, according to alternate versions of the story, at Adhruh in present day Jordan) in mid-August, 657 CE, ʿAmr made easy work of his aging and indecisive counterpart. “O, Abū Mūsā!” he cried. “You have the opportunity to be the greatest maymūn this community has ever seen!” (the Arabic word maymūn means “blessing,” but, as the Shiʿites have often pointed out, it also means “monkey”). Through you, O Abū Mūsā, the lives of countless believers will be spared; and did not God, the Exalted, prescribe for the Children of Israel that “whoever saves a single life, it is as if he had saved the lives of all mankind”? (Qurʿan, 5: 32). Imagine how much greater is the merit of the one who saves these teeming Muslim multitudes, by putting an end to this bloody civil war!¹⁰⁸

ʿAmr’s proposal was simple: since the rivalry between ʿAlī and Muʿāwiya was the root of the problem and the cause of the carnage, both men had to be removed from the running. Abū Mūsā was swayed by this argument, and it was agreed that ʿAmr would declare Muʿāwiya deposed and Abū Mūsā would do the same for ʿAlī. When the deputations arrived to hear the verdict, ʿAmr appealed to Abū Mūsā’s Islamic seniority (sābiqa): “You were among the first to adopt Islam, whereas I am a lowly latecomer to the faith. Honor dictates that you mount the rostrum before I do.” Flattered, Abū Mūsā made no objection, ascended the pulpit, and proclaimed: “I hereby remove ʿAlī from office.” ʿAmr then stepped up, turned to the audience, and said, “Now that my esteemed colleague has invalidated ʿAlī’s candidacy, I hereby declare Muʿāwiya to be the lawful caliph.” Though not exactly history’s most sophisticated ruse, ʿAmr’s little artifice had an impact on the Islamic faith that was, especially from the Shiʿite point of view, colossal and devastating. As present day Shiʿism sees it, the Umayyad¹⁰⁹ usurpation of the caliphate from the hands of Muḥammad’s legitimate heirs – ʿAlī and his progeny – inaugurated a one thousand four-hundred year reign by oppressive, cor-

as a genuine villain, is connected to, and retrojected from, the later antipathy toward Abu l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī, stabilizer of Sunni theology (who also took a “middle position”).  Muḥammad Taqī al-Tustarī, Qāmūs al-rijāl (Qom: Muʿassasat al-Nashr al-islāmī, n.d.), vol. 6, p. 110.  The Quraysh tribe that controlled Mecca in the seventh century CE, when Muḥammad inaugurated Islam, played host to a longstanding rivalry between its two most prestigious clans: the Banū Hāshim and the Banū Umayya (also known as the Umayyads). Muḥammad and ʿAlī both belonged to the Hāshimite clan, whereas Muʿāwiya – son of Abū Sufyān, arch enemy of the new religion during most of Muḥammad’s lifetime – hailed from the Umayyad clan. The ascension to the caliphate (headship) of the Muslim umma (nation, community) by a scion of the group that had opposed Islam tooth and nail is seen as a terrible irony, and not solely by Shiʿites.

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rupt, pseudo-Muslim sovereigns of a variety of dynasties who neither practiced piety themselves nor cultivated or enforced it among their subjects. As if ʿAlī did not have troubles enough at this point, a party of his supporters seceded from his camp in protest against what they saw as his flaccidity in accepting this arbitration, and ʿAlī was forced to fight and virtually annihilate these sanctimonious “seceders” (Arab. Khawārij, sing. Khārijī) at Nahrawān near present day Baghdad in 659 CE.¹¹⁰ Muʿāwiya’s continuing crusade to unseat ʿAlī – who had in the meantime relocated his capital from Medina in Arabia to Kufa in Iraq – reached its goal in 661 CE, by which time virtually the entire Muslim world had gone over to the Umayyad side. The besieged son-in-law of the Prophet was struck down by one of the surviving Khawārij (ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Muljam al-Murādī) in vengeance for the slaughter of the latter’s family at Nahrawān. The victim intoned as the sword blade entered his skull: “By the God of the Kaʿba, I swear it, I am saved and victorious!” and inaugurated a history-long tradition of Shiʿite martyrdom. What should have been the golden period of ʿAlī’s reign, marred throughout by internecine strife, came to a tragic close after less than five years.¹¹¹ The caliphate was then, in a painful irony, usurped by the Umayyads – the descendants of the men who had fought Muḥammad tooth and nail – and the capital transferred to Damascus. Almost immediately upon realization, the Shiʿite dream had been shattered. For Sunnis to this day, and despite the controversy, ʿAlī is venerated as the “fourth Righteous Caliph.”¹¹² For Shiʿites, on top of his caliphal status as “Commander of the Faithful” (amīr al-muʾminīn), he is adored as the first Imam, a term that literally means “leader” but came to signify for the adherents of this

 ʿAlī is portrayed in Shiʿite sources as having initially resisted the plea for arbitration, urging his forces to fight on until victory, but succumbing in the end to their lack of enthusiasm. The Khawārij survived – in a variety of sub-sects – for generations afterward, becoming known both for their insistence upon a merit-based (as opposed to a lineage-based) legitimacy for the caliph and for their fanatical rejection of all those who did not share their views. Their declaration of these last as heretics (takfīr) whose blood must be spilt, and their deadly raids in observance of this principle, made them a sharp thorn in the sides of the Umayyads and Abbasids, and may constitute the true etymology of their name (“those who go out” to battle, as opposed to “those who seceded” from ʿAlī’s camp). Today the epithet Khawārij is used by both Sunni and Shiʿi establishments to disparage radical groups that oppose them.  There is in this missed opportunity for a Kingdom of God on earth an echo of the career of Jesus, cut short by crucifixion, that is not entirely lost on Shiʿites.  There have, however, been several periods in Islamic history during which ʿAlī was cursed from Sunni pulpits. Indeed, under Muʿāwiya the (proto‐) Sunnis may be said to have cursed first.

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minority Muslim sect something closer to a prophet,¹¹³ a mediator between Allah and His Creatures immune to error or sin (maʿṣūm), on many levels almost a demigod (ʿAlī and his descendants, the imams, are often explicitly afforded an even higher station than that of the prophets by exponents of Shiʿism. The celebrated Arab author al-Jāḥiẓ, writing in the ninth Christian century, notes the Shiʿi view that the imams occupy a more august position than Allah’s apostles inasmuch as “the prophets are susceptible to sin but not to error, but the imams neither sin nor err.”¹¹⁴ This position has not changed down to the present day. The official website of the Qom seminary system points out that while all imams are walīs – that is, characterized by the divine authority known as wilāya – only several of the prophets, such as Ibrāhīm and Muḥammad, are in possession of this sublime quality.¹¹⁵ Iranian Hojjatoleslam va l-Moslemin Seyyed Reza Taj-Abadi declared in so many words on a recent “To Question is to Know” morning talk show in Iran: “Imamate is loftier than Prophethood” [emamat balatar as nobovvat ast]).¹¹⁶ In order to maintain true Islam – indeed, in order to safe-guard the entire cosmos from destruction – the presence of a perfect, morally impeccable imam at all times was deemed (by later, more developed Shiʿite doctrine) an absolute necessity.¹¹⁷ Only under the imam’s infallible guidance would the Community of Believers be prevented from going astray and kept on the Straight Path (whereas the Sunnis would quote the Prophet Muḥammad to the effect that “My community will not agree on an error,” thereby in a sense conferring upon the Muslims as a whole

 But note that “Imam” is defined in Shiʿite theology specifically as an individual harboring all the traits possessed by Muḥammad sans prophecy (inna l-imāma lahu jamīʿu ṣifāti l-nabiyyi mā ʿada l-nubuwwa).  Goldziher, Introduction, p. 189, n. 69. ʿAlī alone is said by certain Shiʿi sources to be in possession of all of the occult secrets known to all of the prophets combined. The Muṣḥaf Fāṭima, bestowed by the Prophet upon his daughter and containing the deepest mysteries of the faith, was said to be three times the size of the Qurʾan (Goldziher, Introduction, p. 190). When the Prophet instructed Shiʿism’s “first couple” – ʿAlī and Fāṭima – regarding marital duties, this was not for their sake, for they are already in possession of all knowledge. It was for the sake of the future reading audience (Majdi-ye Maʿaref, IRIB 4, 22/7/20).  Vizhegi name-ye naqsh-e velayat bar negin-e molla, https://hawzah.net/fa/Occation/View. Last accessed 10/10/2022.  IRIB Qurʾan, 05/11/2020. Also, e. g., Ostad Khatemi-ye Khansari, IRIB 1, 14/10/2020. See also Dakake, Charismatic Community, p. 255, n. 43.  In Twelver (and Ismāʿīlī) Shiʿite doctrine, the Qurʾan was (and is) not enough. Shiʿism asserted “the need for a proper interpretation of the final revelation.” Otherwise, “the Qurʾan risk[ed] falling into the same cycle of distortion and corruption that marked previous revelations, but now without the possibility of a new prophet to renew the divine message” (Haider, Shiʿi Islam, p. 26). Hence the necessity of an imam, who functions, in addition to his contributions in the more metaphysical realm, as an indispensable scriptural exegete.

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the flawlessness that the Shiʿa ascribe to their imams).¹¹⁸ ʿAlī’s firstborn son Ḥasan nominally inherited his father’s mantle, but quickly abdicated in order to avoid bloodshed in favor of Muʿāwiya, who nevertheless had Ḥasan poisoned by his own wife in 669 CE (when the latter lady came to claim her promised prize – Muʿāwiya’s son Yazīd as spouse – the Umayyad caliph demurred, reportedly quipping: “I value the prince’s life”). Later Shiʿite dogma would assert that all the imams were poisoned by various Sunni potentates, regardless of the apparent manner of their death, the ninth and tenth, like Ḥasan, through the good offices of their wives. The poisoning motif is so strong that the great Muslim modernist and anti-Imperialist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani al-Asadobadi, who by all accounts died of throat cancer in 1897, is believed by many Iranians to this day to have been undone, again like Imam Ḥasan, by toxic soup, purportedly sent to him by Naser al-Din Shah, who was already dead at the time.¹¹⁹ (Ayatollah Khomeini himself, of course, drank the “poison chalice” [jam-e zahr] of cease fire with Iraq, and died soon afterward).¹²⁰ Eleven years after Ḥasan’s demise ʿAlī’s second son, Ḥusayn – “Master of Martyrs” as he is known in Shiʿite tradition (Arab. sayyidu l-shuhadāʾ, Pers. salar-e sha-

 Lā tajtamiʿu ummatī ʿala l-ḍalāla. This idea evolved into the institution of ijmāʿ or “consensus” – whether of all the Companions of the Prophet (who were increasingly seen by the Sunnis as possessed of a sort of ʿiṣma of their own), all the Muslims of a given generation, or (according to most legal opinions) all, or the vast majority of, the important ulama of a particular era – and together with Qurʾan, Hadith and Analogy (qiyās) became one of the four sources of Sunni jurisprudence. Sunni-Ashʿarī theologians generally held that even prophets could err, but increasingly over time opted for the (originally Shiʿite) notion of ʿiṣma (immunity from sin and/or error). After the last imam occulted in 873 CE, the school of thought that eventually become Uṣūlī Shiʿism itself adopted a form of ijmāʿ (consensus) known as al-niyāba al-ʿāmma, according to which the unanimous or near-unanimous position of the Shiʿite scholar-jurists at a particular point in time reflected the will of the Hidden Imam (according to some, because since the infallible imam [al-maʿṣūm] is absent but also present, he will perforce be a part of any unanimity). Still, the great Ignaz Goldziher could state baldly: “Sunni Islam is a religion of Ijmāʿ, Shiʿi Islam is a religion of authority” (cited in Fazlur Rahman, Islam [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966], p. 173). “Ijmāʿ,” he avers, “is reduced [in Shiʿism] to a mere formality” (Goldziher, Introduction, p. 191). It is crucial to remember, however, that Goldziher was not well disposed toward Shiʿism – to put it mildly.  This belief has often been presented as an established fact in the Islamic Republican media, most recently in the context of a documentary on IRIB1 (10/11/2020) about…the history of soup (osh, a meat stew). Ray Takeyh quips regarding the Persian public’s unwillingness to accept the non-violent deaths of well-known figures that “[i]t appears that in 1970s Iran no politically prominent person died of natural causes” (Last Shah, p. 209).  Professor of philosophy that Khomeini was, the “draining of the poison chalice” was bound to evoke images of Socrates.

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hidan)¹²¹ – led a small band of sympathizers in revolt against the Syrian-Umayyad Caliph Yazīd son of Muʿāwiya, in a desperate attempt to restore sovereignty over the expanding Islamic empire to the hands of his grandfather’s progeny (that is, to himself ).¹²² Relying on a written promise of support from the people of Kufa – eighteen thousand of whom reportedly signed a petition that was brought to the third imam by his cousin – Ḥusayn was abandoned when these would-be champions were cowed into inaction by the dire threats of Umayyad governor ʿUbayd Allah b. Ziyād (this experience was not lost even on doughty clerics in the modern period, who balked at rising up or even protesting against the unpopular decrees of oppressive rulers on the grounds that “the people are ever fickle”).¹²³ The uprising was mercilessly crushed in the battle/massacre known as wāq-

 This title is also given, mostly by Sunnis, to the Prophet’s uncle, Ḥamza, martyred at the battle of Uḥud (625 CE) and mourned like no other by Muḥammad.  Near the end of his life Muʿāwiya had tried to strong-arm an oath of allegiance to his son Yazīd from the “princes” of Islam, the offspring of important Companions in the Ḥijāz. Ḥusayn had adamantly refused, and even when physically threatened offered no more than his silence. Some have seen in the battle between Ḥusayn and Yazīd a metempsychosis of the ancient Zoroastrian battle between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. Others have posited pre-Islamic origins – e. g., the cults of Dionysus or Osiris – for the Ḥusayn saga and rituals. While such influences are possible, they are impossible to demonstrate, and the insistence upon them also does a disservice to the particular potency of dramatic incidents within Islamic history. Without giving in to Foucauldian “discontinuity” theory, we may still assert that not everything in human history is sunna (tradition); there is also bidʿa (innovation). Among the many moons whose light is reflective, there are also suns.  This was, for instance, the main explanation provided by founder of the Qom seminary system Ayatollah Haʾeri-ye Yazdi for his refusal to come out in active resistance to Reza Shah’s new dress code, though he was urged to do so by many of those closest to him who promised the support of the public. It has also become, in reverse, a slogan indicating a group’s determination to remain loyal no matter what happens: “We are not the people of Kufa that we should leave Ḥusayn to fight alone…” (ma ahl-e kufeh nistim Hosayn tanha bemanad) – most recently used by the supporters of Seyyed Hosayn-e Mousavi, opponent of President Ahmadinejad in the 2009 election. (Kufa has ever been known in the Muslim world for the difficult and unreliable nature of its populace, the Syrian city Homs even being nicknamed kuwwayfa – little Kufa – “on account of its inhabitants constant complaining against their governors and officials” [ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Raʾūf alBāsha, Ṣuwar min ḥayāt al-ṣaḥāba (Beirut: Dār al-Nafāʾis, 1412), vol. 1, p. 12)]). There are also more positive paradigms of caution and prudence, such as the taqiyya practiced by Ḥasan and Ḥusayn themselves when they refrained from rising up against an extremely powerful Muʿāwiya (which militates for the notion [re‐]introduced by some Shiʿi modernists that Ḥusayn’s later challenge to Yazīd was not a Christ-like act of self-sacrifice but a calculated attempt to foment a successful uprising). ʿAlī often complained of the untrustworthiness of his followers, at one point stating that he “would not deposit with one of you a wooden cup for fear that he would steal its lid” (Nahj al-balāgha, Speech 25).

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iʿat al-ṭaff,¹²⁴ and Ḥusayn and every male member of his family but one¹²⁵ was slaughtered – note well: at the hands of their fellow Muslims “who cried Allāhu akbar as they slew you!”¹²⁶ – on the Iraqi plain of Karbala in the Euphrates river valley, and their bodies left unburied as food for the fowl of the air and the beasts of the field. (Scenes from this massacre – like that in which the cheeks of the third imam’s beloved toddler, ʿAbd Allah, were pierced by an enemy arrow while his head lay on his father’s breast, after which Ḥusayn gave out a heart-rending cry and “hurled his son’s blood skyward, not a drop of which fell back down to earth” – send hard-bitten Iranian generals and jaded Iranian politicians into spasms of genuine grief on camera).¹²⁷ The imam’s head was severed from his torso, stuffed with straw, hoisted on a spear, and conveyed thus to Damascus, where it was presented on an ornate, silkdraped tray to his Excellency the Caliph. The latter then proceeded to strike the  The event is evidently named thus because it took place on terrain “overlooking” the Euphrates or the plain, the meaning of the root taffa being seen as akin to that of talla, to overlook.  This son, known in some reports as ʿAli l-Awsaṭ (“the Middle ʿAlī,” to distinguish him from his older and younger brothers of the same name, ʿAli l-Akbar and ʿAli l-Aṣghar, both killed in the massacre), survived because he was too sick to participate in the battle, and because the womenfolk of the ahl al-bayt managed to prevail upon their captors to spare him. He grew up to become the fourth Shiʿite imam, ʿAli l-Sajjad Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn. Ḥusayn’s sister Zaynab, known as al-kubrā and as umm al-maṣāʾib (“Mother of Miseries”), is credited with conveying the story of the tragic events at Karbala to all and sundry, which service earned her the Persian epithet payam-avar-e karbala. Several other male descendants of the Prophet may have survived the battle: certain Shiʿite authors enumerate up to five or six such male captives (sabāyā karbala).  Khalid b. Miʿdan, cited by Ayoub, Redemptive Suffering, p. 160.  The genuineness of this lamenting and wailing is obviously open to question and cannot very well be investigated scientifically. It is also, of course, highly individual. Nevertheless, it is the impression of this author, after years of watching and reading about the phenomenon, that not despite, but specifically because of the ritualization of this practice, sincere tears are very often shed. “The heart,” as one hojjatoleslam explained the matter, “is a muscle like any other. It must be regularly exercised in order to work properly.” It is for this reason, one imagines, that Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, the sixth imam, affirmed that even if a Shiʿite pretends to weep over Ḥusayn he is guaranteed ingress to the Garden of Eden on Resurrection Day (Mahmoud Ayoub, Redemptive Suffering in Islām: A Study of the Devotional Aspects of ʿĀshūr āʾ in Twelver Shīʿism [The Hague: Mouton Publications, 1978], p. 158). David Thurfjell cites William James to the effect that “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not [vice versa],” and goes on to analyze the emotional-ritual connection in Shiʿism with the help of this conceptualization (Thurfjell, “Emotion and Self-Control: A Framework for Analysis of Shiʿite Mourning Rituals in Iran,” in Lloyd Ridgeon [ed.], Shiʿite Islam and Identity: Religion, Politics and Change in the Global Muslim Community [London: I. B. Tauris, 2012], p. 20). Roy Mottahedeh’s protagonist Ali-ye Hashemi “felt it was strange that he could not weep easily, but usually after circling the tomb [of Fāṭima the Immaculate in Qom] a few times his throat became choked and he began to cry” (Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 23).

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head’s lips over and over with his royal scepter to the tune of the raucous laughter of his assembled guests, until a lone, trembling octogenarian – the last surviving Companion of the Prophet Muḥammad, Zayd son of Arqam – stood up at the back of the hall and cried out in agony: “Stop! For by the name of Him beside whom there is no other God, I have seen those lips on the lips of the Messenger of Allah (i. e., grandfather Muḥammad) in a kiss.”¹²⁸ To paraphrase the ancient Iranian prince Siyavosh regarding his own death, Ḥusayn’s spilt blood would convulse the world.¹²⁹ The martyrdom of this third imam (Ḥusayn’s elder brother Ḥasan is considered the second imam) simultaneously forged, and broke, the Shiʿite heart. It was a trauma that added the ingredients of agony and ecstasy to the more cerebral and political aspects of the faith represented by ʿAlī: To weep for Ḥusayn is the glory of our lives and souls, or else we would be the most ungrateful of creatures. In Paradise we will still mourn for Ḥusayn. It is the condition of Muslim existence…Mourning for Ḥusayn is the token of Islam. It is impossible for a Shiʿi not to weep. His heart is a living tomb, the true tomb for the head of the beheaded martyr.¹³⁰

In commemoration of this deeply felt communal tragedy the partisans (Shiʿa) of the Prophet’s Family (ahl al-bayt) have engaged for over a millennium in an increasingly wide array of mourning rites (azadari, hidad, marthiya, maatam, etc.), including various forms of self-flagellation: sineh zani (beating of the chest), zanjir zani (lacerating of the back), sar zani (hitting of the head) and qameh zani, shamshir

 Irfaʿ qaḍībaka ʿan hātayni l-shafatayni, fa-wallāhi lladhī lā ilāha illā huwa, la-qad raʾaytu shafatay rasūli llāhi ʿalā hātayni l-shafatayni mā lā uḥṣīhi yuqabbiluhumā (ʿAbd Allah b. Nūr Allah alBaḥrānī, ʿAwālim al-ʿulūm [Beirut: al-Maktaba al-Shiʿiyya, n.d.], vol. 4, p. 383).  The identification of the ancient Iranian hero-martyr Siyavosh with Ḥusayn is well known. In some parts of Iran the Ashura is known as the Suvashun (Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis, Persian Myths [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993], pp. 74– 75). Twelve years after the slaughter at Karbala, the Umayyad general Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf, intent on crushing the stubborn Arabian revolt of ʿAbd Allah b. al-Zubayr (carried out in the name of Ḥusayn) – and reportedly enraged that its leader would not allow him to perform the circumambulation – burned the Kaʿba to the ground (692 CE). This sacred structure is identified by Shiʿite tradition with the ahl al-bayt (descendants of the Prophet’s house, the imams), and the violation of these two inviolables (ḥurmatān) sealed the fate of this evil dynasty (see Dakake, Charismatic Community, pp. 90 – 92).  A. F. Badhshah Husain, Ḥusayn in the Philosophy of History (Lucknow, 1905), cited in Goldziher, Introduction, p. 180. The burial place of Ḥusayn’s head is unknown, or, rather, there are many different opinions.

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zani or tatbir (striking the forehead with a sword)¹³¹ – all in vicarious atonement for their forefathers’ failure to rescue the Imam Ḥusayn in his time of trouble.¹³² They smear their heads and faces with mud to indicate that they are ready to “drink the delicious beverage of martyrdom” (shorbat-e govara-ye shahadat benushand) and be buried together with the imam. They engage in the koshtar neshani (“death display”), in which devotees divide up into pairs, one of them lying on his stomach and burying his head in the ground, barely breathing, while the other digs a deep and narrow shaft not far from his friend, inserts his body into it and leaves only his head sticking out – the point of the exercise being to depict collectively the macabre spectacle of the decapitated corpses of Muḥammad’s family, strewn hither and thither across the plain of Karbala.¹³³ All of these rites reach their apogee on the tenth of Muḥarram, known as Ashura, the date of Ḥusayn’s martyrdom.¹³⁴ S. H. Nasr:

 The latter practice is widely frowned upon and even forbidden by Shiʿite jurists, but is performed anyway, especially East of Iran (but increasingly, since the 1979 revolution, in Iran itself as well).  Shiʿite historical tradition locates the inauguration of such masochistic practices in the collective atonement of four thousand tawwābūn (penitents) who – led by Sulaymān b. Ṣurad and al-Musayyib b. Najaba and referencing the repentance of the Israelites after their worship of the golden calf (“kill yourselves” [Q. 2: 54]) – converged on the grave of Ḥusayn’s torso in about 684 CE, beat themselves in unison for having abandoned their imam to his gruesome fate, and then charged to their deaths one and all in hopeless battle against the Syrian Umayyad army. Since that time, as Patricia Crone put it, “like Christianity, Imamism was a religion that saw salvation as lying with the losers” (Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005], p. 125).  Different rites have been performed in different times and places. Today many of the more extreme forms of flagellation and self-humiliation take place primarily in Shiʿi communities to the East of Iran. There is, however, evidence of a certain return to these more violent practices inside the Islamic Republic.  Ashura literally means “the tenth.” Its debut in Islam goes back to the Prophet Muḥammad, who, according to Muslim tradition, witnessed the Jews commemorating the tenth of the first month as a day of fasting and atonement (Yom Kippur, according to biblical prescription, Lev. 16: 29 – 30). When asked, the Jews – according to the hadith – explained that they acted thus “in remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt” (a departure from Jewish/biblical tradition, where the Exodus is not tied directly to this holiday as it is to many others). Muḥammad responded, “We have a greater right to Moses than they!” and appropriated the fast. A year later this innovation was abrogated in favor of the thirty day fast of Ramadhan, and the Ashura itself turned from a somber into a joyous occasion. Sunnis to this day celebrate it as a festive holiday, a phenomenon which grates to no end on the nerves of Shiʿites. It is probably not without significance that Yom Kippur is the only day of the year on which Jews beat themselves (symbolically – a little tap on the chest) in repentance. The Ashura is also the only day on the Muslim calendar designated as a full day of rest; Yom Kippur is the “Sabbath of sabbaths” (Lev. 23: 32).

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The Shiʿis regard the martyrdom of Ḥusayn as a cosmic event around which revolves the entire history of the world, prior as well as subsequent. It is a divinely pre-ordained even, one that manifests God’s mercy and justice, and, hence, allows man to achieve redemption, or conversely, condemns him.¹³⁵

This great event – “the victory of the blood over the sword” (intiṣāru l-dami ʿala lsayf ) – was to furnish inspiration to untold millions of Shiʿi (and even Sunni) Muslims over history: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameneʾi doubts whether without the model of Ḥusayn’s martyrdom “we would have had the fortitude to charge into that battle” (i. e., the revolution of 1979 – Z. M.).¹³⁶ On the other hand, the blow was so great that the remaining nine imams of what would later become the Twelver Shiʿite line, though heavily engaged in guiding their flocks and laying the foundations of Shiʿite law and theology,¹³⁷ descended into a strictly observed political quietism (quʿūd). Like their ancestor the first imam ʿAlī, although they knew that they were As indispensable to the caliphate as the pivot to the millstone…,¹³⁸ I closed my eyes [to Abū Bakr’s usurpation] and averted my gaze from [the consequent calamity]. I plunged into thought: was it better to rise up empty handed and resist the tyrants though bereft of allies, or was it better patiently to endure this dark night which turns the young old and the old decrepit and devastates the faithful until the day they meet their Maker? In the end I concluded that stoically bearing [this grave misfortune] was the more prudent course, so I endured quietly, though doing so was as painful for me as a thorn in my eye and a bone in my throat.¹³⁹

As the years wore on this withdrawal from politics on the part of the imams became second nature (this stance was justified, usually in retrospect, on the basis

 Nasr et al, Shiʿism, p. 260.  Khameneʾi, Jehad-e farhangi, p. 144.  The fifth and sixth imams, Muḥammad al-Bāqir and Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, are credited with most of the work on this score.  Maḥallī minhā maḥallu l-quṭbi min al-raḥā. “The pivot of the millstone” also hints at the Kaʿba in Mecca, around which the entire nation of believers – and indeed the entire cosmos – revolves. ʿAlī has often been envisioned by Shiʿite tradition as a sort of human Kaʿba. The tawwābūn (“penitents” who sought atonement for having abandoned the third imam in his hour of need) are said to have “swarmed around the tomb of Ḥusayn more intensely than people swarm around the Black Stone [of the Kaʿba]” (Dakake, Charismatic Community, p. 94).  Abu l-Ḥasan Muḥammad al-Raḍī (ed.), Nahj al-balāgha (annotated by Shaykh Muhammad ʿAbduh, Cairo: Maṭbūʿāt al-Istiqāma, n. d.), p. 26. The passage cited here, taken from ʿAlī’s famous Shiqshiqiyya address – a word meaning “the call of a camel” and indicating the impulsive and extemporaneous nature of this truncated speech – is as difficult to translate accurately, let alone eloquently, as the rest of the homilies in this masterpiece of Arabic prose poetry.

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of taqiyya or “prudent dissimulation,” which permitted these spiritual leaders to delay their push for temporal power).¹⁴⁰ When, on the eve of the Abbasid Revolution of 750 CE, the chief architect of that upheaval, Abu Muslim al-Khorasani, made a surreptitious visit to the sixth imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq in Medina and offered him the caliphate – the obtainment of which had been from the outset the very Shiʿite raison d’etre – the latter reportedly caviled: “You have interrupted my studies. Please leave.”¹⁴¹ Another failed foray into the political arena was initiated by the sixth Abbasid caliph al-Maʾmūn, son of the famed Hārūn al-Rashīd, who invited Jaʿfar’s grandson ʿAli l-Riḍā, the eighth Shiʿite imam, to his temporary headquarters in Marv (Northeastern Iran). Perhaps because ʿAbbāsism was at its inception deeply intertwined with a sub-sect of Shiʿism;¹⁴² perhaps because he needed the reinforcement of ʿAlid

 Haider, Shiʿite Islam, p. 45. On taqiyya see Etan Kohlberg, “Some Imam-Shiʿi views on Taqiyya,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 95 (3) 1975.  al-Ṣādiq’s quietism also led him to remain neutral as his half-uncle Zayd battled the Umayyad forces in the Iraqi Shiʿite stronghold of Kufa (740 CE) – although rivalry was involved here as well – and to warn against the activist aspirations of one of Imam Ḥasan’s descendants, Muḥammad alNafs al-Zakiyya (“The Pure Soul”), who rose up against the Abbasids just down the road from alṢādiq in al-Medina and was killed there in 762 CE. This quietist stance did not save the post-Ḥusayn imams from the evil designs of the Sunni authorities, who are conceived by Shiʿite tradition as having compassed the death of every imam by poison. The fifth and sixth imams, Muḥammad al-Bāqir and Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, are especially credited with the scholarly work that placed Shiʿite doctrine and practice on a firm footing. al-Ṣādiq is also credited with the introduction of alchemy into the Muslim world, and one of his students in this and other esoteric subjects, the Persian Jābir b. Ḥayyān, would achieve fame in the West as the “Father of Chemistry.”  The first Abbasid caliph, Abu l-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ (“the Bloodletter”), claimed to have received the spiritual imprimatur of the fourth descendant of Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya, the half-brother of Ḥasan and Ḥusayn (son of ʿAlī but not of Fāṭima) who had been adulated by Shiʿite revolutionaries in Kufa (685 – 7 CE) under the leadership of al-Mukhtār al-Thaqafī and his lieutenant Kaysān. Upon Ibn al-Ḥanafiyya’s death (700 CE), these “Kaysānite” Shiʿites divided into “Three-ers” – those who stopped (waqafū) with this imam, declared him to be in occultation, and anticipated his return as the “rightly guided one” or Mahdī – and the (relatively more numerous) “Hāshimiyya,” those who severed themselves (qaṭaʿū) from the imam whose death they accepted, and offered their fealty to his son Abū Hāshim, and later to the latter’s son and grandson (from which latter al-Saffāḥ is said to have received the stamp of approval or the requisite divine charisma). The identity of this Shiʿite splinter group’s name with that of Muḥammad’s clan the Banū Hāshim – to which the Prophet’s uncle ʿAbbās, eponym of the dynasty, of course also belonged – seems to have heightened the sense of connection. The tendency of anti-Umayyad insurrectionaries to use “revenge for Ḥusayn!” as a rallying cry (even if they were not [proto‐] Shiʿites), added to the well-known Abbasid slogan of al-riḍā min ahli l-bayt, “[We rise up in the name of ] the Chosen One from the Prophet’s family!” further accounts for early Abbasid-Shiʿite affinity. Though this tie was soon sundered and the persecutions of ʿAlids by Abbasids inaugurated, still, Abū Muslim’s offer to Jaʿfar and al-Maʾ-

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legitimacy in the civil war he was still fighting against the supporters of his deceased brother al-Amīn; or perhaps in order to forestall further Shiʿite insurrections during a period in which they were rife – for whatever reason, al-Maʾmūn announced on that occasion that Imam Riḍā would succeed him as caliph upon his death, and replaced the black flags of his dynasty with the green banners of the ahl al-bayt. ¹⁴³ Though the plan fell through due to the imam’s premature death on the road from Marv to Baghdad (818 CE) – poisoned by al-Maʾmūn himself (according to the Shiʿite sources) who had had a change of heart – the incident had at least two long-lasting consequences. The first involved al-Maʾmūn’s own later adoption of the rationalist “Muʿtazilite” position in Islamic theology (kalām), and his establishment of an inquisition to root out all those who believed differently (the miḥna or “ordeal,” that lasted from 833 to 848 CE, when it was reversed under al-Maʾmūn’s third successor).¹⁴⁴ The near concurrence of these two attempted revolutions – the reinstatement of the ʿAlid line and the prioritizing of cogitation over tradition – either reflected or promoted (or both) a phenomenon that would become increasingly central to Shiʿite thought: the indissoluble connection between Religion and Reason.¹⁴⁵ Imam Riḍā’s own abstruse disputations at the

mūn’s offer to al-Riḍā – when not viewed cynically – point to an undercurrent of legitimism in the Abbasid consciousness (or an undercurrent of guilt on the Abbasid conscience).  Shiʿite tradition often describes Maʾmūn’s initiative as nothing more than a trick (makīda) to lure the imam away from his beloved Medina, or to his death, or both.  This third successor, the caliph al-Mutawakkil, also ordered the Imam Ḥusayn’s grave at Karbala destroyed (850 CE). The Shiʿites would utilize the same term to describe the endless tribulations (miḥan) undergone by the imams and their supporters at the hands of the Umayyad and Abbasid “oppressors” (jawara).  This issue is highly complex. The Sunni legal school of Ḥanafism had more to do with provoking the miḥna than the Muʿtazilites proper – though there was significant overlap between the former and latter groups – and the Shiʿa reacted negatively to certain aspects of legal and philosophical rationalism (which trend helped produce the later Akhbāriyya, as we shall see below). For the intricacies see Christopher Melchert, “The Imamis: Rationalism and Traditionalism” in L. Clarke, Shiʿite Heritage, pp. 273 – 283. Shiʿi tradition has the fourth imam’s son, Zayd al-Shahīd, become a pupil of reputed founder of Muʿtazilism, Wāṣil b. ʿAṭāʾ, and credits the former with introducing Muʿtazilī ideas to the Zaydī sect in particular and, to an extent, to Shiʿism in general. The Muʿtazilites held (echoes of Plato’s Euthyphro) that there are rational criteria for distinguishing good from evil acts – criteria that God Himself employs – whereas for Ashʿarism (to say nothing of Ḥanbalism) acts are good or evil only in the sense that God does/commands them or does not do so (a choice He makes without recourse to any criteria whatsoever other than His own will). The impact of this dichotomy of views on the question of the value of human reason, especially but not exclusively in the matter of discovering the law, is self-evident. The Muʿtazilite and therefore Shiʿite requirement that God behave rationally also underlies the main theological argument for the Imamate: God would not leave His commandments – sent through His prophet – unexplicated or incorrectly explicated, because then He would be guilty of charging human beings with observing precepts that

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court of al-Maʾmūn – apocryphal or not – with the mutakallim (theologian) ʿImrān al-Ṣābī and with the caliph himself, set the tone in this regard. Shiʿism adopted important aspects of the Muʿtazilite¹⁴⁶ outlook, including the notion that Allah Himself acts reasonably and justly – and not arbitrarily or inscrutably (bi-lā kayf ) as held by the opposing Sunni-Ashʿarite creed – and thus imitatio dei for Shiʿi scholars entailed a more rational approach to everything from exegesis to jurisprudence to theology to politics.¹⁴⁷ The most important Shiʿite hadith collection, despite being compiled by a traditionalist who generally privileged revelation over reason (al-Kulaynī), opens with a narration that quotes God as addressing the intellect (ʿaql) with the words: “I have not created any creature more beloved to Me than you.”¹⁴⁸ The venerated Lebanese Shiʿite scholar Muhammad Jawad Mughniyya, writing in the mid-twentieth century, could declare that “there is no imam but rationality” (lā

they did not understand properly, and that would be the height of illogic (and injustice). Only an infallible imam can interpret God’s Word properly without fail to the believers. The strong Shiʿite penchant for philosopher-king-type leadership, as opposed to more democratic forms of government, is also tied to the above tendencies. Though identifying Sunnism, in contraposition, with anti-rationalism is certainly going too far, an argument can be made for Shiʿites as purveyors of a more intellectual attitude that gradually impacted on Sunnis (al-Azhar in Cairo was first a Shiʿite-Ismāʿīlite, and only afterward a Sunni, center of learning).  Muʿtazilism is the overall name applied to the positions adopted and argued by an array of medieval scholars working within the more general framework known as kalām (essentially: theology, the practitioners of which are known as mutakallimūn). The common characteristics of those identified with the Muʿtazilī school include belief in freewill (to one degree or another), the perception of the Qurʾan as a document created in time, an underlying reliance on reason and rationality, and the requirement that God behave justly. This latter principle still plays a major role in debates concerning issues like the limits of authority in today’s Islamic Republic. For one example, see Ali Motahhari’s accusation that a “principlist” exponent’s argument for the Guardian Jurist being above the rule of law is similar to the Ashʿarite position that God creates the criterion of justice instead of abiding by it (cited in Meir Litvak, “Justice and Wilayat in Post-Revolutionary Shiʿism,” Middle Eastern Studies, July, 2022, p. 7).  This is a simplification of a complex, multi-faceted issue. The Ashʿarites did not dispense with rationality as a tool, but nevertheless may be said, on the whole, to have rejected the Muʿtazilite notion that human reason can successfully plumb the mind, or even characterize the behavior, of God. ʿAql or reason was a staple of many a Sunni philosopher’s system. Again, however: these mutakallimūn were largely rejected as touchstones of religious thought by Sunnism, whereas Shiʿism for the most part embraced them, and continues to do so down to the present day.  Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb al-Kulaynī, al-Uṣūl min al-Kāfī, Kitāb al-ʿaql wa l-jahl, 1:1 – mā khalaqtu khalqan huwa aḥabbu ilayya minka. Dozens more hadiths in this section and elsewhere (and in other Shiʿi Hadith collections) reflect similar sentiments. For the central, almost personified role of Wisdom in the Shahnameh, see Shaked, Introduction, p. 55 and the reference there.

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imāma siwa l-ʿaql) and “the foundation of my religion is reason.”¹⁴⁹ The renowned twentieth century interpreter and promoter of Shiʿite Islam, Ayatollah Mohammad Hosayn-e Tabatabaʾi, compared “the treasury of knowledge left by the Household of the Prophet with the philosophical works written over the course of centuries” and concluded that “each day philosophy approached this source of knowledge ever more closely, until in the seventeenth century CE philosophy and this inspired treasure of wisdom converged more or less completely.”¹⁵⁰ To this day in the Islamic Republic it is common to speak of taʿaqqol – “using one’s head” – as a founding principle of Islamic society second only to tawḥīd, monotheism.¹⁵¹ Ayatollah Jaʿfare Sobhani stressed that “unlike in Christianity, where faith comes first and only afterward does thought play a role, in Islam deliberation and reasoning (tafakkor va taʿaqqol) precede faith and underly it.”¹⁵² In his sermon on the occasion of Tāsūʿāʾ, the ninth day of Muḥarram, 1442 (2020) – certainly a more Dionysian than Appo-

 Aṣlu dīni l-ʿaql. Cited in Karl Heinrich Gobel, Moderne Shiitische Politk und Staatstsidee (trans. Hamid Dabashi), excerpted in Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Hamid Dabashi and Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr (eds.), Expectation of the Millennium: Shiʿism in History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 4. Mughniyya, though unquestionably aware of modern intellectual trends, cannot be accused of pandering to Western notions here or dressing up the modern scientific or positivist outlook in Islamic garb. His statements reflect a longstanding Shiʿite emphasis. Mughniyya penned several works opposing Khomeini’s velayat-e faqih – just in time for the revolution – in which he took up Morteza Ansari’s minimalist interpretation of this concept.  Allamah Sayyid Mohammad Hosayn-e Tabatabaʾi, Shiʿite Islam (trans. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Albany: SUNY Press, 1975), p. 109. Although Tabatabaʾi is probably referring here to the great neo-NeoPlatonists of Safavid Iran, chief among them Mulla Sadra, whose own brand of exposition partakes as much of the Hermetic as the Peripatetic approach to epistemology, still, Tabatabaʾi himself, in his own oeuvre, leans to a significant extent in the direction of the latter, more logic-based outlook. He can therefore be understood as describing in this passage the emerging harmony between (Shiʿite) Religion and Reason. From another angle, it might be said of Tabatabaʾi that he felt that Sadra had succeeded in fusing Aristotelian with neo-Platonic metaphysics.  E. g. Hojjatoleslam va l-Muslemin Mehdi-ye Khamushi, IRIB 5, 14/06/20. More on what is in many ways this sui generis relationship between revelation and reason below.  Jaʿfar-e Sobhani, al-ijāba ʿala l-asʾilati l-ʿaqadiyya, 9/26/2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= LaYBEYFq9Ew. Last accessed 10/09/2022. It is, of course, important to recognize such claims regarding the higher station occupied by the intellect in Shiʿism relative to other religions (or to Sunnism) for what they are: apologia. Still, even the choice of emphasis in apologia teaches us something important about the priorities of the apologetes. Moreover, within every confessional system the attitude toward reason has varied from time to time and place to place, inter alia in response to challenges posed by Greek philosophy and modern science: many religious trends have striven to meet those challenges (e. g., the Muʿtazilites), many others have chosen to ignore them (e. g., the ahl al-hadith). Latter-day Shiʿite exponents are almost unanimous in adopting, or at least claiming to adopt, the former stance.

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lonian affair¹⁵³ – Grand Ayatollah Javadi-ye Amoli sang the praises of reason, explaining that even though the twelve imams were possessed of primordial knowledge (ʿilm) which they could easily have invoked in order to assure their flocks of the rightness of particular teachings or rulings, they invariably insisted on demonstrating the correctness of their positions with the help of rational proofs.¹⁵⁴ It is, however, important not to over-idealize this attitude. The function of the imam in Shiʿism is to provide guidance for the community which, were it to rely solely on its own reason, would surely go astray. In other words, at least in many important areas the imam thinks for his followers, as the mujtahidūn or scholar-jurists would one day think for their millions of muqallidūn or “imitators.” “Just as the body with all of its organs is in need of a brain to reason and make decisions for it,” explained Hojjatoleslam va l-Moslemin Hasan-e Rastgu to a group of pre-pubescent listeners, “so humankind is in need of an imam to do the same.”¹⁵⁵ The late Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi devoted an entire chapter of his Aftab-e Velayat to rebutting the “satanic notion” that the average person should apply his or her own judgment to weighty issues.¹⁵⁶ Ayatollah Khameneʾi is em-

 There are in fact some considerably Dionysian, even Bacchanalian, aspects to what might be called the “mourning festival” of Ashura (the tenth day of Muḥarram). Solemn and somber as the day is in some ways, it is the scene of a sort of revelry in others, including a smorgasbord of culinary delights and sweet desserts, shows and street-fairs, fireworks and dazzling neon, chanting and rhythmic movement, half naked men beating themselves, and the like. It has even been confided to the present writer by youthful participants that Ashura is the preeminent “pick up” occasion of the year, and that for said purpose young men will apply leeches to their skin before the flagellation session begins in order to increase the bleeding, do push-ups to emphasize their chest muscles, and arrange to faint dead away while in an agony-ecstasy of wailing and self-scourging and be caught “just in time” by friends with worried looks on their faces – all in order to impress a member of the opposite sex present as a spectator in the Hosayniyeh. While some might see in this phenomenon proof of the (much touted) deterioration of religiosity in post-revolutionary Iran, to this writer’s mind it demonstrates the opposite: exploiting Muḥarram rituals to court potential romantic partners shows the profound extent to which such religious practices have penetrated the social fabric. Elements of culture that recede into the background often become stronger, not weaker for such recession: taken for granted as a solid backdrop or undergirding, the more immediate adventures of life are played out, as it were, in front of or on top of them. The merging of powerful socio-psychological and even physical drives with religious ceremony both reflects and increases the potency of the latter.  IRIB Qurʾan, 9 Muḥarram, 1442.  Post-mortem broadcast of a televised lesson, IRIB4, 23/11/2020. This is one of the premier reasons why Shiʿism and Muʿtazilism could never fully reach agreement.  Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-e Yazdi, Aftab-e velayat (“Sun of Loyalty to/Love of Imams”) (Tehran: Markaz-e entesharat-e moʾassese-ye amuzeshi- va pazhuheshi-ye Emam Khomeini, 1382), pp. 61– 76. Mesbah-e Yazdi (d. 2021), who took a leaf from Iranian philosopher Ahmad Fardid (who took a leaf

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phatic that “whatever is proven through scripture or tradition to be authentic and credible is part of religion, whether it is acceptable to the intellect or not.”¹⁵⁷ Even seminary talabeh could have their independent thought squelched, when teachers “reacted unfavorably to students who argued too much, even going so far as to expel them from their classes.”¹⁵⁸ There is, therefore, a balance here: while on the one hand His Excellency [the Tenth] Imam [ʿAlī] al-Hādī summoned into his presence an Imami theologian who had disputed with an opponent of the Shiʿa and bested him. He seated [the theologian] by his side at the head table, higher than all the guests,

on the other hand, the imams would regularly remind the mutakallimūn [scholastics] that “proofs from reason are efficacious as tools for winning a debate, but they should never be perceived as the foundation of belief, for religion is the purview of revelation [waḥy], not reason [ʿaql].”¹⁵⁹ Though it is possible, then, to exaggerate the role of the intellect in Shiʿism, the argument can be advanced that the prerogative of the elite to reason out both theological and jurisprudential matters has “trickled down” in modern-day Shiʿism to educated segments of society at large.¹⁶⁰ The second consequence of al-Maʾmūn’s invitation of Imam Riḍā was that the latter’s burial site – Mashhad (“Martyrium”), a village near Ṭūs in the North-Eastern Khorasan region – and his sister Fāṭima’s burial site – Qom, a village in central Iran, where she had died on her way to join her brother – became the two holiest Shiʿite shrines in Iran, around which sprawling centers of learning grew (Iraq is home to the even more sacred atabat-e aliyat or “Sublime Thresholds”: Najaf,

from Heidegger) and combined it with the relevant predilections of Shiʿite tradition, was an advocate of strong, autocratic leadership.  An cheh keh ba ketab va sonnat mottaqen va moʿtabar shodeh az din ast, cheh halah ʿoqul bepasandand ya napasandand (Khameneʾi, Jehad-e farhangi, p. 206).  Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, p. 41.  Sayyid Hosayn Modarressi-ye Tabatabaʾi, Maktab-e dar farayand-e takamol (trans. Hashem-e Izadpana. Tehran: Ketabkhane-ye Melli-ye Iran, 1386), p. 213.  One cannot over-generalize: respect for the intellect is certainly not absent in Sunni religious, to say nothing of scholarly, circles, and Sunnis thinkers have on more than one occasion in history accused their Twelver Shiʿite and Ismāʿīlī counterparts of a specifically taqlīdī or imitative approach, due to their reliance on the guidance of infallible imams. Still, the profound, Muʿtaziliteish veneration for thought and reason among Shiʿa thinkers may help explain why, for instance, the “perverse sense of glee in being able to stop a respectable university professor in mid-lecture when a member of an Islamic group would leap up and loudly announce the call to prayers” (Nazih Ayubi, Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World [London: Routledge, 1991], p. 218) never caught on in post-revolutionary Iran the way it did in Egypt.

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where ʿAlī is interred; Karbala, where Ḥusayn died; Kazimayn, a suburb of Baghdad, where the seventh and tenth imams – Mūsa l-Kāẓim and Muḥammad al-Taqī – are entombed; and Samarra, where the tenth imam ʿAlī al-Naqī is buried and where the Twelfth Imam “occulted”).¹⁶¹ In general, the sepulchers of emamzadeha (children or other relatives of the imams, who migrated from Medina in Arabia and elsewhere) pepper the Iranian landscape to such an extent that complaints about “emamzadeh inflation” or “emamzadeh proliferation” are often heard.¹⁶² (On a more symbolic level, recently assassinated commander of the Quds Force, Qasem-e Solaymani, declared in his last will and testament that “today the final resting place of Ḥusayn son of ʿAlī is Iran”).¹⁶³ The (not particularly robust) exception of ʿAli l-Riḍā aside, the “mainstream” imams after Ḥusayn stayed out of the political picture, as we noted, and Imam Riḍā’s grandson, the tenth imam ʿAlī al-Hādī al-Naqī, was sequestered by the caliph al-Mutawakkil in the army barracks (ʿaskar) of the newly founded Abbasid capital of Samarra, and could not have been “political” even had he wanted to be.¹⁶⁴ The activist approach was left to contemporary messianist “offshoots” such as the Kaysānites, Hāshimiyya, Zaydiyya, Ismāʿīliyya and Carmatians (Qarāmiṭa), who led

 The four remaining imams, Ḥasan (the second), ʿAli l-Sajjad (the fourth), Muḥammad al-Bāqir (the fifth) and Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (the sixth) are buried just outside of Medina, in the Baqīʿ cemetery. Their tombs were demolished by Saudi Wahhabis, and access to the site is denied Shiʿite pilgrims to this day (they are allowed to view the mounds of sand that are left through a fence), a source and/ or symbol of major tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Each of these mausoleums is a qalʿatun min qilāʿi ahli l-bayt, “a fortress of the fortresses of the Prophet’s Family,” whose temporally powerless members had no fortresses in their lifetimes. A visit (ziyara) to one of them, or residence (mujawira) therein or nearby, is highly meritorious and can effect absolution of sins.  In response, Hojjatoleslam va l-Moslemin Ali Reza Panahian exclaimed, exuding a whiff of national pride: “Are they kidding? (jeddi migan?) The shrines currently known and visited are just the tip of the ice-berg! Thousands of emamzades immigrated to Iran and breathed their last here. They knew where their true supporters and lovers resided!” (IRIB Qurʾan, 18/06/20). One of the most famous of these, other than the eighth imam and his sister, is known as Sulṭān ʿAlī, a son of the fifth imam Muḥammad al-Bāqir, who was invited by the people of Kashan in central Iran to come and teach them, and is buried in Mashhad. Estimates of the number of such purported burial sites run to over a hundred thousand (e. g., Milani, The Shah, p. 56).  https://www.sharafkhani.com/%d9%8a%d8%a7%d8%af%d8%af%d8%a7%d8%b4%d8%aa% d9%87%d8%a7%d9%8a-%d8%b4%d8%ae%d8%b5%d9%8a//%d9%81%db%8c%d9%84%d9%85-% d9%81%d8%b1%d8%a7%d8%b2%db%8c-%d8%a7%d8%b2-%d9%88%d8%b5%db%8c%d8%aa-% d9%86%d8%a7%d9%85%d9%87-%d8%b3%d8%b1%d8%af%d8%a7%d8%b1-%d8%b3%d9%84%db% 8c%d9%85%d8%a7%d9%86%db%8c%d8%9b/. Last accessed 10/10/2022.  The decision to place this imam and his son Ḥasan under house arrest was evidently connected to the reversal of the pro-Muʿtazilite policy in about 849 CE by the caliph al-Mutawakkil (d. 861 CE), though the ninth imam, Muḥammad al-Jawād al-Taqī, was already being watched closely.

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many an uprising.¹⁶⁵ Sections of these groups tended to deny the deaths of their leaders and consequently evolved the concept of “occultation” (Arab. ghayba), whence the Imam would soon return (Arab. rajʿa) to become the Mahdī or “rightly guided savior.”¹⁶⁶ This notion, though criticized consistently and severely by the “orthodox” or “Imāmī” Shiʿites as “extremism” (ghuluww), was in the end unabashedly adopted by those same “moderates” when their own moment of truth came,

 It is important to point out that these sub-sects are only considered “offshoots” because the “victors” – in this case the Twelver Shiʿites – wrote the histories. At the time of each split or schism, not only did the so-called splinter groups see themselves as those travelling the Straight Path and the “Imāmīs” (one line of which would eventually become the Twelvers) as the deviants, but in many cases the evidence points to the existence of significantly more supporters of the former than the latter. When the Twelvers emerged, by the eleventh century CE, as the main Shiʿite denomination, they could convincingly render a retroactive drawing of themselves (or rather, of those imams that they venerated and their hangers on) as the central trunk, and of the dozens of other sub-sects as the branches. Most of these “offshoots” – the premier exception being the Zaydīs – are execrated by the “orthodox” Twelvers.  Upon the demise of each Imam – not just among the so-called “extremist” offshoot sects but even among the “orthodox” Imāmīs (who would one day become the Twelvers) – part of the leader’s followers would accept the fact of his death and move on to a successor. These were classified in retrospect by Shiʿi heresiographs as qaṭʿiyya, “those who cut off [the life of the previous Imam and move on to the next]” or “those who are sure/decisive about the demise of the previous imam.” The remaining believers would insist that the imam had not died but had “occulted” and would return one day to lead his flock to victory (this tendency may go back as far as ʿAlī himself – for whom Noah is said to have preserved one of the boards of the ark so that he could ascend upon it to heaven – but is definitely attested regarding one of ʿAlī’s sons, Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya). These were called (by the same later authors) wāqifiyya, “those who stop [with a particular Imam, waiting for his reappearance].” Stories abound in the literature about Sunni authorities seizing the corpses of imams of various Shiʿite sub-sects and putting them on display – sometimes even mutilating them – in front of their followers to prove that their leader had in fact died (the Abbasids reportedly did this in the case of the seventh Twelver, Mūsa l-Kāẓim, summoning prominent Shiʿa to witness his body and announcing: “This is Mūsā b. Jaʿfar, who the rawāfiḍ claim has not died. Look at him!” (Najam Haider, The Rebel and the Imam in Early Islam [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019], p. 63. al-Kāẓim himself is quoted to the effect that “If anyone says about me that he tended me in my sickness, washed my corpse, embalmed it, wrapped it in shrouds, lowered it into the grave, and shook the dust of the grave off of himself, you may denounce him as a liar” [Goldziher, Introduction, pp. 192– 193]). As we shall see, the Twelvers (like the Christians) would become the ultimate wāqifīs. The term mahdī in the messianist sense was supposedly first applied to the above-mentioned Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya, Ḥasan and Ḥusayn’s half-brother (beforehand it had been applied to Ibrāhīm, Muḥammad, ʿAlī, Ḥusayn and others, but not in a messianic sense – as the word “messiah” itself is used in the Hebrew Bible in a “non-messianic” sense). In Sunni literature, also with no chiliastic intent, the four righteous caliphs are known as al-khulafāʾu l-rāshidūna l-mahdiyyūn, both epithets meaning “[rightly] guided.” On possible pre-Muslim precursors of the ghayba-rajʿa idea – going all the way back to King Sargon I of Assyria – see Goldziher, Introduction, pp. 194– 198.

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that is, when the eleventh scion of the ahl al-bayt (Muḥammad’s family), al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī (“of the barracks”) apparently died childless, and the Shiʿite community was left without a leader.¹⁶⁷ The position on this question that ultimately prevailed amongst his followers was that Ḥasan had indeed borne a son, named Muḥammad, who was kept out of sight for fear of Abbasid assassins and then disappeared or “occulted” at the age of five in 873 CE.¹⁶⁸ Traditions were dug up in which this blessed toddler’s namesake, the Final Prophet, asserted that “my successors will be twelve caliphs, the same number as the tribal leaders (nuqabāʾ) of the Banū Isrāʾīl.”¹⁶⁹ Post-facto preemptions were placed in the mouth of Imam al-ʿAskarī to the effect that “there will be much doubt concerning the occultation of my son, save for among those whom God has preserved from error.”¹⁷⁰ He was also reported to have warned: “Whosoever accepts the imams after the Messenger of God but denies my son, is like a person who accepts all the Apostles of Allah but denies the mission of Muḥammad.”¹⁷¹ The first stage of the Hidden Imam’s disappearance is known as the “minor occultation” (Arab. al-ghaybatu l-ṣughrā) because the Imam’s followers could theoretically keep in touch with him via the good offices of four successive “agents” (Arab. wukalāʾ), “ambassadors” (Arab. sufarāʾ) or “representatives” (Arab. nuw-

 The notion was adopted “unabashedly” – but not immediately. The doctrine that posited the birth and occultation of a twelfth Imam was, according to the sources at our disposal, only one of a wide variety of solutions put forward to the problem posed by Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī’s death (the diverse solutions led to the formation of a plethora of competing sub-sects, though some of these may have been quite minuscule). Of all these, the claim that a child was born to the eleventh Imam, disappeared at the age of five, and would someday return, was in the long run the sole survivor. al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī and his father (Imam al-Hādī) and grandfather (Imam al-Jawād) had been under increasingly close surveillance by the Abbasid authorities. As his name indicates al-ʿAskarī was born under virtual house arrest in the ʿaskar, the caliphal military barracks at Samarra (whither the dynasty had temporarily transferred its capital from Baghdad in 836 CE).  ʿUthmān b. Saʿīd al-Asadī al-ʿAmrī, advisor to the tenth and eleventh imams and afterwards first of the four “agents” (wukalāʾ) of the twelfth, hidden imam, is generally credited with having put about this particular solution to the problem. On the rocky road toward this solution see, e. g., Modarressi, Crisis and Consolidation, chapter three, and Abdulaziz Abdulhussein Sachedina, Islamic Messianism: The Idea of the Mahdī in Twelver Shiʿism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981).  Cited in Jassim M. Hussein, The Occultation of the Twelfth Imam (London: Muhammadi Trust, 1982), p. 18.  Shaykh Ṣadūq, Itmām al-niʿma (Qom: Jamʿiyyat al-modarresin, 1411), vol. 2, p. 119.  Citied by ʿAllama Tabatabaʾi in his Shiʿite Islam (trans. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Albany: SUNY Press, 1975), p. 213. Muslim tradition speaks of no less than one hundred twenty thousand (or two hundred forty thousand) prophets before Muḥammad, “the Seal of the Prophets,” including many that Jews and Christians know as biblical figures. Of these it only names several score.

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wāb), whereas the second stage – beginning in 945 CE and lasting to the present day – is known as the “major occultation” (Arab. al-ghaybatu l-kubrā) because all contact between the Imam and his flock has been severed. “Twelver Shiʿites” (Arab. al-Shiʿa al-Ithnā ʿAshariyya, Pers. Shiʿe-ye Davazda Emami) are dubbed thus because they stopped counting with this twelfth, “Hidden” Imam, and to this day await his return – together with his three-hundred-and thirteen illustrious Companions (among whom will be Jesus) – as the “Rightly Guided One” (mahdī) who will “fill the world with justice as it is currently filled with injustice.”¹⁷² Indeed, the “Anticipation of the Great Relief ” (entezar-e faraj) which will be inaugurated by “the One Who will Rise” (al-Qāʾim), is often declared to be “the best form of worship” (afḍalu l-ʿibādāt).¹⁷³ These “duodecimalists” therefore harbor a potential (but rarely actualized) messianist aspect, intoning ʿajjala llāhu farajah – “may God hasten His holy advent!” – on every appropriate occasion. They make up some ninety percent of the world’s Shiʿites (who, in turn, make up approximately twelve percent of the world’s Muslims, the remainder of whom are Sunni).¹⁷⁴ This longing, however formal and nominal, for the parousia of a future savior, created a fateful dichotomy between the two sects of Islam: “Whereas for Sunnis the course of history since [the era of the “Rightly Guided Caliphs”] has been a movement away from the ideal state, for Shiʿis it is a movement towards it.”¹⁷⁵

 The number of comrades-in-arms accompanying the Mahdī according to Shiʿite tradition is evocative of the Battle of Badr (624 CE), where a similar number accompanied the Prophet Muḥammad.  E. g. Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari, Qiyam va enqelab-e mahdi az didga-he falsafe-ye tarikh in Majmue-ye Athar-e Ostad Shahid Motahhari (Tehran, 1388), vol. 24, p. 406.  The Twelvers are also known as “Imāmī” Shiʿites, indeed were known thus even before the number of their Imams reached twelve. Twelver Shiʿites, numbering around one hundred and fifty million, live today in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, Pakistan and elsewhere, including European countries (especially Great Britain) and the United States. Other still extant Shiʿite subsects, whose roots are in the aforementioned “offshoots” from (what in retrospect is conceived as) the central line of “orthodox” Imams, include the Nizari Ismāʿīlīs (loyal to the Aqa Khan and found primarily in Pakistan and India); the Zaydīs (mostly in Yemen – a country they controlled for centuries and now, under the Houthis, control again – and previously in Northern Iran as well); depending on whom one asks, also the ʿAlawite minority under Bashar al-Asad that has devastated Syria from 2012 to the present in order to maintain control over the Sunni majority; the Druze in Syria, Lebanon and Israel; and the Bahaʾi (the last two sects, though they have their roots in Shiʿism, no longer consider themselves Muslims at all).  Enayat, Political Thought, p. 20. Over time Sunnism essentially borrowed the concept of the Mahdī from Shiʿism, but did not borrow the messianic urge along with it. Concomitantly, Shiʿism appropriated the eschatology and apocalyptic traditions of Sunnism, but failed to fill them with any major significance or make them the object of passionate interest. In both cases, the foreign implant did not really take. David Cook sheds light on this complex issue in Studies in Muslim Apoc-

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alyptic (Princeton: Darwin Press, 2003) and Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005).

Chapter Two: The Shiʿite Academy – From the Marginalization of ʿalī to the Rise of the Ulama ʿAlī, albeit, eventually became “all things to all Muslims”: to the orators and litterateurs he was the “prince of elocution” (amīru l-bayān) and the “epitome of eloquence” (nahj al-balāgha – the title of the collection of his speeches that constitutes Shiʿism’s holiest book after the Qurʿan); to the grammarians he was the inventor of Arabic vocalization and the exemplar of correct composition; to the calligraphers he was the finest master of their art, who developed the Kufic style of writing; to the warriors he was the founder or inspiration of the para-military futuwwa organizations of the middle ages (and in this connection he also became a patron saint of weightlifters – together with his half-brother ʿAbbās – an Olympic medal-garnering sport in Iran); to the mystics ʿAlī was the original fount of esoteric knowledge (al-asrār) and the earliest link in the spiritual genealogies of Sufi “guides” (murshidūn); to many mutakallimūn he was “the theologian of this community” (rabbāniyyu hādhihi l-umma); for several “heterodox” sub-Shiʿite movements – including the Alawites (or ʿAlī-Ilāhis/Nuṣayrīs, Bashar al-Asad of Syria’s sect) – ʿAlī was none other than God;¹ and, of course, for “orthodox” Twelver Shiʿites themselves he was the first Imam, “the Qurʿan in human form,” “the walking Kaʿba,” “the legatee of the Prophet,” “the Lord of Religion” (yaʿsūb al-dīn), “the Essence of Religion” (jawhar al-dīn), “the Leader of the White-Ankled Ones” (into Paradise at the Eschaton), the source of divine wisdom, and much else.²

 One ʿAbd Allah b. Sabaʾ (or Sawdāʾ), a Jew from the Yemen, is saddled with the responsibility for the heretical apotheosis of ʿAlī. The mainstream Shiʿa use this figure to expose the Jewish origins of their sect’s ghulāt (extremists); the Sunnis use him to expose the Jewish roots of the Shiʿa. The Shiʿa are not found wanting: they often claim that Sunnism was a Jewish invention, and to this day Houthis in Yemen sometimes call Saudi coalition forces “Banū Qaynuqāʿ” (a Jewish tribe of Medina exiled by Muḥammad). In his Heterodoxies of the Shiʿites, Israel Friedlaender tells the story of a band of these deifiers of ʿAlī whom the fourth caliph had thrown into the fire to burn alive. From inside the flames he heard, “Now we know that you are God, because ʻNo one may punish by fire except the Lord of Fire!’” (a well-known hadith). Even “orthodox” Shiʿism comes close to deifying ʿAlī. Muḥammad al-Bāqir, for instance, is reported to have declared: “Whoever recognizes [ʿAlī] is a believer, and whoever denies him is an infidel, whoever is ignorant of him is in error, and whoever associates something with him (!) is a polytheist (mushrik)…” (Kulaynī, al-Kāfī, vol. 2, p. 22, hadith 1).  Qāʾidu l-ghurri l-muḥajjalīn is variously rendered. Our translation is based on the interpretation which attributes the ingress of these lucky ones into the Garden of Eden to their stringency in purifying their feet during ablutions. On a more literal level the phrase evidently refers to all-black horses with a white blaze on their foreheads. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-012

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But to the denizens of the medieval Shiʿite madrasehs from Kufa, Baghdad and Basra to Najaf, Qom, Mashhad and beyond, ʿAlī was always first and foremost a jurist, the sage of Islamic law with no equal. His insistence upon rigor in the study, the derivation, the development and the application of that law has ever been their model, as it was the model of the Imams themselves who succeeded him, especially the fifth and sixth thereof, Muḥammad al-Bāqir and Jaʿfar alṢādiq, the true founders of the Shiʿite (“Jaʿfarite”) madhhab or school of jurisprudence. The increasing emphasis placed by Shiʿite exponents on ʿAlī’s prowess as an ʿālim (sage) and especially a faqīh (jurist), mirrors the historical-doctrinal developments that gradually led to the transformation of Shiʿism from a cult of Imamic charisma and chiliasm/messianism to a more settled confession and way of life based primarily on the prescriptions and proscriptions issued by the ulama. This class of scholar-jurists, the ulama, was a natural outgrowth of the increasing intellectualization and decreasing radicalism of the Shiʿite experience. Shiʿism had been born of a refusal on the part of certain Muslims to succumb after the Prophet’s death to what Max Weber called the “routinization of charisma.” While the majority of Muslim believers were satisfied to progress from the prophetic stage of dynamic leadership and ideological upheaval to the post-prophetic stage of codification and maintenance, the backers of ʿAlī and Fāṭima’s line displayed an unwillingness to abandon the immediacy and euphoria of a divine apostle in their midst, and sought, as it were, to make the revolution permanent. No man is truly a Muslim unless he recognizes God and His Prophet and all the imams and the imam of his age, and surrenders his affairs into the hands of the imam and devotes himself to the imam and fights for the imam’s cause.³

Such a level of millennial energy is, however, impossible to preserve forever; indeed, it tends to consume itself in a short, incandescent burst of activity. Thus, although the ghulāt (“extremists”) of each generation may be said to have harkened back to the original Shiʿite radical impetus by erupting in chiliastic supernovas of resistance, the more stable and consistent “backbone” of the Shiʿa – the “mainstream” that would someday become the Twelvers – soon found itself “routinizing” no less than the Sunnis had. Though the faction of Islam that became the Shiʿa continued, after the demise of Muḥammad, to tender their allegiance to a potentially volatile personage who was purported to be in direct contact with the deity (whereas the Sunnis followed not so much an individual as the legal and literary tradition, the sunna, that had taken the Prophet’s place), nevertheless the Shiʿite imams themselves began to  al-Kulaynī, Kāfī, cited by Goldziher, Introduction, p. 182.

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channel their charisma into precepts enshrined in texts, and by so doing provided a model for the behavior of their own more intellectually inclined adherents. Muḥammad al-Bāqir, the fifth Imam, received his appellation not due to his supernatural qualities, transcendent disposition, prowess on the battlefield or even general leadership capability, but rather (we are told) in recognition of his talent for “splitting open” (baqara) and penetrating to the heart of abstruse legal and exegetical problems. His son Jaʿfar was so widely recognized a scholar (estimates of the number of his students range from four thousand to twenty-thousand)⁴ that Sunni jurists of the stature of Abū Ḥanīfa and Mālik b. Anas, founders of two of Sunnism’s four legal schools, studied under him, and he significantly became the eponymous founder of the fifth school of Islamic law (al-madhhab al-Jaʿfarī), that of the Shiʿites.⁵ His hangers-on and those of his successor imams engaged increasingly in the study of fiqh (jurisprudence) and sharīʿa (positive law), emphatically conservative occupations which are in every way diametrically contraindicative to the cultivation of genuine messianism and apocalypticism. The new Shiʿite sages soon outshone their own Imams in these ever more central religio-intellectual pursuits, and the latter often found themselves dependent on the former, sometimes even for their very position. The Imams themselves were more-and-more relegated to the background – ostensibly (and on some occasions in truth) for their protection from the Abbasids – while the learned lawyers took the helm.⁶ By the time of the ninth and tenth descendants of the Prophet’s line (Muḥammad al-Taqī and ʿAli l-Naqī), the Imams were essentially hidden away from their own devotees – even their identity was kept secret, and it became nothing less than a religious obligation to deny them (taqiyya/kitman) – while a select clique of scholar-jurists played the role of intermediaries between the beclouded shepherd and his scattered flock (and on the rare occasions when these imams did come out in public, e. g., to participate in funerals, their levels of knowledge and religiosity were occasionally even criticized by those same scholar-jurists).⁷ It thus represented no great upheaval for the Shiʿite community, but rather a con-

 Iranian scholars of Shiʿism are currently engaged in a computerized project dedicated to crossreferencing thousands of classical sources in an attempt to discover the true extent of al-Ṣādiq’s pedagogical influence. The “interim” number of twenty thousand comes from there.  Dwight M. Donaldson, The Shī‘ite Religion: A History of Islam in Persian and Irak (London: Luzac & Co., 1933), p. 132.  On this process see, among others, Modarressi, Crisis and Consolidation, pp. 62– 77.  In not a few cases, these imams – and the hidden imam after them – purportedly instructed those who submitted legal questions to them to refer instead to Imamite jurists, another indication of the way the wind was blowing.

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tinuation of an already extant trend, when the Abbasids brought the tenth Imam to their new capital in Samarra and kept him and his son, the eleventh Imam alḤasan al-ʿAskarī, under virtual house arrest. The sacred figure-head thereby faded even further from view and the purveyors of scholarly knowledge gained almost exclusive control.⁸ The few associates granted access to the Imam by the Abbasids seem to have already styled themselves his “agents” (wukalāʾ). Viewed from such a perspective, it is hardly surprising that this process of diminution was soon advanced one final stage toward its culmination, with the actual “disappearance” (ghayba) of the five year-old twelfth Imam in 873 CE and the purported mediation between the Absent One and his adherents through the good offices of “agents” belonging to the powerful clerical-juridical class. This was, albeit, the co-optation of a tenet that had up till that point characterized the very ghulāt whom the proto-Twelvers had so vociferously opposed, but like certain other ghālī notions that eventually insinuated themselves into the worldview of Shiʿite “orthodoxy,” the institution of ghayba was tamed by the conservative Imāmī scholars and made to serve the quietism that had become their hallmark. Then suddenly, in the mid-tenth century CE (the “Shiʿite century”), the Buwayhids achieved something unprecedented (and, we would argue, ultimately unwelcome in the eyes of the ulama): they succeeded through their conquests of the mashriq in gaining genuine riyāsa (political-military authority) for the Twelver Shiʿites, and thereby positioned themselves to become the dominant force in that faith. These Daylamite condottieri first carved out an empire on the Iranian plateau and then entered Baghdad in 945 CE, leaving the Abbasid caliph on his throne but ruling in his name. The ulama were at a disadvantage in the ensuing intra-Shiʿite power struggle: the Buwayhid sword was potentially stronger than the clerical pen, and the Twelver scholars now saw the intricate edifice of spiritual-legal sovereignty that they had so painstakingly constructed over the previous centuries threatened. Thus did the realization of the original Shiʿite dream – the dream of attaining power – represent at that point a nightmare for the Shiʿite ulama, first because a new force was introduced that could undermine or out-muscle their fledgling authority, and second (and more fundamentally) because the very phenomenon of Shiʿite empowerment was in many ways inimical to the ramified learning institution which had become the butter on their bread and the meaning of their lives.⁹  Etan Kohlberg, “Imam and Community in the Pre-Ghayba Period,” in Said Amir Arjomand (ed.), Authority and Political Culture in Shīʿism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 38 – 39.  One cannot deny that the ascension of the Buwayhids represented a boon for Shiʿism in many ways, and even for its clerical class. The security and support provided by the state facilitated the

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There was, indeed, a significant analogy between the positions of the two camps in this mid-tenth century contest for Shiʿite leadership. The Buwayhids were forced to share their power to at least some symbolic degree with the caliph to whose legitimacy they paid lip service; the ulama were forced to share their power to at least some symbolic degree with the (hidden) imam to whose legitimacy they paid lip service. Both riyāsa and imāma were thus internally divided. The ulama consequently sought to bolster their position in preparation for the up-andcoming struggle with the Buwayhids by completing their conquest of the imāma and making themselves the only spiritual-religious game in town: toward this end, the messianic figure of the Hidden Imam Mahdī whose presence still overshadowed them and to whom they were forced to turn, through the medium of his “ambassadors,” for every matter of consequence, must be neutralized. He was, therefore, “exiled” in 945 CE to the furthest parts and declared incommunicado (al-ghayba al-kubrā, the Greater Occultation): as the Buwayhid horse trotted into Baghdad, the Mahdī’s mule plodded out, never to be seen or heard from again.¹⁰ All religious decisions were from that point forward the sole prerogative of the professional jurists and theologians, in whose eyes – though they could never admit as much in so many words, even to themselves – their own legal-doctrinal expertise had become more valuable than the eschatological charisma of the ethereal Imams. In the end, the Būyid state disintegrated to be replaced by Sunni Ghaznavids and Seljuks and their Turkic successors, affording the Shiʿite ulama another five centuries – before the riyāsa was in the hands of Shiʿites again under the Ṣafavids – to shore up their fortress of conservative legalism and mundane ritualism against the potential radical inroads of the Hidden Imam-Mahdī and his over-excited harbingers. During this time the scholars went themselves one better, and after having earlier neutralized the power of the imam through the expedient of exile so that he would not undermine or detract from their authority, now managed to turn his continued existence in limbo into the very bulwark of their authority – their infallible authority. This they achieved through the notion of niyāba ʿāmma or “the general representation [of the hidden imam].” Whereas when the imam was in the Lesser Occultation (873 – 945 CE) his will was conveyed to the world by individuals

establishment or consolidation of a number of important Shiʿi institutions that would help maintain the faith in centuries to come. The scholars, however, while happy to take advantage of the new situation created by the Buwayhids, saw them, in the last analysis, as dangerous competitors.  Although believers cannot contact, or know anything about, the Hidden Imam during his occultation, the Imam himself is said to be “updated” about the state of the world, and of every individual human being in it, once a week or even daily (Biḥār al-anwār, vol. 53, p. 174 [chap. 31, hadith no. 7]).

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(the “agents”), now, in the time of the Greater Occultation, his will is conveyed to the world – so this new doctrine held – by the consensus of the ulama. ¹¹ This move made the Shiʿite clerics the undisputed masters of the imāma (and paved the way for their acquisition of more and more power in the temporal sphere, as well). The notion that the Hidden Imam was still alive lent those clerics, in their capacity as mujtahidūn, a more flexible outlook on jurisprudence: it was supple and malleable, it could undergo vicissitudes. The gate of ijtihād or independent reasoning, at least half-shut for Sunnis because their Exemplar was long dead, remained wide open for Shiʿites. The imam’s presence-in-absence also meant that the temporal authority of caliphs, sultans, kings and (eventually) presidents and prime-ministers was essentially illegitimate: they were usurping the imam’s authority. Sunnis were (for the most part) urged by their ulama to bend the knee before whatever ruler held the reins of sovereignty: “If he oppress you, be patient, if he dispossess you, be patient”; “A thousand years of tyranny are better than one hour of sedition”; “Obedience and compliance – even to an Ethiopian slave;”¹² whereas Shiʿites – though unquestionably quite passive across large swaths of history – have ever been prepped to “fight the powers that be.” The concept of niyāba ʿāmma evolved hand-in-hand with another important idea: ijtihād. Among the Sunnis somewhat earlier – not long after they had lost the last charismatic figure in their midst (i. e., the Prophet Muḥammad) – questions regarding the legitimate bases of authority and parameters for decision-making in the post-prophetic era led to the formation of two increasingly distinct schools of thought. The first school, generally styled ahl al-raʾy (the advocates of logical demonstration), held that qualified jurisconsults should bring their independent reasoning (ʿaql) and intellectual effort (ijtihād) to bear on the sources of law (especially the Qur’ān and exempla) in order to flesh out the Muslim legal system. The opposing camp, most often referred to as ahl al-ḥadīth (the advocates of tradition), asserted that no matter how qualified, scholar-jurists should not be permitted to employ their own discursive logic in order to derive the law from scripture and prophetic reports. Instead, they must base themselves directly and without extrapolation on the latter two sources, merely transmitting their contents to ensuing generations (naql) and imitating the precedents they had established (taqlīd). Though the thoroughgoing “closure of the gate of intellectual effort” (insidādu

 Hossein Modaressi Tabatabaʾi, An Introduction to Shī‘ī Law: A Bibliographical Study (London: Ithaca Press, 1984), pp. 7– 9.  al-samʿu wa l-ṭāʿatu wa in kāna ʿabdan ḥabashiyyan. These statements having been adduced, and there are many more of their ilk, nevertheless the widespread scholarly assertion to the effect that Sunnism preaches quiescence in the face of tyranny across the board must be tempered, even challenged. Such a discussion is, however, outside of the bounds of the current volume.

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bābi l-ijtihād) in the third century after Muḥammad’s death has been placed in doubt by modern scholars, it may still be safely said that in the medieval Sunni world the relatively un-creative transmission of, and adherence to, precedent (taqlīd) ultimately won the day.¹³ A similar struggle, as we have seen, informed Shiʿite scholarship after the final departure of the Hidden Imam, but ultimately with opposite results. In the tenth and eleventh centuries CE the Twelver ulama split into two loosely defined factions over (their own version of ) the question of ijtihād versus taqlīd, with those supporting the former approach assuming the sobriquet “us ̣ūliyyūn” (i. e., those who exploit the principles of jurisprudence [uṣūl al-fiqh] in order to arrive at novel rulings) while those who backed the latter outlook took the name akhbāriyyūn (i. e., those who restrict themselves to conveying prophetic and imāmic reports [akhbār]to future generations). The first school emphasized the primary role of the scholars; the second stressed the centrality of the imams, both past and present (i. e., absent). Unlike in Sunnism, in Shiʿite fiqh it was the us ̣ūlī-ijtihādī school that prevailed in the end.¹⁴ This development was both a cause and a consequence of the institution of niyāba ʿāmma, because the effective exertion of authority on the part of the scholars in the name of – actually instead of – the occulted imam required the agility, maneuverability, flexibility and independence afforded by the methods of ijtihād. Shiʿite clerics became mujtahidūn (a title not used, for the most part, by Sunnis), for whom cerebral discussion and casuistic debate were the essence of religion and whose own intellectual ability had entirely supplanted the sway of the imam(s).¹⁵ Qom in central Iran, since the tenth century CE the intermittent world capital of Twelver orthodoxy, soon saw its shrine to imam ʿAli l There was (and is), among Shiʿites as well as Sunnis, a (Shāfiʿite-sounding) middle ground between the two approaches of the ahl al-raʾy and ahl al-hadith, which argued that though independent reasoning was not illegitimate, when a relevant, authentic hadith was available, the scholar should say: “Smash my personal opinion against the wall!” (iḍrib bi-qawlī arḍa l-ḥāʾiṭ). The ahl al-hadith of Sunnism are also identified with an anti-philosophical and, indeed, largely anti-analytical strain of thought known as al-Ẓāhiriyya (“Externalism”), on which see the classic study by Ignaz Goldziher, The Zahiris: Their Doctrine and their History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008). The ahl al-raʾy, for their part, are often lumped together with the mutakallimūn (theologians). Some early advocates of Akhbārism actually referred to themselves as Ẓāhirīs. The “neo-Muʿtazilism” of the modern Sunni world managed, to a certain extent, to revive an approach that resembles (and is often explicitly identified as) ijtihād. The influence of Taymiyya-ism, a.k.a. Wahhabism, has tempered that development. Both neo-Muʿtazilism and Wahhabism – both liberalism and conservatism – are linked, each in its own way to the movement/tendency known as Salafism.  Norman Calder, “Doubt and Prerogative: The Emergence of an Imami-Shiʿi Theory of Ijtihad,” Studia Islamica, 70 (1991).  Saʿid Amir Arjomand, “The Consolation of Theology: Absence of the Imam and Transition from Chiliasm to Law in Shiʿism,” Journal of Religions 76 (1996).

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Riḍā’s sister Fāṭima al-Maʿṣūma encircled and upstaged by a dozen or more madāris (study centers). The emergence of the mujtahids had a further consequence significant for our purposes. Only upper echelon Shiʿite scholars who had mastered the gamut of legal sciences were granted the right to exercise ijtihād, ¹⁶ whereas the remaining, lower level ulama, as well as the populace at large, were expected to practice taqlīd and emulate (i. e., obey without question the decisions of ) the mujtahids. This division of Shiʿite society into a vast majority of muqallidūn and a tiny minority of mujtahidūn placed a great deal of religious power into the hands of the latter, power that would prepare them to meet the new challenges waiting in the wings.¹⁷

The Word Spreads The tenth century CE is known by Western students of Islamic history as “the Shiʿite century,” because during this period Būyid or Buwayhid Shiʿites ruled most of the mashriq (the Eastern half of the Muslim world); Hamdānid Shiʿites controlled the greater part of the Fertile Crescent; and Ismāʿīlī Shiʿites, who went by the name of Fatimids, conquered North Africa and Egypt (founding in the process both Cairo and its al-Azhar seminary, today the premier center of learning in the Sunni world but originally a missionary headquarters for heterodox Shiʿites).¹⁸ Shiʿite scholarship, which had its inception under the later Imams,¹⁹ blossomed exceptionally during this period, and “The Four Books” (al-kutub al-arbaʿa) – containing what are claimed to be the most reliable compilations of hadith reports attributed to the Prophet and the imams²⁰ – were penned by the “Three Great Muḥammads”

 On occasion masters would issue ijtihād certificates to their students for one or two areas of law only.  See Nikki R. Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), esp. chap. 2.  These various Shiʿite dynasties and sub-sects will be explicated in a later section of the book.  From the orthodox Shiʿite perspective, even the earlier imams, all the way back to ʿAlī (who is credited with founding many an Islamic science), engaged in every type of scholarship. But in terms of the intellectual production of the companions or followers of the imams, this emerges in any seriousness under the latter half-dozen, with names like Ḥasan b. Maḥbūb, Ḥusayn b. Saʿīd, Faḍl b. Shādhān, Zurāra b. Aʿyun (a companion of al-Bāqir, the fifth imam), Yūnūs b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān and others, a goodly number of whom were Iranian. See, for this overall question, Ismaʿil K. Poonawala, “The Imam’s Authority during the Pre-Ghayba Period: Theoretical and Practical Considerations,” in Clarke, Shiʿite Heritage, pp. 103 – 122.  Hadith is a sacred genre of Islamic classical literature easily as important for the formation of the faith as the Qurʾan, if not more so. It includes thousands of narrations that quote the state-

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of early Shiʿite scholarship: Abu Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb al-Kulaynī (d. 941 CE), Abu Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. ʿAlī b. Bābawayh al-Qummī (also known as Shaykh Ṣadūq, d. 991 CE), and Abu Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī (also known as Shaykh alṬāʾifa [“Elder of the Sect”], d. 1067 CE).²¹ The illustrious Shaykh Mufīd (Muḥammad b. Nuʿmān al-Ḥārithī, d. 1022 CE) – a student of Ibn Bābawayh’s – moved away from his master’s almost exclusive reliance on hadiths and wrote his classic books on kalām (theology) in the Muʿtazilī mode.²² He influenced one of his prize pupils – the above-mentioned al-Ṭūsī – in the direction of a more rationalist take on religion, such that al-Ṭūsī’s own hadith collections were more critical, logical and legal in nature than those of his two canonical predecessors, al-Kulaynī and Ibn Bābawayh (the rationalist versus revelatory pendulum in Shiʿism – which had its corollary in the Sunni world in the mounting medieval tension between the ahl al-raʾy or advocates of reasoned opinion and the ahl al-hadith or advocates of textual tradition – would eventually inform what was known as the AkhbārīUṣūlī conflict, see below).

ments, and hundreds of anecdotes that describe the behavior, of Muḥammad and his Companions (among the Sunnis) or Muḥammad and his descendants (among the Shiʿa).  The “b.” in these and other Arabic names cited in this work stands for “son of.”  Shaykh Mufīd was also a jurist, and in Shiʿite history the rationalist approach to theology often went hand-in-hand with the rationalist approach to jurisprudence (in the intra-Shiʿi Akhbārī (traditionalist)-Uṣūlī (rationalist) conflict – for which see below – the latter school was for this reason occasionally referred to as the kalāmiyya or “theologians”). Muʿtazilism was a more-or-less rationalist school of Islamic metaphysics that flourished from the ninth to eleventh centuries CE, after which it was shunned by Sunnism but continued to be cultivated in one form or another by Shiʿism (which nevertheless critiqued aspects of it – especially those which conflicted with the concept of imamate – and strictly speaking does not condone its doctrines. “Initially,” Najam Haider reminds us, “the relationship between the Muʿtazila and the Shiʿa was quite adversarial” [Haider, Shiʿi Islam, p. 13], and throughout history, the same author points out, that relationship was “quite dynamic” [Haider, Shiʿi Islam, p. 14, n. 3]. Indeed, we have medieval Sunni anti-Shiʿi tracts which praise Muʿtazilism – like the Faḍīlat al-muʿtazila of al-Jāḥiẓ – and medieval Shiʿite anti-Sunni compositions that excoriate Muʿtazilism – such as Ibn al-Rāwandī’s Faḍīḥat al-muʿtazila – so the breakdown is far from simple. Still, Shiʿite tradition likes to assert that ʿAlī and the imams were the founders of Muʿtazilite theology – the fragrance of which certainly wafts up from many sections of the Nahj al-balāgha – and the Hidden Imam himself is said by certain sources to belong to the school of Monotheism and Justice [al-tawḥīd wa l-ʿadl – see Goldziher, Introduction, p. 204]. Certainly, Twelver Shiʿi arguments for the necessity of the imamate are constructed on Muʿtazilī-sounding principles). The Shiʿi-Muʿtazilī connection also had a political side, as we saw, such that the Abbasid caliphs who presided over the miḥna or “ordeal” – the inquisition (lasting from 833 – 848 CE) that persecuted those who held that the Qurʾan was uncreated and advocated other anti-Muʿtazilī beliefs – for the most part protected Shiʿi communities and promoted members of the Shiʿite elite to high office.

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Another of Shaykh Mufīd’s renowned students, al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā (also known as ʿAlam al-hudā [“Symbol of Guidance”], d. 1044) placed Shiʿi jurisprudence, known as the Jaʿfarī school after the sixth Shiʿite Imam, Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, on a firm footing, and al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā’s younger brother al-Sharif al-Razi (d. 1016) assembled the purported speeches and epigrams of Imam ʿAlī into the celebrated Nahj al-balāgha (“Pinnacle of Elocution”), a work that inspires millions of Muslims, Sunni as well as Shiʿi, down to the present day, and is second in importance for the Shiʿa only to the Qurʿan.²³ (ʿAlī said: “As the intellect is perfected, rhetoric is abridged” [idhā tamma l-ʿaqlu naqaṣa l-kalām], and no aspect of this masterpiece’s style is more outstanding than its compression of expression). The abovementioned Shaykh Ṭūsī (who should not be confused with the famous Shiʿite scientist, mathematician and philosopher of two centuries later, Naṣīr al-Din alṬūsī, d. 1274 CE) was not only a collector of hadiths but a jurist (faqīh) – a student of al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā as well as of Shaykh Mufīd– and he is credited with founding the Najaf seminary (howzeh) in Iraq that has trained Shiʿite clerics for over a thousand years since. Several generations of the Iranian Nawbakhti family, who served in key posts under the Abbasid caliphs,²⁴ contributed in the realms of science, literature, theology, historiography and jurisprudence during the same period. Most of this Shiʿite scholarly activity took place in and around the cities of Baghdad in Iraq and Qom in Iran. If the tenth century CE was “the Shiʿite century,” the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw a return of the Sunnis to a position of political and religious dominance in the Islamic world, and of the Shiʿa to the introspective pursuits of a minority striving to consolidate its forces while staying out of the limelight. These were particularly difficult times to be a Shiʿite: bereft of powerful leadership in both the temporal and spiritual realms – their imams and sultans were all gone – and persecuted by a vengeful and increasingly fundamentalist and intolerant Sunni majority, the devotees of the ahl al-bayt (the Prophet’s lineal descendants) maintained a low profile and honed their taqiyya or “prudent dissimulation” skills (challenged on the streets of Iraqi cities to declare for ʿUthmān or for ʿAlī, they learned to re-

 “Nahj al-balāgha tali-ye Qurʾan ast” (ʿAli Hosayni-ye Khameneʾi, speech in front of students, teachers and administrators, Baqer al-Ulum Cultural Institute, 1/11/68, transcribed in Jehad-e farhangi, pp. 140 – 142). For a glimpse of the enormous influence of the Nahj al-balāgha on Arabic literature and the Sunni world, see Chief Mufti of Egypt Muhammad ʿAbduh’s eloquent and passionate introduction to his own commentary on the work. According to some estimates, over eighty percent of the hundreds of commentaries written on the Nahj al-balāgha over the centuries were penned by Sunni authors (see, e. g., Ayatollah Javadi-ye ʿAmoli, Raz-e Mandegari-ye Nahj albalāgha [Hawzeh.Net]).  This dynasty ruled a large but decreasing percentage of the Muslim world from 750 to 1258 CE.

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spond: ana min ʿAliyyin wa min ʿUthmāna barīʾ, “I am of ʿAlī and of ʿUthmān innocent” – a sentence bearing two antithetical meanings depending upon the length of the pause after the first name).²⁵ Though some of the Mongol Il-Khans, who charged into Baghdad and replaced the Abbasid caliphate in 1258 CE, were sympathetic to Shiʿism, on the whole the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were an even more precarious period for the Shiʿa, the danger looming not just from the Sunni establishment but from the wild, messianic, Sufistic (“mystical”) confederations that sprung up like mushrooms after the Mongol devastation, in that hothouse of heterodoxy that was the region between Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria (paradoxically, one of these – the Safavi Sufi order – was destined to bring about an unprecedented improvement in the fortunes of Shiʿism, as we shall see presently). Still, Shiʿite scholarship continued to flourish during this period, spearheaded by the al-Ḥillī family, from the town of Ḥilla in central Iraq. Al-Muḥaqqiq al-Ḥillī (Abu l-Qāsim Jaʿfar b. al-Ḥasan, d. 1277 CE) – known simply as “al-Muḥaqqiq” (Pers. Mohaqqeq, “The Researcher” par excellence) – penned his Sharāʾiʿ al-islām (“The Precepts of Islam”) which has since attracted over thirty major commenta-

 Taqiyya had been transformed from a mere precautionary measure to an almost mandatory prescription already in the ninth century CE or even earlier, so that the fifth Imam Muḥammad al-Bāqir (d. 733 CE) could be quoted by al-Barqī (d. 894 CE) to the effect that “Whoever does not practice taqiyya is an infidel” (cited in Andrew Newman, Twelver Shiʿism [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013], p. 40). Imams and their followers are described in Shiʿite sources as practicing dissimulation even when no danger or even discomfort warranted it (see Etan Kohlberg, Belief and Law in Imami Shiʿism [reprinted by Variorum, 1991], passim). The permission, even obligation, to engage in taqiyya is derived by Shiʿite scholars from several verses in the Qurʾan (such as Q. 3: 28, in which Muslims are instructed not to take unbelievers for friends “unless you fear a fear from them”) as well as anecdotes from the tradition, such as that of ʿAmmār b. Yāsir whose parents were tortured to death by their fellow Qurashites for having adopted Islam and refused to recant, whereas ʿAmmār himself pretended to revert to polytheism in order to save his life – and Muḥammad defended him. Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq said: “Taqiyya is a hallmark of my religion and that of my fathers” and Shiʿite scholars have broken it down into a handful of categories (e. g., ikrāhiyya or “forced,” khawfiyya or “precautionary,” etc.). Henry Corbin suggests a different understanding of this practice, averring that it partakes of the elitist-bāṭinist imperative to keep esoteric information under wraps. Like many other of Corbin’s constructions, this is pretty but far-fetched and apologetic and is not supported by the majority of the sources. Taqiyya has become embarrassing for some, especially in the pre- and post-revolutionary era of struggle and sacrifice in Iran, and many a contemporary Shiʿite exponent has tried his hand at justifying this potentially scandalous precept. Some have gone so far as to declare it mansūkh or “abrogated” in this day and age by the increasingly crucial imperative of al-amru bi-l-maʿrūfi wa l-nahyu ʿan al-munkar (enjoining the good and forbidding the evil). These last take inspiration, inter alia, from Shiʿite “self-sacrificers” from Ḥusayn himself and Ḥujr b. ʿAdī (who was thrown off of a roof by the Umayyads for refusing to curse ʿAlī) down to al-Shahīd al-Thānī (“The Second Martyr”), whose arguments support the more militant position as much as his fate does.

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ries, and the great philosopher, theologian, physician and scientist Naṣīr al-Din alṬūsī (d. 1274 CE) sat in on his classes.²⁶ Al-Muḥaqqiq al-Ḥillī’s nephew and pupil, alʿAllāma (“Most Learned”) al-Ḥillī (Ḥasan b. Yūsuf, d. 1325), the great polymath that theoretician of the Islamic Revolution Morteza Motahhari called “one of the seven wonders of history,”²⁷ wrote dozens of works on historiography, jurisprudence, philosophy, theology, science, the Sunni-Shiʿi polemic and more. This period also witnessed the rise of Jabal ʿĀmil in Southern Lebanon – home to an ancient Shiʿi community – as a major center of sectarian learning, producing especially al-Shahīd al-Awwal (“The First Martyr,” Muḥammad b. Makkī, d. 1384), a student of al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī’s son. Accused by Sunni jurists of rafḍ (“rejection” of Abū Bakr et al, a codeword for militant Shiʿism),²⁸ he was jailed and then beheaded, and his corpse crucified and stoned. While in prison he wrote the juristic treatise al-Lumʿa al-Dimashqiyya or “The Damascene Radiance.” Two centuries later this work became the subject of a celebrated commentary – Sharḥ al-Lumʿa – by another son of Jabal ʿĀmil, Zayn al-Dīn al-Jubaʿī, who suffered the same fate as the author of his text and became al-Shahīd al-Thānī, “The Second Martyr.” Today this latter work, sometimes nicknamed al-shahādatayn or “the two testimonies/martyrdoms” (a term that also indicates the Muslim creed),²⁹ is one of the main gateways through which howzeh or seminary students enter the heady world of theoretical jurisprudence (fiqh). It is at this juncture that Shiʿite history merges strongly with Iranian history. While there had always been a powerful Shiʿite presence in Iran, the rise of the Safavid dynasty in the sixteenth Christian century and its conquest of the entire country and beyond ushered in a new, in many ways unprecedented era for both Shiʿites and Persian speakers.³⁰

 al-Ḥillī’s other major work is the Kitāb al-Mukhtaṣar al-nājī (“The Beneficial Digest”), dedicated to the application of jurisprudential principles to positive law (furūʿ al-fiqh).  Morteza Motahhari, Kolliyat-e ʿulum-e eslami in Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 20, p. 77.  Shiʿites are known, in most cases pejoratively, as rawāfiḍ (sing. rāfiḍī) either because they reject Abū Bakr and ʿUmar, or because they reject the fourth imam’s son Zayd for not rejecting Abū Bakr and ʿUmar.  Usually known as the shahāda or the witnessing, the Muslim testimony of faith is, strictly speaking, two testimonies (shahādatān): “I testify that there is no God but Allah,” and “I testify that Muḥammad is the Apostle of Allah.” Most Shiʿa today add “and ʿAlī is the friend of God” (ʿAliyyun waliyyu llāh), and even “ʿAlī is the proof of God,’” as we shall see later on.  For the most comprehensive study of Shiʿism in Iran prior to the coming of the Safavids, see Jaʿfarian, Tarikh-e tashayyo.

Chapter Three: A Shiʿite Commonwealth – The Safavids and Beyond The Safavid monarchs (r. 1510 – 1722) “reasserted Iranian identity and established an independent Iranian state after eight and a half centuries of rule by foreign dynasties.”¹ They also effected another major transformation: more-or-less at the point of the sword, they turned a mostly Sunni population into a mostly Shiʿite population “overnight,” that is, apparently within a matter of decades.² Sandwiched between two Sunni (though Persianate)³ “Gunpowder Empires” – the Ottomans in the West and the Mughals in the East – and incessantly torn at home by internecine strife between (and within) competing ethnic interest groups, Safavid Iran nevertheless managed for two centuries to maintain a relatively stable political order and even project its power outward to neighboring territory.⁴ In many ways this dynasty helped Iran prepare for the onset of modernity, but, perhaps paradoxically, at the same time initiated processes that would ultimately coalesce into the mightiest anti-modern movement ever known.

 Roger Savory, Iran Under the Safavids (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 2. This is not so much a nationalist or racialist statement: the ethnic origin of the Safavids is still up for debate. Savory seems to be focusing on the fact that Iran once again became an integrated unit more or less surrounded by the country’s ancient borders and ruled indigenously. Pahlavist historiography also often depicts the Safavid dynasty as ushering in an Iranian renaissance after centuries of foreign domination.  Andrew Newman has called into question the generally accepted notion that the Iranian population’s conversion to Shiʿism was a relatively rapid affair, marshalling much evidence to show that even the Safavid court itself was not fully won over until the end of the sixteenth century, or even beyond (see Newman, Twelver Shiʿism, chapters eight and nine). See also Moojan Momen, Shiʿi Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 107– 10.  Both Mughals and Ottomans with their padeshahs (sovereigns) and divans (cabinets) partook of Iranian models of government and Persian culture in a great many ways.  Andrew Newman and others are certainly right to raise objections and offer correctives to an overly “neat” depiction of the Safavid experience, and even to the use of the term “state” to describe it. Like many other pre-modern polities, and perhaps even more than most, Safavid Iran often resembled more of a mess than an organized commonwealth. Still, as Newman himself points out, we have to do with the longest lived Iranian dynasty since the Muslim conquest, and one which outlasted the Tudors, the Stewarts, the Valois or the Bourbons (Andrew Newman, Safavid Iran [London: I. B. Tauris, 2006], pp. 7– 8). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-013

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Were the Safavids of Persian stock? Were they Arabs? Turks? Opinions are divided. The most recent findings argue for their Kurdish provenance.⁵ The first king of the dynasty, Esmaʿil, was actually one quarter Byzantine Christian, his father having married the daughter of a Greek Orthodox princess.⁶ The Safavid’s own increasingly promoted version of their lineage was geared to furnishing two out of the three bases of their legitimacy. They claimed descent from the seventh imam, Mūsa l-Kāẓim, which made them scions of the ahl al-bayt or Muḥammad’s family: the Shiʿi leg of the triangle. Since that family (it will be recalled) was the purported offspring of the third imam Ḥusayn’s union with Shahrbanu, daughter of Yazdegird III, this also allowed them to lay claim to the farr or kingly glory of the Sassanians: the Iranian leg of the triangle. The original foundation of Safavid authority was, however, neither Shiʿi nor Iranian, but Sufi (Muslim mystical).⁷  Amanat, Iran: A Modern History, p. 40; Savory, Iran, p. 2. Abbas Milani states that “both the Qajar and Safavid dynasties, who together ruled Iran for over four centuries, were Turkish” (The Shah, p. 27).  Theodora Despina Khatun, daughter of John IV Megas Komnenos, Emperor of the Byzantine rump state of Trebizond in Anatolia, married Ak Koyunlu (“White Sheep”) leader Uzun Hasan. Shortly after their marriage her relatives – the royal family of Trebizond – was executed en masse by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror. The product of Uzun and Theodora was Martha (also known as Halima Begum Agha and ʿAlamshah Begum), who was eventually affianced to the Safavid founder Shah Esmaʿil.  Sufism or taṣawwuf, the gnostic dimension of Islam, is of hoary vintage, traced by tradition back to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and other ṣaḥāba (first generation Muslims) as well as to various tābiʿūn and tābiʿu l-tābiʿīn (second and third generation Muslims). Proposed etymologies for “Sufi” range from Greek “sophia” (knowledge, i. e., gnosis) through the wool (ṣūf ) shirts worn by devotees to the “People of the Bench” (ahl al-ṣuffa), pious beggars on the Prophet Muḥammad’s porch. At first taken up by individual “travelers along the path” (sālikūn), the mystical method soon spawned ṭuruq/tarīqāt (sing. tarīqā) or “orders” (lit. “ways”) presided over by spiritual mentors or “guides,” an institution that spread across Islamdom and for several centuries provided one of the premier modes of mass connection to the faith. Although Sufism shares with Shiʿism an esoteric (bāṭinī) outlook on religion and on reality – Henri Corbin went so far as to aver that “true Shiʿism is the same as tasavvof and genuine tasavvof cannot be anything other than Shiʿism” (cited in Michael Mazzaoui, The Origin of the Safavids [Weisbaden: F. Steiner, 1972], p. 83) – and although these two schools of thought cooperated, as it were, to produce the Safavid phenomenon, nevertheless, orthodox Shiʿite clerics would eventually come to oppose taṣawwuf with a fierceness even greater than that of their Sunni counterparts (Meir Litvak states categorically that “[t]he hostility of the Shiʿi ʿulamaʾ toward Sufism stands in sharp contrast to the more reconciliatory attitude of their Sunni counterparts” [Shiʿi Scholars, p. 48]). Exceptions were made: in some Shiʿite circles, as we shall see, the “Illuminationism” of Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī and Mulla Sadra was influential, and in general the mystical or metaphysical sciences were accepted so long as they were taught in closed, elite circles. The great nineteenth century jurist Morteza Ansari was admired by Sufis and, to some extent, returned the favor. Ayatollah Khomeini himself instructed select students in such theosophical subjects at Qom and even at Najaf, though it is said that for that reason

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In the late thirteenth century CE a Sufi Pir (Elder) or Murshid (Guide) named Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ardabīlī (from the town of Ardabil in North-Western Iran) established a tariqa (mystical order) called the Safavieh after its founder.⁸ Ṣafī al-Dīn and his followers were Sunnis, but some one-hundred-fifty years later a distant successor of his by the name of Shaykh Junayd adopted (a heterodox form of ) Shiʿism.⁹ He amassed an army of Turkmen who became known as the Qizilbash or “Redheads” on account of the crimson cap (taj) they wore, sporting twelve folds in honor of the twelve Imams.¹⁰ Junayd’s grandson Esmaʿil, at the tender age of twelve, led these

there were those at the seminary who demonstrably refused to drink from the same cup as his son. Still, the Khomeinist state views Sufism as dangerous. The Ne’matollahi and Darvish Gonabadi Sufi orders have been severely persecuted by the Islamic Republican authorities, especially since the turn of the Christian millennium and down to the present.  Safi al-Din was the seventh in a line of holy men going back to one Firuzshah-e Zarrinkola (literally translated: “King Victor of the Golden Hat” – “shah” is often appended to the names of nonroyals). He did not so much found as inherit the Sufi order in question, from his own spiritual director and father-in-law, Shaykh Zahed-e Gilani, who, in an apt metaphor for an Iranian, declared to Safi al-Din that “I have broken the polo stick of all your adversaries, and cast the ball before you. Strike it where you will; the field is yours” (cited in Savory, Iran, p. 8. Polo was invented in Iran). The order was renamed Safaviyyeh in honor of its new head. Not just the hoi polloi but several of the big names of the era, including the illustrious Mongol Il-khan vizier Rashid al-Din, venerated Shaykh Safi al-Din. Legend even makes Tamerlane an enthusiastic disciple of the founder’s second successor, Khwaja ʿAli.  There is some evidence of Shiʿite notions insinuating themselves into the ethos of the Safavid order even earlier, such as under Junayd’s grandfather Khwaja ʿAli, but it is inconclusive. That the Shiʿism of Junayd, his son Haydar and his grandson Esmaʿil and their followers was “heterodox” we know from the ghuluww (“extremist”) elements in their theology, which included viewing the leader at different points as (1) possessing ʿiṣma (immunity from sin and error, like the imams and prophets); (2) constituting the gateway through which the Hidden Imam would re-enter the world; (3) being the Hidden Imam himself; and finally, (4), being God (in Esmaʿil’s poetry he identifies himself as the deity unequivocally). A similar trajectory, culminating in apotheosis, would be followed by the Shaykhi, Babi and Bahaʾi movements of the nineteenth century. In general, it may be said that what was for all intents and purposes the Mongol erasure of the Abbasid caliphate in 1258 CE inaugurated (or at least amplified) an atmosphere of ideological anarchy in which a wide variety of heterodox and syncretist trends flourished, especially in the mashriq (Eastern part of the Muslim world). As we shall see, these radical Safavid tendencies were reined in by the purveyors of a more mainstream, “orthodox” Shiʿite theology and law as the dynasty established itself and Weber’s “institutionalization of charisma” set in.  “Qizilbash” originated as a derogatory term invented for these Sufi-Shiʿi-soldiers by the Ottomans. The circumstances of Junayd’s adoption of Shiʿism are not entirely clear, the preponderance of scholars tending toward the opinion that he came under the influence of Zaydī-Shiʿite condottieri from the North Iranian province of Daylam on the Caspian littoral, to whose territory he had fled at one point for protection from an internal rival.

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loyal soldiers in the conquest of Iran (accomplished by 1510 CE).¹¹ His spectacular successes on the battlefield intensified the syncretist cult of personality that turned Esmaʿil into morshed-e kamel (the Most Perfect Sufi Guide), sahib ol-zaman (the Master of Time, i. e. the Mahdī) and zell Allahi fi l-arz (the Shadow of God on Earth, the honorific of the Iranian kings). He was brutal toward those who refused to bend the knee or resisted his campaign of Shiʿitization. Roaming the streets of major cities with their enforcers, known as tabarroʾiha (“those who dissociate [from evil]”), the Shah and his governors compelled all and sundry to curse sacred Sunni personages such as Abū Bakr, ʿUmar and the Prophet Muḥammad’s favorite wife, ʿĀʾisha.¹² “I am committed to this action,” declared Esmaʿil. “God and the Immaculate Imams are with me, and I fear no one; if the people utter one word of protest, by God’s help I will draw the sword and leave not one of them alive.”¹³ Five hundred years later, no less a personage than the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic would describe the methods employed by the early Safavids to forcefully Shiʿitize Iran as “inhumane” (ghayr-e ensani).¹⁴ Over time the prerogative of Esmaʿil and that of his immediate successors became less and less radical-mystical and more and more conservative-monarchical.¹⁵ As the latter approach required the stability facilitated by organized religion (as opposed to the revolutionary heterodox brand), Twelver scholars were “imported” by the Safavids from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Bahrain for the purpose of instructing the newly Shiʿitized Persians in the tenets and praxis of the “orthodox”

 Esmaʿil spent the first half of his childhood incarcerated by, and the second half on the run from, the then chief of the Aq Koyunlu tribe Rostam. He hid out all over the Northern Provinces of Gilan and Mazandaran, as well as in his home town of Ardabil. One famous story has it that a local potentate, having sworn to the envoys of Rostam that Esmaʿil was “nowhere on the soil of Gilan,” had the young Safavid suspended above the earth in a wooden cage so as not to perjure himself (Savory, Iran, p. 22).  Amanat, Iran, pp. 47– 59. This method was less effective in the case of the clerics of the Sunni population, many of whom fled the country rather than convert, leaving their flocks even more vulnerable to the inquisition.  Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 171.  Khameneʾi, Jehad-e farhangi, p. 136. In general the Safavids are notorious for their methods of torture, considered extraordinarily cruel even by the sadistic and sanguinary standards of Iranian dynastic history. Shah Esmaʿil, the founder of the line, had his orders inscribed on the dismembered bodies of his adversaries. Shah Abbas the great is said to have been flanked on his travels by a division of cannibals.  Safavid ideology also became increasingly “patriotic” or at least Iranian: Shah Esmaʿil named three out of his four children, including the heir apparent Tahmasp, straight out of the pages of the Shahnameh.

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Imāmī faith.¹⁶ One might say that of the three legs of the Safavid legitimacy triangle delineated above, these newly arrived Arab fuqahāʾ (jurists) represented the Shiʿite leg, the Turkish qizilbash warriors the Sufi leg, and a third group, the indigenous, Persian speaking “Tajiks,”¹⁷ the Iranian national farr o vahar (kingly splendor) leg.¹⁸ To these groups were later added the descendants of Caucasian prisoners of war – for the most part Georgians, Circassians and Armenians – who were consigned to the royal harem or given important posts in military and civil administration. The perennial competition between these camps was matched only by the internal rivalries within each camp, especially between the “seven great umyags” of the qizilbash. ¹⁹ The inherent turbulence of these soldiers was exacerbated early on by the crushing defeat inflicted on Safavid forces by the Ottomans at Chaldiran (1514), which dispersed Shah Esmaʿil’s aura of invincibility both abroad and domestically. However, though this development initially unleashed and emboldened the wild Turkish military forces, ultimately it contributed to their curtailment, in two ways. First, the temerity and unruliness of the qizilbash became so excessive that the Shahs – with the help of the local Tajiks, the Northwest Shahsevan (“king-loving”) super-tribe and the aforementioned “third force” of Caucasian  Recent scholarship has called into question the extent of this “importation” – especially Andrew Newman’s meticulous tracking of those who did and did not come to Iran (Newman, Twelver Shiʿism, pp. 161– 163 and throughout chapter eight) – but its impact was profound and cannot be denied. Even in terms of pure numbers, Seyyid Hossein Nasr writes that “so many scholars from these two regions [of Jabal ʿĀmil and Bahrain] came to Persia that two works, the Luʾluʾat al-baḥrayn and Amal al-Āmil, are entirely devoted to their biographies” (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Religion in Safavid Persia,” Iranian Studies, vol. 7, mos. 1– 2 [Winter-Spring 1974], p. 4). Roy Mottahedeh speaks of a “stream of Shiah learned men from other parts of the Islamic world to Iran” (Mantle of the Prophet, p. 94). Meir Litvak notes that “the Safavids invited large numbers of Twelver-Shiʿi ʿulamaʾ from Lebanon, Arab Iraq and Bahrayn” (Shiʿi Scholars, p. 12, emphasis mine).  The history of the name “Tajik” is a complex one, the riddles of which have not all been resolved. Originally a Persian or Turkish term denoting Arabs (whence the present, sometimes derogatory “Tazi”), it evolved into a designation for Iranian Muslims (who had converted under the influence of their Arab conquerors and intermarried with them). By Safavid times the word meant native Iranians as opposed to Arab or Turkish immigrants. Today, to complicate matters further, it refers specifically to the inhabitants of Tajikistan, North-East of Iran.  This is, of course, an oversimplification, among other reasons because elements from among both the indigenous Iranians and the invading qizilbash participated in the Safavid Shiʿi religious establishment and held posts such as sadr, mulla bashi and shaykh al-Islam. As time went on, however, these elements were upstaged and eventually unseated by the incoming Arab mujtahids and their Persian students.  Andrew Newman argues convincingly for the precedence of the latter factor – intra-qizilbash clashes – in creating the stubborn instability of the Safavid polity (Newman, Safavid Iran, Chap. 3). An umyag is a large tribe.

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slaves – took drastic steps to rein them in. Second, and more importantly for our purposes, the debacle of Chaldiran initiated the erosion of the chiliastic, antinomian Sufi-Shiʿism that had characterized the Safavids and their qizilbash troops for almost half a century, paving the way for its replacement by the sturdier doctrine introduced by the newly arrived Arab scholars, for whom all this messianism was too reminiscent of the “extremist” Shiʿi sub-sects they had been seeking to suppress for centuries. These scholars – beginning with the celebrated ʿAlī b. ʿAbd alʿĀlī al-Karakī (known as “al-Muḥaqqiq al-Thānī”)²⁰ – gradually carved out their sphere of influence at the expense of several rival centers of ideological and political power and established what Saʿid Amir Arjomand has called a “hierocracy.”²¹ First, they encroached upon the purview of the indigenous, court-appointed religious establishment, from which they themselves remained aloof ²² – with some important exceptions, in which even high-ranking mujtahids did indeed accept governmental posts. (This is an exceptionally complex subject, among other reasons because scholar-jurists who did serve in the Safavid political institution – like alKarakī himself, Ibn ʿAbd al-Ṣamad and later al-Majlisī²³ – were often instrumental in increasing the activism and purview of the ulama in state and society. It is also a sore subject. In his Islam and Government Ayatollah Khomeini cites a tradition recorded by al-Kulaynī according to which the Prophet Muḥammad said: “The jurists are the trustees of the prophets, as long as they do not concern themselves with illicit desires, hedonistic pleasures and the wealth of the world.” He was asked, “Oh Messen-

 Also known as al-Muḥaqqiq al-Karakī, this teacher of the great “Shahīd al-Thānī,” mentioned above, hailed like his more famous student from Jabal ʿĀmil. Upon reaching Iran, he not only rose rapidly to the pinnacle of religious and political influence, but rendered a major contribution to what would eventually become the theory of “the Guardianship of the Jurist,” the founding principle of the Islamic Republic (as we shall discuss later). Shaykh ʿAli b. Jaʿfar Kashif al-Ghitaʾ (d. 1837), author of the Khiyārāt, is known by some as al-Muḥaqqiq al-thālith.  E. g., Said Amir Arjomand, “The Clerical Estate and the Emergence of a Shiʿite Hierocracy in Safavid Iran,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 28 (2) 1985.  British historian John Malcolm (d. 1833) would write of the Shiʿite clerics of a slightly later period that they “fill no office, receive no appointment, [and] have no specific duties but who are called, from their superior learning, piety and virtue, by the silent but unanimous suffrage of the inhabitants…to be their guides in religion, and their protectors against the violence and oppression of their rulers” (cited in Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, p. 5). The Shiʿite learning institution was – in theory and often in practice – an intellectual-religious meritocracy, in which “ascriptive” factors like pedigree (and even less ascriptive factors like wealth) did not play the central role.  Ḥusayn b. ʿAbd al-Ṣamad was a student of the “Second Martyr,” Shaykh Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī, and was appointed Shaykhu l-islām by Shah Tahmasp. On al-Majlisī see below.

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ger of God, how may we know if they do so concern themselves?” He replied: “See whether they follow the ruling power. If so, fear for your religion and shun them.”²⁴

Erstwhile foreign minister and current chief advisor to the Supreme Leader Ali Akbar Velayati was recently at pains to make clear – in a barely disguised allusion to revolutionary theoretician Ali Shariʿati’s critique of “Black Shiʿism” – that “the ulama of the Safavid era were never court clerics!”²⁵ Of course, post-revolutionary Iran embodies the paradox of paradoxes in this regard, for the mujtahidūn themselves have become the ruling class). As the Safavid period progressed, the fiqh-focused²⁶ immigrant scholars and their students slowly but surely upstaged the purveyors of the “extremist” Sufi-

 Khomeini, Guardianship of the Jurist, p. 44.  “Olama-ye dowre-ye safaviyye darbari nabudand,” Resalat, 05/07/1397. “ʿAlem-e darbari” or “court cleric” – one who receives his salary from the authorities and serves at their pleasure – is a slur bordering on obscenity in seminary circles, and all the more so since 1979 (they are also called voʿaz al-salatin, preachers in the service of sultans). Unsurprisingly, opposition writers have pinned this pejorative on those very “committed and revolutionary” (motaʿahed va enqelabi) ayatollahs and hojjatoleslams who have become mouthpieces for the Khomeinist regime. Dr. Ali Shariʿati (d. 1977) was one of the motive forces behind the revolution of 1979, especially among the modernized university population. In one of his many influential works he distinguished between the pure, revolutionary, “red” Shiʿism of ʿAlī and the imams (the “red” imagery was not divorced from his communist leanings) and the corrupt, bourgeois, “black” Shiʿism of the Safavids, that served as an opiate of the masses. (Mohammad Reza Shah began utilizing the same colors at about this time in an almost antithetical sense: “black reaction” for the stubborn clerics who opposed his reforms, “red destruction” for communist radicals. At this king’s behest an Open Letter would be published in January, 1978 in the Ettelaʾat newspaper attacking Ayatollah Khomeini in absentia, entitled “Iran and Red and Black Imperialism” – and would set off a storm). Despite Shariʿati’s major contribution to the founding of the Islamic Republic, he was repudiated by Ayatollah Khomeini and his cohorts, and the post-revolutionary anathematization of the “eclectic” (IslamicSocialist) guerilla organization inspired by his ideology – the Mojahedin-e Khalq (“Popular Front”) – sealed this original thinker’s fall from grace (for more on Shariʿati see below). It is important to note that even prior to the arrival of the Arab scholars Shiʿite learning centers, law courts and religious endowments (awqāf ) already existed under the auspices of the Safavid religious establishment (supervised by the sadr, the mulla bashi and/or the shaykh al-Islam). But their ethos was different from that of the incoming jurisprudents, who essentially condescended to them. Moreover, the indigenous ulama jealously guarded their prerogatives and livelihoods, preventing most of the immigrant scholars from integrating with the extant religio-political apparatus, a fact which fostered the development of separate, opposing camps. Interestingly, one of those who did accept a government position was none other than al-Muḥaqqiq al-Thānī/al-Karakī himself who, evidently invited to Iran by Shah Esmaʿil and having spent a decade or so in Iraq afterward, returned under Shah Tahmasp to become shaykh al-Islam.  Fiqh is the Islamic science of jurisprudence. It refers to the intricate dialectical processes of ratiocination involved in working out religio-legal rulings. The conclusions of those processes

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Shiʿi ideologies (ghulāt) that had brought the dynasty to power. They stared down, at the same time as they admired and sometimes even coopted, the emerging neometaphysical-illuminationist trend (hekmat-e elahi, ʿerfan, eshraq) epitomized by the likes of Mir Damad (d. 1631 CE), Mulla Sadra (d. 1636 CE) and Sadeq-e Ardestani (d. 1721 CE).²⁷ The very monarchy was elbowed out of many spheres of influence and jurisdiction by the same mojtaheds whom the monarchs themselves had invited to Iran: freed from the clutches of the qizilbash, the kings came increasingly under the thumb of the clerics.²⁸ “Important mullahs,” writes Roy Mottahedeh, “were men of enormous power who could call kings to account and who some-

are collectively known as the sharīʿa, the positive law. As we shall see later on, fiqh became in many ways an end in itself at the Shiʿite seminaries.  This neo-Neo-Platonism, derived from the work of medieval theoreticians like Muḥyī al-Dīn b. ʿArabī (d. 1240 CE) and Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191), combines philosophical, theosophical and mystical themes into a “doctrine of light.” It’s popularity in certain (even clerical) circles notwithstanding, this “divine science” was suspect in the eyes of the mojtaheds of the howzeh no less than the ideas and practices of Sufism or the speculations of the philosophers. All of it was seen as a threat to standard, sharīʿa-based Islam, as inimical to rigorous legal study and practice, and as a gateway to heresy (it unquestionably contributed to the emergence of Shaykhism, even if Ahmad al-Ahsaʾi himself claimed not to be an admirer of Mulla Sadra). It was also suspected of blurring the lines between Shiʿism and Sunnism (and between Islam and other religions). Still, illuminationism has survived, and Ayatollah Khomeini not only taught it, delved deeply into it and wrote of it to family members and friends, he included references to eshraq (illuminationism) in his famous “Letter to Gorbachev” dispatched shortly before the ayatollah’s death. For the argument that – through the good offices of Hadi-ye Sabzevari (d. 1873) among others – a more “acceptable” version of illuminationism has joined hands or even merged with the orthodox feqh-e ejtihadi to this day, see Hossein Zial, “Knowledge and Authority in Shiʿi Philosophy” in L. Clarke, Shiʿite Heritage, pp. 359 – 374, especially sections three and four. Some even argue that eshraq and ʿerfan have functioned as philosophical tools wielded by Islamists in their kulturkampf with the West. For an insider’s look at the mystical-illuminationist experience among Shiʿite seminary students see the masterful (and moving) presentation of Roy Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, Chapter Five. Mottahedeh (Mantle of the Prophet, p. 183), Baqer Moin (Khomeini, p. 295), Michael Axworthy (Empire of the Mind, p. 266) and Ray Takeyh (Last Shah, p. 209) have alluded briefly to the fearlessness/callousness engendered in Ayatollah Khomeini – so they surmise – by ʿerfan’s dismissal of the significance of external reality. A complex, finessed synthesis within Shiʿite theology of Neo-Platonisthermetic-gnostic sciences, on the one hand, with the more purely rational or Aristotelian methods, on the other – both acknowledged as “primordial” disciplines (awāʾil) of pre-Islamic origin – produced a field known as ḥikma, “wisdom.”  The clerics would occasionally style themselves “shahan-e velayat,” the “kings of faith.” Velayat, or in its Arabic pronunciation walāya/wilāya (the distinction between the two is somewhat hazy, though the second is generally rendered “authority”) is not an easy concept to define, especially in its Shiʿite context, where it is quite central. One might venture: “love and devotion to God, the prophets and the imams.” Calling someone a “king of wilāya” is a way of attributing to them power in a realm higher than the temporal.

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times controlled wealth that rivaled that of the king himself.”²⁹ Andrew Cooper goes even further, stating that “With his following, money and moral influence, a marjaʿ enjoyed a stature most kings and prime ministers could only dream of.”³⁰ Already the second Safavid ruler, Tahmasp, had “essentially declared Shaykh Karakī the highest authority in the realm and himself the Shaykh’s deputy.”³¹ It was more than merely an affectation of piety when the dynasty’s most powerful son, Shah Abbas the Great (d. 1629), signed his letters “The Dog of the Threshold of ʿAlī” (kalb-e ostan-e Ali).³² The fact that the fuqahāʾ (scholar-jurists) were known in this period as nuwwab al-imam (deputies of the [Hidden] Imam) speaks volumes in this regard.³³ On the international front, the Safavids conquered territory Eastward (from the Uzbeqs) and Westward (from the Ottomans), turning Iran once again into a power to be reckoned with on the regional stage, especially under the most celebrated of this dynasty’s rulers, Shah Abbas the Great (reigned 1588 – 1629). A standing army, largely drawn from the Caucasian “third force” (niru-ye sevom), gradually replaced the troublesome qizilbash; the state administration was to some extent rationalized; diplomatic relations were established with European powers; and an impressive flourishing of art and architecture characterized the entire period and beautified many an urban skyline with edifices that delight both native Iranians and tourists down to the present day. Shiʿism increasingly came into its own, perhaps no figure better symbolizing the faith’s efflorescence in these unprecedentedly conducive circumstances than the scholar-politician Muḥammad Bāqir al-Majlisī (d. 1699 CE) – a descendent of one of those “imported” Lebanese-Shiʿite clerics – whom Houchang Chehabi has called “arguably the most powerful member of the Twelver Shiʿite ulema before

 Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 97.  Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 106. A “marjaʿ” is the highest Shiʿi religio-legal-scholarly ranking, as we shall see below.  Morteza Motahhari, Kolliyat-e ʿulum-e eslami in Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 20, p. 80. Mirza Hasan-e Shirazi, of Tobacco Boycott fame (see below), was fond of quoting the hadith: “If you see the ulama at the gates of the kings, say, they are bad ulama and bad kings. If you see the kings at the gates of the ulama, say, they are good ulama and good kings” (cited by Algar, Religion and State, p. 22).  Motahhari., Kolliyat, p. 82. Iranian kings sometimes washed the feet of senior clerics to show their piety. The mujtahid Mohammad Fazel-e Sharabiyani would refer to Mozzafar al-Din Shah as a dog (Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, p. 174). Of course this reverence for clerics on the part of sovereigns should not be exaggerated: all told, the former served the latter more than vice versa.  Andrew Newman, “Fayd al-Kashani and the Rejection of the Clergy/State Alliance,” in Linda S. Walbridge (ed.), The Most Learned of the Shiʿa: The Institution of the Marjaʿ Taqlid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 34. Jaʿfar Kashif al-Ghitaʾ was the first individual mujtahid to be styled “nāʾib al-imam” (Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, p. 49).

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Ayatollah Khomeini.”³⁴ Majlisī’s one-hundred-and-thirty volume Arabic language hadith encyclopedia entitled Biḥār al-anwār (“Oceans of Lights”) assembled almost a millennium’s worth of traditional material and placed it at the disposal of both clerics and even many laypeople for the first time.³⁵ The same author’s Persian output included an account of the sufferings of the imams entitled Jalāʾ al-ʿuyūn (“Sparkler of the Eyes”), a digest of ʿAlid hadiths known as Ḥayāt al-qulūb (“Life of the Heart”), a compendium of fundamental Shiʿite beliefs called Ḥaqq al-yaqīn (“The Reality of Certainty”) and a manual of devotional acts by the name of Zād al-maʿād (“Provisions for the Day of Return”), all of which were highly influential. Al-Majlisī was the last of the “Three Great Muḥammads” of later Shiʿite history, together with his teacher Muḥammad al-Ḥurr al-ʿĀmilī (d. 1693 CE), author of the hadith compilation Wasāʾil al-shīʿa ilā tahṣīl masāʾil al-sharīʿa (“The Shiʿite Methods of Treating Legal Issues”) and Muḥammad al-Murtaḍā al-Fayḍ al-Kāshānī (d. 1680 CE), author of the hadith collection al-Wāfī (“The Trustworthy”).³⁶ Earlier, Esmaʿil’s successor on the throne, Tahmasp, had supported the spread of Shiʿite ritual (even foreign dignitaries were invited to watch the elaborate Muḥarram/Ashura ceremonies),³⁷ and reportedly forced his own sister to remain celibate in anticipation of her marriage to the twelfth (Hidden) Imam.³⁸ The same Shah Abbas the Great, Tahmasp’s great grandson, inaugurated the madraseh (college) of Isfahan – whither he had moved the Safavid capital from Qazvin in the North – to rival the seminaries of Qom, Mashhad and Najaf and augment the already vibrant free-market competition that characterized Shiʿite learning. The theosophical “School of Isfahan,” starring the aforementioned Mir Damad and the student who eventually outshined him (and all other Islamic Neoplatonists), Mulla

 Houchang Chehabi, Culture Wars and Dual Society in Iran (Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History, 2018), p. 58.  The Biḥār is in Arabic, so perhaps it is not right to say that it gave “many” Iranian “laypeople” access to all of that material. The extent of Shiʿism’s popular penetration at this early stage is debatable: Andrew Newman suggests that due to Safavid Shiʿism’s profound internal tensions it lay “less heavily on the populace than later Persian and most Western secondary sources would have it” (Newman, Safavid Iran, 123 – 4).  Kāshānī and al-Ḥurr al-ʿĀmilī were self-proclaimed Akhbārīs; al-Majlisī – though his father was also a dyed-in-the-wool Akhbārī – is harder to pin down.  See Jean Calmard, “Muharram Ceremonies and Diplomacy (A Preliminary Study),” in Bosworth and Hillebrand (eds.), Qajar Iran, pp. 213 – 228.  Andrew Newman, Safavid Iran (London, I. B. Taris, 2006), p. 36. This is indicative of the type of millenarianism that was on its way out at the time, to be replaced by the more sober, this-worldly Shiʿism of the mojtaheds.

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Sadra, flourished there side-by-side with the more terrestrial juristic curricula.³⁹ Under Abbas, Shaykh Bahāʾī (Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī, d. 1621, whose nisba betrays his Iraqi provenance)⁴⁰ composed the Jameʿ-e Abbasi, a relatively accessible compendium of law and ritual in the Persian language (the works of fiqh, and of most other Islamic sciences, penned by Iranian scholars had traditionally been written in Arabic).⁴¹ In future not a few mujtahidūn who, in order to attain to the status of Grand Ayatollah or “Source of Emulation” (see below), were required to pen a handbook of law (Arab. risāla, Pers. Resaleh), made do with a commentary on Shaykh Bahāʾī’s Jameʿ. Incessant succession struggles after Abbas (d. 1629), as well as the increased lethargy and debauchery of rulers raised in the harem, contributed to the descent into chaos and eventual demise of the Safavids (1722 CE). But even under this dynasty’s later, less effective rulers, both “secular” and religious culture continued to flourish. The ulama during this period began coalescing into what would ultimately become a quasi-consolidated, anti-establishment establishment. The intra-clerical conflict between the Akhbārī and Uṣūlī camps of Shiʿi jurisprudence, having simmered in one form or another for centuries, sharpened and intensified, precipitating its final and fateful resolution by the end of the eighteenth century (see below). The long reign of the Safavids, in short, was formative in a great many ways for modern and, indeed, even revolutionary Iran. Once this dynasty left the stage, the Shiʿi ulama were simultaneously orphaned and manumitted, as we shall discuss in a moment. A mostly miserable interregnum of Afghan invasions, economic deterioration, mass starvation and civil war ensued following the Safavid collapse and throughout most of the remaining eighteenth century, briefly relieved (if that is the word) by the comet-like career of “Iran’s Napoleon,” Nader Shah Afshar (ruled 1736 – 1747). This qizilbash-born, self-styled “Son of the Sword” temporarily regained for

 The designation “School of Isfahan” was coined by the scholars Henry Corbin and Seyyid Hossein Nasr (both of whom studied with Allamah Tabatabaʾi). Some have called into question the use of the term “school” here, given the often-polemical relationship between the various exponents involved and especially between Mir Mohammad Baqer-e Esterabadi (Mir Damad) and his pupil Sadr al-Dīn Muhammad Shirazi (Mulla Sadra). See also Andrew Newman, “Towards a Reconsideration of the Isfahan School of Philosophy: Shaykh Bahaʾi and the Role of the Safawid ʻUlama,” Studia Iranica, 15, 2 (1986).  Nisba is Arabic for an adjective indicating one’s place of origin. We harp on the issue of provenance for good reason. The “transnational” nature of the clerical class under the Safavids is extremely important for future trends, including the clash with Iranian nationalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as we shall see.  This was less true during much of the period of pre-Safavid Turkish domination, when many texts were written in Persian.

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Iran the territories of Iraq and Afghanistan; made off with Delhi’s famed Peacock Throne and the incomparable Kuh-e Nur (“Mountain of Light”) diamond;⁴² “adorned” the gates of cities that had resisted him with giant conical towers of skulls (kalleh menar); and tried (and of course failed) to re-unite Shiʿism and Sunnism,⁴³ leading to his virtual canonization by later anti-clerical nationalists down to the present day.⁴⁴ He was, unsurprisingly, assassinated by his own troops. A point of light in this dark period was the relatively peaceful and efficient reign of Karim Khan Zand (ruled from Isfahan, 1751– 1779). Kareem Khan was a Lur⁴⁵ from the South-West who had been transferred to the opposite corner of Iran (Khorasan) by Nader Shah to fight the Afghans. Returning to his homeland after the conqueror’s death, he allied with other tribal leaders to reduce much of the country. Setting up a Safavid puppet, he chose Shiraz as his capital. He made use of a combination of the South-Persian monarchical tradition (Luristan adjoins Pars) and the North-Eastern Shahnameh tradition to offset the Northern Turkish tradition relied upon by the Safavids before him (and the Qajars after him). He is thus perceived, even more so than Nader (who was, after all, a qizilbash Turk), as a forerunner of modern Iranian nationalism. Still, he is remembered more than anything for his humility. Refusing the title of Shah, he called himself vakil al-raʿaya (free translation: “servant of the people”). On his gravestone was written simply: Ay, vai, kareem khan mord – “Oh, woe, Kareem Khan is dead.”⁴⁶

 This diamond, one of many extraordinary jewels plundered by Nader on the Delhi campaign, supposedly received its name when Nader saw it for the first time and exclaimed “A mountain of light (kuh-e nur)!” After Nader’s assassination it passed into the hands of Afghans and thence back to Sikh rulers in Northern India, finally ending up – like so many other Eastern treasures – in Great Britain, where it occupies a place of honor among the crown jewels.  Nader may have been motivated to pursue this project by a desire to reconcile the rival religious elements of his army, which was composed of both Sunnis and Shiʿis. Like the Safavid founder Esmaʿil before him, he dealt ruthlessly with those who opposed his project of religious reformation, executing Shiʿi scholars who stood in his way.  He was Reza Shah’s “great hero” (Milani, The Shah, p. 32).  Lurs live in South-West Iran – today they number approximately five million – and speak an Iranian dialect which seems to be descended directly from Old or Middle Persian. They are apparently related to the Kurds. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s second wife, Queen Soraya Esfandiari-Bakhtiari, was the daughter of a Lur father and German mother.  Almost two decades later the founder of the Qajar dynasty, Aqa Muhammad Shah, who bore a grudge against the Zands (he had been their hostage in Tehran for many years), supposedly had Kareem Khan’s bones dug up and reburied under his own palace steps in Tehran. His successor, Fath ʿAli Shah, may have had the remains transferred to Najaf and buried with honors. Other versions of the story have Reza Shah Pahlavi disinterring the bones from under those Golestan Palace steps and having them sent to the Emamzade-ye Zayd shrine in Tehran. Still others have them somehow returned to Shiraz.

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In 1796 one Aqa Mohammad Khan, who had been castrated in his youth by Nader Shah’s nephew,⁴⁷ led his Turkic tribal troops on a journey of (exceptionally sanguinary) conquest throughout the country and founded the Qajar dynasty, which held onto power until the turn of the twentieth century.⁴⁸ The capital was moved from Shiraz to Tehran: yet another swing of the North-Turkish/South-Persian cultural-geographical pendulum. There was also a re-orientation in the sphere of international relations, due to the metastasizing imperialism of Europe and Russia. As Abbas Amanat puts it, under the Qajars “the east-west two frontier Iran of the Safavid and post-Safavid eras [in which wars were constantly fought against Afghans, Uzbeks and Ottomans] was substantially changed to a new north-south two frontier reality.”⁴⁹ Two wars with the Tzar, followed by two humiliating treaties (Golestan in 1813 and Torkamanchay in 1828), saw the permanent loss of the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia and Northern Azerbaijan). The second half of the nineteenth century was marked by the increasing encroachment of Russia (as always seeking warm water ports) into Iran’s Northern hemisphere and of Great Britain (drawn by the desire to protect the India route) into Iran’s Southern Hemisphere. Aqa Muhammad Shah died a year after his conquest of the country, and his nephew Fath Ali assumed the throne and reigned for thirty-six years until his death in 1833. If Nader had been Iran’s Napoleon, Fath Ali Shah was its Louis XIV: bedecked in the finest silken robes, wearing his jewel encrusted “Kiyanid” crown and surrounded by glittering pomp and ostentation, he was the hub of an elaborate court protocol involving scores of page boys, guards, jesters, cooks, butlers, musicians, singing girls and attendants of every sort. He hunted, palace hopped, posed for portraits and even had his own giant rock-relief chiseled, Sassanian style, onto the face of a cliff not far from Tehran.⁵⁰ Like le Roi Soleil he sat on

 The title “Aqa” in his name, Turkish in origin, can be spelled two ways, one signifying “Lord” or “Master,” the other meaning “castrato” or “eunuch.” In Persian pronunciation they sound more or less the same.  For probing studies of aspects of the Qajar period recourse may be had to the classic volume Qajar Iran edited by Edmund Bosworth and Carole Hillebrand (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983); Religion and Society in Qajar Iran edited by Robert Gleave (London: Routledge, 2004); and now the ambitious and thorough analysis in chapters four and five of Abbas Amanat’s sweeping Iran: A Modern History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).  Amanat, Iran, p. 179.  Amanat, Iran, p. 186. The Kiyanid crown and the Cheshmeh ʿAli relief of Fath ʿAli fighting a lion reflect the rising Qajar interest in “Iranianism” (iraniyyat), as opposed to the Turko-Mongol or Muslim-Shiʿi tradition (even though neither the former nor the latter was neglected).

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a “Sun Throne” (takht-e khorshid), ⁵¹ and like him – who was simultaneously the Rex Catholicissimus – Fath Ali Shah compensated for all the revelry and grandiloquence with a strong patronage of the Shiʿite seminaries. This super-procreant rivaled Solomon with his nearly one thousand wives and consorts, upon whom he fathered over one hundred children, many of whom were themselves quite prolific (“Every region,” went a plaint of the time, “is infested with camels, fleas and royal princes [shahzade-ha]”).⁵² The most eminent of these offspring, governor of Azerbaijan and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces Abbas Mirza – generally esteemed in historical retrospect despite the disastrous outcome of his battles with Russia – died just before his father, and his own son Muhammad was crowned in 1834.⁵³ Muhammad Shah’s decade-and-a-half-long rule saw a slew of campaigns to quell provincial rebellions; a failed siege of Herat (in which the burgeoning Russian and British influence at court and in the country at large was rather flagrantly on display); political murder and centralization achieved through marginalization of the aristocracy (Muhammad Shah’s mystical guide and then prime minister, Haji Mirza Aqasi, was nicknamed by his detractors hadim al-anjab or “destroyer of the nobles”)⁵⁴; raging cholera and other forms of plague that significantly depleted

 The Sun Throne was reputedly constructed for Fath ʿAli Shah using parts and precious stones from the original Peacock Throne that Nader Shah had brought back from Delhi, but this cannot be verified. Later, the Sun Throne was renamed the Peacock Throne, either because of this claim or because it was used during the marriage ceremony to an especially beloved wife, Tavus (peacock).  Abbas Amanat, Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Qajar and the Iranian Monarchy, 1831 – 1896 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), Introduction. Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 15. Fath ʿAli reputedly had almost seven hundred grandchildren. When the British were toying with the idea of bringing back the Qajar dynasty after  Abbas Mirza had been nominated to succeed his father by his grandfather, Aqa Mohammad Khan, and since he was not the first-born but rather the fourth in line, this nomination caused much tension. Both wars with Russia were partially instigated by the Iranian ulama, against the better instincts of the military and political establishment (we say “partially” because the influence in this matter between the Tehran and Tabriz courts, on the one hand, and the clerics in Iraq and Iran, on the other, was two-way and complex. For an excellent discussion of the “chicken and eggness” of the events leading up to both conflicts, see Algar, Religion and State, pp. 82– 99). The ability of the mojtaheds to pressure king and prince (Abbas Mirza) into embarking on these ill-fated jihads – even if the pressure was in some cases initiated by the latter and only then taken up with a passion by the former – demonstrates that the extent of their influence had not waned since Safavid times. The difference was, perhaps, that under the Safavids this influence was used at least to a large extent in support of the monarchy, whereas under the Qajars the bifurcation and even opposition between clergy and court began to emerge.  Amanat, Iran, p. 221. The fact that Muhammad Shah had a mystical guide points up another aspect of his regime which will be noted momentarily: his conflict with the Shiʿite ulama.

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(and depressed the mood of ) the populace⁵⁵; and the rise of the millennial Shaykhi/ Babi heresy, which ultimately produced the Bahaʾi religion. Muhammad Shah died in 1848 and was replaced by his only surviving son, Naser al-Din, who ruled Iran for close to half a century. Together with his exceptionally capable but short-lived vizier, Amir-e Kabir (murdered by his own master in 1852), Naser al-Din Shah brought comparative stability to the country and certain improvements to the administrative apparatus, and began to open the country up to Western influence, both by importing Austrians and Prussians to teach in the newly founded Polytechnic College and by sending young Iranians to study in Europe.⁵⁶ Employing a strategy that was later dubbed “positive equilibrium” (tavazon-e mosbat), this monarch kept his realm together, and foreign powers at bay, by giving all comers a piece of the Persian pie and relying on each to defend Iran’s integrity against the other (the Pahlavis, Mohammad-e Mosaddeq and the Khomeinists all later decried this “cringing” policy – Mosaddeq said that it resembled someone trying to balance his amputated left hand by chopping off his right – and sought to replace it with one of “negative equilibrium” [tavazon-e manfi]. While the former regime’s quest to fulfill this aspiration was forestalled by increasing reliance on the U. S. after the Second World War, the latter regime has often come close to genuinely realizing it. A famous slogan of the Islamic Revolution was na sharqi, na gharbi, jomhuri-ye eslami – “No to [alignment with] the West, no to [alignment with] the East: [only] the Islamic Republic!”⁵⁷ Islamic Republican Party banners attacked China and the Soviet Union along with Britain and the United States. Ayatollah Khomeini famously told Yasir Arafat: “The Shah leaned on America, England, China and Israel. But this is weakness. The only support to lean on is God”).⁵⁸

 Various plague epidemics were evidently exacerbated – were spread far and wide – by means of pilgrimages to Iraq and cross-border journeys for the sake of burial at Najaf. Then as now (under the shadow of the Corona virus), anti-religious and reformist circles made use of this phenomenon in their polemics.  See Ehsan Yarshater, “Observations on Naser al-Din Shah” in Bosworth and Hillebrand, Qajar Iran, pp. 3 – 13.  This slogan itself is a partial paraphrase of Qurʾan 24: 35: “The light of Allah…is like a lamp within glass like a pearly white star, lit by oil of the blessed olive tree, neither Eastern nor Western (lā sharqiyya wa lā gharbiyya)…” Another popular version of the slogan was “Independence, Freedom, an Islamic Republic!” (esteqlal, adi, jomhuri-ye Eslami). Another way to look at the matter is that by leaning increasingly on the Americans, Mohammad Reza Shah slowly undid the tavazzon-e mothbat policy of Ahmad Qavam and his ilk. Still, in the late 1960s the king felt confident enough to play the Soviet card in order to squeeze more unconditional support from the U. S. government.  Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, “Protocol of Meeting with Yasir Arafat,” 28 Bahman, 1357 (= 1979), in Sahife-ye Nur (“Scroll of Light,” the collected writings and speeches of Imam Khomeini, also

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Naser al-Din was also a spendthrift who racked up huge foreign debts in order to finance his extravagant court life and foreign travels, including the first visit to Europe by a reigning Iranian monarch since Xerxes.⁵⁹ Worse yet, he and his ministers were regularly bribed into parceling out entire branches of the country’s economy to European governments and private concerns in the form of emtiyazat or “concessions.” One of these, the Reuter Concession of 1872, granted the GermanBritish-Jewish-Christian entrepreneur Julius von Reuter monopolies stretching decades into the future over nearly every significant branch of the Iranian economy, from mines to industry, from transportation to textiles, from customs to banks. British arch-imperialist Lord George Nathanial Curzon, no slouch himself when it came to exploiting the peoples of the East, called this contract “The most complete and extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has probably ever been dreamed of, much less accomplished, in human history.”⁶⁰ President of France Adolphe Thiers commented that the contract “left nothing to the Shah except the atmosphere.”⁶¹ The agreement made Naser al-Din a national and international laughing-stock, and was cancelled within the year (Reuter managed the salvage the rights to found the Imperial Bank of Persia). Another concession, the Tobacco Regie of 1891 that granted first a British subject and then the British government a monopoly over the production, sale and export of tobacco throughout Iran for the following half century, stimulated the energetic reformer and ubiquitous anti-imperialist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani⁶² to ac-

known as Sahife-ye Emam [Tehran: Moʾassese-ye tanzim va nashr-e athar-e Emam Khomeini, 4th edition 1385 (= 2007)]), vol. 6, p. 180. Mehdi-ye Bazargan, after meeting Khomeini at Neauphle-leChateau, was “struck dumb” by his “absolute refusal to take any account of the existence or influence of the United States” (Buchan, Days of God, p. 233). Obviously, the question of just how independent the Islamic Republic is or has been at any stage of its existence is an extremely complex one (after all, no state is, or ever has been, fully independent). The particularly invasive economic agreement with China in the summer of 2020 has already been called “a new Reuters concession” by domestic critics, but at least in the short run seems to have strengthened Iran’s hand.  Naser al-Din would visit Europe three times all told.  George Nathanial Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1892), vol. 1, p. 480.  Cited in Buchan, Days of God, p. 66. What was perceived as this unprecedented sell-off of national resources, coupled with the fact that de Reuter was born Israel Be’er Jehosaphat, served the cause of Iranian Shiʿite clerics, several of whom protested vociferously against this concession.  al-Afghani, also known as al-Asadobadi, was almost certainly an Iranian Shiʿite and not an Afghan Sunni as he himself claimed. Jamal al-Din was a complex, fascinating personality. Though considered a hero in many Islamist circles today, including those currently in charge of Iran, for his forceful stance against the West, he was at the same time in many ways a freethinker. The best analysis of his thought – and review of the evidence concerning his true identity – remains

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tion, and he in his turn encouraged the Shiʿite jurists and heads of seminaries in Iran and Iraq to oppose this humiliating sell-off of national resources. These last, and especially Source of Emulation Mirza Hasan-e Shirazi (d. 1895), took up the gauntlet and initiated the spectacularly successful Tobacco Boycott (tahrim-e tonbako) that forced the cancellation of the concession.⁶³ Homa Katouzian notes that this was the first time that the arbitrary state had given in to a public demand rather than either suppressing it or being overthrown violently. It was the nearest thing to the European practice of politics perhaps that had ever been experienced in Iranian history.⁶⁴

The Tobacco Boycott has also often been described – albeit almost invariably with post-1979 hindsight – as the first modern muscle-flexing exercise on the part of the Shiʿite clerical class (though one could no less plausibly push the initial dress rehearsal for an ulama-led uprising as far back as the Griboedov Incident of 1829 – in which some seventy Russian diplomats and hangers-on were massacred on the strength of a fatwa or religio-legal decision issued by the Tehrani mojtahed Mirza Masih⁶⁵ – or even to the resistance to Safavid Shah Esmaʿil II’s pro-Sunni policies led by “Seal of the Mujtahids” Seyyed Karaki in 1576).⁶⁶

that of Nikki Keddie in An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamal al-Din “al-Afghani” (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983).  There is an ongoing debate concerning the question whether it was Shirazi himself who issued the fatwa, and if he did, whether it was at his own initiative, in response to the adjuration of alAfghani, or in confirmation of previous fatāwā already issued by some of his Iranian clerical colleagues.  Homa Katouzian, Iran: Politics, History and Literature (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 38. The irony of the Tobacco Boycott being seen as both the first step toward democracy and the first step toward theocracy is symbolic of a tension in Iranian political ideology that remains unresolved until the present day.  See Amanat, Iran, pp. 215 – 217. It is important to balance notions of increasing clerical defiance with the reality of what remained, for the most part, a tradition of acquiescence in the face of temporal authority. Amanat writes: “Such interventions [against the state to protect the sharīʿa] were far less common and far more anecdotal than some modern apologists for the authority of the ulama versus the Qajar state would like us to believe” (Amanat, Iran, p. 205). Still, an American envoy to Naser al-Din’s court could write, no albeit hyperbolically, that “the most senior mojtahed in Tehran was so powerful…that with one word he could hurl down the Shah” (Abrahamian, History, p. 16).  See Devin J. Stewart, “Islamic Juridical Hierarchies and the Office of Marjiʿ al-Taqlīd,” in Clarke, Shiʿite Heritage, p. 150. Local resistance against Ottoman-Western inspired Roshdiyeh schools at the turn of the century, involving destruction of the physical classrooms and deportation of the teachers, was lead by Shaykh Mohammad Taqi-ye Najafi (Aqa Najafi – see Amanat, Iran, p. 324).

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Such muscle-flexing was made possible, among other factors, by significant shifts in Shiʿite jurisprudential theory and the structure of spiritual leadership at the outset of the Qajar period. Unlike the Safavids, the Qajar kings did not base their legitimacy on descent from, or representation of, the Shiʿite imams. Instead, they put themselves forward as the guardians of Shiʿism, and the maintenance of this pretension required the cooperation and approval of the ulama. The relationship of sacerdotum to imperium under this dynasty was sufficiently complex that one doyen of the discipline can state that “the tension between the hierocracy and the state abated during the long reign of the subsequent monarch, Nasir al-Din Shah,” while another can state: “It was during the long reign of Naser al-Din Shah that this hostility [between the ulama and the sovereign], with all its ramifications, began to cast a constant shadow over the affairs of Iran” – and they can both be right.⁶⁷ On the one hand the clerics offered up some of the most impressive religio-legal endorsements for the monarchy devised to date. On the other, we read that when the esteemed (and fabulously wealthy) jurist Sayyid Muhammad Baqir Shafti (d. 1844) approached the retinue of Muhammad Shah for an official visit, he ordered his mujawwid (cantor) to recite aloud the Qurʿanic verse: “We sent a Prophet to the Pharaoh, but the Pharaoh rebelled against the Prophet.”⁶⁸ We also read that the above-mentioned Mirza Hasan-e Shirazi, even before issuing his famous Tobacco fatwa, “categorically refused to welcome [Naser alDin Shah] in public, or to visit him as a mark of respect.”⁶⁹ This was a time of seminal transformations and significant consolidations for the Shiʿite scholarly community. The most momentous of these involved what might be viewed as the final installment in an age-old internal Shiʿite struggle between opposing conceptions of the law, the role of the jurist and the leadership of the community.

Room to Maneuver It is hard to pin-point a terminus a quo for the argument between a school of thought that would become known as the Akhbāriyya – that held that legal scholarship must be based solely on an unmediated consultation with classical sacred texts, and that Shiʿites must remain passive until the reappearance of the Hidden

 The first quote is from Said Amir Arjomand, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Order and Societal Change in Shiʿite Iran from the Beginning to 1890 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), p. 239. The second is from Hamid Algar, Religion and State in Iran: The Role of the Ulama in the Qajar Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 258.  Arjomand, Shadow of God, p. 238.  Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, p. 83.

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Imam – and its counterweight that would become known as the Uṣūliyya – that held that creative intellectual effort on the part of qualified ulama in order to deduce the law was essential, and that Shiʿites must be activist despite the Imam’s absence.⁷⁰ This dispute extended back to early medieval times, though the camps were not really defined by name until later.⁷¹ The conflict’s terminus ad

 The founder of Akhbārism as such is usually identified as Muḥammad Amīn al-Astarābādī (d. 1627 CE), but the approach he represented is in many ways much older. Its origins go back, as we noted above and shall see in greater detail later on, to the dialectic between more textually oriented scholars (such as al-Kulaynī) and more rationally oriented scholars (such as al-Ṭūsī) in the immediate post-imamic period (tenth century CE). The same may be said of Uṣūlism (Meir Litvak, for one, speaks of the “reinstatement” of Uṣūlism in the late eighteenth century [Shiʿi Scholars, p. 5], just as he describes the “revitalization” of Akhbārism in the early seventeenth [Shiʿi Scholars, p. 14]. Later on in the same work, however, Litvak overgeneralizes momentarily, stating that “The dominant legal school in Imami-Twelver Shiʿism since the fifth/eleventh century has been the Uṣūliyya” [Shiʿi Scholars, p. 11], and issues a corrective three pages later: “Akhbārism became the dominant school in the [Iraqi] shrine cities since the 1730s,” and in Iran during the same period “Uṣūlism was taught only in a few provincial towns”). Just to make the terminology even more confusing, the tendency that would later acquire the designation Akhbārism began as a predilection for recording and compiling hadiths that had been jotted down by the students of the various imams in notebooks that were known as uṣūl (sing. aṣl). The usual number given for these notebooks is four hundred (they themselves were reportedly compiled from shorter records of aḥādīth known by various names, e. g. juzʾ, nuṣkha, ṣaḥīfa and the same aṣl (Modarressi, Tradition, p. xiv; on the larger uṣūl see Etan Kohlberg, “al-Uṣūl al-Arbaʿumiʾa,” in Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 10 (1987). Yann Richard’s comparison of Akhbārīs to Protestants and Uṣūlīs to Catholics (Shiʿite Islam, pp. 68 – 69) is rough but instructive.  An outlook that in many ways resembles what would later become Akhbārism was designated by some early Shiʿite luminaries, such as al-Ṭūsī, as al-muqallida (“the Imitators”). We do possess some medieval sources that refer to these adversarial tendencies by what would later become their well-known names, the earliest evidently being the famous heresiography (al-Milal wa lniḥal) of Tāj al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Shahrastānī (d. 1158 CE), where the Akhbāriyya are interestingly contraposed to the Kalāmiyya (the theologians). To put a finer point on the matter, it might be said that among the speculative sciences, ʿerfan (gnosis) : Akhbārism : : kalām : Uṣūlism. The type of rational argumentation that characterizes kalām is also essential for ijtihād, whereas intuitive knowledge [mukashafa] – as Shaykh Ahmad Ahsaʾi (among others) asserted – is a grace of the imams, who were the sole authorities in the eyes of Akhbārīs. But nothing is so neat, inter alia because Uṣūlī scholar-jurists have exhibited an increasingly hostile attitude toward philosophy since their victory over Akhbārism. Some, like Vahed-e Behbehani’s disciple Muhammad Mahdi Bahr alUlum (d. 1798), endeavored to bridge the gap with an epistemological approach that combined intuitive knowledge (kashf ) with reasoning (ʿaql). Note, as well, that the Uṣūlīs would eventually divide the Shiʿa into mujtahidūn (“strivers,” i. e., scholar-jurists who were entitled to employ their independent reasoning) and muqallidūn (“imitators,” i. e., the remainder of the believers who must comply with the rulings of the mujtahidūn). The Akhbārīs, on the other hand, would hold that all Shiʿites must be “imitators” – of the imams, and only of the imams – and outlaw “striving” completely.

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quem, however – which saw the Uṣūlī camp emerge victorious – is more easily identified, as we shall see momentarily. The increase in the power of the mojtaheds – scholars learned enough to engage in ijtihād, the bringing to bear of independent reasoning on religio-legal sources – had proceeded apace since important Arab Shiʿite jurists were enticed to immigrate to Iran by the early Safavids sovereigns. The students of these new arrivals, and their students’ students, increasingly dominated not just the religious but even the political scene, as we noted above. As its power grew, however, the clerical class simultaneously saw itself rent in twain by a particularly fierce eruption of the hoary Akhbārī-Uṣūlī debate, ignited by one Muḥammad Amīn al-Astarābādī (d. 1627). Astarābādī, who had begun his scholarly career as a razorsharp mujtahid who obtained his ijāza (“permission [to teach]”) from the august likes of al-Shahīd al-Thānī (the “Second Martyr”), was turned around – as the founder of Saudi “Wahhabism” Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb would be more than a century-and-a-half later – by years spent in the holy cities of the Arabian Ḥijāz poring over both Shiʿi and Sunni hadith collections. In his celebrated (and execrated) al-Fawāʾid al-madaniyya (“Medinan Lessons”), he launched a vigorous attack on the ijtihād (use of independent reasoning in jurisprudence) of the mujtahidūn and demanded a return to exclusive reliance on hadiths or akhbār ascribed to the infallible imams.⁷² When no information could be found in such exempla regarding a given legal question, the jurist, argued Astarābādī, must err on the side of caution (iḥtiyāṭ): when in doubt, don’t – not exactly a recipe for boldness or progressivism. The book’s appearance caused a furor in the Iraqi shrine cities and other howzeh circles, its arguments garnering as much support as they provoked opposition.⁷³ Conflict flared, and physical violence between the two camps was

 The full name of this work is al-Fawāʾid al-madaniyya fi l-raddi ʿala l-qāʾili bi-l-ijtihādi wa l-taqlīd fi l-aḥkāmi l-ilāhiyya (“Medinan Lessons concerning the Rebuttal of Those who Advocate for Independent Reasoning [on the part of the scholar-jurists] and Imitation [of those scholar-jurists’ rulings on the part of the masses] in God’s Law”). In particular, Astarābādī declared the hadith reports found in the “Four Hundred Sources” (al-uṣūl al-arbaʿu miʾa) – the notebooks in which disciples of the imams had jotted down their masters’ traditions (most no longer extant by Astarābādī’s time) – as well as the hadiths recorded in the “Four Books” (al-Kutub al-arbaʿa) of al-Kulaynī, Ibn Bābawayh and al-Ṭūsī, to be the sole acceptable sources of Islamic law. His legitimation of the material in al-Ṭūsī’s two works – save that which the compiler himself had declared “weak” – is somewhat ironic, since al-Ṭūsī is considered the chief restorer, if not founder, of the “rational” approach (i. e., proto-Uṣūlism) in Shiʿite theology and jurisprudence.  According to Muḥammad Bāqir al-Majlisī’s father, “most of the scholars of Najaf, Karbala and Samarra approved of [Astarābādī’s] approach and returned to [reliance upon] traditions” (Muḥammad Taqī al-Majlisī – known as “the first Majlisī” – cited in al-Mirza Muhammad Baqir al-Musawi

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not unheard of. Matters came to such a head that at least one Akhbārī scholar reputedly considered his Uṣūlī antagonists najis (ritually impure and contaminating, like infidels) and ruled that books written by clerics of that persuasion could be carried only with the help of a handkerchief.⁷⁴ Some Uṣūlī mujtahids even outlawed prayer behind Akhbārī imams (prayer leaders).⁷⁵ “Can any thinking person believe,” asked the Akhbārī scholar Seyyid Neʿmatollah Jazayeri rhetorically, [T]hat on the Day of Resurrection when one of God’s servants will be brought forward and asked, “How did you act?” And he answers, “I acted according to the injunctions of the infallible [imams], and whenever I found no statement by one of the infallibles concerning a particular issue, I exercised caution (iḥtiyāṭ)” – can anyone imagine that such a person would be taken and thrown into the fires of hell, while at the same time a fellow who does not feel obligated to the words of the imams, indeed, does not even pay them any mind and throws out any hadith that he doesn’t like on the flimsiest of pretexts (har hadisi beh yek bahane tard mikonad) would be sent straight to heaven!? Impossible!!⁷⁶

While Astarābādī’s new-found neo-conservative convictions and boundless polemical energy were certainly a major factor in the resurgence of this intellectual-ideological contest, the fact that Shiʿite ulama were fast climbing toward the pinnacle of power in a Shiʿite state – a dramatic first not just in Shiʿite but in Islamic history – no doubt set the stage and furnished an added impetus: the stakes were now quite high. This was no longer a purely theoretical quarrel engaged in by cloistered and largely hapless divines. Doctrine now mattered more than ever, and would exert a considerable influence on state and social policy. Still, with all that, the Uṣūlī-

al-Khwansari al-Isbahani, Rawḍāt al-jannāt fī aḥwāl al-ʿulamāʾi wa l-sādāt [Tehran: Naser-e Khosroe, n.d.], vol. 8, p. 48).  Moojan Momen, “Usuli, Akhbari, Shaykhi, Babi: The Tribulations of a Qazvin Family,” Iranian Studies, vol. 36, no. 3 (Sep. 2003), p. 318. See also the introduction to Vahed-e Bebehani’s Fawaʾid al-Haʾiriyyin: “Inna l-ṭāliba l-dīnī fī karbalāʾa aṣbaḥa yujāhiru bi-taṭarrufihi wa yughālī wa lā yaḥmilu muʿallafāti l-ʿulamāʾi l-uṣūliyyīna illā bi-mindīlin khashyatan an tanjusa yaduhu min mulāmasātin ḥattā jildahā….” Behbehani was forced to practice taqiyya when he first began to disseminate Uṣūlī ideas (Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, p. 15). Despite what may appear to be evidence of later Qajar-era retrojection of the Akhbārī-Uṣūlī conflict to the Safavid period – e. g., the lack of reference to this conflict in the relevant ṭabaqāt literature – Robert Gleave concludes that Astarābādī was indeed the reinvigorator, if not the founder, of seventeenth century militant Akhbārism (Robert Gleave, Scripturalist Islam: The History and Doctrines of the Akhbari-Shiʿi School [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007], pp. 41– 44).  It is not unheard of for modern-day and even post-revolutionary Shiʿite scholars – including Ayatollah Motahhari – to compare Akhbārīs unfavorably with Sunnis.  Cited as a foil by Morteza Ansari in Farāʾid al-uṣūl, cited in turn by Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 20, p. 171. Motahhari adduces Ansari’s response, as well, and reserves some of his own fiercest denunciations for Akhbārism.

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Akhbārī schism under the Savafids and even afterward was never characterized by clear and unmovable battle lines. Aspects of the positions attributed to each camp could be found in the works penned by their purported antagonists: Uṣūlīs often relied on traditions as the launch points and corroborative texts of their arguments; Akhbārīs were not always mere literalists who refused to employ their powers of reason.⁷⁷ At least one senior Uṣūlī mujtahid – no less an authority than “Universal Focus of Emulation” Ayatollah Hasan-e Najafi (d. 1850) – came out against Friday prayers in public while the imam was in abeyance.⁷⁸ Confusion reigns: were the Akhbārīs more anti-Sunni than the Uṣūlīs, given the former’s retention of a plethora of “extreme” parochial hadith reports as opposed to the more rational and therefore more universal and ecumenical attitude of the Uṣūlīs? Or were the Uṣūlīs more anti-Sunni, given their fierce opposition to what they perceived (and still perceive) as the majority Muslim sect’s comparative literalism and conservatism, whereas the Akhbārīs in many ways identified with Sunnism’s post-Shāfiʿī emphasis on imitation of precedent (taqlīd) and textual transmission (naql)?⁷⁹ Akhbārīs were so singularly focused on hadith that, unlike their Uṣūlī

 On one hand Akhbārīs could carry textual literalism and exclusive reliance on aḥādīth to extremes, e. g., the insistence by some of their exponents that the words “Ismaʿil testifies that there is no God but God…” be embroidered on all shrouds – even though the vast majority of those about to be interred in them do not bear that name – on the pretext that the sixth Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq commanded that those words adorn his own son’s shroud. Pointing out that this was because the imam’s son was in fact named Ismāʿīl elicited from these scholars accusations of “exercising the intellect” (such excess – it may be caricature – is reminiscent of anecdotes describing Muslims who carried the notion of Muḥammad as “Excellent Exemplar” [uswa ḥasana, qudwā ḥasana] too far, such as the Sufi Uways al-Qarnī, who reportedly pulled out two of his teeth because he heard that the Prophet had lost two teeth at the battle of Uḥud). On the other hand, Akhbārīs could compromise. Quite a few imamic hadiths, for instance, explicitly enjoin that the tip of one’s turban (taḥta l-ḥanak) must hang down beside one’s throat, one narration going so far as to affirm that “the difference between believers and pagans is wearing the tip of the turban below the chin” (al-farqu bayna l-muʾminīna wa l-mushrikīna l-talahhī). Still, several Akhbārī hadith commentators (shurrāḥ), such as al-Fayḍ al-Kāshānī, argued that since the underlying purpose of these hadiths had been to prevent the imitation of polytheists – the tip of whose turban was customarily tucked in on top of the head – and since there are no more such pagans against whom one must practice “deliberately antithetical behavior” (mukhālafa), then there is no problem with tucking up the tip. This is ijtihād with a capital “I”. (Today many Shiʿite turban-wearers let the tip hang down primarily during prayer).  Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, p. 69.  To add to the complication: Akhbārīs and proto-Akhbārīs had often accused mujtahids (i. e., Uṣūlīs and proto-Uṣūlīs) of adopting Sunni rationalist (i.e., Ḥanafite) positions (see below the discussion of Ayatollah Borujerdi). At the same time, Astarābādī himself, by his own admission, had derived inspiration from perusing Sunni as well as Shiʿi hadith collections. Meir Litvak notes that “[a] byproduct of the ascendancy of Uṣūlism was the lessening of tolerance within the ʻulamaʾ commu-

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nemeses, they occasionally had recourse to Sunni exempla; yet the acme of their influence (in the eighteenth Christian century) witnessed a sharpening of the divide between Shiʿism and Sunnism. Which camp may be seen as having harboured stronger supporters of the Iranian monarchy in general, and the Safavid state in particular: the Uṣūlīs because their activist attitude dovetailed with the needs of Shiʿism in power, or the Akhbārīs because their passivism made them more amenable to the authorities? Muḥammad Bāqir al-Majlisī (d. 1699), author, as we saw, of the most influential compendium of Shiʿite lore in the pre-modern period, epitomizes this confusion: though his work evinces not a few Akhbārī characteristics – premier among them his inclusion of myriad traditions that had long before been rejected by the more rationalist-leaning scholars of Shiʿism, as well as not a few borrowings from al-Astarābādī’s al-Fawāʾid al-madaniyya – he was claimed by both factions, and is quoted by today’s reigning Uṣūlīs without cease (some Islamic Republican television channels feature a strip of hadiths from Majlisī’s Biḥār al-anwār running across the bottom of the screen for hours on end).⁸⁰ After the disintegration of the Safavid state, the power of the increasingly influential clerical class was further augmented by a political development. One of the consequences of the chaos of the interregnum between the Safavid and Qajar dynasties, and of Nader Shah’s aforementioned “ecumenical” project to unite Islam’s two mutually hostile sects – perceived by many as more of an attempted Sunnization of Shiʿism⁸¹ – was the exodus of a large portion of the Iranian Shiʿi ulama to Ottoman-controlled Mesopotamia (Iraq). There, these refugee scholars congregated in the three “Sublime Thresholds” (Pers. ʿatabat-e ʿaliyat): Samarra, the site of the Twelfth Imam’s occultation a millennium earlier; Karbala, the final resting place of the Imam Ḥusayn’s body (though not his head); and especially Najaf, the site of ʿAlī’s grave.⁸² This latter location witnessed the establishment

nity toward heterodox ideas, as manifested by the church-like persecution of the Sufi, Shaykhi and Babi movements” (Shiʿi Scholars, p. 181). Hostility to heterodoxy in Shiʿite history, however, has generally gone hand in hand with a more moderate approach to Sunnism.  Ayatollah Khameneʾi, for one, praises Majlisī to the skies, although he advises preachers not to make use of his (Persian) works, because their contents do not speak to the present generation (Jehad-e farhangi, p. 136).  Ignaz Goldziher references material that includes the protocol of a synod convened by the great conqueror specifically for the purpose of rendering Shiʿite jurisprudence a “fifth school of Islamic law” (Ignaz Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law [trans. Andras and Ruth Hamori; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981]), p. 266. Whether Nader Shah was himself brought up as a Sunni or Shiʿi is debated.  Many of these scholars fled from the college of Isfahan, which had enjoyed a relative precedence since the time of the Safavid Shah Abbas. There are actually six “thresholds” – the burial

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by these self-exiled mujtahidūn of a sprawling seminary system on the foundations of the venerable local howzeh, a system that continued to grow even after the undoing of Nader Shah and the reinstatement of Shiʿism as the official state religion in Iran under the succeeding (Zand and Qajar) dynasties. Although the instability and insecurity engendered by the post-Safavid “exile” of the ulama to Iraq may have originally helped the cause of Akhbārism – and damaged the cause of the Uṣūlīs, who supported temporal Shiʿi rule even in the absence of the Hidden Imam – ultimately distance from the authority of a Shiʿi regime helped push Uṣūlism forward at the expense of Akhbārism: an independent clerical class required legal tools geared to facilitate at least some semblance of governing. At Karbala the distinguished Aqa Mohammad Baqer-e Behbehani (d. 1792) gathered around him a cadre of loyal students as well as some considerable local muscle, and overcame the Akhbāriyya, seemingly for good, both intellectually and physically (most of their representatives fled to India).⁸³ His militant Uṣūlism, explicated in polemical-juristic tracts like al-Ijtihād wa l-akhbār and al-Fawāʾid al-Ḥāʾiriyya,⁸⁴ was carried on after him, in Iran as well as in Iraq, by his many illustrious disciples (so many that he became known as ostad-e kol, “Teacher of All”).⁸⁵ Seen as the founder

shrines of six of the twelve Shiʿite Imams – in four cities, the fourth being Kadhimiyya, now a neighborhood of Baghdad. Speculation regarding the ultimate destination of the Imam Ḥusayn’s head after its exhibition and abusal by the Umayyad caliph Yazīd in Damascus has involved a goodly number of locations (known as maqāmātu raʾsi l-Ḥusayn) including Medina, Cairo, Aleppo, Merv in Iran and Karbala itself, the latter representing the majority view today. One suggested site is currently located on the campus of Israel’s Barzilai Hospital in the Southern port city of Ashkelon (Asqalan), and has accordingly become an object of annual pilgrimage for a small number of Ismāʿīlī (Dawudi-Bohra) Shiʿa.  High ranking clergy during this period often retained, or relied on, bands of toughs known as “club-wielders” (chomaqdaran). Karbala remained the preeminent location for Shiʿi learning of the ʿAtabāt until the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman massacre of Shiʿites there, after which the center of gravity shifted to Najaf. Behbehani had evidently been an Akhbārī himself early on in his scholarly career, reverting to Uṣūlism after returning from Iraq to his Southern Iranian birthplace upon Nader Shah’s invasion (Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, p. 14).  Although Behbehani penned many works, the latter volume – as its title indicates – contains what are perhaps the author’s most aggressive and creative attacks on the revived Akhbārism of al-Astarābādī and his successors, and appears to have been most instrumental in obtaining for him the reputation of mujaddid or “renewer” in clerical circles.  Or: ustādhu l-kull fi l-kull, “the master of all in all subjects.” He was also known as Aqa, “Sir,” and his descendants down to the present day as Al-e Aqa. Many of Behbehani’s more illustrious students, such as Seyyed Mohammad Mehdi-ye Bahr al-ʿUlum and Jaʿfar Kashif al-Ghitaʾ, evidently started out as Akhbārīs, students of “moderate” Akhbārī scholar Shaykh Yusūf al-Baḥrānī, author of al-Ḥadāʾiq [“The Gardens”]. al-Baḥrānī was Behbehani’s chief rival at Karbala, who treated the latter with more respect than he was treated by him. Behbehani is said to have won these students over to his approach.

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of “Neo-Uṣūlism,” Behbehani was posthumously granted honorifics such as moʾasses (“founder”), mojadded (“renewer”) and vahed (“the One,” “the Unique” – thus he is best known as Vahed-e Behbehani. Related to this development, and more-or-less coterminous with it, was the gradual evolution of the concept of marjaʿ al-taqlīd or “Focus/Source of Emulation,” which recognized the right of certain highly learned and respected jurists from among the pool of mujtahidūn or ayatollahs (lit. “Signs of God,” itself a latterday neologism)⁸⁶ to issue legal decrees that must be respected by the masses of adherents to the faith (the so-called muqallidūn or “emulators”).⁸⁷ This set of developments represents the beginning of what Roy Mottahedeh referred to, at the outset of his incomparable The Mantle of the Prophet, as “an internal intellectual revolution that had passed unnoticed by all except a handful of legal specialists within the Shiʿa Muslim tradition.”⁸⁸

 Maceoin claims, basing himself on Calmard, that the title “Āyat Allah” was first used during the Constitutional Revolution (1905 – 11) – D. M. Maceoin, “Changes in Charismatic Authority in Qajar Shiʿism” in Bosworth and Hillebrand, Qajar Iran, p. 162 – but this requires further study, as there exist what appear to be near-contemporary references that apply the title at least as far back as nineteenth century senior clerics. Litvak states that Mirza Hosayn Khalili at the turn of the nineteenth century was the first to be styled “ayatollah” (Shiʿi Scholars, p. 98). Heinz Halm notes that the title was used as an honorific as early as the thirteenth Christian century, for al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī (Halm, Shiʿa Islam [Princeton: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 1997], p. 102). Marja-e taqlid is variously translated as “Focus of Imitation,” “Source of Emulation” or “Supreme Exemplar” (preferred by Litvak).  The marjaʿ; was also known by other designations, such as ʿallāma (“Most Learned [of the generation]”) or muqtaḍa l-ānām (“Source of Imitation of the People”). One has to take into account, when discussing the development of the institution of marja-e taqlid, the phenomenon of retrospective classification of eminent scholars as marājiʿ. On marjaʿiyya see A. K. S. Lambton, “A Reconsideration of the Position of the Marjaʿ al-Taqlid and the Religious Institution,” Studia Islamica 20 (1964). A nuance on muqallidūn is murīdūn, a term with Sufi overtones used primarily for clerical students of a revered sage. Not just between “foci” and their “imitators” but between the former and their clerical juniors a hierarchy of mutābaʿa (following the opinions of one’s seniors) was established. The development of the institution of marjaʿiyya was a process, but its most important purveyor was the great scholar-jurist Morteza Ansari (d. 1864) about whom more later.  Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 7. What Akhbārīs saw as the gradual transfer of the authority and prerogatives of the Shiʿite imams to the ulama proceeded through five stages or “five transgressions,” each presided over by an important scholar. Thus Shaykh al-Ṭāʾifa in the eleventh century CE delegated to the fuqahāʾ the right to disperse zakāt and khums taxes to the indigent as well as the right to hold Friday prayers in the absence of the occulted imam; Muḥaqqiq al-Ḥillī in the thirteenth century extended the authority of the ulama to meting out punishment (iqamat alḥudūd); Muḥaqqiq al-Karakī in the early sixteenth century CE accorded scholar-jurists the status of nuwwāb al-ʿāmm, general representatives of the Hidden Imam; his younger contemporary al-Shahīd al-Thānī decreed that religious taxes should be paid both through and, in many cases, to stu-

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The clerics reinforced their geographic-based independence (out of the Shah’s clutches in Ottoman Iraq)⁸⁹ with an economic component: the victory of uṣūl-ism over akhbār-ism allowed for the direct collection by a marjaʿ al-taqlīd or senior scholar from the Shiʿite populace of the khums tax, equivalent to one fifth of a family’s income after basic expenses have been deferred. This meant that the clergy would be less beholden to the monarchy for their sustenance and influence, and harbor a greater sense of loyalty to their lay “parishioners” – and to their students, whose “patronage” was essential to their rise in religio-intellectual rank – than to the Ottoman or Iranian state.⁹⁰ (A century-and-a-half later Ayatollah Khomeini would deploy the khums tax in order to argue that Shiʿism mandates an Islamic government: The sum total of the khums remitted by the merchants of the bazaar [market] of Baghdad alone would suffice not just for the needs of the sayyids [descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad] and the budgets of the religious seminaries, but for the upkeep of all the poor throughout the Islamic world – quite apart from the khums of the bazaars of Tehran, Istanbul, Cairo

dents and teachers of fiqh, thus paving the way for the economic independence of the clerical class; and Jaʿfar Kashif al-Ghitaʾ led the ulama of early nineteenth century Iran in declaring jihad against Russia, thus arrogating this right to (what were by now designated as) the Uṣūlī mujtahids. Presumably Ayatollah Khomeini would be seen as perpetrating the sixth “transgression” in this regard.  Meir Litvak, in his assiduously researched and highly informative Shiʿi Scholars of Nineteenth Century Iraq, disputes this conventional characterization of the Shiʿite ulama in the shrine cities as independent of the Iranian kings. He argues that the former needed the latter to offset pressure brought to bear upon them by the Ottoman-Sunni state and society in which they found themselves (see especially Chapter Six). Still, Litvak himself adduces throughout his book many examples of the ways in which those same Iraqi-based scholar-jurists maneuvered between, and even manipulated, the forces on both sides of the border in order to preserve and even enhance their power, independence and influence. On p. 17, he even states directly that “the failure of Nadir Shah and Karim Khan Zand to take over Iraq and the weakness of the Ottoman-Mamluk regime in Baghdad gave the ʿulamāʾ of the shrine cities sufficient latitude to build important centers of study without government interference.” Later he states that these Iraqi mujtahids were “deemed to be free from the intimate proximity to government circles in Iran” (p. 178). A century later, Ayatollah Khomeini would exploit to the utmost this same freedom from Pahlavi supervision during his exile in Iraq.  The question of the sources of clerical income and the economic independence of the ulama in modern Iran and elsewhere is far more complex than reflected in this single sentence. A good place to start is Hamid Algar, Religion and State in Iran, 1785 – 1906 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 11– 21. Meir Litvak writes: “The uniqueness of the community of learning in the [Shiʿite] shrine cities was largely due to the fact that it was founded by the ʿulamāʾ themselves to serve as a center of erudition and scholarship, rather than by rulers or by lay notables to serve political, administrative and social purposes. Consequently, in contrast to contemporary Sunni religious establishments, the community of learning in the shrine cities was independent of the rulers, and was much more oriented toward the lay Shiʿi constituency than toward the state” (Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, p. 1, see also Litvak, Shi’i Scholars, pp. 35 – 38).

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and the other cities. The provision of such a huge budget must obviously be for the purpose of forming a government and administering the Islamic lands. It was established with the aim of providing for the needs of the people, for public services relating to health, education, defense and economic development).⁹¹

Funded and free, the howzeh of Najaf in Iraq thus became the hub of Shiʿite learning during the latter half of the nineteenth Christian century, outshining its Iranian rivals, Isfahan and Qom (perhaps more than anything due to the immense contribution rendered by several generations of the “Kashef al-Ghita’” family of scholars).⁹² The balance only shifted in favor of the latter town when the Shiʿite ulama-led rebellion against the British occupation of Iraq was fiercely quashed in 1920, and many prominent mojtaheds made their way back to Iran.⁹³ Though Najaf remained important and experienced brief revivals, Qom regained its preeminent status in the Shiʿi world from that time down to the present day.

Into the Modern The last kings of the Qajar dynasty were relatively weak, and had to contend not only with the erosion of their power by Russia and Britain, but with a domestic movement opposing absolutism and advocating political participation known as “The Constitutional Revolution” (Pers. enqelab-e mashruteh, 1905 – 11). This groundswell, the culmination of a period of intellectual ferment known in retrospect as the “age of awakening” (ʿasr-e bidari), resulted in the establishment of a National Consultative Assembly (majles-e shuraʾye melli) that framed the much sought-after Fundamental Law (qanun-e esasi). The movement was supported, even led, by many ulama (religious scholars), in part because these had often functioned as  Ruhollah Khomeini, Guardianship of the Jurist (trans. Hamid Algar, Tehran: Institute for Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini’s Works, n.d.), p. 21. The khums or “one fifth” tax is levied on agricultural and commercial profits. In terms of the numbers, Khomeini would seem to be exaggerating here to make a point.  On Najaf as the nerve-center of region-wide Shiʿite learning see Chibli Mallat, The Renewal of Islamic Law: Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr, Najaf and the Shiʿi International (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). The line of fiercely Uṣūlī jurists known as the Kashif al-Ghitaʾ began with the eponymous Jaʿfar b. Khidr b. Yahya Kashif al-Ghitaʾ (d. 1812 CE, himself named after his book, Kashf al-Ghiṭāʾ, “Revealer of that which is Concealed,” a phenomenon common to famous Jewish scholars as well, e. g., the Tzemach Tzedek or Hafetz Hayim [“You shall know them by their fruits” (Matt. 7: 16)]). The family’s most famous twentieth century representative was Mohammad Hosayn Kashef al-Ghitaʾ (d. 1954).  See Laurence Louer, Shiʿism and Politics in the Middle East (trans. John King, London: Hurst and Co., 2008), chap. 1.

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protectors of the people from the despotic whims of the ruler.⁹⁴ Chief among these was Mirza Mohammad Hosayn-e Naʿini, who studied at Samarra under the abovementioned Mirza Hasan-e Shirazi, of Tobacco Boycott fame, and later at Najaf with the eminent jurist Mohammad Kazem-e Khorasani (who had himself been a student of Shirazi). Naʿini, known as constitutionalism’s preeminent clerical theoretician, exemplified a burgeoning trend toward appropriating modern Western ideas and institutions and clothing them in traditional Islamic garb. He argued that It is well known to those who have researched into such matters that the Christian nations prior to the Crusader Wars were utterly bereft of scientific knowledge, civilization and political order. This is due either to the fact that their religious systems (sharāʾiʿ) did not contain such, or to the fact that they corrupted (ḥarrafū) those religious systems. After this great event – the Crusades – took place, they attributed their defeat to their backwardness and ignorance, and they made the treatment of this illness – which is the underlying basis of all illnesses – the apple of their eye and their greatest goal, and they embarked upon this mission with much passion and enthusiasm. They borrowed the principles of Islam [to which they had been exposed during the Crusades] in the fields of civilization and politics from the Qurʿan, the traditions (al-sunna) and the speeches and positions of the Commander of the Faithful (i. e., the Nahj al-balāgha of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib – Z. M.) and the remaining infallibles (i.e., the Shiʿite imams – Z. M.). Their own history books admit openly that no mere human could have hatched such principles and ideas, and that all that Europeans have achieved in terms of progress and enlightenment is the direct result of their expropriation of and adherence to these Islamic principles and ideas.⁹⁵

As the Europeans had followed in the footsteps of the Muslims in alleviating “the ailment that underlies all ailments” – that is, backwardness and ignorance and their main political manifestation: despotism – the Muslims must now follow in

 One should not, of course, over-idealize this: there was no dearth of clerics in Iranian history who functioned as protectors of the despotic whims of the ruler from the people. One should also be careful not to ignore the major role played by lay and secular thinkers and activists in the Constitutional Revolution, even though labels like “secular” are problematic in themselves in such contexts: even the radical Westernizing constitutionalist Hasan Taqizadeh regularly led the evening prayers at the Seyyed Nasr al-Din mosque in Tehran in the midst of the revolutionary ferment (Katouzian, Iran, p. 56). One can identify a more-or-less direct lineage of activist mullahs, beginning with Shirazi, whose fatwa against smoking apparently galvanized the tahrim-e tonbaku of 1891; continuing with Shirazi’s students, including Khorasani and Naʿini; and culminating, as we shall see later on, in Khorasani’s pupil Hosayn Ali-ye Borujerdi, director of the Qom seminary system after WWII (We will argue below that contrary to the conventional wisdom, Ayatollah Borujerdi was in many ways the epitome of an activist mullah).  Mohammad Hosayn-e Naʿini, Tanbih al-umma wa tanzih al-milla (Arabic translation: ʿAbd alMuḥsin al-Najaf. Beirut: Alefbalib, n.d.), p. 141. The Europeans’ “corruption” of their religious systems is a clear allusion to the Islamic claim that Jews and Christians corrupted their sacred texts (taḥrīf ).

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the footsteps of the Europeans in order to improve their own lot in this regard. But this is should not be misconstrued as an imitation of foreign infidels, as it is, in truth, only a return (via the West) to Islam’s original outlook. Other Shiʿite jurists of the time, most well-known among them Shaykh Fazlollah-e Nuri, were not having any of it. Seeing through the sheen of Islam to the alien core, and detecting ideological elements latent within constitutionalism that would, they believed, ultimately undermine the foundations of religion, they opposed the movement vigorously.⁹⁶ (Nuri saw the nascent parliament as “a conspiracy hatched by heretics, Babis and atheists.”⁹⁷ Ayatollah Khomeini would, in retrospect, describe the constitutional revolution as a British plot to undermine the rule of Islamic law, in which “a copy of the Belgian legal code was borrowed from the Belgian embassy and used as the basis of a constitution” to which “a few of the ordinances of Islam were tacked on in order to deceive the people”).⁹⁸ Nuri, declared an apostate by his ideological rival (and Naʿini’s mentor) Ayatollah Khorasani,⁹⁹ was hanged for his troubles by the “progressive” forces in 1909, his own son, it

 There are many ways to look at Nuri, including as an avaricious Russian agent, but this polemic is outside of the scope of our discussion. Ayatollah Naʿini is perhaps the most famous of the clerics who “recanted” and became opponents of the cause they had previously fostered. Nuri himself backtracked near the end, abandoning even the mashruʿe idea in favor of a return to pure monarchism.  Amanat, Iran, p. 338. “Nuri concluded that, until the return of the Lord of the Age, absolutism was preferable to constitutionalism precisely because it made no claim to a legitimacy that might rival religion” (Buchan, Days of God, p. 101). The second Pahlavi, “Light of the Aryans,” would, however, make his own claim to legitimacy outside of the realm of religion, in the name of Iranian nationalism, as several of the monarchs of earlier dynasties had already done in one form or another.  Khomeini, Islamic Government, p. 10. Of course, the constitution of the Islamic Republic is “French” enough in itself. Interestingly, Mohammad Reza Shah had a similar opinion of the 1906 constitution, deriding it as a European invention imposed on Iran by former colonial powers (Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 86) and as “copied from the Belgian constitution” (Shakibi, Pahlavi Iran, p. 201). Khomeini stated elsewhere that “the constitutional movement started well, but in time corrupt individuals took it over” (Abrahamian, Khomeinism, p. 93). This overall negative appraisal of the constitution did not stop Ayatollah Khomeini from regularly appealing to this document in his struggle against the Shah – declaring this or that of the monarch’s policies or actions, and eventually even the monarchy itself, “unconstitutional” – nor did it prevent him from commending the ulama who participated in the enqelab-e mashruteh for leading this “fight against despotism.”  Nuri, for his part, had previously declared journalist supporters of the constitution infidels – issuing a fatwa that authorized killing pro-constitutionalist protesters who had taken sanctuary (bast) – and supported the bombardment of the Majles building, in which many were killed.

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is said, looking on and laughing.¹⁰⁰ The celebrated mid-twentieth century author Jalal Al-e Ahmad (on whom see below) would later write that To me, the corpse of that great man hanging on the gallows is like a flag they raised over this country…to symbolize the ascendancy of Euromania. Now, in the shadow of that flag, we are like a nation alienated from itself, in our clothing and our homes, our food and our literature, our publications and, most dangerous of all, our education. We affect Western training, we affect Western thinking, and we follow Western procedures to solve every problem.¹⁰¹

Today this “dissenting” or “rejectionist” Ayatollah (Nuri) enjoys hero status in the official Islamic Republic, while the same constitutional movement’s clerical supporters, such as ayatollahs Naʿini, Behbehani, Khorasani, Tehrani, Mazandarani and Modarresi – in yet another instance of the Khomeinist regime’s stubborn internal dialectic – are also for the most part celebrated, together with several of their lay comrades-in-arms, as enemies of despotism).¹⁰² Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar, who had reluctantly inherited the mashruteh and majles conceded by his father Muzaffar al-Din Shah, turned against them in the summer of 1908 in the name of Islam. His cannons bombarded the parliament building, killing many deputies in the process, but a year later pro-constitutional forces, converging on Tehran from Azerbaijan, Baluchistan and elsewhere (and also flying the flag of Islam), deposed and exiled the “reactionary” monarch.¹⁰³

 Shaykh Mahdi, Nuri’s eldest son, was indeed a staunch constitutionalist, but whether he was actually present in the jeering crowd at his father’s execution is an open question. The ayatollah’s grandson, renowned architect Nur al-Din Kianouri, would become general secretary of the communist Tudeh party several years before the revolution of 1979, and would lead his party into the camp of Khomeini immediately after that event. But the Islamic Republic outlawed the Tudeh in 1983, imprisoning and evidently torturing this septuagenarian until his release to house arrest over a decade later. Kianouri was complicit in the first attempt on Mohammad Reza Shah’s life in 1949 (Milani, The Shah, p. 134).  Cited in Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 302.  Some of these religious advocates of the enqelab-e mashruteh or Constitutional Revolution (and some of its opponents, including Nuri) would style their own preferred version of the cause as enqelabʾe mashruʿeh or “Islamic Legal Revolution,” a term sometimes used to describe the later revolution of 1979, as well. Many ulama soured with time on the constitutional movement and came around more or less to the position of Nuri. Naʿini is considered a kafer (infidel, apostate) in certain Khomeinist circles, even though he reversed his position on constitutionalism not long after adopting it.  Muhammad ʿAli’s son Ahmad, eleven years old at the time, ascended the throne in his stead to become the last Qajar sovereign. The two famous Western participants in this civil war were the eminent scholar of Persian literature Edward Granville Browne, who wielded his pen to great effect on behalf of the constitutionalists, and twenty year-old Princeton University student Howard Baskerville of Nebraska, in Tabriz teaching English, who went beyond the pen to the sword: he

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Britain and Russia, having formally settled their longstanding disputes in the region through the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention, could no longer be played off against one another as effectively, and increasingly encroached on Iranian sovereignty. Brazenly dividing the country up into “spheres of influence,” the British busied themselves with economic exploitation – amplified by the discovery of oil in Khuzestan in 1908 – while the Russians more or less terrorized the North, at one point virtually demolishing the shrine of Imam Riḍā in Mashhad. From the constitutional revolution onward, twentieth century (and indeed, twenty-first century) Iranian domestic politics can be viewed instructively as one long struggle between democratic and autocratic tendencies, with the clerical class torn between the two.¹⁰⁴ Though they were often hesitant and cautious, climbing onto popular bandwagons, if at all, late in the game,¹⁰⁵ the Shiʿite clerics, or at least exceptional individuals among them, also stepped up and took initiative at crucial moments, and exhibited strong, unwavering leadership. Sunni Muslim activist-intellectual Rashid Rida, writing in the early 1930s, “contrast[ed] the diminishing status of the Sunni ulama with the irrepressible popularity of the Shiʿi mojtaheds, and praised the political dynamism of the latter as demonstrated in their leadership of the Iranian Tobacco Rebellion in 1891 and the Iraqi Revolt of 1920.”¹⁰⁶ organized local recruits on behalf of the constitutional camp, and was killed in their first skirmish with the monarchists.  High ranking clerics in Qom and elsewhere are to this day among the fiercest critics of what they see as the increasingly autocratic tendencies of the Islamic Republican regime under Ayatollah Khameneʾi. More on this below.  Ray Takeyh is largely correct in saying that “the revolution’s historical revisionism notwithstanding, the clerical estate traditionally maintained amicable relations with Persian monarchs and was often employed by them against their secular leftist nemeses” (Ray Takeyh, Hidden Iran [New York: Holt, 1997], pp. 12– 13). Nevertheless, there were flash points during which the Iranian ulama turned on their sovereign, in some cases almost en masse, e. g., the Tobacco Boycott of 1891, the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 – 11, the struggle for oil nationalization in the early 1950s, the unrest of 1963 – 4 and the lead-up to the Khomeinist takeover in the latter half of the 1970s. Fereydun Adamiyat has argued, somewhat tendentiously and unconvincingly to this author’s mind, that the clerics joined movements such as the Tobacco Boycott and the Constitutional Revolution specifically in order to rein them in or even undermine them. There is no question, however, that the propaganda of the Islamic Republic seeks to amplify the role of pre-revolutionary ulama in various popular causes, often at the expense of lay and even secular forces who were in truth more instrumental or influential. A case in point is Ayatollah Kashani, who is given an inordinate amount of credit for the achievements of the “nationalist” movement of the early 1950s, while the contributions of, for instance, Bazargan and Bani Sadr are downplayed (of course, this also happened because the latter two – and especially the last – are portrayed by the official Khomeinist propaganda as having betrayed the 1979 revolution they helped make).  Hamid Enayat, “Ayatullah Sayyid Ruhallah Musawi Khumayni,” in Nasr et al, Expectation, p. 337. The statement is all the more significant coming from one of the founders of Salafism, a

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In 1921 a British-assisted coup carried out by Reza Khan, commander of the “Cossack Brigade” – created earlier by Nasser al-Din Shah with Russian help and constituting the only serious military force in the country – led to the exile of the final Qajar Shah to Paris.¹⁰⁷ A native of Mazandaran in the North, orphaned of his father in infancy and his mother at the age of six (just like the Prophet Muḥammad), Reza Khan had exploited a family connection to gain an entry position in the Brigade, and rapidly rose to the rank of commander due to his determination and discipline (and height). While in this post, Reza is said to have engaged every morning in a ritual reading of the newspaper, his face waxing redder with each account of Iranian failure or humiliation, until finally, in a fit of rage, he would stand up and rip the tabloid to shreds. Soon, this determined corporal would rewrite the headlines that had so dismayed him, and do much to turn the sleeping cat into a rising lion. Becoming defense minister (sardar-e sepah) after the coup, he at first toyed with the idea of creating a republic, but ultimately had himself crowned Reza

major characteristic of which was and is anti-Shiʿism. Nevertheless, it should not go unmentioned that not a few Shiʿite clerical activists of the following generations and up to the 1979 revolution itself drew inspiration from Sunni authors and activist organizations, from the Algerian FLN to the Indian-Pakistani Jamaʿat-e Eslami to the Muslim brothers, especially Sayyid Qutb (whose books al-Mustaqbal li-hādha l-dīn [“The Future of this Religion”] and Islām wa mushkilātu lḥaḍāra [“Islam and the Problem of Civilization”] were translated into Persian by a young ʿAli Hosayni-ye Khameneʾi).  The Cossack Brigade both bombarded the parliament building on behalf of Mohammad ʿAli Shah in 1908, killing many, and then, having been enlisted after the counter-coup of 1909 by the same constitutionalists that they had earlier suppressed, rolled back that same Mohammad ʿAli Shah when he tried to return from Russia in 1911. The Communist Revolution of 1917 relieved the brigade of its Russian officers and paved the way for Britain to make use of this fledgling force to create a stronger Iranian buffer state between Russia and the Way to India/British oil installations (the British military itself had no choice but to withdraw from Southern Iran as a result of pressure to “bring the boys home” after the war). The anglophile journalist and constitutionalist Seyyed Zia al-Din Tabatabaʾi (d. 1969) represented the civilian wing of this mostly military takeover. “Iranian sources have called Seyyed Zia the most notorious Anglophile politician in modern Iranian history” wrote Abbas Milani (The Shah, p. 17). During his brief tenure (ninety-three days) as prime minister, Seyyed Zia eagerly cooperated with the British behind the backs of the Iranian populace and parliament, and Reza Khan appears to have gone along with this general policy, even after Seyyed Zia’s fall (Milani, The Shah, pp. 19 – 21). Seyyed Zia wandered in exile after his dismissal by the last Qajar sovereign, Ahmad Shah, selling Persian carpets in Berlin and Switzerland, presiding over the newly founded World Islamic Congress (and becoming a passionate alfalfa farmer) in Palestine, and finally returning to Iran where – from 1949 until his death in 1969 – he became a sometime advisor to Mohammad Reza Shah. His home in Tehran was eventually turned into the notorious Evin prison.

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Shah Pahlavi in 1925.¹⁰⁸ Once in power, he drew on his military experience, and on his comrades-in-arms, to run the country. Assisted by a dedicated and colorful triumvirate – Abd al-Hosayn Teymurtash, Firuz Mirza Nosrat-e Dowleh and Ali Akbar Davar (the first two of whom were eventually murdered by their master, while the third committed suicide)¹⁰⁹ – the new monarch set about pacifying the countryside and developing infrastructure, implementing reforms in fields like education, sanitation, technology, agriculture and women’s rights – all with no small degree of success. He was determined to shove Iran, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century: he even gave his subjects three days to come up with a last name, for purposes of taxation, conscription and general modernization (hitherto everyone had been known as “so-and-so son or daughter of so-and-so” or by a nickname reflecting their profession, town of origin or infirmity).¹¹⁰ Disillusioned by the chaos, weakness and stagnation of the interregnum, many intellectuals welcomed the strong hand of “the Corporal” as the most efficient means of reforming the country in the desired direction. Ali-ye Dashti, a writer and politician of the period who was himself imprisoned later by Reza Shah, opined that The best method for achieving such progress is the establishment of a powerful government that, while enlightened and virtuous, can with the end of the bayonet achieve modernization and welfare and eliminate corruption.¹¹¹

 Interestingly, the clerical class was instrumental in quashing the initial notion – entertained by Reza Khan among others – of establishing a republic. The bitter taste left in their mouths by the increasingly secular bent of Iranian constitutionalism (predicted by Ayatollah Nuri) had soured them on such Western imports. The widely respected marjaʿ Abu l-Hasan-e Isfahani, the reformed constitutionalist Mohammad Hasan-e Naʿini, and none other than founder of the howze-ye ʿelmiye in Qom ʿAbd al-Karim Haʾeri-ye Yazdi issued a statement denouncing republicanism. Reza Khan “repented” of this “sinful innovation” and promptly arranged for a coronation.  A fourth sometime pillar of the Reza Shah regime, tribal leader Jaʿfar Qoli Asʿad Bakhtiyari, was also murdered, as was ʿAbd al-Hosayn Diba, the future Empress Farah Diba’s uncle, as were many others, both while incarcerated and while banished to internal exile. Teymurtash, having fallen from grace due to genuine corruption compounded by the king’s paranoia, officially died of angina while in solitary confinement in the Central Jail, after having spent several miserable months at Qasr prison, which he himself had been instrumental in building. The consensus is that he was poisoned, probably by the infamous Lieutenant “Doctor” Ahmad-e Ahmadi, but the Iranian penchant for such conspiracy theories must be factored in here.  This was the “Law of Identity and Personal Status.” Upon discovering that a man named Mahmud had already chosen the last name that he himself wished to register – Pahlavi – Reza Khan forced him to forego it. In protest, Mahmud made his first name into his surname, becoming Mahmud Mahmud, and went on to write an important history of the Constitutional Revolution (Milani, The Shah, p. 445, n. 51).  Cited by Shakibi, Pahlavi Iran, p. 103. “Iranians,” argued ʿAli Akbar Davari, “will not voluntarily and willingly become human. Salvation must be imposed on Iran” (Shakibi, Pahlavi Iran, p. 103).

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For all that Reza Shah is depicted in post-revolutionary retrospect as an incorrigible Westernizer (mostafrang) – even his coronation was choreographed according to “The Proceedings at Westminster Abbey for the Coronation of His Majesty George V”¹¹² – it cannot be denied that this king raised Iran from the status of a trampled down, virtual protectorate and conspicuous consumer of European goods, to the status of an essentially independent and self-respecting polity assiduously cultivating Import Substitution Industry.¹¹³ Already early in his reign he had a series of run-ins with the British over issues of national honor (in which Iran had its way) and oil revenues (in which it did not). In a symbolically significant act in 1928, Reza Shah abolished all vestiges of the capitulatory system which had for centuries granted colonial powers special privileges in Middle Eastern countries.¹¹⁴ He also advocated many progressive reforms, in fields like education, sanitation, technology, women’s rights and land distribution, and of these, what he himself did not manage to implement, his son for the most part did. (Of course, “progressive” here means, in almost all cases, “Westernizing,” and so we come full circle to Reza Shah the farangi-maʾab).¹¹⁵ At the same time, the new monarch amassed a vast fortune in land and property, in general by force or the threat thereof (his son would endeavor to give much of it back). “Pahlavi,” the new dynasty’s name, was chosen to evoke the pre-Islamic Iranian past, as part of an overall push by an increasingly secularized royal court and surrounding intellectual class in the direction of nationalism at the expense of religion.¹¹⁶ The new king’s repression of Islamic practice and outlawing of the Muslim dress code, partially in imitation of his hero Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (founder of modern Turkey), simultaneously weakened and strengthened the faith, sowing

 Milani, The Shah, p. 31. His son’s belated coronation ceremony in 1967 was no different in this regard.  There is no shame, as it were, in the fact that this Import Substitution Industry had to be kickstarted by foreign experts. One must begin somewhere. Reza Shah officially abolished the so-called “Capitulations” in 1928.  Like Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, whom he admired, Reza Shah pushed the armies of foreign polities out of his country while simultaneously opening the floodgate to the lifestyles and ideologies hailing from those same polities.  For an in-depth discussion of the Westernizing “type” in pre-Pahlavi Iran, see Sivan Balslev, Farangimaabs and Fokolis: Masculinities and Westernization from the Constitutional Revolution to Reza Shah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).  Several authors writing in Kamran Scot Agaie (ed.), Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity, especially Vejdani, Siavoshi and Aghaie himself, have instructively nuanced this dichotomy. Reza Zia Ebrahimi has tackled the overall question of neo-Aryanism in Iran in The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism as well as in several informative articles. We discuss this issue at greater length in Chapter Six.

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the seeds of religious resentment, self-awareness, activism and defiance that would eventually blow back in the face of his son and heir. The nationalist trend, with its “Aryan” and “anti-Semitic” (i. e., anti-Arab) overtones, was one factor that facilitated the increasing cooperation between Iran and Nazi Germany, affording the Allies a pretext to invade and depose Reza Shah in 1941 and install that son, Mohammad Reza Shah, in his stead.¹¹⁷ In the same year (1921) that Reza Khan entered Tehran with several thousand troops, Grand Ayatollah¹¹⁸ Abd al-Karim Haʾeri-ye Yazdi, a student of the illustrious Khorasani, entered Qom with a far smaller entourage. Making the move from Arak – reportedly on the strength of a bibliomantic consultation (estekhareh) that produced Joseph’s command to his brethren: “Come [down to Egypt] with your entire family!” (Qurʿan 12: 93) – Haʾeri-ye Yazdi set up the learning center known as the howze-ye ʿelmiyeh. ¹¹⁹ Copied many times since, this institution and its methodology have had a major impact on the Shiʿite world, as we shall see. Haʾeri-ye Yazdi died in 1937, and a worthy replacement had to wait for the end of World War II, when Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Hosayn-e Borujerdi agreed to remain in Qom and shoulder the responsibility. Far from the reputation he has garnered in standard descriptions of twentieth-century Iranian history as a prototypically withdrawn and fearful quietist, we will argue below that Borujerdi should be viewed as nothing less than one of the unsung heroes of the Islamic Revolution. He died in 1962, leaving a vacuum in his wake. Muhammad Reza Shah was soon perceived by more militant elements among the Iranian-Shiʿite faithful as (in the words of one Hojjatoleslam) “the flaccid, debauched Yazīd to his father’s fierce, austere Muʿāwiya.”¹²⁰ Both of these historical figures are considered the epitome of evil by Shiʿite tradition, as we saw, but of the two only Muʿāwiya could say, with Caligula, oderint dum metuant (“let them hate

 Mohammad Reza Shah rejected the attribution of Nazi sympathies to his father (Milani, The Shah, pp. 74– 75). Ray Takeyh writes perceptively that “[t]he collapse of Reza Shah’s rule eerily foreshadowed the end of his son’s reign thirty-eight years later. Reza Shah’s modernization drive had failed to create a constituency loyal to his regime. The army he had created quietly disintegrated. The traditional classes that he disdained rose up in defiance…The young Shah, it seemed, learned little from his father, and he would repeat many of his mistakes” (Last Shah, p. 13).  This is the way most English speaking scholars today render marja-e taqlid (lit. “Focus of Emulation”). In the past the title Ayat Allah Ozma was indeed granted solely to such “foci,” but more or less since World War II highly venerated mojtaheds, though non-marjaʿs, have often been so addressed as well.  Karbaschi, Tarikh, p. 26. The designation howze-ye ‘elmiye itself is older than the institution founded by Haʾeri, and is sometimes retrojected back to medieval times. Haʾeri’s successor Ayatollah Borujerdi also reportedly came to Qom on the strength of an estekhareh.  Hojjatoleslam v’al-Muslimin Mehdi-ye Daneshmand, IRIB Mostanad, 12/03/2016.

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me, so long as they fear me”). Just as partisans of the Prophet’s family (ahl al-bayt) waited until the death of Muʿāwiya and the ascension of his son (680 CE) to essay an insurrection geared to reinstate right religion, so the cowed clerics of Iran bided their time until Reza Shah was replaced by his son (1941), and only then began their campaign to restore the country’s battered religious ethos. Scholars have recently made much of what they argue was the second Pahlavi sovereign’s backpedaling of Reza Shah’s harsh secularizing policies, pointing to everything from the son’s oath of office, which included commitments to promote Twelver Shiʿism and in the conclusion to which he beseeched the aid of Allah; to the young king’s accession to the demands of the newly returned Ayatollah Qomi¹²¹ – among them gender segregation and religious education in state schools – as well as the widely publicized visit paid by the new monarch to the hospitalized Ayatollah Borujerdi; to mystical experiences he reported in which one or another Shiʿite imam explained that he had been saved from sickness, accident or assassination because he was destined to do great things; to his habit of inserting a mini-Qurʿan into his breast jacket pocket; to a significant increase in the number of new mosques and a partial easing of the restrictions on the veil, collective mourning rituals and the like under his reign. While there is truth to all of this, the broader picture tells a different story. Oaths of office and hospital visits are recognized by the genuinely pious for what they are – lip service – and while claims of dream visitations by saintly figures can be a feather in the turban of respected theologians (or even an effective means of buttressing a legal or ideological position), in the case of a non-observant ignoramus like Mohammad Reza Shah such claims merely point up the claimant’s irreligiosity (as does the Qurʿan in his breast pocket).¹²² More importantly, while the father’s anti-clericalism and march toward modernization may have been gruffer, under the son these tendencies “matured” and came of age, proceeded apace and expanded relentlessly, to a large extent because of the exponentially proliferating contacts with Europe and especially the United States. There were, albeit, more mosques built, but the mushrooming cine Seyyed Hosayn Tabatabaʾi-ye Qomi (d. 1947) was a sometime student of the above-mentioned Mirza-ye Shirazi – of Tobacco Boycott fame – as well as of Mirza Hasan-e Ashtiyani and Fazlollah-e Nuri. Soon after reaching marjaʿ status, he travelled to Tehran in 1935 in an attempt to meet with Reza Shah and induce him to cancel the new dress code law. Instead, he was placed under house arrest, and when this fact became known it contributed to the chain of events leading to the Goharshad Mosque protest and massacre in Mashhad. He was exiled to Iraq where he made the rounds of the shrine cities and their seminaries. Soon after ascending the throne Mohammad Reza Shah brought this high-ranking cleric back to Iran with much fanfare.  Andrew Cooper’s claim that while abroad at Le Rosey Mohammad Reza “found consolation in faith and prayer” and became “more devout in his religious beliefs” (Fall of Heaven, p. 55) is an example of one of this sterling scholar’s few shortcomings: his over-credulousness.

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mas were the up-and-coming place to be. The veil, it is true, could now be worn, but more and more women, especially of the upper-middle classes, preferred bouffant hairdos and mini-skirts. As uncomfortable and un-moored as traditional believers began to feel in the 1930s, they would feel so to a far greater extent in the 1960s, and if they did not, that was because they had grown accustomed to the direction the country had been taking for decades, not because that direction had changed or been reversed. The few “regressive” features that characterized the reign of the second Pahlavi monarch in connection with religion were offset ten times over by the careening, take-no-prisoners juggernaut of sweeping modernization that was the preeminent hallmark of the period. And while “black” traditionalism would on occasion receive (disingenuous) royal support as a counterweight to “red” communism (and while king and court were indubitably regarded by many clerics as bulwarks against diverse types of radicalism) the Shah and his governments were, if anything, more inclined toward socialism than Shiʿism.¹²³ Above all, their lighthouse and shining beacon was always the West. “The regime was clever,” explains one Hojjatoleslam. It did not deny religion outright. Indeed, to a certain extent it even promoted religion. But it was a religion disemboweled of its content and skewed toward inculcating every non- and anti-religious value imaginable, in such a way that outright advocacy of unbelief would have done less damage.¹²⁴

In the eyes of the vast conservative sector of Iranian society, Pahlavism was Epicureanism, plain and simple. In the eyes of the increasing number of students who subscribed to lay theoretician Ali Shariʿati’s militant neo-Shiʿism (see below) – young people for whom faith had become “cool” again and the imperative of the hour was “the return to ourselves” – Pahlavism was the contemptible, traitorous antithesis of religio-cultural authenticity. The new king had grown up under the shadow of a father who both inspired and terrified him.¹²⁵ Packed off to a prestigious Swiss boarding school at age elev-

 Land distribution, progressive labor laws, the obligation of all large industries to grant their workers half of the company’s stock are just some examples.  Hojjatoleslam Darvazeʾi, cited in Baqeri, Khaterat, vol. 2, p. 95.  There is, contrary to the conventional wisdom, at least some evidence of genuine affection between father and son (Abbas Milani states that Reza Shah was “a soldier and peasant by temperament, disinclined toward demonstrative shows of affection toward his children, even to his favorite son, Mohammad Reza” – The Shah, pp. 22– 23. Andrew Cooper, on the other hand, shows this Cossack turned monarch on his hands and knees with his son on his back playing horse, and marshals considerable evidence that Reza Shah treated his crown prince with no small amount of tenderness – Fall of Heaven, esp. pp. 46 – 48). That his father’s figure loomed in-

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en, he endured the condescension of his aristocratic peers, who sneered at the “son of the corporal.” Reza Baraheni characterized the impact of this experience thus: He had gained enough knowledge of their ways to know that they all considered the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East as subhuman species. The young man became their equal simply by hating what they hated and loving what they loved. They hated the people of the colonies, and although Iran was not an official colony of a European nation, there was no difference between the people who had actually been colonized and those of Iran who lived under the iron-clad fist of Reza Khan and the unofficial hegemony of the British. They also loved the blond princesses of their own palaces in Europe. Later, [Mohammad Reza Shah] imported blond women from Europe by the dozen to satisfy his taste for a whiter flesh, and when he married Farah, his third wife, so much facial surgery had to be done that she came to look like a mummified movie star from Hollywood…He gradually became the colonialist in his home country. Whenever he was in Europe or, later, the United States, he would open up and socialize, but at home he was a god – a frowning, dark-glassed, savage god – who had come from a better world and was superior to the rest of the population.¹²⁶

Abbas Milani echoes Baraheni’s last sentence: “With Europeans and Americans [the Shah] was more comfortable, less starchy and less pompous. In audiences, only a handful of Iranians were ever allowed to sit down, while every Westerner, regardless of rank or riches, was allowed to sit down.”¹²⁷ It was specifically because (contrary to the conventional narrative) the young prince’s years at the Le

ordinately large for him is evident, among other things, in the refrain pedar-e man/pedaram (“my father”) which repeats itself literally scores of times in his first autobiography, Maʾmuriyyat baraye Vatanam or Mission for My Country.  Baraheni, Crowned Cannibals, pp. 105 – 106. “Cruising” Zhaleh street in Tehran in the late 1940s, behind dark glasses and a scarf, the young (married) king spotted and followed a sixeen year-old (married) blond girl named Parvin Ghiffari, arranged to have her divorced (or, according to other versions, dis-engaged), and kept her as a concubine (sigheh) in the palace for several years (Buchan, Days of God, p. 33). Ironically, her last name evoked a Shiʿi saint famous for his chastity. Her memoir published after the 1979 revolution salaciously details her many rendezvous with the Shah during his marriage to Fawzia. She was not the last such “Bathsheba.” The Shah’s brief affair with Grace Kelly is well known. He regularly pursued the spouses of other men, Iranian and foreign. Together with JFK and De Gaulle, he was a client of the legendary “Madame Claude” of Paris, who had young women regularly flown into Tehran for Mohammad Reza’s “recreation” (gardeshha). The posthumously published secret memoirs of Prime Minister and afterwards Court Minister Asad Allah Alam (d. 1978) – one of the most powerful men in the kingdom and a sometime rival of Amir Abbas Hoveyda – depict the king’s many indiscretions in almost graphic detail (and reveal much concerning his clandestine contacts with Israel), and are exploited to this day by the Islamic Republican media to blacken the face of the dethroned Pahlavi sovereign. Hosayn Fardust, longtime friend of the Shah and deputy director of SAVAK before the two had a falling out, wrote a similarly revealing memoir after the revolution “as penance.”  Milani, The Shah, p. 36.

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Rosey school “were easily the happiest of his life” that they instilled in him a love of French language, literature and culture and European civilization in general, compared to which his attitude toward Persian and Iran was far less enthusiastic.¹²⁸ The Shah himself wrote: “Since my father was so determined to Westernize Iran, no one was surprised when he decided to send me to school in the West.”¹²⁹ His first wife, the Egyptian princess Fawzia, was “steeped in the modes and manners of European royalty. She wore the hats and the bags, the dresses and the gloves, of a Hollywood glamour girl.”¹³⁰ His second wife, Soraya, though half-Persian, harbored a “shocking disdain for Iran, [a] remarkable ignorance of its history and culture, and [an] infatuation with the noble Europe of her imagination.”¹³¹ The king’s second and third wives were both plucked out of their European educational institutions to become queen consort. Mohammad Reza Shah himself was, according to all available evidence, “infatuated with all things Western.”¹³² The new king’s reign began auspiciously enough, with an impressive geo-strategic victory: with a little help from astute advisors and a determined post-war American administration, the fledgling Iranian sovereign induced no less a megalomaniacal expansionist than Joseph Stalin, at the zenith of his power, to pull his troops out of the North-Western province of Azerbaijan, where they had supported local socialist-secessionist movements. Mohammad Reza’s next major challenge came from the charismatic prime minister Mohammad-e Mosaddeq. Although the official title of this Qajar noble was Mosaddeq al-Saltaneh or “Validator of the Monarchy,” he was anything but. An energetic parliamentarian and indefatigable gadfly during the constitutional period, he opposed (together with Ayatollah Hasan-e Modarres)¹³³ the coronation of Reza Khan in 1925 and afterward made enough trouble for the first Pahlavi to earn him internal exile to his estates

 Milani, The Shah, p. 44. Even before attending Le Rosey Mohammad Reza had a French tutor as a child who left a strong impression upon him and “opened my mind to the spirt of Western culture” (Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 48). Despite his comparative lack of enthusiasm for Persian, he developed a more than satisfactory writing ability in that language, to judge by his several memoirs. He would never have a tutor in Islamic religion or its sciences, although he seems to have imbibed some folklore about the imams from palace servants.  Mission for My Country, p. 59.  Milani, The Shah, p. 90.  Milani, The Shah, p. 155.  Takeyh, Last Shah, p. 260.  Ayatollah Modarres, intrepid supporter of the constitutional revolution and opponent of Reza Shah, was purportedly poisoned or strangled to death by the latter’s henchmen while in prison (see, among others, Abrahamian, Khomeinism, p. 102 and the note there).

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from 1928 to 1943.¹³⁴ Returning after his nemesis’ abdication, Mosaddeq founded the pro-democratic “National Front of Iran” (jebhe-ye melli-ye Iran) and climbed up to the premiership in 1951, after the assassination of his predecessor in office by a member of the Fadaʾiyan-e Eslam (“Self-Sacrificers of Islam”).¹³⁵ Once in office, he followed in the footsteps of that same nemesis, Reza Shah, by championing the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry – till then largely in the hands of an exploitative British consortium – nearly toppling the monarchy along the way and creating ideological ripples that would touch an entire generation of activists (Roy Mottahedeh calls Mosaddeq “the lodestone, the magnetic field, the lightning rod that lay both chronologically and intellectually at the center of twentieth century Iranian politics”).¹³⁶ The nationalization movement received the support of – among many others – charismatic cleric and speaker of parliament Seyyed Abu l-Qasem-e Kashani (d. 1962). Ayatollah Kashani, wunderkind at the Najaf seminary where he studied (like Ayatollahs Haʾeri-ye Yazdi and Borujerdi) under the activist marjaʿ Khorasani, had participated in the Constitutional Revolution and helped foment the anti-British insurrection in Iraq (1920). Returning to Iran a year later, he launched over the ensuing decades a panoply of anti-British, anti-monarchical, anti-Zionist and proNazi campaigns for which he was jailed and exiled several times. He became the

 Ironically, Crown Prince Mohammad Reza is said to have interceded on Mosaddeq’s behalf with his father, otherwise he may well have shared the fate of Taymurtash and others who fell out of favor with Reza Shah (Buchan, Days of God, p. 24; Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 59). Mosaddeq reportedly treated the new king with respect and even kindness at the beginning of his reign, and even at the height of their bitter political rivalry, the Shah returned the favor, steadying the old man as he ascended the palace steps and the like.  Founded in 1946 by Seyyed Mojtaba-e Mirlohi, a.k.a. Navvab-e Safavi, the Fadaʾiyan-e Eslam specialized in the assassination of prominent individuals that it perceived to be enemies of the faith (e. g., historian and vehement critic of Shiʿism Ahmad-e Kasravi). The organization’s members gunned down no less than three prime ministers within a decade-and-a-half (invariably, for some reason, with three bullets): ʿAbd al-Hosayn-e Hazhir (1949), Ali-ye Razmara (1951) and Hosayn Ali-ye Mansur (1965), the latter of whom was said by some to have been killed on the strength of a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini. Following Razmara’s death Hosayn ʿAlaʾ – not to be confused with his predecessor Hosayn ʿAli – was appointed prime minister, but his tenure lasted less than two months, after which Mosaddeq had his turn at the helm (the Fadaʾiyan tried to kill Mosaddeq, as well, because of his fiercely secular views). When Hosayn ʿAlaʾ was re-appointed prime minister in 1955, he himself narrowly escaped an assassination attempt carried out, ironically enough, at the funeral of Ayatollah Kashani’s son, who had been killed in a car accident.  Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, p. 115. Though Mosaddeq’s movement is often mourned as the last chance for Iranian democracy – quashed with the help of the two premier Western democracies – Mosaddeq displayed not a few dictatorial tendencies himself. The national security law that later facilitated some of SAVAK’s worst abuses was first promulgated under Mosaddeq.

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“Source of Emulation” (marja-e taqlid) for the Fadaʾiyan-e Eslam terrorist organization founded by fellow Najaf seminary alumnus Mojtaba-e Mirlohi (a.k.a. Navvab-e Safavi), who was forty-seven years his junior, narrowly avoiding a run-in with head of the Qom howzeh Ayatollah Borujerdi, who was opposed to the Fadaʾiyan. When a member of this organization nearly assassinated the king in 1949, Kashani was banished to Beirut. His popularity in Iran was such, however, that after one year and four months, through the intercession of (among others) then parliamentarian Mohammad-e Mosaddeq, the charismatic cleric was flown home at government expense and greeted at Mehrabad airport by throngs of Tehranis, including representatives of the National Front. His Fadaʾiyan having murdered Prime Minister Ali-ye Razmara (d. 1951) – with his knowledge and possibly at his instigation – Kashani, who had meanwhile been elected to parliament, cajoled the Shah into appointing Mosaddeq as head of government.¹³⁷ Ayatollah Kashani initially combined forces with Mosaddeq in the struggle for oil nationalization, but from the beginning relations between the two men were strained. By 1953 differences over religious matters (including the prime minister’s bill to enfranchise women and his protection of the Bahaʾi, both of which induced a late middle-aged Ruhollah Khomeini to tell Ayatollah Kashani that Mosaddeq was an “infidel”); the ayatollah’s fear of communism;¹³⁸ the embattled premier’s increasingly dictatorial tendencies (which saw him, among other repressive measures, dissolve Iran’s supreme court and forcibly retire several hundred high-ranking army officers whom he suspected of excessive loyalty to the Shah);¹³⁹ and finally (depending on whom one asks), considerable pecuniary encouragement on the part of the Americans and British – all of these factors combined to turn the heretofore outlaw marjaʿ into a staunch royalist.¹⁴⁰ The stages of Kashani’s ca-

 All of this, again, in the face of Ayatollah Borujerdi’s ban on clerical participation in politics. The Fadaʾiyan had already assassinated former prime-minister and then court minister Abu l-Hosayn Hazhir in 1949. There is some evidence tying Mosaddeq, as well, to the Hazhir and especially Razmara assassinations (Takeyh, Last Shah, p. 64– 5).  This was ironic because Mosaddeq’s anti-aristocratic land-reform efforts were at least partially designed to take the wind out of the sails of the communists; because the National Front would later claim that the Tudeh party’s “stab in the back” had undermined Mosaddeq; and because Mosaddeq regularly played on domestic and Western fear of communism to garner support.  Some of Mosaddeq’s erstwhile allies went so far as to compare him to Stalin and Hitler (Takeyh, Last Shah, p. 97). He turned, claims Ray Takeyh, from a champion of democracy into “a despot fanning the flames of xenophobia” (Takeyh, Last Shah, p. 97.), and conducted a “transparently fraudulent referendum” to disperse parliament (Takeyh, Last Shah, p. 100).  After the defeat of Mosaddeq and the triumphal return of the king, Kashani’s reputation suffered in democratic secularist and even many religious circles, such that – according to Khomeini –

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reer: young scholarship; anti-imperialist, anti-Pahlavi and pro-Palestinian activism; resistance to the erosion of religious morals; jail followed by exile followed by a national welcome home; tension with more cautious clerical colleagues; even the (Nuri-esque and Naʿini-esque) withdrawal of support from a “progressive” cause upon descrying in it a threat to Islam – all of these career milestones would later turn Ayatollah Kashani into the perfect model for Ayatollah Khomeini in particular, and for the clerical revolutionary as a general type. He has thus been lionized by Islamic Republican propagandists at the expense of Mosaddeq, whose historic role has been diminished and whose many faults have been amplified (an irony, given the extent to which the latter man’s ghost hovered over the revolution of 1979 – an estimated one million-strong march to his estate took place soon after the Shah’s departure – while the former man was instrumental in saving the teetering monarchy in 1953). Such propaganda is accurate at least on one score, however, which is rarely acknowledged by chroniclers of the coup: had Mosaddeq been less of an avid, principled secularist, religious forces (including Ayatollahs Borujerdi, Behbehani, Shahrestani [in Iraq] and Kashani) would not have allied themselves with Anglo-American efforts to bring him down, and Iranian history might have taken an entirely different route. The legendary prime minister, in other words, was toppled for some of the same reasons that his royal rival was sent packing two-and-a-half decades later. Mohammad Reza Shah, having all but given up hope of retaining his crown, agreed in late 1953 to cooperate with (what is generally perceived, though with some exaggeration, to have been) a CIA and MI6-engineered coup.¹⁴¹ He flew to Baghdad and thence to Rome, biding his time there as generals (especially Fazlollah-e Zahedi), religious figures (especially Ayatollah Kashani) and street toughs (especially Shaban “the Brainless” and members of the “House of Strength” [zur khaneh])¹⁴² sowed turmoil at home. He returned in triumph several weeks later, on the Muslim “Holiday of Sacrifice” (ʿīd al-aḍḥā), when it was all over. (Iranians may thus be forgiven – after both monarchs of the Pahlavi dynasty were propped up, and one of them was dethroned, with the assistance of Western governments – for see-

“people in the streets would dress dogs as Ayatollah Kashani. Even fellow clerics lacked the courtesy to stand up when he entered a room” (Abrahamian, Khomeinism, p. 110).  The most recent, and probably most thorough, debunking of Kermit Roosevelt’s exaggeration of the CIA’s role in the coup to restore the Shah is Ray Takeyh, The Last Shah, Chap. 4. Indeed, Takeyh argues that if anything, the U. S. was more directly involved in the 1958 Qarani plot to topple the Shah (Takeyh, Last Shah, pp. 130 – 136).  The zur khaneh or varzesh-e bastani/pahlavani is a traveling Iranian fitness club-cum-circus of ancient vintage that combines strength-building exercises with Sufi (Muslim mystical) ritual (or alternately, recitation of the Shahnameh).

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ing American and British conspiracies behind just about everything, including the Islamic Revolution of 1979 itself.¹⁴³ The British in particular helped undermine Iranian movements for democracy on three separate occasions: the Constitutional Revolution,¹⁴⁴ the coup of Reza Khan in 1921, and the Mossadeq affair).¹⁴⁵ Scores if not hundreds of Mosaddeq’s defenders lost their lives in the coup of August, 1953, and the deposed prime minister himself was kept under house arrest until his death in 1967.¹⁴⁶ But like the Imam Ḥusayn – to whom he was sometimes compared – the memory of his defeat would later help bring about a great victory.¹⁴⁷ One step in the direction of that victory was the publication in 1962 by an already well-known writer and one-time darling of the communist left, Jalal Al-e Ahmad (d. 1969), of a short book entitled Gharbzadegi or “West-Strickenness” (a phrase he borrowed from a mentor of his, the pseudo-Heideggerian and sometime Islamic purist Ahmad Fardid [d. 1994]). Widely read – including at the seminaries – Gharbzadegi railed against the Iranian population’s ugly abdication of national and religious independence in favor of a wholesale, self-effacing adoption of European ideas and institutions (the fact that Al-e Ahmad was himself in many ways “Weststricken” should not lead to accusations of hypocrisy: he was a true eclectic and unrestrained self-critic, and besides: the colloquial phrase “it takes one to know

 Even the Shah himself was convinced that the Americans and British had to have been behind his overthrow – they were, he claimed, threatened by his spectacular successes in turning Iran into an oil superpower at their expense – and not only confided as much to various diplomats and intelligence operatives, but inscribed this theory for all to see in his memoirs from exile.  The British, though initially supportive of the constitutionalist protesters, soon joined Russia in its fierce opposition to the fledgling parliamentary regime. One might say that the two “Tehran Springs” of twentieth century Iranian history occurred from 1907– 1925 and from 1941– 1953, and that both were quashed with the help of the West. Add to this the extensive American support for the Iraqi aggressor during its eight year war with Iran, and we have a recipe for some serious resentment and distrust.  “Millions of American taxpayers’ dollars,” points out Reza Baraheni, “were spent to overthrow Iranian democracy” (Crowned Cannibals, p. 6). This is true if what Mosaddeq was offering to the Iranian people was truly democracy – a big “if ”.  “The eighty Iranian army soldiers who surrounded Mossadeq’s residence were camped out in the fields in tents stamped ‘U. S. Army’” (Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 80).  Some, unsurprisingly, put the number of casualties among Mosaddeq’s supporters during the coup at seventy-two, the number of martyrs who died with Ḥusayn (the same would be done for the number of Islamic Republican Party members killed in the Mojahedin-e Khalq bombing of 1981). Mosaddeq’s image in the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic is complex and contradictory. At bottom, Khomeini did not like him or support his positions, and as early as the 1963 referendum on the White Revolution declared that “this referendum is no less unconstitutional than was Mosaddeq’s referendum for the dissolution of parliament.”

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one” is particularly apposite in this case).¹⁴⁸ Two years later, in 1964, the publisher of Gharbzadegi, Dr. Ali Shariʿati, having returned from an eight year stint in Paris (during which he studied sociology and helped form the pro-democratic Iranian Freedom Movement [nehzat-e azadi-ye Iran]), began his highly influential lecture series at the recently established Hosayniye-ye Ershad or “Mourning Canopy of Right Guidance” in Tehran (an institution financed by none other than the Dodge Motor Company). Shariʿati was a spellbinding orator and an original thinker, who sought to reinvigorate Shiʿism as a force for social revolution and to merge radical European ideology with traditional Islamic notions and narratives. Taking his que from, among other sources, Ayatollah Neʿmatollah Salehi-ye Najafabadi’s highly controversial Shahid-e Javid (“Eternal Martyr”), a book which claimed that Imam Ḥusayn was no sacrificial lamb who had gone deliberately to slaughter but rather a militant revolutionary who had every intention of overthrowing the Umayyad tyranny, Shariʿati taught a combative faith that rose up on behalf of the downtrodden (mostazʿefin).¹⁴⁹ He urged Shiʿites to graduate from the status of Hābīl (Abel) – who died oppressed (mazlum) – to the status of Ḥusayn – who died defiant.¹⁵⁰ He sought to transform Islamic classical texts into blueprints for social action, and shake the ulama and their flocks out of what he saw as their inordinate preoccupation with death and ritual at the expense of life and struggle:

 In general, as Samuel Thrope puts it, Al-e Ahmad was “more of a feeler than a thinker, and if you really try to pin him down, even on a signature issue like Iranian society’s relation to Western culture, the topic of his most influential essay Occidentosis, you don’t come up with very much” (“Israel as a Blank Slate: A Conversation with Samuel Thrope,” Restless Books Blog, August 13, 2014).  On the book itself see Evan Siegel’s excellent essay “The Politics of Shahid-e Javid,” in Brunner and Ende, Twelver Shiʿa. The polemic surrounding Najafabadi’s book – especially in Qom, where it led to instances of violence – tapped into an ancient intra-Shiʿite debate concerning the nature of the imams, with mufawwiḍūn or those who see them as practical demigods at one pole of the spectrum and muqaṣṣirūn or those who see them as mere righteous and knowledgeable men, at the other (this debate is discussed at some length below, in Chapter Seven). The former opposed Najafabadi’s radical, militant message, the latter supported it. Paradoxically, the exponents of the twentieth century version of taqṣīr, who would furnish the greatest impetus to revolution in the 1960s and 70s, were excoriated by their “wilayati/velayati” opponents (the latter-day mufawwiḍūn) as Wahhabis, the arch-Sunni sect that built Saudi Arabia, and nāṣibīs, haters of the ʿAlids – which is another way of saying pan-Islamists. Classifying Ayatollah Khomeini himself along this spectrum is exceedingly difficult (although his people at Qom, including Montazeri and the latter’s protégé Mehdi-ye Hashemi, backed the book. Montazeri wrote an introduction to it; Hashemi apparently murdered one of its clerical critics, Ayatollah Abu l-Hassan-e Shamsabadi).  Rajaee, Islamism, p. 132– 133.

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The Qurʿan is a book that begins with “God” and ends with “People.” It is a heavenly book, but – contrary to what today’s believers (and non-believers) think – it is primarily concerned with nature, existence, awareness, power, progress, improvement and striving (jihad)! A book the titles of over seventy chapters of which [out of a total of one hundred fourteen – Z. M.] relate to human and humanitarian concerns, the titles of over thirty chapters of which involve material phenomena (padideha-ye maddi), and the titles of only two chapters of which – Pilgrimage and Prayer – are connected to ceremonial matters (ʿebadat)! A book that was conveyed to us by a simple, illiterate man of the people who was so uneducated that he swore by the pen, by ink and by writing!…But this Book, that is called “The Reading,” has long since ceased to be read, and is now used primarily as an amulet or decoration. No longer consulted for remedies to intellectual, spiritual, moral or social ailments, it is now employed as a talisman to cure physical ailments: back pain, shoulder pain, hip pain… Ignored while we are awake, we place it above our heads while we sleep, and in the end, the melodious sound of its words rises up to our ears only from the cemetery…This is what you do not know, my dear intellectual brothers and sisters! You do not know how hard they have worked to remove the Qurʿan from the land of the living to the graveyard of history, and to silence its call for jihad – and ijtihad! ¹⁵¹

Rarely systematic and never one to be pigeon-holed, Shariʿati excoriated contemporary Shiʿite jurists as hidebound, but described the imams of old as openminded and enlightened. He thundered against the importation of Coca-Cola (as opposed to “authentic” Iranian milk), but imported foreign concepts and philosophies by the dozen. He fought for diversity and tolerance in Iran, while arguing the advantages of Islamic monism over liberal pluralism on the ideological plane. He denounced dictatorship, but despised Western (and Sunni) ideas of rule by majority. He sang The International but declared that “internationalism is a big lie” and saw national identity and cultural uniqueness as prerequisites for creativity and progress.¹⁵² He advocated pan-Islamic cooperation (in the wake of which he was promptly accused of Sunni proclivities), but regularly regaled his audiences with stories of the Sunni hero ʿUmar burning down the Shiʿite heroine Fāṭima’s house or conspiring to assassinate her father, the Prophet Muḥammad. He feminized that same Fāṭima, and at the same time “Fāṭimized” feminism. As Mossadeq had sought an “economy minus oil,” Shariʿati sought an “Islam minus clerics.” Students and intellectuals flocked to him by the thousands, and the Socialist-Islamic “People’s Fighting Organization” (Mojahedin-e Khalq) coalesced around his preach-

 Ali-ye Shariʿati, Mazhab ʿalayhe mazhab (Tehran: Bonyad-e Farhangi-ye Shariʿati, 1388), pp. 124– 125.  Cited in Mehmat Talha Pasaoglu, “Nationalist Hegemony over Islamist Dreams in Pakistan and Iran: Who were Shariʿati and Maududi?” Asian Politics and Policy 5: 1 (2013), p. 114.

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ing.¹⁵³ The more activist ulama (all of whom we will meet later) were divided concerning him: Tabatabaʾi and Mesbah-e Yazdi detested him; Beheshti and Motahhari initially supported him;¹⁵⁴ Montazeri helped get his message out; Taleqani virtually idolized him; Falsafi argued that the anti-Shah movement could not pick and choose its allies. Khomeini himself, while adopting some of Shariʿati’s rhetoric, eventually condemned the upstart’s new-fangled “hippie-guerilla Shiʿism,”¹⁵⁵ and after coming to power, mercilessly rooted out the organization Shariʿati had inspired. Still, it was Shariʿati’s electrified Islam that, perhaps more than any other factor, gave ideological momentum to the revolutionary movement in the late 1970s, and his picture was held aloft in the mass demonstrations of 1978 next to that of Khomeini. When he died abroad a year beforehand at the age of forty-four, foul play was suspected. Shariʿati was buried at the shrine of al-Sayyida Zaynab (the Imam Ḥusayn’s sister) near Damascus, with Musa al-Sadr – the Iranian pupil of Khomeini who had recently revivified the Shiʿite community of Lebanon – officiating at the funeral.¹⁵⁶

 Later Shariʿati would repudiate the Mojahedin and the Mojahedin Shariʿati, but they remained identified with one another.  It was apparently in revenge for Mottahari’s later withdrawal of support for Shariʿati and condemnation of this lay theologian’s “deviations” that he was assassinated hard on the heels of the revolution by the militant anti-clerical “Forqan” (on which group see Ronen Cohen, Revolution under Attack: The Forqan Group of Iran [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015]).  This was not Khomeini’s phrase – it was employed (in the English original) by a post-revolutionary hojjatoleslam on a talk show, whose identity I have forgotten. But it captures (at least one angle of ) Khomeini’s take on Shariʿati. Some Arabs referred to him, affectionately or mockingly, as al-shīʿī al-shuyūʿī, “the Communist Shiʿite.”  Andrew Cooper argues in The Fall of Heaven, based largely on hearsay, that Musa al-Sadr was fiercely opposed to Khomeinism and was on the verge of being brought to Iran by royalist forces to save the day, when Khomeinist agents prevailed upon Moʿammar Ghaddafi to do away with the Iranian-Lebanese Shiʿite hero. He disappeared in August 1978 while on a trip to Libya.

Chapter Four: Ayatollah Khomeini and the Rise of Revolutionary Shiʿism Ayatollah (“Sign of God,” the highest Shiʿite clerical rank) Ruhollah (“Spirit of God,” a given name) Musavi (descended from Mūsā – Moses – al-Kāẓim, the seventh Shiʿite Imam) al-Hindi (whose family lived for several generations in India) Khomeini (of the town of Khomein, some three-hundred kilometers South of Tehran) was born in 1902 into a family of scholar-jurists (fuqahāʾ). His father Mustafa was murdered by thugs while trying to rid his hometown of a local mafia,¹ and Ruhollah was brought up by his mother and aunt with a keen sense of injustice and the need to confront it. When he was sixteen years old both of these women perished in the terrible cholera epidemic that raged through Iran at the end of the First World War. The orphan left his birthplace to study in the madraseh (religious school) of Isfahan, but when he discovered that one of the great religio-legal minds of the day, Shaykh Abd al-Karim Haʾeri-ye Yazdi, had set up a theological college in Arak, not far from Khomein, he headed thither to study at the great man’s feet. Eventually (in 1922) Khomeini followed Haʾeri-ye Yazdi to Qom, whither the latter had been invited by the resident ulama (scholars)and where he founded the howzeh-ye ʿelmiyeh (“Seminary of Religious Knowledge”) that rapidly catapulted Qom to the position of preeminent Shiʿite learning center, surpassing even Najaf in Iraq. Khomeini excelled at his studies – which consisted of the traditional Shiʿite Islamic blend of grammar, law, exegesis, hadith (sayings and anecdotes of Muḥammad and the Imams), theology, philosophy, logic, poetry and the like – and displayed an inordinate predilection toward mysticism, a science largely frowned upon by Orthodox Islam (in future years, when Khomeini was one of the highest ranking instructors at the self-same seminary, there were those who reputedly wiped the common drinking cup clean after his son Ahmad Khomeini had used it, because Ahmad’s father was tainted by the teaching of ʿerfan [gnosis]).² Khomeini’s youth corresponded with the tumultuous years of the Constitutional Revolution (enqelab-e mashruteh) between 1905 – 1911, a series of upheavals and counter-upheavals that culminated in the establishment – for a short while not even just on paper – of a more democratic form of government in which the heretofore absolutist Iranian monarchy was tempered by an elected Parliament  This version of events, much touted by the Imam’s official Islamic Republican biographers, is contested. See, e. g., Abrahamian, Khomeinism, p. 6, where he adduces the narrative that Sayyid Mostafa was killed in retaliation for his own previous abuse of a rival in the context of a family feud.  Montazeri, Khaterat, p. 311. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-014

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(majles) and a series of legislated restrictions on arbitrary rule. The future Ayatollah’s maturity corresponded with the ascension to the throne and seventeen-yearlong rule of Reza Shah (1925 – 1941), the stable boy turned Cossack Brigade commander turned founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, whose reign, as we discussed above at some length, saw the cultivation of Iranian nationalism and Westernizing tendencies and the forceful repression of religion. Khomeini managed to stay out of the politics of these periods, and his first foray into regime criticism came when that of many other intellectuals came: after Reza Shah’s ouster by the British in the midst of World War II (on the pretext of his Nazi leanings), which ushered in a “Tehran Spring” of sorts that allowed for more freedom of speech, pluralism and political participation. In 1944 Khomeini penned a small work entitled Kashf al-Asrar (Revealer of Secrets) which sought to refute a treatise written by a former taleb (religious student) at Qom by the name of Ali Akbar Hakamizadeh, who had gone renegade under the influence of the notorious atheist and nemesis of Shiʿism, Ahmad-e Kasravi. Hakamizadeh’s treatise, entitled Secrets of a Thousand Years (asrar-e hezar saleh), employed a mixture of Western freethinking and Sunni Wahhabism to attack the beliefs and practices of Shiʿite Islam, and Khomeini responded both defensively and offensively, explaining (for instance) why the intermediary role of the Imams between believers and Allah did not constitute polytheism (shirk) and condemning the Wahhabis for disrespecting the graves of even Sunni saints, to say nothing of Shiʿite Imams. By-the-by in this book – it is not central to the thesis and does not take up more than a handful of pages all told – the author launched a scathing attack on the deposed Shah, whom he described as “that illiterate soldier who knew that if he did not suffocate [the clergy] and silence them with the force of bayonets, they would oppose what he was doing to the country and to religion.”³ No less significantly as a foreshadowing of future intellectualideological developments in his thought, Khomeini devoted several paragraphs to the somewhat unprecedented idea in Shiʿite clerical circles that It is manifest from the many statements emanating from the Messenger of God, may God’s peace and blessings be upon him, and the pure Imams on the subject, that those who transmit onward and continue the traditions of the Prophet and his sacred progeny, the People of his House (ahl al-bayt), are the successors (janeshin) of the Prophet and the Imams, and all that is incumbent upon the believers in terms of obedience, allegiance and [acceptance of ] the governmental authority (hokumat) of those excellencies (i.e. the Imams), is incumbent upon them regarding their successors.⁴

 Ruhollah Khomeini, Kashf al-asrār (Qom, 1944), p. 9. Reza Shah’s relative illiteracy – that source about the telegram that was almost sent.  Khomeini, Kashf, p. 34.

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The “successors” to which Khomeini is here referring as “those who transmit onward and continue the traditions of the Prophet and his progeny” are none other than the Shiʿite clergy (ulama), and since Hakamizadeh – the author of the work to which Khomeini was responding – argued specifically that the branch of the clergy known as scholar-jurists (fuqahāʾ) did not possess legitimate authority and were not worthy of being obeyed, it is clear that the future revolutionary leader was already here adumbrating the notion that would eventually change the face of Iran, Islam and the world: velayat-e faqih, “the Rule of the Scholar-Jurist.” Despite getting his feet wet in this initial controversy, the middle-aged professor of Islamic sciences at the howzeh of Qom for the most part stayed out of the fray during the early years of the reign of the second Pahlavi monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah, even when clerics that he admired – particularly Ayatollah Abu l-Qasem-e Kashani – participated heavily in such momentous affairs as Premier Mohammad Mosaddeq’s struggle to nationalize Iran’s oil, which almost toppled the Shah (one significant exception to this policy of withdrawal, also portentous for future developments, was an open letter penned by Khomeini upon the publication of the aforementioned Ahmad-e Kasravi’s provocative anti-Shiʿite tract Shiʿigari, a letter which called upon “zealous Muslims everywhere” to “kill this pagan apostate who spreads corruption on earth” [mortedd-e jahel mofsed al-ard], almost the exact formulation the Ayatollah would employ some forty years later in his fatwa demanding the execution of Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses. Kasravi was assassinated not long afterward by a member of the Fadaʾiyan-e Eslam. Rushdie was badly injured in an attack by a young Muslim in the summer of 2022).⁵

Borujerdi: Obstacle or Catalyst? Khomeini’s political passivity during this period, which he later compared to the self-restraint of the Imam ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib as he waited in the wings throughout Abū Bakr’s, ʿUmar’s and most of ʿUthmān’s caliphate,⁶ was to some extent attributable to the accession of Ayatollah Sayyid Aqa Hosayn-e Tabatabaʾi-ye Borujerdi to the leadership of the Qom seminary system in 1945 (Ayatollah Haʾeri-ye Yazdi had

 Montazeri, Khaterat, 221– 2. Efsad fi l-ard, “spreading corruption on earth,” has become a bit of a catch-all accusation used to justify the execution of activist regime opponents, but it is usually leveled at those whose activism has included violence or the promotion of violence (the most recent cases being that of Judo champion Navid-e Afkari, accused of murdering a guard during anti-regime protests, and blogger Ruhollah Zam, accused of inciting rioters to attack police).  Sahife-ye Nur, 5: 238.

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passed away in 1937). Indeed, this marjaʿ – the “greatest religious leader of the Imāmī (i. e., Twelver) Shiʿites in the fourteenth hijrī century,”⁷ the “first sole and uncontested Source of Emulation for the entire Shiʿite world”⁸ and the man responsible for cementing the transfer of the Shiʿite center of intellectual gravity from the Iraqi shrine cities to Iran – is generally remembered by Western scholarship, when he is remembered at all, as little more than a prophylactic, whose main function, in what is essentially the revolutionary narrative, was to keep Ayatollah Khomeini at bay (Khomeini himself is reported to have said of this period: “I am as fire under ashes!”).⁹ “In many ways,” writes Ray Takeyh in Hidden Iran, referring specifically to Borujerdi, “Khomeini had the misfortune of existing in a clerical establishment that was dominated by the quietist Shiite political tradition.”¹⁰ “The later 1950s were primarily a quietist period for the ulama,” states Nikki Keddie, “led by the conservative Ayatollah Borujerdi…In the late 1950s [Khomeini] was closely associated with Ayatollah Borujerdi at Qom and politically rather quietist.” Elsewhere she portrays this Focus of Emulation as “not unfriendly to the Shah” (a claim for which there is undeniably some evidence).¹¹ Hamid Dabashi belittles this sage’s importance – “A certain Ayatollah Boroujerdi was the chief Shiʿi cleric of the land at this time, and by disposition he had an apolitical and acquiescent character” – and implies that only after his death was the door opened to “major institutional developments” with “enduring revolutionary implications.”¹² Heinz Halm devotes two sentences to Borujerdi, in which this marjaʿ is described as having taught at Qom, and died.¹³ Ervand Abrahamian styles him “a staunch loyalist” and even “a pillar of the Pahlavi regime.”¹⁴ In Shaul Mishal and Ori Goldberg’s Understanding Shiite Leadership, this widely esteemed scholar is not mentioned at all. What these and a host of other studies have in common in this regard is a concep-

 Habib Allah-e Azimi, Tarikh-e feqh va foqahaʾ (Tehran: Asatir Press, 1385), p. 395. The fourteenth Islamic or hijrī century corresponds approximately to the years 1882– 1979 CE.  Yegane marja-e bela monaze-e tamam-e shiʿayan esna ʿashari-ye jahan (R. N. Bustan, Shiʿe: Mazhab-e Qiyam [Rahnavard: Name-ye Azad Andishan-e Iran (n.p., n.d.), vol. 37], p. 18).  Man atash zir-e khakestar hastam. Khaterat 15 Khordad, vol. 1, p. 59. Such a title grants Borujerdi an even higher status than that enjoyed by Najafi, Ansari or Shirazi in the nineteenth century.  Takeyh, Hidden Iran, p. 12.  Keddie, Modern Iran, pp. 186, 147, 146. Ayatollah Borujerdi’s relationship with Muhammad Reza Shah was complex and vicissitudinous – and beyond the scope of this discussion.  Hamid Dabashi, Shiʿism: A Religion of Protest (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 3 and 268. Dabashi also writes that “Boroujerdi’s passive acknowledgment of the second Pahlavi monarch Muhammad Reza Shah…was reminiscent of Haʾeri Yazdi’s passive acceptance of Reza Shah. This had limited Shiʿi political activism…” (p. 267).  Heinz Halm, Shiʿa Islam (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1997), p. 121.  Abrahamian, Khomeinism, pp. 8 – 9.

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tion of Ayatollah Borujerdi as, at least, irrelevant to the emergence of an activist, Islamist orientation in Iran, and at most, an obstacle in the way of the same. (Another factor that seems to have contributed to the relative indifference to Borujerdi among scholars is the presence at Qom during his tenure of a young, brash prodigy named Sayyid Muhammad Hosayn-e Tabatabaʾi [d. 1981], who pedagogically outshined his master and authored dozens of works, among them what became an indispensable Qurʿan commentary. That having been said, Tabatabaʾi has also been thoroughly neglected by the academy). There is no question that Ayatollah Borujerdi was a highly cautious man, and that he strove to keep himself and his students out of politics, lest they endanger the seminary.¹⁵ He is also said to have had a bitter taste in his mouth from the “hijacking” of the constitutional movement by secular westernizing elements that he witnessed in his youth, which soured him on such enterprises.¹⁶ The middle of Borujerdi’s tenure corresponded with the heady days of Mossadeq’s movement, but his pupils at the howzeh feared being caught with a newspaper, let alone participating in protests, and could only visit Ayatollah Taleqani’s engagé “Mosque of Guidance” (masjed-e hedayat) on the sly.¹⁷ This nearly universal Source of Emulation once castigated a junior lecturer for asking his audience what business American President Eisenhower had meddling in the affairs of Iran, explaining that “if you wish to speak about an onion, think and think again whether this subject will attract the attention of the authorities. If so, desist.”¹⁸ He exiled the “red Ayatollah” (Abu l-Fazl Borqeʿi) from Qom for excessive agitation. He summoned some two thousand clerical colleagues to a conference where a resolution was passed forbidding the participants to engage in politics.¹⁹ There lingers still, to this day, some muffled resentment at what appears to have been Borujerdi’s reticence to inter-

 The administration of the howzeh and its expansion were all-engrossing activities for the aging ayatollah. He said, “Before I came to Qom, I used to hear the voices of angels; since embarking on the work of [managing the seminary] I have lost that.”  “Some people criticize me for not interfering in politics,” explained Borujerdi. “The reality is that when I was in Najaf, I observed the involvement of Akhund Khorasani and Naʿini in politics and saw the result” (Rajaee, Islamism, p. 69). Nevertheless, the two premier “constitutional” ayatollahs, Behbehani and Tabatabaʾi (not to be confused with Borujerdi himself, who had the same nisba, or with his highly influential junior partner at Qom, Mohammad Hosayn-e Tabatabaʾi) may have helped instill in Borujerdi the importance of adopting a more worldly approach to religion, as we shall see.  Karbaschi, Tarikh, p. 212– 13.  Karbaschi, Tarikh, p. 146.  Akhavi, Religion and Politics, pp. 68 – 73. This resolution was at least partially connected to the attempt on the Shah’s life of that same year, and Borujerdi’s rejection of the methods of the Fadaʾiyan.

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vene on behalf of the condemned assassin and founder of the Fadaʾiyan-e Eslam Navvab-e Safavi, who was executed in 1956.²⁰ Even at the Grand Ayatollah’s funeral, a eulogist was reprimanded for remarking that the howzeh should “involve itself in the affairs of society.”²¹ Despite all this, in the necessary digression that follows we offer a somewhat different assessment of the role of this marjaʿ al-marājiʿ, of whom it may be said (like Vahed-e Behbehani, the “ostad-e kol”) that virtually all the revolutionary clerics were his students. First, it is important to avoid the retrospective assumption – based largely on the later mantras of Khomeinism – that being a committed Muslim or even an Islamist in mid-twentieth century Iran meant opposing the monarchy. Indeed, it may be said that to whatever small extent Ayatollah Borujerdi was able to detach himself from his all-consuming preoccupation – maintaining, defending and expanding the howze-ye ʿelmiye in Qom – he did what he could to prop up the second Pahlavi, as his predecessor in office, Ayatollah Haʾeri-ye Yazdi, had endeavored to prop up the first. In both cases the Grand Ayatollahs were at pains to support the monarchs – as they explained to their coteries on quite a few occasions – because weakening the Shah meant weakening Iran and Islam, both of which were seriously beset by an outside world converging on them from all sides with ill intent (and were threatened, on the domestic front, by various socialist and communist movements, as well). In a certain sense, it was either too difficult or too unpleasant for them to imagine that “The Shadow of God on Earth” was himself the source of the anti-Islamic measures descending upon them and their communities without cease. On the contrary: the king was seen as the last bulwark – crumbling, but still extant – between the Muslims and political-spiritual catastrophe. It was the Great Infidel Powers and (what we would call today) their “cultural imperialism” that had forced the hand of the Shah, and were he to be attacked simultaneously from the inside, what little resistance he had been able to muster to date would collapse. Ayatollah Soltani-ye Tabatabaʾi: I remember that a man from Shiraz sent a letter to Ayatollah Borujerdi, in which he took His Excellency to task for penning supportive missives on behalf of king and court. “Do you know what this Shah is all about?” he asked. In the envelope he sent a newspaper cutting in which

 E. g., Akhavi, Religion and Politics, pp. 369 – 372. Borujerdi had also taken steps to prevent Safavi’s people from rabble rousing at the howzeh, which, it will be recalled, nearly led to a rupture between him and Ayatollah Kashani, who supported the Fadaʾiyan (in an ironic twist, later on Kashani himself, in order to get out of prison, may have sanctioned the arch-terrorist’s execution). Safavi, for his part, severely castigated Borujerdi, calling him “a friend of the enemies of Islam and an enemy of the friends of Islam.” With all of its sympathy for Safavi, the Islamic Republic, being a cleritocracy, places Borujerdi on a higher pedestal.  Akhavi, Religion and Politics, pp. 415 – 416.

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Muhammad Reza was photographed standing next to his un-veiled wife. Upon reading the letter Ayatollah Borujerdi turned to us and said: “The author of these words is ignorant of the extent to which I am aware of what is going on. But what can we do, since this is a matter of foreign pressure (feshar-e ajaneb dar kar ast). I do not believe it is in our interests to weaken the government. The king does not have control: he is under pressure from foreign governments. From one side the Russians, from the other the West and America, they all force their designs and desires upon him. If the king gets the feeling that his position within the country is weakened, that the rug is being pulled out from under his feet (ja-ye payash sost ast), in order to save himself he will surrender to the foreigners completely. Thus, our task is to keep him strong. If then we occasionally go along [with the king and his ministers – agar gahi momashat mishavad], it is for that reason.²²

In the nineteen sixties and seventies Ayatollah Khomeini, even after his exile, would time and again address the Shah in speeches and open letters as the champion of Islam and Iran, and urge him, sometimes in so many words, to “man up.” Khomeini promised Mohammad Reza that if he did so – if he stood strong in the face of imperialist inroads – the ulama would throw the full weight of their support behind him (when he failed to do so, Khomeini called him a mardak, “a little man” – his sobriquet to this day in the Islamic Republic). No less a radical than founder of the terrorist Fadaʾiyan-e Eslam, Navvab-e Safavi, “celebrated the restoration of Mohammad Reza [in the coup of 1953] and called on him and [new prime minister General Fazlollah-e] Zahedi to further the cause of Islam.”²³ Borujerdi himself told a SAVAK agent that “the presence of the shahanshah is a major safeguard against the influence of communism and irreligion”²⁴ and the ayatollah played a not insignificant role in unseating Mosaddeq.²⁵ “Do return,” this preeminent marjaʿ wrote to Mohammad Reza Shah once that latter goal had been achieved. “Shiʿism and Islam need you. You are the Shiʿite sovereign.”²⁶ The mass circulation daily Ettelaʾat carried a telegram sent by the same Source of Emulation to the king expressing the hope that his return to the throne “would correct the past corruptions and lead to the restoration of Islam’s greatness.”²⁷ Thus, Ayatollah Borujerdi’s willingness to work with the monarchy, in the spirit of his constitutionalist

 Ahmadi, Cheshm va cheragh, p. 58.  Cited by Buchan, Days of God, p. 117.  Qiyam-e poonzdahom-e khordad beh revayat-e asnad-e SAVAK (Tehran: Markaz-e Barresi-ye asnad-e tarikhi-ye vezarat-e ettelaʾat), vol. 1, p. 67.  Milani, The Shah, p. 168.  Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 78.  Rajaee, Islamism, pp. 69 – 70.

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teachers, should not be construed as contra-indicative to an unbending Islamic stance.²⁸ Second, Ayatollah Borujerdi did in fact stand up to the king on quite a few occasions, protesting certain highly offensive policies in telegrams and during personal audiences, primarily but not solely when he perceived those policies as detrimental to the seminary system. Indeed, far from holding back his pupil and employee Khomeini, Borujerdi quite often held back the very royal projects that Khomeini would later come out so fiercely against, to such an extent that one government-controlled newspaper would cheer upon this marjaʿs death (which was marked, at the Shah’s orders, by three days of national mourning): “The obstacle in the path of progress has finally been removed, and now without further ado we can launch our reform program!”²⁹ The construction of a movie theater in the port city of Abadan directly across from a mosque had to await Borujerdi’s death: “It could never have been accomplished during his lifetime.”³⁰ Hojjatoleslam Seyyed Mehdi-ye Amini-Moharrer Darvazeʾi: [Ayatollah Borujerdi] was the greatest Source of Emulation of his age, and his influence extended beyond Iran and even beyond the Shiʿa. As such, he stood as an immovable and impenetrable dam against the self-serving and tyrannical [Pahlavi] regime, and indeed, the regime lay in constant wait for his demise, for they were convinced that when that happened, they would be able with the greatest of ease to pursue their diabolical plots against the people and against religion – something that was quite impossible while he was alive.³¹

 It is telling in this regard that, as Yann Richard informs us, “the Shiites of Lebanon, even before the arrival of Musa al-Sadr (1959), had a picture of the Shah in their homes” (Richard, Iran, loc. 7490 – 1).  Ahmadi, Cheshm va cheragh, p. 190. See also Mohsen-e Saleh, Yaran-e sadeq-e aftab (Tehran: Markaz-e asnad-e enqelab-e eslami, 1388), p. 45: rezhim-e Pahlavi goman mi-kard keh dar feqdane an zaʿim mitavanad barnameh-ha-ye khod ra beh rahati ejra konad.  Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 24, p. 292. This is apparently the movie theater – the one burned to the ground in the late summer of 1978 along with three hundred and seventy-seven (others: up to six hundred and fifty) people trapped inside (Cinema Rex). Although this horrific event provided fuel primarily for the revolutionary forces, who blamed government agents for setting the fire, the discussion by Motahhari whence this statement was excerpted represents yet another piece of evidence militating for the culpability of (independently acting) Islamists. In 1980 one of these – a welder and opium addict name Hassan Takbʿalizadeh – came forward of his own accord and confessed to committing the crime. He was executed, but questions still remain regarding the event. Ayatollah Khomeini condemned the arson, and went right on railing against movie theaters and defending the “pious and zealous” crowds who destroyed them.  Ali-ye Baqeri (ed.), Khaterat-e 15 Khordad: Majera-ye aghaz-e enqelab-e eslami dar Tabriz (Tehran, 1374), vol. 2, p. 95.

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The head of Qom’s seminary system (howze-ye ʿelmiye) once left the young Mohammad Reza Shah, who had made a long journey from Azerbaijan just to pay his respects, standing outside the back of his house while the ayatollah pretended not to be home: the king had just returned from Rome where he had kissed the pope’s hand, and Borujerdi was incensed.³² The venerated marjaʿ even refused to grant clerical authorization to His Majesty’s marriage to Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary (showing more mettle than an earlier pope). The fact that she was half-Christian was not the problem: Islamic law does not oppose the marriage of male Muslims to female members of the “peoples of the book.” It was the “gravitation to the foreign” (biganegaraʾi) that bothered Borujerdi – ten years before Al-e Ahmad’s famed Gharbzadegi (“Westitis”).³³ Prime Minister Asadollah ʿAlam told his friend, British diplomat Denis Wright, that Ayatollah Borujerdi “was threatening to publish in Iran a shot of Queen Soraya in Florida wearing the new-fangled bikini” as well as evidence of the king’s infidelities, unless the latter agreed to an attack on the Bahaʾi, which he did.³⁴ The marjaʿ even threatened the Shah in a direct telegram regarding his desire to wed the nineteen year-old Catholic princess Maria Gabriella of Savoy: “His Majesty is king of a Shiʿite country and must not do such a thing… If he were to go ahead [and marry her], he would be jeopardizing his throne. We cannot remain silent.”³⁵ In another correspondence with the “King of Kings,” Ayatollah Borujerdi, having challenged the Shah to confirm or deny rumors regarding various reform programs in the offing and having received the royal response that “Jamal Abd al-Nasser in Egypt did the very same thing,” countered bitingly: “Over there, they first got rid of the monarchy, and only afterward did they pursue such programs…”³⁶ Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi was also provoked to activism against Sufi organizations, and – as we saw just above – he had more than a hand in fomenting the anti-Bahaʾi policy that reared its head exactly one hundred years after the antiBabi persecution under the Qajars (which was also stimulated by the clerics).³⁷

 Karbaschi, Tarikh, pp. 150 – 154.  Ahmadi, Cheshm va cheragh, p. 385. This led Borujerdi to make the very Khomeini-esque move of ruling that such marriages are forbidden – even though they are not (Ahmadi, Cheshm va cheragh, p. 123). Borujerdi also expressed his disapproval of the Shah’s proposed marriage to the Catholic Princess Maria Gabriella of Savoy in 1958.  Buchan, Days of God, p. 118. Milani, The Shah, p. 199. Less than a decade later Time magazine would enthuse that in Iran itself “the beaches bounce with bikinis.”  Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 87.  Khaterat 15 Khordad, vol. 1, p. 77.  Khaterat 15 Khordad, vol. 1, p. 190. Borujerdi’s plenipotentiary in this matter was the aforementioned Ayatollah Falsafi. At the turn of the century there had been another spate of vicious antiBahaʾi persecutions, and Bahaʾis would suffer severely after the revolution of 1979. It would be

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He authorized, if he did not instigate, the assassination of a well-known JewishBahaʾi physician, suspected by Islamists of poisoning anti-Shah activists.³⁸ He appears to have been instrumental, as well, in quashing the establishment of a “women’s house” in Tehran, another Pahlavi project (fifteen years before Khomeini’s own objection to female suffrage would set off a storm). He threatened in 1959 to issue a fatwa declaring territory received through land reform haram (forbidden), and was thus instrumental in postponing this pet project of the Shah.³⁹ He did in fact issue fatwas against the purchase by Muslim families of radios, televisions and Pepsi Cola (the latter primarily because it was imported by a Bahaʾi businessman). Borujerdi’s pressure led to the expansion of religious instruction in elementary curricula; the establishment of “prayer rooms” (namaz khaneh-ha) in high schools; the construction of the masjed-e aʿzam in Qom; and, eventually, the building of a mosque at Tehran University. Even before he took up his position in Qom, Borujerdi telegraphed the government on one occasion, in connection with certain measures proposed by a clerical colleague, to the effect that “If attention is not paid to the requests of [Ayatollah] Qomi, do not have faith in the security of the South of Iran.”⁴⁰ He was instrumental in springing from the Shah’s jails quite a few activist clerics, including a young instructor at Qom who would in time become Ayatollah Mohammad Reza-e Saʿidi, the “scholar warrior” (mojtahed-e mojahed) celebrated as the Islamic Revolution’s first clerical martyr.⁴¹ In 1958, when the Shah sought to banish a cleric who had allegedly participated in the failed “Gharani coup,” a threat on the part of Borujerdi to go abroad himself averted the evil decree.⁴² Not for nothing did the Shah send his telegram of condolence upon Borujerdi’s death specifically and solely to Ayatollah Mohsen al-Hakim of Najaf, thereby supporting the latter’s candidacy for the position of universal marjaʿ: two decades of

wrong not to note that more than a few high ranking officials who took part in the severe repression of Islamism (and even Islam) under the Pahlavis, were of Bahaʾi origin, including some of the cruelest SAVAK interrogators.  Karbaschi, Tarikh, pp. 294– 296.  Milani, The Shah, p. 244.  Mottahedeh, Mantle of the Prophet, pp. 230 – 231. Admittedly this took place in 1943: a little earlier or a little later and such a threat would probably have brought dire consequences in its train. Ayatollah Borujerdi was even responsible, to a large extent, for major repairs to local dams in Qom (see Cyrus Shayegh, “Seeing like a State: An Essay on the Historiography of Modern Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 42 (2010), p. 50).  “Negahi beh nokhostin mojahed-e shahid-e nehzat-e emam.” https://www.tasnimnews.com/fa/ news. Last accessed 10/12/2021.  Milani, The Shah, p. 208.

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There are other ways in which Ayatollah Borujerdi was an influential activist who anticipated and promoted what would become major revolutionary themes. He was the first marjaʿ to embark on a campaign of national, regional and even international outreach, inaugurating newsletters, financing magazines (Maktab-e Eslam, Maktab-e Tashayyoʿ, Maktab-e Qurʿan, Maktab-e Anbiyaʾ) and founding a Shiʿite teaching mosque in Hamburg, whither he dispatched Messrs. Golpayegani and (later) Beheshti.⁴³ He preached – three decades before the Khomeinist “Exportation of the Revolution” (sodur-e enqelab) – that “our responsibility is not confined to the howzeh or even to Iran; rather, we must develop a program that extends far beyond our country’s borders.”⁴⁴ Even inside Iran, his work to disseminate religious knowledge beyond the walls of the howzeh ploughed the field and planted the seeds that would later sprout into Islamic resistance, at the same time as it served as a model for the establishment, only a few years later, of lay educational associations that would play an important part in both the Fifteenth of Khordad Uprising and the revolution of 1979. This is all on top of the hundreds of students and scores of mojtaheds that he trained, many if not most of whom would go on to participate in various facets of the crescendo toward the dethronement of the king and the institution of an Islamic Republic. No less significant, Ayatollah Borujerdi undertook a major structural overhaul of the administrative and financial apparatus of the local and national seminary system, leaving in place a vast network of communication and patronage that was put to use by his successors and especially by the Khomeinists on the eve of the revolution. In the words of Farhang Rajaee, Borujerdi “strengthened the view that the ulama’s main efforts should be exerted on organization, institution building and the assertion of authority.”⁴⁵ Borujerdi’s activities on behalf of Sunni-Shiʿi unity were unprecedented and unparalleled, and played a major role in the creation of the Middle-East-wide Jamiʿat-e Taqrib or “Association for Inter-denominational Dialogue.”⁴⁶ The issue was “the apple of his eye.”⁴⁷ Almost uniquely among Shiʿite scholars of his time, he adduced Sunni exempla (aḥādīth) as well as the positions of Sunni jurists throughout the ages in the context of his howzeh lectures, and forcefully advocated to his lis-

 Rajaee, Islamism, p. 73.  Ahmadi, Cheshm va cheragh, p. 188.  Rajaee, Islamism, p. 68.  Otherwise known as Dar al-taqrib bayna al-madhahib al-islamiyya. The extent of Borujerdi’s contribution is debated by scholars, but all acknowledge that he played a role (see Brunner, Islamic Ecumenism, 189 – 193 and passim). Ali Shariʿati, for one, credited Borujerdi with leading the movement for Islamic unity (Richard, Shiʿite Islam, p. 203).  Morgh-e delash, lit. “the bird of his heart” (Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 20, p. 155).

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teners that they do the same.⁴⁸ According to many sources, his last words before dying were: “Has Shaykh Mohammad Taqi-ye Qommi gone to Egypt yet [for the unity conference]?”⁴⁹ Again: a major component of Khomeinist revolutionary ideology – pan-Islamism – was adumbrated and imbued in his students and colleagues (including the “Imam” himself ) by Ayatollah Borujerdi. And all this activism – there is no other name for it – issuing from a man who was, at the time, in his mideighties! But the most potent contribution of this preeminent marjaʿ to the Islamic Revolution was, we will argue, rendered not outside the walls of the seminary, but inside them, in his research, and even more so in his classroom. This was on two levels. Concerning the first we shall not elaborate, but only remark upon Borujerdi’s penchant for the study of philosophy, and to some extent gnosis (ʿirfān) and even illuminationism (ishrāq). Even though Shiʿism’s bāṭinī (esoteric) and kalām (theosophic) leanings made these topics less anathema among Shiʿi ulama than among their Sunni counterparts, ⁵⁰ they were still highly controversial. Although the more acceptable Peripatetic end of the scholastic spectrum – the legacy of Avicenna (d. 1037) – was generally construed as opposing the less acceptable Hermetic or Neo-Platonic end – the legacy of al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191) – nevertheless spectrums, once entered upon, could be and often were traversed.⁵¹ There was a slippery slope between Muʿtazilite-like falsafa and Sufi gnostic mysticism, and another one between such mysticism and out-and-out heresy.⁵² Moreover, medieval Islamic

 Though extraordinary for his time, this was not a pioneering position: in earlier centuries Shiʿite sages did not scruple to make use of Sunni hadith, especially but not exclusively in order to argue some aspect of the Sunni-Shiʿi schism on their adversaries’ “home turf.” Some might see in this tendency of Borujerdi’s a partial reversion to certain Akhbārī attitudes, but it is not necessary to go that far. Meir Litvak notes that Shiʿite ulama in the Iraqi shrine cities occasionally attended classes of their Sunni counterparts during the nineteenth century and sometimes even received an ijaza from them. Still, he stresses, the relations between the two sides were “mostly characterized by antagonism” (Shiʿi Scholars, p. 119).  Ahmadi, Cheshm va cheragh, p. 189.  Many have echoed the assertion of renowned Egyptian (Sunni) historian Ahmad Amin (d. 1954) to the effect that “Shiʿite thought is more suited to philosophy than Sunni thought” (Ahmad Amin, Zuhr al-Islam [Cairo: Dār al-Muharrir al-Adabi, 1945], vol. 1, p. 190).  The legendary Hermes Trismegistus, eponymous founder of the Hermetic sciences – a syncretic mix of ancient Gnostic ideas – reportedly visited Suhrawardī in a dream, together with Aristotle, and both sages shared their wisdom with him (Mangol Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent: Socio-Religious Thought in Qajar Iran [Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982], p. 42).  In this connection one might speak of a quadruple dread that haunted Iranian-Shiʿite orthodoxy: Theosophy, Sufism, Manicheism and Poetry, the last of these traditionally drawing on, and therefore tainted by, the first three (and suffering from the additional stigma of having been condemned by the Prophet Muḥammad).

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theology-philosophy (kalām) began as apologia: nothing about the religion of Muḥammad, insisted the mutakallimūn, contradicted Greek logic. But this strategy, of course, by definition assigned Greek logic the role of ultimate arbiter and criterion, and thereby opened up a Pandora’s Box of potential infidelities. The day will come (mourned the Prophet Muḥammad in a well-known hadith), when my followers will argue without cease, until one of them asks: “Given that God created the world – who created God?” (khalaqa llāhu l-khalqa wa man khalaqa llāh?). Whoever encounters such [a challenge] should say: “I believe in God!”

Reason-based religion, in short, was dangerous. Ayatollah Haʾeri-ye Yazdi, Borujerdi’s predecessor and founder of the howze-ye ʿelmiye, had emphatically rejected philosophy as “no part of Islam.”⁵³ In Borujerdi’s own time the Mashhad howzeh to the East and the Najaf howzeh to the West were known for their fierce anti-speculative stances,⁵⁴ but the head of the Qom seminary, sandwiched in between them, was not cowed. He indulged his unfashionable proclivity both privately, in his research and writing, and publicly, or at least amongst select students and colleagues (true to form, even in this non-conformism Borujerdi was cautious, treading a thin line: he withstood pressure to cancel the philosophy classes of the rising stars Montazeri and Tabatabaʾi, but demanded that they remove certain potentially “dangerous” – i. e., overly Sufistic – works from the syllabus; when rumour had it that the SAVAK was egging on the luminaries at Najaf to indict Qom for its neo-scholasticism and thereby increase the prestige of the former learning center at the expense of the latter, Borujerdi suspended such classes altogether – but later reinstated them).⁵⁵ Some have claimed that it was this partial revival of the study of philosophy at Qom under Borujerdi – a revival which unquestionably influenced Ayatollah Khomeini and in which he played a role as well – that ultimately provided the religious intellectuals of the nineteen-sixties and seventies with the epistemological tools to confront the challenge of Western-based modernity.⁵⁶ In partic-

 Karbaschi, Tarikh, p. 75. This negative attitude to the more speculative approaches to religion spread widely among latter-day ulama even though Uṣūlism (as opposed to Akhbārism, but similar to Sunni Ḥanafism) has historically been linked with kalām. Borujerdi was, in a sense, re-establishing the tie between the two.  Mashhad even played host to the rise of an anti-philosophical school of thought known as maktab-e tafkik, which advocated for the separation (tafkīk) between philosophy and religion, a position that is still preached today.  Karbaschi, Tarikh, pp. 212– 217. There is nothing simple about these assessments. Mottahedeh states that Borujerdi “disapproved of philosophy in general” (Mantle of the Prophet, p. 243).  See, for one example among many, Hamid Parsaniya, Hadith-e Paymane: Pazhuheshi dar enqelab-e eslami (Qom: Mo’avenat umur-e asatid va durus maʿaref-e eslami, 1376), p. 290.

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ular, the Thursday evening classes in which Muhammad Hosayn Tabatabaʾi expounded the ideas that would eventually inform his widely read The Principles of Philosophy and the Method of Realism (Osul-e Eslam va Ravesh-e Realism), are credited with galvanizing, and even politicizing, the Qom student body.⁵⁷ The Islamic Revolution’s greatest philosopher, Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari, was a product of the Qom howzeh under Ayatollah Borujerdi. Abbas Amanat goes so far as to argue that “what turned [Khomeini] into a revolutionary prophet anxious to save the ʻwronged Islam’ from the threats of a secular world came essentially from his mystico-philosophical bent.”⁵⁸ Down to the present day disciples of Ayatollah Borujerdi, like Ayatollah Javadi-ye Amoli, push hard for an emphasis on philosophy at the howzeh to counterbalance the considerable stress on jurisprudence, declaring that “if only we were to give as much space to kalām as we do to fiqh and uṣūl, we would be saved.”⁵⁹ The return to speculative thinking was not, albeit, pioneered by Borujerdi – the credit for inaugurating this “neo-Muʿtazilism” should probably be laid at the feet of the famed anti-imperialist and “Father of Islamic Modernism” Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani al-Asadobadi (d. 1897)⁶⁰ – but the venerable midtwentieth century leader of the Qom seminary system did more than most of his contemporaries and colleagues to keep up and even increase the momentum of this “retro-innovative” trend in the Shiʿite world. Not for nothing does Roy Mottahedeh call the talebeh of late twentieth century Shiʿite seminaries “the last true scholastics alive on earth.”⁶¹

 E. g., Khaterat-e 15 Khordad, vol. 1, p. 156.  Amanat, Iran, p. 591. Amanat’s point is, essentially, that when Khomeini “returned” from the heights of Sadra-esque theosophy to the more mundane world of juridical activities, he abstracted and elevated the latter with the help of the former and turned it into a tool for battling Western ideas. Though quite pretty, to this writer’s mind such a claim on behalf of the decisive influence hekmat had on Khomeini’s revolutionary stance goes a bit far.  Sokhanrani-ye Ayatollah Javadi-ye Amoli, 15/8/2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMgo9qGOLs. Last accessed 10/10/2022.  Or perhaps at the feet of the teacher of al-Afghani’s teacher, Hajj Mola Hadi-ye Sabzevari.  Mottahedeh, Mantle, p. 8. We should be careful not to draw too fine a line between the trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic and the science of jurisprudence: at the howzeh they often nourish each other, as no one shows better than Mottahedeh himself, e. g., pp. 72– 74. It is also important to distinguish between philosophy as a mind-honing exercise that to some extent dovetails with the study of uṣūl al-fiqh and which is a mainstay of the Shiʿite howzeh, and philosophy in the guise of theology, which, “though it underlies many of the core beliefs of modern Shiʿism…is not a central concern in contemporary Shiʿi scholarship” (Haider, Shiʿite Islam, p. 16, n. 8 – an instructive qualification from an author who, in the same volume, asserts more than once that “the core theological beliefs,” though they are “later developments,” have “come to hold a central place in Shiʿi understandings of history, ritual and politics,” have “profoundly affected the ways in which Shiʿi communities remember the past” and have “helped shape (and reshape) Shiʿi historical memory”

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The second level on which Ayatollah Borujerdi prepared the intellectual ground for the Islamic Revolution is perhaps subtler, but, we will argue, even more profound and powerful. It has to do with a fundamental shift in emphasis that this peerless marjaʿ introduced into the study of Islamic jurisprudence. The analysis of that shift that we proffer here represents a severe oversimplification that ignores a great many complicating factors, chief among them, of course, the fact that the history of Shiʿite fiqh is made up of the contributions of thousands of individual thinkers and the polemics that raged between them. Under such circumstances, talk about “shifts,” “trends” or prevalent positions during a particular period is always a composite that rides roughshod over its highly diverse component parts in order to portray a general trajectory. Another risk that should be taken into account in connection with any investigation of the ideas and actions of pre-revolutionary clerical figures, involves the phenomenon of post-revolutionary authors superimposing Khomeinist outlooks on those figures, or retroactively skewing their careers in a more revolutionary direction than they actually took. Although this author feels that the extent of such distortion can also be overestimated, the following discussion, which is based on the recollections of dozens of senior clerics, avoids this pitfall for a different reason, to wit, that the transformation described herein is not readily identifiable – and moreover has not been directly identified by any of these primary sources – as one of the processes that contributed to a burgeoning revolutionary outlook. This specific motivation for exaggeration, at least, is thus absent, and given the fierce polemic that has always surrounded issues such as these in the world of Islamic jurisprudence, saddling a given ʿālim with responsibility for pushing the juristic discourse in one or the other direction in this connection does his future reputation few favors. Like all other religious cultures (and cultures in general), Shiʿism has played host over its long history to a wide variety of tensions: pendular oscillations along spectrums in diverse fields that in many ways constitute the dialectical motor of the faith. One of these has been the seemingly eternal push-and-pull between the more cerebral and theoretical approach to the study of Islamic law, on the one hand, and the more textual-based and “empirical” approach, on the other –

[Haider, Shiʿite Islam, p. 4 and passim]. Haider provides us with many an edifying illustration of this process, but also of its opposite, i. e., instances in which memory – historical or legendary – impacts upon the construction of theology. To the present writer’s mind the latter is more common and fundamental than the former, and thus I would reverse Haider’s argument that “it is important to understand the belief structures of Shiʿi groups before plunging into a dizzying array of names and places” [Haider, Shiʿite Islam, p. 8]. Indeed, Haider himself points out that “In the early history of the Shiʿa…there is scant evidence of Muʿtazilī influence, and discussions of the Imamate are largely embedded in historical narratives” [Haider, Shiʿite Islam, p. 51]).

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a struggle of which the longstanding contest between the Uṣūliyya and Akhbāriyya schools is one expression. An (extremely) schematic portrayal of the fluctuation between these two poles over the career of Shiʿite fiqh might look like this. In the waning days of the Imamate and throughout the period of the “Lesser Occultation” – that is, during the ninth and the early tenth centuries CE – Shiʿi (proto‐) jurists reacted negatively to what they perceived as the excesses of the Sunni Ḥanafite school, where raʾy (opinion) and qiyās (analogy) formed the bases of much legal development (a somewhat similar negative reaction among Sunni fuqahāʾ led to the emergence of Shāfiʿism).⁶² As a contra point to these overly intellectual, insufficiently “anchored” methods – their critics would mockingly call the practitioners thereof “the what-is-your-opinion-ists” (al-a-raʾaytiyyun) – the Jaʿfarī (i. e., Shiʿi) school of fiqh sought to root its system in the more solid ground of the sacred sources: Qurʿan and especially Hadith (this reaction might be seen as an early form of Akhbārism). Al-Kulaynī and Ibn Bābawayh, preeminent Shiʿite hadith collectors of the tenth Christian century, leaned (it will be recalled) in that more conservative direction. They and their ilk were wont to quote the sixth imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, who asked renowned Sunni jurist Abū Ḥanīfa when the latter came to visit him in Medina: “Tell me, which, in the eyes of God, is the more serious crime, homicide or adultery?” “No doubt, homicide is the greater crime,” replied the illustrious Iraqi jurist. “Yet murderers are convicted on the basis of two witnesses’ evidence,” al-Ṣādiq pointed out, “whereas adultery is proven only by statements from four witnesses. How does your reasoning explain that?” The sixth Imam pressed on: “Now, what is more meritorious in the eyes of God, fasting or prayer?”

 To put a finer point on it, Sunni qiyās appears to have been an attempt to rein in the open-endedness verging on chaos into which raʾy could easily fall. But qiyās itself could also go too far; or, put another way, could become a tool of raʾy (qiyāsu l-dīn bi-raʾyihi, carried out by those dubbed by later authors muṭahhariyyūn – “those who take liberties”). Indeed, the backlash against excessive qiyās led Shiʿi ulama to reject the scholarship not only of their Sunni counterparts but of some of their own esteemed colleagues and predecessors, as well, such as Ibn Qūlawayh al-Qummī (d. 978 CE) and al-Iskāfī (Abū ʿAlī Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. Junayd, d. 991 CE), together known as “The Two Ancient Ones” (al-qadīmayn – Astarābādī speaks also of Ibn Abi l-ʿAqīl al-Aʿmāʾī in this connection). Their reputation would be revived by Shaykh Mufīd (d. 1022 CE) and the latent Uṣūlī trend. From the Shiʿite proto-Uṣūlī perspective, it should be noted, qiyās did not go far enough. It was, one might say, the coward’s ijtihād. All of this having been said, the line between qiyās and other ʿaql-based methods that were acceptable to Shiʿa jurists is not as finely drawn as all that: Goldziher, for one, states that the Shiʿi Uṣūliyyun “also admit qiyās and other subjective methods as roots” of jurisprudence (Goldziher, Introduction, p. 211, n. 124).

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“Prayer is definitely more meritorious,” answered Abū Ḥanīfa. “Yet a woman must make up the fasts she misses due to menstruation,” continued the imam, “but not the prayers she missed for the same reason. How does your logic deal with such a discrepancy? Fear God, O servant of God! For you and we may be summoned before God’s tribunal tomorrow, at which point we shall say, ʻAllah said such and such; the Prophet said such and such…’ but you shall say, ʻWe have guessed such and such; we have deduced such and such.’⁶³

Some Shiʿi scholars of the period went even further in their limitation of the acceptable wellsprings of jurisprudence (uṣūl al-fiqh): in their eyes not just raʾy (opinion) or ʿaql (intellect) but none other than the Qurʿan itself was disqualified for this task. Scripture, after all, describes itself as “a noble Qurʿan, a book kept hidden; none may touch it save the purified” (Q. 61: 77) – where “touch,” given the context here, means “penetrate the true meaning of.” The same sacred source declares elsewhere that “Allah’s wish is but to remove impurity from you, O People of the House (ahl al-bayt – Q. 33: 33)” – the latter designation, as we have seen, referring in Shiʿi exegesis to Muḥammad, Fāṭima and the twelve imams. Combining the two verses, these scholars arrived at the conclusion (or, rather, reinforced an already held conviction) that only the immaculate, infallible imams, possessed of the esoteric knowledge passed down to them from Muḥammad through Fāṭima, could fathom the genuine import of the Qurʿan (taʾwīl). They, and they alone, were the tarjuman al-wahy. Post-occultation jurists (fuqahāʾ) were thus precluded, in the opinion of this “proto-Akhbārī” school, from deriving laws from Holy Writ, since there was no imam present to interpret it properly for them.⁶⁴ Since those jurists were, according to the traditionalists who harbored this restrictive outlook, also barred from the use of ʿaql or their free-ranging intellect (after all, the Companions of the Prophet had employed their independent reasoning to appoint Abū Bakr at

 Mahmud Ramyar cited in Nasr et al, Shiʿism, pp. 231– 232. Ramyar quotes al-Ṭūsī who cites Abān who asked the sixth imam about the compensation for a woman whose fingers were cut off. Abū ʿAbd Allah (al-Ṣādiq) replied, “The compensation is fixed at ten camels for one finger, twenty for two and thirty for three, but twenty for four. Such is the command of the Prophet, and you may not engage in qiyās, because qiyās destroys religion.” Hossein Modarressi writes: “[B]ecause the Imam was the supreme religious authority, all questions must be submitted to him, and his instructions, which were considered by his followers to represent the pure truth, must be followed. There was no room, therefore, for rational argument or personal opinion” (Crisis and Consolidation, p. 110). Haider, Shiʿite Islam, pp. 146 – 163, helps one navigate the extremely complex intra-Shiʿite tension between traditionism and rationalism over history.  “Proto-Uṣūlīs,” for their part, would counter the notion that the Qurʾan is accessible only via imamic exegesis with verses like “This is a blessed Book that We have revealed to you [Muḥammad], so that they (i. e., the believers) may ponder its verses” (li-yaddabbarū āyātihi – Q. 38: 29).

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the saqīfa) as well as from reliance on the principle of ijmāʿ or “consensus” (after all, a virtual consensus of Muslims had robbed ʿAlī of the caliphate at that same venue) – all that remained as a legitimate “root of jurisprudence” was hadith (akhbār).⁶⁵ The internal Shiʿi backlash to this intellectual “contraction” was not long in coming. In the eleventh century Shaykh Ṭūsī – al-Kulaynī and Ibn Bābawayh’s illustrious successor – would complain: For a long time now I have wanted to write a book about the derivation of laws (furūʿ)…but one of the obstacles in my path has been the thoroughgoing disinterest of our [scholarly Shiʿite] colleagues in any such exposition, because they are addicted to the texts of traditions and the literal formulations of the prophetic/imamic narrations, and are unwilling to countenance the alteration of even a lone syllable. This stagnation (jumūd) has gone so far that even if a single word is replaced by a synonym [in one of those texts] they are at a loss to understand the meaning.⁶⁶

The increasing number of Shiʿite scholars in later generations who agreed with Shaykh al-Ṭāʾifa (the cognomen of al-Ṭūsī) – especially the various Muḥaqqiqs and ʿAllāmas from Ḥilla as well as the “Two Martyrs” – gradually evolved a more analytical method based on ʿaql (intellect), which became one of the four Shiʿi uṣūl al-fiqh or principles of jurisprudence (such that this trend may be seen as an early form of Uṣūlism).⁶⁷ For these fuqahāʾ transmitted tradition (naql)

 Thus, eventually, “Akhbāriyyūn,” i. e., those who rely solely or primarily on the genre of hadith. In their eyes, the imams had provided answers to all possible questions, legal or otherwise, in their traditions, and thus no recourse to ijtihād was required or permitted. Muḥammad Amīn Astarābādī, reviver of Akhbārism in the seventeenth Christian century, would advance a similar argument. Basing himself, inter alia, on Q. 2: 269, Astarābādī advocated the position that the Qurʾan – and for that matter, prophetic (Muḥammadan) hadith – could not be parsed properly without the help of imamic tradition (akhbār). Without such assistance, all scriptural verses are mutashābihāt (“obscure”), whereas in the Uṣūlī and Sunni view only part of the Qurʾan consists of obscure verses, the remainder being clear (muḥkamāt) and therefore susceptible to unaided scholarly interpretation. Some Akhbārīs went even further in this vein, straightforwardly ruling out the Qurʾan as a source of law. As for the aṣl of ijmāʿ, what would later become the Uṣūlī school of Shiʿi jurisprudence, as opposed to these proto-Akhbārīs, adopted the principle of ijmāʿ in the form of al-niyāba al-ʿāmma, as we saw above.  Cited in Motahhari, Majmuʿe-ye athar, vol. 20, p. 142.  Shiʿite fuqahāʾ would explain that this did not mean that they had reverted to Sunni qiyās, God forbid. Au contraire: qiyās – making superficial comparisons (tamthīl) between an explicit precept and a ruling required by an analogous situation – was not just illegitimate, it was a way of avoiding the hard intellectual work entailed in extracting (istinbāṭ) genuine rules from the sources through the use of reason. This polemic is highly involved. The four sources of jurisprudence, as they ultimately coalesced in Uṣūlī Shiʿism, are Qurʾan, Sunna (= hadith), consensus (ijmāʿ) and reason (ʿaql).

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was subordinate to such rational argumentation (ʿaql), and if a hadith of one of the infallibles contradicted conclusions arrived at via legal logic, that hadith must be either invalidated or interpreted away. The opponents of this more probing technique of ijtihād (independent reasoning) did not go down without a fight, and indeed often took the lead in the ensuing generations: from their perspective the title mujtahid was a presumptuous misnomer, since all Shiʿites, even the most learned, were equally duty bound to imitate (taqlīd) the precedent of the imams (replace “imams” with “the Prophet and his Companions” and this was, and remains, the prevalent Sunni position). The opposing, ijtihādī outlook within Shiʿism established a “Platonic” hierarchy of knowledge and skill, with the ignorant masses imitating the most learned, and, eventually, with a philosopher king – the marjaʿ – at its head.⁶⁸ For these men the imitation of long dead scholars (taqlid al-mayyet), even if they were imams, was “reactionary.”⁶⁹ This position steadily gained ground at the expense of its detractors, and by the modern period – and especially after the defeat of the Akhbāriyya by the Uṣūlī champion Vahed-e Behbehani at the end of the eighteenth century – the rational, conceptual mode of doing fiqh was firmly in the driver’s seat.⁷⁰ This development had two seemingly antithetical ramifications. First, as we have seen, the victory of Uṣūlism helped empower the clerics vis a vis both state and society, and furnished them with the means to adjust and advance the law in line with the challenges of the day (or of modernity). On the other hand, over time the Uṣūlī trend had increasingly enshrined the intellect and reason, until by the late Safavid or early Qajar period these means had become almost ends

 Thus, one could almost argue that the Akhbārī position is more “democratic,” requiring as it does of those who would issue legal rulings “only” a knowledge of hadith (as well as of the diction and usage of the imams), as opposed to the more variegated skill set demanded of the same by Uṣūlism. This skill set is akin to the ability to penetrate the inner meaning of revelation – almost bāṭinism – an ability of which, some said, even the angel Gabriel was bereft, mere (Akhbārī-like) transmitter that he was.  For the Akhbāriyyūn, on the other hand, “the correctness of a statement is not nullified by the death of the one who said it.” They would also adduce, in order to refute the Uṣūlī position on this question, the hadith according to which “that which was declared permitted by Muḥammad retains in the status of permitted until Resurrection Day, and that which was declared forbidden remains forbidden until Resurrection Day” (ḥalālu muḥammadin ḥalālun ilā yawmi l-qiyāmati wa ḥarāmu muḥammadin ḥarāmun ilā yawmi l-qiyāma).  It is important to qualify this statement by pointing out, with Najam Haider, that “although [Uṣūlī] Shiʿi jurists rarely utilize reason alone in their legal rulings, they uphold the theoretical possibility” (Haider, Shiʿi Islam, p. 25). The flights of soaring ratiocination that would increasingly characterize the hypothetical debates at the howzeh – i. e., those launched in the context of discussions of uṣūl al-fiqh more than of furūʿ al-fiqh – were another story.

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in themselves. The legitimization of the method of “supposition” or “presumption” (ẓann) – necessary to extend the jurisdiction of the rational approach such that it could cover those areas upon which textual tradition did not explicitly pronounce – threw open the floodgates of theorizing and conjecture.⁷¹ The study of Islamic law in the howzeh more and more assumed the guise of an abstract intellectual exercise detached from surrounding reality: a game of the mind. Issues were deliberately tackled in a vacuum, so that the unevenness and soot of genuine existence would not impinge upon the problems posed and detract from their purely hypothetical nature. This process was helped along by the comparatively removed, not to say alienated, nature of the Shiʿite religious institution over history: it was rarely beholden to a state or even judicial apparatus, and thus its deliberations could be all the more “up in the air.” By the time the Arab scholar-jurists were imported to Iran by the Safavids, it was too late to bring this ethereality back down to earth: “A man of learning who had acquired fame and risen to the exalted rank of mujtahed could continue to teach and lead a pious life in total independence from the state, and was revered all the more if he chose to do so.”⁷² The howzeh “occulted,” as it were, existed – at least in terms of its cerebral pursuits – in a parallel universe, locked itself in an ivory tower. This was when imaginary conundrums were raised (as we saw in a previous chapter) that had no connection whatsoever to human experience, that were wholly and pristinely theoretical, and this was when the solving of such conundrums via evermore creative and casuistic methods became the preeminent and most prestigious preoccupation of budding fuqahāʾ. The acme of this approach had a name: Morteza Ansari (d. 1864). This outstanding marjaʿ, known to posterity as “The Seal of the Scholar-Jurists” (khātimu l-mujtahidīn), began his career, according to seminary lore, as a minor brought by his father on a visit (ziyāra) to the Exalted Thresholds (al-ʿatabāt alʿāliyāt) of Iraq. In the presence of the senior mujtahid of Karbala, Ansari reportedly “propounded twelve proofs for the licitness and necessity of convening communal prayer on Friday at noon despite the absence of the Hidden Imam” (an Uṣūlī position). Having impressed and pleased the crowd and clerics with these arguments, the young man then turned around one-hundred-eighty degrees and deftly advanced twelve equally convincing proofs for the invalidity and proscription of that same ritual (an Akhbārī position). This display of sophistry reportedly earned Ansari enrollment in the Iraqi seminaries, where he studied intermittently under such great masters as Mullah Ahmad-e Naraqi and Ali Kashif al-Ghita, and matured into a first rate mujtahid and eventually an (almost) universally acknowl-

 In Akhbārī eyes, on the other hand, “laysa ḥukma l-ẓanni ka-l-maqṭūʿ.”  Arjomand, Shadow of God, p. 128.

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edged Focus of Emulation. In his works and in his study sessions, intellectual legerdemain and legal logic-chopping reached dizzying heights. The mind was flexed, twisted, stretched, squeezed, pulverized, rebuilt. Propositions were put forward, rebutted, resubmitted, refuted, restructured, riposted, parried, inverted – almost always in a theoretical bubble. The Qurʿan stipulates (Q. 5: 6) that if a believer does not find water with which to perform pre-prayer ablutions, then s/he may use sand. Suppose a Muslim named Zayd has conducted the requisite “search for water” (ṭalabu l-māʾ), initiating this search after the outset of the window of time during which a given daily prayer may be performed. Having canvassed both terrain and populace and come up empty-handed, he bends down, executes a perfect tayammum (sand ablution), and is about to raise hands to ears in prayer. Suddenly, those ears overhear a man standing nearby, named ʿAmr, say to his friend: “I’ve got some water with me.” The instant Zayd hears these words his tayammum is voided, for he now knows that he rubbed with sand too soon: there may still be water to be had. He must approach ʿAmr, request some of his water, and if he is refused, he must start all over again, conducting a second search. If water still eludes him, Zayd must perform tayammum once again, and only then begin his ṣalāt (mandatory prayer) – all of this with the “prayer window” closing fast. But what if Zayd, our post-tayammum, pre-prayer devotee overhears a man confide to his friend: “I just robbed so-and-so of some water!” In this case, Zayd’s ritual fitness for worship based on tayammum is not violated, because stolen water may not be used for ablutions, and so there has emerged, in fact, no new potential water source. There is, however, a third scenario. What if Zayd overhears ʿAmr say the following: “I’ve got some water with me…that I just stole from so-andso.” Now what? Immediately after registering the first half of the sentence in his mind, does not Zayd become “one who has performed tayammum prior to completing the search for water,” because he has suddenly been informed of a new possible water source? Maybe so, but then isn’t his ceremonial preparedness based on sand-ablutions restored once the second half of the sentence hits his ears? Perhaps not. After all, in the case in which a worshipper notices new riders arriving at the camp just after he has rubbed with sand, and is obliged to approach them and ask for some water, even if it turns out that they have no water – that is, even if the worshipper’s disillusionment was more-or-less immediate – still his tayammum is null and void because of the mental notion he had momentarily entertained that water for ablutions might perhaps be had. If so, then should not the same be true in the case of the third scenario in question, in which the first words uttered by ʿAmr (“I’ve got some water with me…”) convinced Zayd that he had not in fact completed his search and that water might still be had, and only afterwards the last words of the sentence (“…which I stole from so-and-so”) showed him his mis-

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take? Should this experience not invalidate his tayammum, because it got his hopes up that water might be had, even though he rapidly discovered that those hopes were false? Or do we envision a sentence as a single unit, as a beaten whole, and the time it takes to utter it an indivisible instant as far as human understanding and psychology is concerned? If so, then Zayd’s hope and disillusionment have essentially occurred all at once (or at least: disillusionment nipped hope in the bud before it could have any effect)?⁷³ All of the above represents merely the initial “set up” for the ensuing debate, which was ten times more dizzying and might easily continue for hours, days and even weeks. Most of this scintillating ratiocination took place in blissful ignorance of, and utter disengagement from, the outside world: intellectus intelligens intellectum. While the ulama were not, for the most part, physically or socially cloistered from the surrounding community (Ansari himself was often involved in community affairs), when it came to thought – indeed, when it came to the centerpiece of their religious and spiritual existences (i. e., the science of jurisprudence) – they lived in a separate, rarefied, theoretical universe, on the planet of pure fiqh: fiqh unsullied by society at large and generally unapplied to it.⁷⁴ This disconnect was double-ended: the increasing “spatial” detachment of howzeh legal debates from the surrounding human environment in the here and now went hand in hand with a decreasing “temporal” interest in the original literary-historical environment whence these juristic issues arose in the first place. The maʿqūl (rational) thoroughly upstaged the manqūl (transmitted). Uṣūlī Shiʿi talebeh encountered

 The previous admonition that this analysis is perforce an oversimplification cannot be emphasized sufficiently. Some aspects of Ansari’s unprecedented development and elaboration of the laws of contracts and commerce, for instance, may be said to have facilitated the expansion of domestic and even international Iranian trade. At the same time, other aspects thereof rendered the law so complex and abstruse that it would be forever consigned to the theoretical realm. All in all, it is this writer’s opinion that the latter effect of his work was far greater than the former. It is not insignificant that this faqīh – in some senses the first Shiʿite-wide recognized marjaʿ al-taqlīd – was extremely reticent about issuing fatāwā (religio-legal rulings). Nevertheless, his own prize student, Mirza Shirazi, probably proclaimed the famous fatwa that ignited the Tobacco Boycott.  One might argue, and some have argued, that Ansari’s new techniques, by “enabling mujtahids to extend the area of law to any matter where there was even a possibility and not just a probability of being in accord with the Imam’s guidance” (Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, p. 72), actually increased the extent to which fiqh was applied to the affairs of the Muslims. Abbas Amanat, for one, briefly advances such a thesis in Chapter Four of his Iran: A Modern History. This writer remains unconvinced: the theory was not, for the most part, translated into practice, but rather utilized for pure intellectual purposes inside the seminary, thereby increasing the insular trend. I should not, however, conceal the piquant fact, that might be exploited with some effect by those who advocate the former position, that none other than the great fin de siècle Muslim superman Jamal al-Din al-Afghani al-Asadobadi studied under al-Ansari at Najaf.

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less and less prophetic or imamic exempla (aḥādīth) in their studies – these were, after all, the province of dull, imaginationless Akhbārīs – and when they did encounter them, it was almost invariably in the context of, or as a means to, yet another flight of dexterous logomachy. The narratives were thoroughly detached from their original milieu and mise en scene. The Shiʿite academy had withdrawn from its past as well as from its present, into the timeless, placeless world of the freefloating mind.⁷⁵ This arrangement was rather suitable to the political authorities. It kept a potential center of alternate power and social activism busy with harmless, circular cogitation, whirling around centripetally in an infinite loop, all energies focused inward. Both sides – clergy and crown – paid their respects and their lip service, and, to a considerable degree, left the other side alone (thus one might say that Uṣūlism, which had opposed its nemesis Akhbārism’s passive religio-political stance, now found itself harboring the very stance it had opposed). While it is true that important ulama played leading roles in the Tobacco Boycott and the Constitutional Revolution, they did so either in their traditional role as protectors of the people from excessive despotism or in a new, non-traditional role: as concerned Iranian citizens adopting foreign ideas. In terms of bringing the processes and conclusions of the seminary itself to bear upon state and society, they balked. Until Ayatollah Borujerdi.⁷⁶ Student after student would testify to the new method introduced into the seminary by this old man. Before anything else, he laid the groundwork for a radically different approach by pounding into his students the proposition – virtually unheard of in howzeh circles at the time – that aḥādīth (narrations regarding the words and deeds of Muḥammad and his holy descendants) had to be understood first of all in-and-of-themselves, and in their entirety, removed (at least at the outset) from the context of fiqh discussions. But Borujerdi went further. Since hadiths formed the initial basis and launchpad for said juristic discussions, it was essential

 For a terse statement of what is essentially an opposing assessment of Ansari’s impact on Islam’s relationship with the outside world, see Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, p. 182. Litvak argues that “[Ansari’s] theory helped the ʿulamāʾ to claim a leadership role in communal affairs that verged on the political, particularly by the turn of the twentieth century.” This amounts to a claim that the clerical leaders of constitutionalism were indirectly influenced in their activism by Ansari’s innovative methodology, a proposition which would make for a stimulating debate.  As we noted in the introductory historical survey, Borujerdi was in some ways a link in a chain of “activist” clerics that went back to Mirza Shirazi, who (apparently) issued the decree banning the use of tobacco and initiated the famous boycott of 1891. Still, we are concerned here less with activism per se and more with a sea change in intellectual methodology that, in its turn (we are claiming) had a major impact on future activism. In this sense, we argue, Borujerdi was a pioneer.

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to grasp the fundamental import of those hadiths, and the only way to do that was to go back and investigate the historical, social, ideological and political circumstances in which the exchanges recorded in the hadiths took place. It was impossible, Ayatollah Borujerdi insisted, to comprehend the meaning of a question submitted a thousand years earlier by a given believer to a given imam without steeping oneself in the requisite knowledge concerning the time and place in which both interlocutors lived, the people with whom they interacted, the schools of thought that proliferated during that era, the economic conditions of the city or village in which the conversation occurred, the character of the individuals involved (ʿilm al-rijāl or “the Science of Men”) – to say nothing of the Arabic usages prevalent in that region and period. And if the question was not properly understood, the answer would be misconstrued, as well. Authorial intent mattered. As Ayatollah Jaʿfar-e Sobhani would later put it, “[Just as the verses of the Qurʿan require the establishment of their ʻcircumstances of revelation’ (asbāb al-nuzūl) in order to be comprehended, Ayatollah Borujerdi argued that] the meaning of hadiths also cannot be fathomed without their own “circumstances of revelation.”⁷⁷ Borujerdi also overturned the by then well-established practice of making do with the study of the latest fiqh works alone, and sent his pupils and the teachers under his supervision back to the treatises of the ancient jurists, as well as to many of the myriad masterpieces that came between those almost forgotten tomes and the fruits of the most recent scholars (al-mutaʾakhkhirūn), including many a Sunni digest. Borujerdi’s own research proceeded along such lines, and he strongly urged his many disciples to follow suit.⁷⁸ Ayatollah Borujerdi was, by all accounts, as capable as any of his peers and predecessors at head-spinning jurisprudential dialectics. Of him could be said what was said of Shaykh Mufīd, that “he could, if he wanted, prove that a stone pillar was made of iron and silver.” But he would regularly and deliberately “disappoint” his students, who were waiting to be challenged in what had become the

 Cited in Ahmadi, Cheshm va cheragh, p. 184. This emphasis on the study of hadith may be construed as yet another back-swing of the above-mentioned pendulum in the direction of certain Akhbārī tendencies (Borujerdi, indeed, was very partial to the Biḥār al-anwār). The emphasis on the study of the societal and linguistic conditions in which hadiths arose, however, represents in truth a more Uṣūlī outlook: Akhbārīs tended to take hadiths as they were, without inquiring into the “intentions of the framers” or into the circumstances in which the exempla were produced: this was seen as too much analysis. Just to complicate matters, however, Borujerdi’s aforementioned willingness to deploy Sunni traditions in his teaching and research militates simultaneously for two opposite assessments: in some senses such willingness is more characteristic of Uṣūlism than Akhbārism, yet in other senses it is vice versa. Wa llāhu aʿlam.  See, for two testimonies among a great many, the remarks of Ayatollah Golpayegani in Ahmadi, Cheshm va cheragh, pp. 127– 131, and of Ayatollah Motahhari in Athar, vol. 20, pp. 148 – 153.

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traditional manner, that is, with hypothetical puzzlers (masʾale sazi). “I guess you are waiting for a ʻstumper,’ eh?” he would look up from his page and tease them. “You won’t get that here!” Borujerdi was adamant that whatever fiqh they dealt with in the seminary must be useful, applicable, and worldly. He would, albeit, engage his students in lengthy legalistic debates, but more often than not the jumping off point for these debates was a question (istiftāʾ) received from a farmer in Gilan or a worker in Shiraz. In this manner, as he had re-tied hadith to its surrounding real-world context in ancient times, he re-tied fiqh to its surrounding real-world context in the present. Farhang Rajaee, alone among critical scholars in his appreciation for the magnitude of Borujerdi’s contribution, summed up this marjaʿs bold, innovative approach succinctly: “He made Islam relevant in the public sphere.”⁷⁹ Ayatollah Borujerdi’s seminal but unsung contribution to the Islamic Revolution consisted, then, more than anything else in reconnecting Islamic law in particular, and the Islamic religion in general, with both history and the world at large – two interests which are nothing if not related. Of course, in this he was not entirely original (no one is): there is no question that being the student of a famous constitutional revolutionary (Ayatollah Khorasani) and the student of the student of the jurist who brought about the cancellation of the tobacco concession (Ayatollah Shirazi) helped mold this clerical activist (for that he indeed was). But when Ayatollah Golpayegani states that “the method of ijtihād introduced by that great man (Borujerdi) led to a stupendous overhaul and an entirely new situation at the seminary, in terms of the manner in which we derived rulings from the sources”⁸⁰ – he is understating the case. The implications of this new/ old approach were far-reaching: they helped create a consciousness among a rising generation of talebeh and ulama of the relevance of religion to life, to history, to current events, and eventually, even to struggle.⁸¹ When Ayatollah Khomeini

 Farhang Rajaee, Islamism and Modernism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), p. 68. Rajaee makes this – to my mind accurate – statement without any surrounding proof or argument. It is tempting, as we noted above, to see in Borujerdi’s new approach a swing-back of the perpetual pendulum in the direction of a moderate Akhbārism, but this may be doing his originality a disservice.  Ahmadi, Cheshm va cheragh, p. 131.  Abbas Amanat reminds us that the communication gap between the howzeh and the world outside it has never been fully bridged. In the context of a discussion of the crimes of the revolutionary judge Mohammad Mohammadi-ye Gilani – a “competitor” of Ayatollah Khalkhali in terms of the number of people sent he to the gallows after 1979 – Amanat notes that the television program in which Gilani “articulated intricate points of Shiʿi jurisprudence, often with sexual undertones pertaining to temporary marriage, incest and sodomy… spoke volumes of a humanistic disconnect that was the prevailing character of Qom legalism” (Amanat, Iran, p. 802). Still, the correctives of Borujerdi, Taleqani and even Khomeini and Khameneʾi (e. g., Jehad-e farhangi, pp. 129 – 133), to

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later lambasted those lethargic old clerics sitting in their dark and dusty corners in the mosque and teaching that which had nothing whatsoever to do with the needs of the Muslim nation or of any human beings anywhere, he was most decidedly not talking about Ayatollah Borujerdi. On the contrary: although we are not privy to his thoughts on the matter, it is probable that Khomeini worked so hard to have Borujerdi – much of whose outlook could not but have been known to him by that time – appointed as headmaster of the Qom seminary system specifically because the engagé attitude toward Islam latent in Borujerdi’s pedagogical and scholarly philosophy tallied well with the ideas gestating in his own breast.⁸² Ayatollah Borujerdi was not, in short, a prophylactic that temporarily checked the processes that would lead to the Islamic Revolution; he was one of their premier catalysts. Indeed, most evidence suggests that it was the death of this powerful marjaʿ that allowed the Pahlavi machine to initiate its “March toward the Great Civilization,” the very development that would goad Ayatollah Khomeini into action.

A Rebel is Born Back to the early nineteen-sixties in Iran. His position strengthened after the triumph over Mosaddeq, Mohammad Reza Shah soon took up where his father had left off and initiated what he dubbed the “March toward the Great Civilization” (Pers. tamaddon-e bozorg): a pastiche of ersatz Achaemenid Persia and ersatz modern Europe. What may be seen as the first step in this “march” was taken partially in response to pressure from the Kennedy administration, partially in order to take the wind out of the sails of the Iranian Tudeh (communist) party, and partially based on the sovereign’s own genuine convictions.⁸³ It involved revisions to a

name just the most prominent figures, have unquestionably had an effect: televised clerics today and for some time have carefully and sensitively tailored their messages to their audiences (whether this is too little, too late – and whether under the influence of the Internet that audience has moved so much further away as to be beyond the reach of the ulama – only time will tell).  This does not mean that the paths of the two men – Borujerdi and Khomeini – did not diverge. Events conspired to push the latter in the direction of a more activist and less cautious ideology, and this of a necessity caused tension between them. But this tension, as well, has been somewhat exaggerated. Much is made, for instance, of the fact that Khomeini did not participate in Borujerdi’s funeral, but Khomeini explicitly attributed this absence in conversations with students to his desire to avoid attempts to turn the event into his own “coronation” as marjaʿ and successor to Borujerdi. One may, of course, choose to see this as an excuse. Years later, both before and after the revolution, Khomeini often heaped praise on his erstwhile teacher.  The pressure from the Kennedy administration was itself motivated partially by conviction and partially by a desire to weaken the Soviet-supported Tudeh party.

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“Local Council Bill”⁸⁴ that included clauses permitting both women and non-Muslims to vote and run for office.⁸⁵ It also allowed the use of “any heavenly book” for purposes of swearing in those elected (sogand beh ketab-e asemani). While these clauses unquestionably caused discomfort for most clerics and many traditional laypeople, it was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (b. 1902, d. 1989) who took a fateful decision: “The son of Reza Khan has embarked on the destruction of Islam in Iran. I will oppose this as long as the blood circulates in my veins.”⁸⁶ Although Khomeini himself would later accept and even advocate the enfranchisement of women – and although swearing on the sacred scriptures of the other monotheistic religions is not strictly forbidden by Islamic law – these clauses were exploited by this upand-coming marjaʿ, who made use, among other methods, of the institution of responsa (istiftāʾ-fatwā) to galvanize what would become nothing less than a mass movement. Khomeini, who had been a student of Ayatollah Haʾeri-ye Yazdi and was instrumental afterward, as a senior lecturer at the howzeh, in bringing Ayatollah Borujerdi to Qom, had stayed respectfully under the latter’s shadow. Seen by many as an emerging marjaʿ after Borujerdi’s death (1962), and allowing sentiments that had been gestating in his breast for years to percolate to the surface, Khomeini had already begun communicating certain reservations about the actions taken by the government during that period via intermediaries,⁸⁷ but the Local Council Bill led him to dispense with these latter and send the king a direct telegram. It began, and indeed continued, politely enough: In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate; Your Eminence, the Blessed and August Majesty (hozur-e mobarak-e aʿala hazrat-e homayun): Prayers and Felicitations. According to what has been reported in the press, the government has foregone – in the context of the Local Council elections – the requirements of being Muslim and male for both voters and candidates. This matter has become a cause for concern among the most knowledge-

 Pers. Layehe-ye/tasvib name-ye qanun-e anjomanha-ye eyalati va velayati.  Though there is no clear-cut prohibition against women voting in Islamic law – the Islamic Republic would enfranchise them hard on the heels of the revolution of 1979 – surrounding legal and cultural questions involving modesty, tradition, proper gender roles, etc. came into play. The question of women serving in high office is more fraught, and bedevils Iranian politics to this day.  Bayat, Khomeini, p. 75.  These intermediaries included, most famously, the then Chief of SAVAK (the State Intelligence and Security Organization), Hassan-e Pakravan. French educated, “highly cultured” and reportedly more humane than any of his predecessors or successors in the position, Pakravan may have been instrumental in saving Ayatollah Khomeini’s life after his arrest in 1963. A decade-and-a-half later, the Leader of the Islamic Revolution did not return the favor, and Pakravan was executed in April, 1979.

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able scholars (olama-ye aʿlam) and among the various classes of Muslims. As His Majesty is well aware, the welfare of the state rests upon the observance of the laws of the perfect religion of Islam…Therefore it is requested that you issue an order for the removal of such clauses that are in violation of sacred religion and the official faith of the land from all programs of government and party, such that the prayers of this Muslim nation [for your majesty’s wellbeing] will be forthcoming. – The Supplicant, Ruhollah Musavi

The Shah, for his part, passed Khomeini’s telegram on to the government, and in a return communication praised Khomeini for his efforts on behalf of spreading the message of Islam and emphasized that “no one exerts himself to the extent that I do in order to preserve the precepts of religion.” Though the ayatollah must have smiled wryly at this claim, he wrote back that “Of course, that is exactly what the Muslim nation of Iran expects of Your Majesty,” but that Prime Minister Asadollah ʿAlam – to whom the original telegram had been handed for treatment – “neither bends his neck to the command of God, nor takes any account of the constitution, nor pays heed to royal injunctions, nor lends his ear to the advice of the clerics.”⁸⁸ Having hit a brick wall with the government, Khomeini turned to his peers, convening a meeting with two other senior clerics, Ayatollahs Shariʿatmadari and Golpayegani. Although they and several other respected authorities agreed to issue what amounted to a fatwa’ (legal decree) to the effect that “The recent bill regarding the participation of ladies in elections is, from the standpoint of Islamic law, null and void,”⁸⁹ Khomeini was disappointed by what he saw as their overly cautious approach. Assailed by colleagues who accused him of bringing the wrath of the regime down upon them and their institutions, he trained his efforts thenceforward on the agitation and organization of more junior ulama and of laypeople, creating the rudiments of an activist network (soon to be known as “The Coalition” or moʾtalefeh) that served his purposes at the time and would do so tenfold a decade-and-a-half later. Telegrams, petitions, demonstrations, bazaar closures, a good deal of cajoling and some threats soon led to victory: Prime-Minister ʿAlam announced the cancellation of the bill on national television. Round Two began with the Shah’s “White Revolution” (Pers. enqelab-e sefid), also known as “The Revolution of the Shah and the People,” inaugurated in January, 1963 and involving land re-distribution,⁹⁰ “improvement” of the status of

 Sahife-ye Nur, vol. 1, pp. 35 – 36.  Sahife-ye Nur, vol. 1, p. 31.  Though generally concerned for the poor, many clerics opposed land re-distribution as overly Socialist. It is also argued that the clerical class included quite a few landowners, and therefore took exception to the project.

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women and minorities,⁹¹ the formation of a literacy corps⁹² and other projects destined to provoke fierce opposition in religious circles.⁹³ Tehran preacher Ayatollah Falsafi called the national referendum surrounding this set of reforms “the government’s attempt to rip the chador off of the face of Zaynab [the sister of the Imam Ḥusayn],” and it was largely boycotted⁹⁴ (the government still claimed that the results were: five million for, four thousand against). The demonstrations protesting the referendum were the occasion for the violation of a particularly deep-rooted taboo: “This was when [the police] began beating akhunds (clerics). Up until that time no-one had ever raised a hand to a rouhani (another word for cleric).”⁹⁵ Less than a month later the Shah proclaimed, and the cabinet ratified, the right of women to vote and run for office not only in the Local Councils, but in Parliament, as well. Ayatollah Khomeini had been stymied again, but his determination remained fierce. In a message circulated to his fellow clerics, he declared the up-

 Mehdi-ye Bazargan’s Freedom Movement (see below) quipped: “The government does not respect the votes of men, what is the good of giving women the right to vote?” (Bayat, Khomeini, p. 77). Few today would argue that enfranchising women and religious minorities is not an improvement in their status. Indeed, the Islamic Republic itself has opted for this position. Still, the scare quotes are necessary, because many clerics and laypeople at the time opposed these egalitarian trends, and any attempt to penetrate the outlook of the Islamists who overthrew the Shah and currently run the country requires wiping the slate clean – at least for the sake of analysis – of pre-conceived equations like “gender parity = desideratum.” And while many Islamists would argue that their religious tradition champions just such a principle of equality between the sexes, most Western feminists (for instance) would not accept that claim. See, for interesting observations on the paradoxes involved, Sussan Siavoshi, “ʻIslamist’ Women Activists: Allies or Enemies?” in Jahanbegloo, Iran, as well as Azadeh Kian, “Gendered Khomeini” in Arshin Adib Moghaddam (ed.), A Critical Introduction to Khomeini (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014), among scores of other relevant studies.  This institution, which would go on to have a major impact on rural areas and raise literacy levels considerably, was called by Khomeini “the conspiracy to spread heresy and debauchery among the god-fearing people of Iran” (Sahife-ye Nur, vol. 2, p. 124). He also accused the Shah – inaccurately, though perhaps with foresight – of planning to draft girls into the military. Later a “religious corps” would also be activated, further angering the clerics of the howzeh.  Khomeini himself actually approved of more elements of the Shah’s “White Revolution” than he opposed – he was an advocate of (certain) women’s rights and an emphatic champion of the poor – but chose to place all his emphasis on what he saw as the noxious aspects of the project. He referred to the White Revolution as the Black Revolution (enqelab-e siya).  Nateq-e Nuri, Khaterat, p. 47.  Nateq-e Nuri, Khaterat, p. 49. Akhund is used both derogatorily and non-derogatorily. Rouhani – “spiritual [leader]” – is an inauthentic, essentially Western-inspired epithet that reflects the modern removal of ulama from their previously wide-ranging and multi-faceted responsibilities in society, but that has nevertheless been adopted by Shiʿite-Iranian clerics (including Khomeinists) to describe themselves and their office.

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coming Iranian-Zoroastrian New Year (Nowruz) – celebrated from time immemorial in the Spring even by many Islamically pious Iranians – a day of mourning, explaining that “this year Iran’s religious scholars have no holiday.” In March of that year, Nowruz coincided with the commemoration of the martyrdom of the sixth Shiʿite imam, Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq.⁹⁶ A better symbol of the contest between the nationalist and religious narratives could not be had. For many days the government-controlled press had been painting the clerics as “black reactionaries,” while the streets in Qom and elsewhere rang out with cries of “Death to the Hārūn of our time!”, comparing Mohammad Reza Shah to the Abbasid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd who, according to Shiʿite lore, compassed the demise of that same Imam al-Ṣādiq in prison. Following what appears to have been a government-inspired, if not government directed, attack on the Fayziyyeh seminary of Qom during Ayatollah Golpayegani’s vigil for Imam al-Ṣādiq – an attack in which many students were injured and several were killed – Khomeini took off the gloves, so to speak. He fired off telegrams and circulars in which he called the perpetrators of this crime – the Iranian government – “followers of Chingiz [Khan, the Mongol conqueror who devastated Iran]” and spoke of “readying my heart to be pierced by the bayonets of [the Pahlavi monarch] but not my knees to bend in subjugation to him.” At this point, the aforementioned Ayatollah Mohsen-e Hakim of Najaf (to whom Mohammad Reza had sent condolences after Borujerdi’s death) – evidently shocked by these events – sent a telegram to Qom in which he invited the ulama of that town and the rest of Iran to migrate to the Shiʿite shrine cities of Iraq, both in protest and for their safety. Ayatollah Khomeini, replying on behalf of his colleagues, thanked the venerated jurist for his offer but insisted that We shall, God willing, continue to carry out the task we have been assigned by our Creator, either removing the hands of the traitors from the sanctum of Islam and the Qurʿan, or becoming neighbors of the Merciful Truth, Exalted and Sublime. Verily, I do not view death as anything other than happiness, nor do I see life among the oppressors as anything other than misery.⁹⁷

During the ensuing month-and-a-half the government, inspired by what it saw as its successes to date and buoyed up by vocal encouragement from Western allies and President Kennedy himself, continued its forward march. The Ministry of Justice publicly proposed extending gender egalitarianism to the judicial bench; a trial  The Muslim calendar being lunar and intercalation being prohibited in Islamic law, such a calendrical coincidence occurs about once every twenty-six years. To be more accurate, the second day of the four-day New Year’s holiday coincided with the commemoration of the sixth imam’s death.  Ahmad-e Samiʿi-ye Tehrani, Ketab-e si va-haft sal (n.p., 1986), p. 182.

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balloon was sent up in the matter of drafting young women into the army; and the king, speaking in Kerman province on the first of Muḥarram – the Muslim New Year and beginning of the Shiʿite mourning period for the Imam Ḥusayn – went on the offensive, exploding for the first time at the clerics who opposed “The Revolution of the Shah and the People” (enqelab-e shah va mellat) and calling them “vile, filthy, backwards, reactionary people” and “thieves and free lunchers” from whom the public should keep its distance “as you would distance yourselves from impure animals (hayvanat-e najes).” This was a red line. Khomeini bided his time until the tenth of the same month, that is, the Ashura holiday, taking advantage of the opportunity to deliver an unprecedently powerful – and, as suited the occasion, tear-jerking – oration at the Fayziyeh school itself, in which he compared the Shah to the villain-caliph Yazīd son of Muʿāwiya, who sent forces to massacre the Imam Ḥusayn and his family at Karbala. He addressed the accusation that the ulama were “free lunchers,” telling his audience of thousands that You well know that when [founder of the Qom howze-ye ʿelmiye system] Aqa Shaykh Abd alKarim [‐e Haʾeri] died, his children had nothing to eat! [Haʾeri’s successor Ayatollah Sayyed Hosayn Ali-ye Tabatabaʾi-ye] Borujerdi upon his death was in hock to the tune of two hundred thousand tomans! Are these ʻfree lunchers’!? Whereas those who have filled half the banks of the world with their loot and build palaces upon palaces with their ill-gotten gains – these are not thieves!?⁹⁸

“If the clerics are impure animals,” he continued, “why does this people kiss their hands? Why do they wipe their bodies with the [leftover of the] water that the akhunds drink? By God, I hope you did not mean this! For if you did, you will not be able to live. This people will not allow you to live…” He called the king a coward, a worthless wretch, and a lackey of Israel manipulated by the JewishBahaʾi conspiracy, even hinting that His Highness was a Jew himself ⁹⁹ (thenceforward Khomeini, and later the official Islamic Republic during his tenure and after him, would see the Jewish State’s hand – together with that of the U. S. and Britain – behind an endless array of conspiracies. “Death to Israel!” is the concluding and most enthusiastic component of the set series of “Death to…” slogans shouted thou-

 Sahife-ye Nur, vol. 1, p. 92. Impurity or najāsa is a far more serious, tangible and contagious phenomenon for Shiʿite than for Sunni Muslims, and the comparison made by the Shah therefore that much more odious.  Khaterat 15 Khordad, vol. 1, p. 105.

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sands of times daily at official events throughout the country down to the present time).¹⁰⁰ Two days later – in the pre-dawn hours of the fifteenth of the Iranian month of Khordad – Khomeini was arrested, taken to Tehran and imprisoned. Nationwide protests erupted in response, protests which together became known in retrospect as the “Fifteenth of Khordad Uprising” (qiyam-e punzdahom-e khordad). The students of Qom poured into the streets early in the morning, as soon as news of the ayatollah’s arrest reached their ears, and soon seminaries across the country followed suit. Secular organizations like the National Front (jebhe-ye melli) – founded by Mossadeq – and even the well-organized communist Tudeh party joined forces with the more pious protesters, and Mehdi-ye Bazargan’s “modern-religious” Freedom Movement (nehzat-e azadi-ye Iran), an offshoot of the National Front, dropped its anti-ecclesiastical bent for the purpose. Both sides to the conflict evoked the values enshrined in the 1907 constitution: the Shah’s people stressed égalité (between Muslims and non-Muslims, between women and men) their opponents liberté (from the despotism of the Shah). Though put down with an iron fist and much loss of life,¹⁰¹ the protests ultimately bore fruit. The Shah was forced to free his newfound nemesis – some eight months later – and Khomeini was given a hero’s welcome home to Qom, where he went right back to castigating the regime on a weekly basis: for its relationship with Israel (“The Qurʿan enjoins that we not ally ourselves with those who draw themselves up in military formation against the Muslims”);¹⁰² for its war on Islam and its clerics (“The moment any Muslim engages in insulting behavior toward the great Sources of Emulation, his relationship with God is severed” [bayna u va khoda velayat monqateʿ mishavad]”);¹⁰³ for threatening to extend army conscription to girls, with all that this implied in terms of separation from parental supervision and exposure to temptations and perils of various sorts (“We are not against progress for women [ma ba taraqqi-ye zanan mokhalef nistim]; we are against

 Sahife-ye Nur, vol. 1, pp. 55 and 92. On the first page of his Islamic Government, Khomeini writes: “The Islamic movement from the outset encountered the Jews, and they were the first to spread anti-Islamic propaganda and hatch intellectual conspiracies.” The considerable cooperation between the State of Israel and the Pahlavi regime is a matter of undisputed record.  Hundreds were apparently killed, including the execution of demonstration ring-leaders. The ancient regime’s moral record in quelling unrest with an iron first certainly bears comparison with that of the Islamic Republic, and may even excel it. The record of most other Middle Eastern governments in this regard throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is arguably worse than both.  Sahife-ye Nur, vol. 1, p. 77.  Sahife-ye Nur, vol. 1, p. 78.

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these obscenities…”);¹⁰⁴ for failing to own up to its culpability for the Fayziyeh attack and for the massacres perpetrated in order to quell the Fifteenth of Khordad Uprising (“Those women and little children – what sin did they commit that you machine-gunned them to death?”);¹⁰⁵ and finally, for the straw that broke the camel’s back: the humiliating legal exemptions that the government, in exchange for a considerable extension of military cooperation with the United States and a large weapons package, had granted American servicemen on Persian soil (“The honor of Iran and its army has been trampled and lies in the dust – You have sold us!”).¹⁰⁶ In the autumn of 1964, a bill was forced through Parliament granting diplomatic immunity not just to United States Foreign Service officials, but to American servicemen and their families and many other categories of temporary residents as well, a provision highly reminiscent of the humiliating “Capitulation” agreements between Western powers and Middle Eastern governments since the sixteenth century. Khomeini had found his new cause célèbre: According to this shameless bill, if a servant of an American advisor insults one of the venerated Sources of Emulation (marājiʿ taqlid, Grand Ayatollahs) of Iran or injures him, the police have no right to arrest that servant, and our courts have no right to try him. However, if one of their [i. e. the American servicemen’s] dogs is harmed in any way, the police are obligated to get involved, and the courts must prosecute! Today, when one after another the colonized countries of the world are bravely and courageously extricating themselves from the repression of imperialism and smashing the chains of their servitude to foreign powers, the “progressive” parliament of Iran with its claim to represent the culmination of two thousand five hundred years of civilization and its boast of being on the same level with the most advanced polities in the world, approves the most humiliating and disgraceful bill, worthy of states bereft of any semblance of self-respect, thereby turning the noble nation of Iran into the lowliest and most backward of the peoples…My informants tell me that this bill (which extends diplomatic immunity to circles far beyond Western diplomats themselves – Z. M.) was proposed to Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey, East Germany and others, but none of them agreed to place themselves under the burden of such humiliation. Iran alone was willing to throw its national honor and Islamic pride to the four winds.¹⁰⁷

Fed up, the Shah banished the ayatollah to Turkey in November, 1964.¹⁰⁸ From there Khomeini moved, several months later, to the Najaf seminary in Iraq, where,  Tehrani, Si va Haft sal, p. 135.  Sahife-ye Nur, vol. 1, p. 83.  Sahife-ye Nur, vol. 1, p. 139.  Sahife-ye Nur, 1: 409 – 10.  The legal exemptions for American servicemen and their families, known as the “Status of Forces Agreement” or SOFA, which the U. S. had signed with many countries. It was even more inclusive in the case of Iran. Some say that the option of executing Khomeini was seriously entertained by the Pahlavi regime at this time, but that confirmation of his ayatollah-ship and interven-

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Lenin-like, he bided his time in exile and labored to formulate his ideological outlook and the system of government that would reflect it (perhaps a better comparison, and one that was sometimes made by Khomeinists after 1979, is to the Prophet Muḥammad himself, who was forced out of his home town of Mecca by the local pagan potentates; was welcomed and supported by the considerable portion of Yathribians/Madinans that had already been Islamized, just as Khomeini was welcomed and supported by the considerable portion of students and faculty at Najaf that had recently been converted to his cause; spent his exile fleshing out and consolidating the positive, even political principles of his new religion, which up until the hijra [emigration] had been quite sketchy and comprised primarily of fiery declarations of takfīr [opposition to unbelief ]; and finally returned in triumph to Mecca and foisted upon it his Islamic state, complete with a pact drawn up between the tribes there). Khomeini called his utopian system of government velayat-e faqih, the Guardianship of the Jurist.¹⁰⁹ In 1970 he delivered a series of lectures on the subject at Najaf that were taped and transcribed, and his students and the lay networks he had set in motion saw to their distribution far and wide inside Iran. As Yann Richard puts it, adducing yet another comparison to the events of early Islam and well reflecting the perception of “eternal recurrence” that suffuses Shiʿite history: “Khomeini lived for 15 years in ʻoccultation’ in Najaf…during that occultation he nonetheless continued to communicate with the Iranians with the aid of a few messengers who carried his declarations to the religious militants.”¹¹⁰ “You are obligated to establish the Islamic government,” the Ayatollah-in-Exile would urge. “Have self-confidence and know that you will be able to do it! Do not be intimidated by the uproar of a few West-stricken (gharbzadeh) individuals and servile lackeys of colonialism…”¹¹¹

tion of other kinds by SAVAK chief Hassan-e Pakravan and senior clerics in Iran and abroad (especially Ayatollah Shariʿatmadari) led the Shah to commute the sentence to banishment. Others argue that execution was never on the table, while claiming that many protesting clerics sent side messages to the government requesting that their protests be ignored: they were frightened of Khomeini and would have liked him out of the way. Three months after Khomeini’s exile a Muslim zealot assassinated the prime minister involved, Hosayn ʿAli-ye Mansur, and comparisons to the assassination of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar by Mirza Reza-e Kermani soon after the monarch deported arch anti-imperialist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani al-Asadobadi in 1896 were not slow in coming.  Neither the term nor the concept originated with Khomeini, as will be explained.  Yann Richard, Shiʿite Islam (trans. Antonia Nevill, Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1991), p. 106.  Amanat, Iran, p. 746.

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The Guardianship of the Jurist Ayatollah Khomeini was a unique personality – charismatic, creative, determined, ruthless, and most important of all, fearless – and his was the single most important role in bringing about the Islamic Revolution of 1979. But an agglomeration of essential traits and momentous developments helped prepare the stage for Khomeini’s “advent,” and it is to these that we turn our attention now, before proceeding any further. The history of modern Iran is characterized, perhaps more than by any other phenomenon, by the complex interrelationship and increasing antagonism and struggle between the Persian monarchy, on the one side, and the Twelver Shiite clerical establishment on the other. In what follows, we will delineate and discuss some of the factors that contributed to the strengthening of the latter element – the various echelons of the ulama – and moved them steadily away from cooperation with, and into a stance of opposition to, the more secular sovereigns of the Qajar and Pahlavi dynasties. We will also attempt to discover the reasons why such an evolution in the outlook and puissance of the religious doctors occurred specifically and solely in Iran – as opposed to any other Islamic (and for that matter, nonIslamic) polity – and ultimately led in 1979 to the unprecedented national upheaval which ushered in a no less unprecedented cleritocracy. We begin with an analysis of (what we will argue, in tandem with many others, is) the uniquely inherent Shiʿite tendency toward instability and revolt. It would not be an exaggeration to say that all the world’s major organized religions have been accused by post-Renaissance philosophers and intellectuals hailing from a wide variety of ideological backgrounds, of deriving from and reflecting – and what is more important (and more damning), constituting a powerful justification of – the sociopolitical status quo in any given place and time. The average serf, peasant, slave or, for that matter, woman in medieval Europe – none of these was motivated to, and all of them were prevented or discouraged from, rising up against their masters or even just protesting against their predicament, by the tenets of the faith that had been instilled in them since birth. The creed upon which they were raised induced them to look upon themselves, and upon their position and rank in the human and even cosmic hierarchy, as a fixed and morally warranted one, put in place by the benevolent and unchallengeable Creator since the dawn of time. This was his or her natural place in society, this was the immutable fate that he or she was assigned in this world, and there was no cause and no point in wondering about, to say nothing of seeking to undermine, this state of affairs. More than this: in the end, after all, the bestowal of reward and administering of punishment in the next world would redress the inequalities of this world, compensating those who bore an inordinate burden and, as it were, “making it all

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worthwhile in the end.” To this attitude and worldview Karl Marx was, of course, emphatically referring when he made his famous statement, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”¹¹² Whether or not Marx and the other critics of the traditional faiths were justified in saddling organized religion with the responsibility for tranquilizing the oppressed classes, it is important for our purposes here to stress the obvious (at least to those of us “pestiferous essentialists”): that different faiths act upon and influence their adherents in this connection in different ways and to different extents. Shiʿite Islam, we will aver (again, based largely on the research and analysis of others), is a salient example of a creed that can, given the proper interpretation and conducive circumstances, propel the believers therein specifically in the opposite direction. Ayatollah Khomeini: We see over and over again in the period of the Umayyads, Marwānids and Abbasids how famous figures from the field of religious studies, scholars of the highest rank, placed themselves in the service of the caliphal despotism. They would furnish convenient interpretations of sacred sources in order to please their masters. For example, they would assert that when God the exalted and the Qurʿan enjoin us to “Obey…those in authority (ulu l-amr), the intent is that any individual who has made use of any means whatsoever to climb to a position of power over us – we should obey as “the one in authority.” In other words, whether he achieved this status with the help of trickery, deception, force and the sword, thuggery and highway robbery (qoldori va sar gardaneh gereftan) or whatever other evil acts, his position must be respected and none must rebel against him. This way of thinking has remained on the books for centuries and unfortunately still today influences the attitudes of most Muslims. [The fifth imam] Muḥammad al-Bāqir – whose sobriquet means “the splitter” [of knowledge] – delved into these corrupt exegeses and refuted them step-by-step using clear, learned arguments, and thereby rescued many Muslims from the harmful illusion that was the cause of so much impotence.¹¹³

In other words, far from functioning as a socio-political soporific, the religion of ʿAlī and Ḥusayn has had a tendency, during certain periods and under particular conditions, to instigate, or at least work hand in hand with, insurrection and even revolution. Some distinctive theological features of Shiʿism take on a particular emphasis as soon as they are used in a political context: the eschatological wait for the saviour-Imam (the “great evening”), the justification of rebellion against an iniquitous government, secrecy and clandestinity, obedience to a religious leader chosen by oneself. Not one of these elements exists in

 “Do you know the phrase that makes the Iranians sneer the most, the one that seems to them the stupidest, the shallowest? ʻReligion is the opiate of the people’” (Michel Foucault, cited in Afary and Anderson, Foucault, p. 83).  Supreme Leader Khameneʾi citing his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, Kayhan, 28/7/20.

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Sunnism, and each is liable to…become laden with emotion and acquire an irresistible force, even in politics.¹¹⁴

Another aspect of Shiʿite theology, to wit, its adoption of the Muʿtazilite doctrine of rational divine justice, “allows for (or even requires) an activist agenda that legitimizes the overthrow of a tyrannical ruler under the leadership of a qualified Imam.”¹¹⁵ Muʿtazilism, among other things, strongly supports the notion of human freewill, and many Khomeinists make use of this fact in their publicism. The Muslim moirai (fates) – in the guise of the doctrine of qadar (predestination) – that have helped lull Sunni populations to socio-political sleep even in the modern period, have, they argue, little power over the Shiʿa.¹¹⁶ (As usual, such positions should not be over-idealized: there are more than a few Shiʿite traditions that agree with the Sunni emphasis on the inevitability of fate [qadar] – as opposed to the human ability to effect change [istiṭāʿa] – including the widespread notion that Shiʿis were pre-ordained to become Shiʿis from before creation. In such matters we can only speak of a greater overall tilt or emphasis toward free-will on the part of Shiʿism). Shiʿite history opens with a series of what were, to the minds of its exponents, cataclysmic injustices that began with the shunting aside by the leaders of the Islamic state of ʿAlī, son of Abū Ṭālib, in the course of choosing Muḥammad’s successor. Such oppression reached its apogee with the event that still reverberates thirteen hundred years after its occurrence in the head and especially the heart of every committed member of the Shiʿite faith: the istishhād or martyrdom of the third imam, Ḥusayn, son of ʿAlī, together with his seventy-two followers (family and friends). In the wake of these formative tragedies, the Shiʿites evolved over the ensuing centuries three fundamental attitudes/emotions. The first of these involves a burning hatred for and fury towards “the powers that be,” that is, the

 Richard, Shiʿite Islam, p. 207.  Haider, Shiʿi Islam, p. 29. Although this particular principle in this particular formulation was adopted more by Zaydī than by Twelver Shiʿites, the latter were unquestionably influenced by it, and by the general outlook underlying it.  Of course, the effect of this doctrinal difference cannot be measured in any exacting fashion, and as we have noted more than once in this volume, Shiʿites and their leaders have often been characterized by an extraordinary degree of quietism and even fatalism during different periods. Perhaps we should say that while undergirding worldviews like the one discussed here unquestionably have their powerful effects upon those directly or indirectly imbued with them, these effects can be quite latent, and may require a gradual (or dramatic) shift in circumstances and/or the volition of a given mujaddid (“renewer”) to bring them to the fore. Such personages are successful at evoking ideas or sentiments buried deep in the collective conscience, as it were dusting them off and taking them out for a ride.

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reigning political authority, inasmuch as it was that authority – in the guise of the first three “righteous” caliphs and (later) the second Umayyad ruler Yazīd – that perpetrated the aforementioned criminal atrocities which for Shiʿites signified nothing less than the death of Islam hard on the heels of its birth. This sentiment extended itself within the Shiʿite ethos to a general antagonism towards whatever political, social, even ontological state of affairs prevailed at any given point in time. The longstanding Shiʿite outlook has been, essentially, that nothing in the universe is as it should be, and that the entire cosmos, as it were, is in need of fundamental repair and rectification. The second attitude-emotion that developed out of the traumatic events surrounding the undoing of ʿAlī and Ḥusayn is one of guilt: a deep personal and communal guilt arising out of the fact that the early Shiʿites did not rush to the side of these sacred paragons, did not provide them with the requisite support and succor, indeed abandoned them completely in their hour of dire need. In every generation each Shiʿite Muslim is duty bound, in a sense, to see him or herself as if he or she personally abandoned Ḥusayn on the Plain of Karbala: wherefore all the weeping and self-flagellation (the element of guilt and expiation in these rituals indicates that the exact calendrical correspondence between the Ashura or Tenth of Muḥarram and Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement – when penitents beat themselves in the synagogue, although far more “symbolically” than do the Shiʿites – is not without significance). The believer’s life should be lived in such a way as to expiate this guilt – whether perceived as his own or that of his ancestors – and his death, if at all possible, should transpire in a manner geared to achieving that same expiation. And this brings us to the third and final attitude-emotion that is ideally inspired in the Shiʿite psyche by the martyrdom of Ḥusayn: the desire to emulate the third Imam by sacrificing one’s own life for the cause (Pers. ithargaraʾi) or at least dedicating one’s life to the cause (Pers. Hosayni zistan). These three sentiments/ideas – the distrust and downright vilification of authority structures, the pangs of conscience over the cowardice of their forbears, and the urge to imitate the legendary role model (Ḥusayn) especially by laying down one’s life – together forge a Shiʿite consciousness that is, if not consistently revolutionary in nature (probably no such consciousness exists anywhere for any significant length of time), then at least more conducive to the growth of revolutionary notions and fervor than the collective mindsets characterizing other religious civilizations (Sunnism, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.). Shiʿism is thus characterized by an acute historical “neurosis” that renders it more volatile, more “flammable” and apt to “explode,” than other confessions.¹¹⁷ “Shiʿ-

 This tendency is part of what renders twentieth century Shiʿite Islamism, as opposed to its

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ism,” wrote Foucault, “arms the faithful with an unremitting restlessness.”¹¹⁸ To this should be added the messianic fervor emerging out of the doctrine of the Hidden Imam Mahdī, a fervor that periodically erupted in the form of bursts of radical, chiliastic, even antinomian activity of one kind or another, in some cases leading to the creation of sects and even political entities, for the most part among the so-called “extremist” or ghulāt “offshoots.”¹¹⁹ The consequences, then, of the cosmically jarring event of Ḥusayn’s martyrdom, has historically combined – and today perhaps more than ever combines – with the mindset produced by the expectation of the Savior’s advent, to produce a Shiʿite ethos bristling with collective emotional energy and laced with a lasting fortitude. (Speaking at a conference in Jerusalem in 1986, Francis Fukuyama averred that “Shiʿism is a bird with two wings: the green wing of waiting for the Imam Mahdī’s advent, and the red wing of weeping for Ḥusayn’s martyrdom.” He was far more right about this than about “the end of history”…). Nevertheless, all of these concepts, feelings and general tendencies cannot be said to have coalesced during the many centuries of Islamic history in an “effective” fashion among the “orthodox” Twelver Shiʿites. In other words, the last eight immaculate Imams (those who succeeded Ḥusayn), and their spiritual-scholastic inheritors the scholar-jurists (ulama), did not for the most part take advantage of the turbulence ever brewing beneath the surface of their religious tradition and harness it for their own ends. The scholar-jurists were reticent to do so, among other reasons, because as legists they formed the most conservative wing of the community, and (as we saw in a previous chapter) often sought and fought to subdue and suppress the many Shiʿite cathartic-messianic-revolutionary outbreaks that punctuated the history of the faith: they were antidisestablishmentarians. Moreover, although the ulama had

Sunni counterpart, “an articulate program of social revolution” (Michael Cook, Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014], p. 182). As usual in this day and age, such generalizations render us – and a host of far more eminent scholars – vulnerable to accusations of “essentialism.” Yet we persist in the truistic belief that cultures and religions are characterized by endemic worldviews that distinguish them from one another.  Cited in Afary and Anderson, Foucault, p. 83.  At the same time one could argue that “It was probably thanks to the input from the Ghulat that there was such a thing as an a-political imam” (Crone, Political Thought, p. 124), because for many other Shiʿites, as epitomized by the Zaydīs, an imam who did not at least aspire to a thisworldly saving role was just an exceptional scholar (for a different take on this question see Haider, Shiʿite Islam). The various heterodox movements introduced the notion of a supernatural imam who ruled the spiritual and metaphysical realm. (Henry Corbin would heartily embrace this outlook on the imam; Ayatollah Khomeini would help bring a more Zaydī-like outlook back into vogue).

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to a certain extent managed to step into the shoes of the Imams, they possessed even less authority than these last (who themselves, it will be recalled, were venerated during their lifetimes more than they were actually followed). This was the case both because the ulama were naturally lacking in the divine charisma inhering in the Imams as direct descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad and ʿAlī who enjoyed immunity (ʿiṣma) from error and sin, but also because unlike the single, central figure of the Imam around whom members of the Shiʿite sect could rally (albeit for the most part theoretically), the clerics were legion and scattered, and could not elicit anywhere near the same level of common focus. But a second set of developments, this time less on the emotional-passionate and more on the legal-methodological end of the religious spectrum, gradually moved the Twelver ulama into a position whence they could manipulate the mass of Shiʿites toward the realization of important collective objectives (it was historical circumstance and – in the end – the unique personality of Ruhollah Khomeini that ensured that they not only could but did do so, as we shall see). This set of developments involved, as we saw above, the gradual emergence and ultimate triumph of the directly related notions of ijtihād (the privilege of scholar-jurists to engage in independent legal reasoning) and al-niyāba al-ʿāmma (the “general representation” of the Hidden Imam). The victory of the Uṣūlī over the Akhbārī school enshrined these principles once and for all. The right to lead the public prayers, the right to declare holy war, and perhaps most importantly the right to receive the zakāt and khums remittances from the believers, now devolved upon the Uṣūlī scholar-clerics. This meant power – economic no less than spiritual – and especially independence from the central, monarchical authority, which in the Sunni world for the most part paid the salaries of the ulama directly and thereby kept them on a short leash.¹²⁰ The curricula of Sunni seminaries have frequently been revised by Sunni governments; the curricula of Shiʿi madrasehs are an internal affair decided by the relevant ulama alone. On the rare occasions when a Shiʿite government has successfully interfered with the internal workings of a howzeh, that howzeh has suffered a drastic drop in prestige. At the same time as this phenomenon allowed for a certain clerical autonomy vis a vis the ruling class, it strengthened the relationship between the ulama and their primary “financiers,” the people. Another development is perhaps of even greater significance. Partially as a result of the need to galvanize and organize against the threat posed by spin-off millennialist movements such as the Shaykhis, Babis and Bahaʾis (all of which appeared in the nineteenth century), the Uṣūlīs took steps beginning in the 1830s

 Keddie, Modern Iran, p. 74.

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to reinforce and codify the all-important relationship between mujtahidūn (scholars) and muqallidūn (followers).¹²¹ The notion was propounded and gradually accepted that in an ideal situation there would be a lone mujtahid standing at the top of the clerical hierarchy to whom all others owed allegiance. He would be the single, supreme marjaʿ al-taqlīd, Focus of Emulation, and would enjoy unchallenged authority. This ideal was realized almost completely three times during the nineteenth century, in the persons of Ayatollahs Najafī, Anṣārī and Shīrāzī.¹²² And so we have come full circle: from the niyāba khās ̣s ̣a, the individual representation of the absent Imam during the Lesser Occultation (873 – 945) by the four successive “agents” or wukalāʾ; to the niyāba ʿāmma, the collective representation of the occluded Imam during the Greater Occultation (945-present); and now, in the nineteenth century, back again to the niyāba khās ̣s ̣a, in the form of the concentration of all religious authority in the hands of a single jurisconsult (or at most several of them). The difference between the first and third stages of this process is essential, however: while the wakīl of the twelfth imam in medieval Baghdad was perceived as the mere spokesman of his master, the marjaʿ of modern Twelver Shiʿism – who cannot be the imam’s spokesman because the imam does not speak to him or to anyone else during the Greater Occultation – has for all intents and purposes usurped the position and power of the Hidden Master. The Uṣūlī Grand Ayatollah(s) is able to issue commands based on the dictates of his own autonomous reasoning, has the financial wherewithal to back up those commands, and (at least theoretically) enjoys the more-or-less blind obedience of millions of Shiʿite believers. (It is important to note that Shiʿites are free to choose which marjaʿ to follow, and may even “mix and match” rulings of different marājiʿ to suit their needs). While all of these metamorphoses within the clerical milieu were shoring up and magnifying the spiritual and political might of the Persian Shiʿite ulama, events were taking place in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Iran that would allow and encourage the high ranking mujtahidūn to flex their newly acquired muscles and test the extent of their power. By the eighteenth cen-

 Shaykhis labelled those who opposed them “Balasaris,” because at the tomb of Ḥusayn at Karbala the latter would advance to a position “above the head” (bala sar) of the imam in order to worship, whereas the Shaykhis, following the practice of their founder Shaykh Ahmad-e Ahsaʾi, remained below the head out of respect for the great martyr. The epithet stuck and was applied by “orthodox” Shiʿis to themselves for some time, especially with reference to this internal polemic (much like the use of the term misnagdim – “those who resist” – by the Jewish opponents of Hasidism since the eighteenth century).  See Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, chap. 3. As Litvak shows, however, none of these was ever universally accepted as marjaʿ-e ʿam-e shiʿe. Indeed, several others would claim the mantle of Universal Source of Emulation, from Ayatollah Naʿini to Ayatollah Borujerdi.

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tury the star of the Muslim powers in the Middle East had been on the wane for quite some time, and Iran was no exception. The latter days of the Qajar dynasty witnessed the weakening of central government in Tehran, not just vis-à-vis the surrounding provinces and competing Muslim polities, but vis-à-vis the increasingly encroaching Western (and North-Eastern) imperialist powers as well. There is a well-known Persian children’s game that involves the recitation by parents of a variety of limericks, accompanied by horseplay of different kinds. One version of the game, popular in the mid-twentieth century, has the father of the household seat himself on a Persian carpet in the living room after dinner, with one of his children standing at one wall of the room, and the other at the opposite wall. The father from his position on the floor then declaims: There was once a cat (yek gorbeh bud) Poor and miserable (bichareh bud) A dog came and bit him in the belly (delash sag-e gaz gerefte bud) (at this point the first child charges across the room and dives headlong into his father’s stomach) Next a bear came from behind and nearly killed the cat (khers az poshtash taghriban koshtash) (the second son bounds across the rug and leaps onto his father’s back) “But then, just as things looked darkest for the cat, he rose and turned himself… into a lion! (gorbeh beh shir avaz shodeh bud) (the father issues forth a low roar, straightens up and hurls his progeny this way and that onto the soft furniture)

This particular game harbors an obvious historical purport. Anyone looking at a map of modern Iran will perceive the lineaments of what the Persians call “the sleeping cat” (gorbe-ye khabideh). This “cat” – the Iranian state – was indeed in a sad state domestically by the time of the reign of Naser al-Din Shah (1848 – 1897): what little authority this Qajar king still possessed was retained by a method that a twentieth century Iranian intellectual dubbed “positive equilibrium” (tavazon-e mosbat). ¹²³ This meant that the sovereign survived on his throne and wielded at least a modicum of influence over territories close to the capital by empowering, and distributing favors to, tribal chieftains, local potentates, and foreign powers, in order to create rivalries between them whereby they would cancel out each others’ power. This is opposed to the approach of “negative equilibrium” (tavazon-e manfi) in which the central authority exerts its power by denying the forces surrounding it any influence whatsoever and thereby monopolizing and centralizing authority. Of the many forces and polities that Naser al-Din Shah

 Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Tavazon-e Mosbat (Tehran: n.p., 1956).

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had thus to “buy off,” none was more menacing than Russia (the “bear” that jumped onto the cat’s back) and none was more influential than Britain (the [bull‐] “dog” that bit the cat on the belly). These two powers had been converging on Persia from the North and South respectively since the early nineteenth century, and each needed to be placated. Thus did Naser al-Din find himself doling out first to Moscow and then to London a variety of extremely lucrative “concessions” (emtiyazat) that gave them control over vast sections of the Iranian economy. The most egregious of these was the Tobacco Concession of 1891, which bestowed upon a private English company – which then sold it to the British government itself – the rights to supervise the cultivation, sale and export of tobacco throughout Iran. In reaction to this “parceling out” of Persian national resources to the great powers, the flamboyant Islamic modernist and anti-imperialist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (who was in truth an Iranian posing as an Afghan in order to conceal his Shiʿite background and thereby maximize his influence in the Muslim world) crafted a powerful petition to a Source of Emulation residing in Samarra – the Shiʿite shrine town in Iraq where the twelfth Imam had “occulted” – by the name of Ayatollah Mirza Hasan-e Shirazi. Moved to act, Shirazi dashed off a religious decree or fatwa (some said it was forged by Jamal al-Din himself, but this is far-fetched) only two lines long: Today and until further notice the use of Tobacco in any form is tantamount to warring against the Hidden Imam – Hasan-e Shirazi.¹²⁴

According to memoirs from the period, diplomatic dispatches from the British embassy and British and Russian consular offices throughout Iran, an entire country quit smoking on the spot (one widely circulated anecdote had it that the king himself woke the following morning and called for his narghila, only to have it handed to him empty by a trembling servant, together with a copy of the fatwa). After three months of this sort of abstinence on a national scale – known in Iranian history as the Tobacco Boycott (tahrim-e tonbaku) – the concession became worse than worthless, and the Persian government was forced to cancel it, or rather, buy it back from the British purchaser. Such was the power of an Uṣūlī marjaʿ. Shiʿism’s raison d’etre, as we have seen, consists of a plaint and a plea. The plaint is that almost immediately upon its inception, the religion of Islam was cleft in twain: that which belonged to “Caesar” – that is, the political-military-economic power – was rendered unto the Caliphs, whereas that which belonged to God – that is, the religious power – was rendered unto the Imams. The plea – Shiʿism’s mission, goal, aspiration and destination – is that these two halves be reunit Nikkie Keddie, Religion and State in Iran (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 137.

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ed to form a seamless Islamic whole, in which temporal and spiritual authority are indistinguishable and indivisible and are wielded by one and the same leadership. After the failure of ʿAlī and Ḥusayn themselves to achieve this ultimate objective – and as a result of the inordinately heavy price they and their followers paid for attempting to do so – the remarriage of mosque and state quickly metamorphosed into an utopian chimera in the theology of mainstream (i. e. Imāmī and eventually Twelver) Shiʿism, a far off, fantasy-ridden Promised Land into which the community of true believers would be ushered only at the End of History by the messianic Mahdī figure, the “Hidden Imam.” Ḥusayn, the neo-maddahan (narrators of his tale of woe) tell their post-revolutionary audiences, was abandoned by his Shiʿite followers way back then at Karbala; Khomeini, Ḥusayn’s latter-day avatar, was in contrast supported to the hilt by the Iranian people, with the outcome plain for all to see. Not for nothing, then, was and is Ayatollah Khomeini adulated by his considerable following inside and even outside Iran as modern Shiʿism’s greatest hero – indeed, as a sort of third leg completing a sacred triangle begun fourteen hundred years ago by ʿAlī and Ḥusayn themselves – whose charisma and accomplishments earned him nothing less than the title “Imam”: because it was Khomeini who, through his unparalleled vision, boldness, piety and courage, recalled this eschatological eventuality from the misty, metaphysical, distant future and realized it in the terrestrial here and now: theocracy in our time. It has been fashionable for many decades now in a scholarly milieu increasingly dominated by the theoretical outlook of the social sciences, to seek the preeminent factors underlying a given historical development in just about any area other than that involving the decisive influence of an ideology and/or that ideology’s exponents. This is obviously not the place to declare war upon, or even skirmish with, this by now pervasively entrenched academic approach. But it is the place to try to demonstrate, in our specific context, the extent to which at least the fundamental principles and basic structure of the post-revolutionary Iranian polity and society constitute a fulfillment of the age-old Shiʿite dogma-dream of recombining dīn (religion), dunyā (the mundane world) and dawla (the state), as this dogma-dream was revamped and re-energized by Khomeini and a handful of other intellectual leaders in mid- and late twentieth century Iran. In simpler terms, it is not hard to show – but it is extremely important to do so nevertheless – that the Islamic Republic of Iran as we know it today was no accident: a political entity supervised by religious seminary graduates was the very reification of Ruhollah Khomeini’s mature thought. Indeed, perhaps no idea runs like a thread through so much of the revolutionary Ayatollah’s numerous writings, sermons, lectures and speeches as does this one, intertwined as it is therein with other ubiquitous motifs such as the battle against traditional Shiʿite quietism and the struggle

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against modern Western imperialism (two forces that, in Khomeini’s eyes, essentially work in tandem). We spoke of Khomeini’s “mature” thought. There is no question that the outlook of this determined Muslim scholar evolved over time, an evolution punctuated by several comparatively instantaneous and jarring transformations galvanized by particular traumatic events (such as the aforementioned government-backed assault on the Fayziyeh seminary of Qom in 1963). In his earlier writings from the late 1930s to the late 1950s (those writings, that is, that diverged from the traditional literary pursuits of a Shiʿite jurist, and thereby initiated him into the realm of publicism) Khomeini was working out the rudiments of his critique, and spent most of his intellectual energy identifying those factors and culprits responsible for what he saw as Iran’s and Islam’s dire predicament. During this period he was, albeit, already quite clear about the need to “smash in the teeth” of those intellectual and cultural forces that posed a menace to religion, and he heaped unrestrained invective even upon the (deposed) first sovereign of the Pahlavi dynasty, the secularizing, Westernizing dictator Reza Shah.¹²⁵ But this did not yet lead Khomeini to advocate the establishment of a theocracy. Even when he began, in the early 1960s, to offer actual positive prescriptions for the alleviation of the miserable state into which, to his mind, his country had fallen, these were nothing if not a work in progress. It must be remembered that in order to reach the momentous conclusions that he finally reached, the Ayatollah had first to overcome – with no real role models of any kind to inspire and guide him – the hoary tradition of Shiʿite clerical passivity, on the one hand, and the time-honored Iranian culture of obeisance to monarchical authority, one the other, both of which profoundly colored the environment in which Khomeini and all of his cohorts were raised. His first steps in the direction of imagining a solution to the problems besetting his people, and specifically in the direction of advocating the intervention of religion in politics, were hesitant and tentative, for all that they often manifested themselves in furious, fiery phrases. In June, 1964, for instance – soon after being imprisoned for delivering an unprecedentedly direct attack on the Shah – Khomeini spoke fiercely and intrepidly to a group of Tehran seminary students and teachers against the regime’s anti-Islamic actions, and even hinted at his well-known distaste for clerical “cloisterism,” but at the same time sounded a particularly minimalist (“secularist”) note when it came to the issue of mosque and state: Today is not a day to sit at home and pray; today is a day of struggle. It is a day in which the enemy has attacked religion, and we must stand in its defense. I shall so stand until the last

 Baqer Moin, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 60 – 64.

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drop of my blood is spilled; and all of you must also go out and tell the people from your pulpits that danger threatens religion today. Even had we no beef with the government – it has a beef with us! (agar ma kari be dowlatiha nadashteh bashim, anha kar darand). As I stressed during my recent meeting with [Minister of the Interior] Dr. Sadr: “We will leave you [politicians] alone – on the condition that you, for your part, leave our religion alone.” But no! They are by no means leaving our religion alone!¹²⁶

Far from evincing a positive, ideologically based motivation for clerical intervention in matters of government and state, such passages give the impression that Khomeini was dragged, against his natural predilections and in contrast to what he saw as ideal, into the realm of the political by the need to defend the faith from the ever deeper forays of the “satanic apparatus” (dastga-he shaytani). Were it not for these intolerable intrusions – the Westernizing and modernizing initiatives of the Shah that threatened the sacred institutions of Shiʿite Islam, as well his security apparatus’s direct attacks on religious educational institutions – Khomeini, like the rest of the ulama, would apparently have been willing to continue the longstanding “division of labor” that had more or less consistently characterized palace-howzeh relations since the Safavid era (1510 – 1722). It was during the latter half of his exile, the late 1960s and early 1970s, that Khomeini began to work out at least the theoretical-legal underpinnings of the doctrine that would be forever associated with his name: velayat-e faqih (Arabic: wilāyat al-faqīh) or “the Guardianship of the Jurist.” He did not do so from scratch. Two primary principles contributed to this revolutionary idea, both hailing from the milieu of Islamic law. The first – which we might designate the positive component – involves the general notion of wilāya (a term that supports a variety of meanings, in this context meaning “guardianship”).¹²⁷ On a more specific level, Muslim jurisprudence, both Sunni and Shiʿi, has long harbored the position that if and when the helpless individuals of a given habitation – the indigent, the orphaned, the insane, the dead – have no one to care for them, it is incumbent upon the local jurist (faqīh) to step up and take them under his wing: to clothe and feed the indigent, to house and see to the education of the orphan, to care for the different needs of the insane, to bury the dead. In the case of Shiʿism, the processes (detailed above) that gradually empowered the jurists, rendering them by the modern period more independent – economically as well as intellectually – and more activist than their Sunni counterparts, dovetailed with the longstanding principle of wilāya (and the longstanding status of an isolated and barely

 Sahife-ye Emam, 1: 346.  Wilāya and walāya are often confounded and indeed, hard to distinguish accurately. On this confusion see Haider, Shiʿi Islam, p. 32, n. 2.

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tolerated minority) to forge a sense of expanding communal responsibility among the clerics. It was a large but not a giant step from here to a sense of national responsibility, a step facilitated by the decreasing scope of Qajar sovereignty and increasing encroachment of foreign interests in fin de siècle Iran, the Reuters Concession (1872), Tobacco Concession (1891) and Constitutional Revolution (1905 – 11) serving as milestones along the way. The ulama, with some encouragement from fiery modernizers and anti-imperialists like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, felt that they could not sit idly by as the Abode of Islam was sold off piecemeal by Qajar monarchs (especially Naser al-Din Shah, assassinated by a disciple of Jamal al-Din in 1896) and ravaged unabashedly by gluttonous European concerns. As the traditional mediators between the Shah and his subjects, they also sought to defend the populace (and especially their closest partners, the merchant or bazaari class) from the cruelty and caprice of a despotic king, and thus a goodly number of clerics joined ranks with frustrated businessmen and budding intellectuals in the protracted struggle to limit the Shah’s absolutism and establish democratic institutions known as enqelab-e mashruteh (the Constitutional Revolution, or more literally, the revolution on behalf of making the monarch’s rule “conditional” – mashrūṭ – as opposed to absolute). Some high-ranking jurists realized early on that this Iranian magna carta would curtail the power not just of the king but of the clerical class, and that the European-inspired notions that underlay it would lead the country away from Islam. Chief among these “reactionaries” was Ayatollah Fazlollah-e Nuri, who was executed by the “progressive” party for his resistance to their project but who managed beforehand to argue for an alternative to the liberal, secularizing constitution sought by the revolutionaries: an enqelab-e mashru-e (“Islamic legal revolution”) as opposed to an enqelab-e mashruteh. He urged the fusion of wilāya with faqīh and proposed the appointment of a committee of Foci of Emulation (marājiʿ al-taqlīd) or Grand Ayatollahs to supervise the monarchy and check its excesses. Nuri, too, did not hatch this notion from scratch. When the Safavids conquered Iran in the early sixteenth century under the Sufi shaykh-turned-boy-king Esmaʿil (d. 1524), they forcibly converted the Persian populace to Shiʿism (though not overnight), and set about importing additional intellectual manpower for this daunting transformational enterprise in the form of Shiʿite scholars from Lebanon, Syria, Bahrain and elsewhere (though perhaps not as many as previously thought). One of these was a jurist brought over from Jabal ʿĀmil in Southern Lebanon by Esmaʿil, and then again by his successor, Shah Tahmasp, and known to Shiʿite history as al-Muḥaqqiq al-Karakī. Seeking to strengthen the authority of the ulama as part of the Shiʿitization project (and in opposition to the Akhbārī tendencies of many of his clerical rivals), Karakī argued that

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It is clear that violating the edicts of the religious scholars, who are tasked with watching over the law of the Lord of the Apostles (Muḥammad), is tantamount to an act of polytheism (huwa wa l-shirku fī darajatin wāḥida). Therefore whoever violates a decree of “the Seal of the Religious Scholars” (khaṭīmu l-mujtahidīn, a bold usage strikingly evocative of Muḥammad’s own title: khaṭīmu l-nabiyyīn, “Seal of the Prophets,” also the title bestowed on Karakī himself by the Safavid sovereign – Z. M.), whoever violates the rulings of “the Legatee of the Knowledge of the Chief Messenger” and of “the Representative of the Infallible Imams” (these designations evidently referring to the leading faqīh of a given generation, a sort of marjaʿ al-taqlīd avant la lettre – Z. M.) – whosoever disobeys him will inevitably be cursed and rejected and banished from heaven (lā maḥāla malʿūnun mardūnun wa ʿan mahbaṭi l-malāʾikati maṭrūdun), and he will be punished with terrible tortures…The qualified jurist must rise and assume the leadership of the Community of Believers. The infallible Imams were vested with the same authority as the Messenger of God (Muḥammad), and during the period of Major Occultation (al-ghayba al-kubrā, since 945 CE, when all communications with the final Imam are severed – Z. M.), the qualified jurist represents the Imams and has the same authority that they did.¹²⁸

Perhaps the increasingly stable and eminent position of the Shiʿite clerics under Safavid rule – they were co-opted, card-carrying members of the ruling establishment now – coupled with the resounding success of the national conversion project, served to curb the newcomer’s enthusiasm and temerity that animated Karakī, for we do not find such formulations uttered by an influential faqīh for another three centuries. (Internal rivalries among the Shiʿite clerics, which saw the ascension of more passive-conservative [Akhbārī] elements in the generations after Karakī, also played a part). And perhaps it was the relative weakening of Qajar sovereignty in the early nineteenth century that allowed for the next installment, as it were, in the development of the concept of velayat-e faqih. In the second decade of that century an accomplished and widely respected Shiʿite jurist by the name of Shaykh Ahmad-e Naraqi from Kashan – a mid-size town in central Iran nicknamed dār al-īmān or “the Abode of Faith” in honor of the many luminaries who had lived and worked there – penned a volume entitled ʿAwāʾid al-ayyām (“The Course of Days”). In it he paraphrased and re-injected into Shiʿite consciousness a somewhat neglected hadith (tradition) of the sixth Twelver Imam, Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 765 CE): ʿUmar b. Ḥandhala (one of the Imam’s close disciples) queried his master: “Oh Abū ʿAbd Allah (i. e. Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq)! What is your opinion regarding two of our people who are in the throes of a dispute concerning a debt or an inheritance or the like, and they go and apply for redress to the ruler and the court judges (taḥākama ila l-sulṭāni wa ila l-quḍāt) – is this permissible?” The Imam replied: “He who turns to the likes of these, whether his plea be false or just, has placed his trust in satanic despotism/idol-worship (ṭāghūt). And if [the sultan or his judges] rule in favor of one of the two parties – even if the ruling is correct and substantiated –

 ʿAlī al-Karakī, Jāmiʿ al-maqāṣid (Qom: Muʾassasat Āl al-bayt li-iḥyāʾ al-turāth, 1408), vol. 1, p. 33.

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then the winner will enjoy forbidden fruits (yaʾakhudhu suhtan), for he received them from the hand of the ṭāghūt, which Allah commanded him to repudiate, as it is written: ’O you who believe! Obey Allah and obey the Messenger, and those charged with authority among you (uli l-amri minkum). If you differ in any matter amongst yourselves, refer it to Allah and His Messenger, if you believe in Allah and the Last Day. That is best for resolving disputes. Have you not seen those who claim to believe in that which was revealed to you (O Muḥammad) and that which was revealed to those [prophets] who preceded you, but nevertheless turn together for judgement to the Evil One (ṭāghūt), even though they had been commanded to repudiate him. Satan seeks to lead them far astray…’ (Qurʿan 4: 59 – 60).” “If so,” continued Abu Ḥandhala, “then what should we do [in the case of a legal dispute and the like]?” The Imam answered: “Let both disputants seek out one amongst you who transmits our hadith (traditions), holds forth regarding that which we have declared permitted and forbidden, and is familiar with our responsa and the legal precedents we have set, and let them agree to submit themselves to his judgment (yarḍū bihi ḥukman) – for I have made him judge/ ruler over you (fa-innī jaʿaltuhu ʿalaykum ḥākiman). And if he judged according to our principles but one or both parties to the suit did not accept his ruling, verily they have made light of the sovereignty of God and have all but become pagans.”¹²⁹

Based on this tradition and a score of others, al-Naraqi almost arrived at the farreaching logical conclusion adumbrated by the words attributed to a celebrated acolyte of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib named Abu l-Aswad al-Duʾalī: “Kings are in charge of the people; religious scholars are in charge of kings” (al-mulūku ḥukkāmu ʿala lnās; al-ʿulamāʾu ḥukkāmu ʿala l-mulūk). But he was not intrepid (or imaginative, or angry) enough to take that final step (his student, the famed marjaʿ Morteza al-Ansari, even back-pedaled to a degree, stressing that the wilāya of the faqīh was limited to cases of those members of the community who could not take care of themselves).¹³⁰ The honor of turning wilāyat al-faqīh into the basis for full-fledged political authority was reserved for a mullah who flourished over a century later, and who seemingly feared nothing.

 Naraqi, ʿAwāʾid, p. 43.  Naraqi, despite facilitating the development of what would become the theory of velayat-e faqih, was “known for his firm support for the Qajar state” (Amanat, Iran, p. 744). In the context of our discussion earlier of Ayatollah Borujerdi’s contribution to political Islam, we characterized Ansari as the zenith and epitome of Uṣūlī intellectual remove and (though not in the Sufi sense) world renunciation (tarku l-dunyā). It is not hard to see why such as he would not be enthusiastic about this precursor of velayat-e faqih.

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We must make Islam rule! We left Ayatollah Khomeini as he began formulating the theoretical underpinnings of the “Guardianship of the Jurist” concept from his Iraqi exile.¹³¹ His method in doing so, at the outset, was appropriately jurisprudential, not to say casuistic. He made use of several prophetic traditions, including Muḥammad’s supplication to Allah on behalf of “those who will succeed me” (khulafāʾī, “my caliphs”). Asked who those would be, the Apostle answered: “Those who…transmit my traditions and practice, and teach them to the people after me.” Since this hadith is traced back to the prophet through a Shiʿite isnād or transmission chain (going back to the eighth imam al-Rida, elsewhere to the fifth al-Bāqir), the “successors” in question might be assumed to be Shiʿite imams. But Khomeini argues otherwise: the understated descriptions (“those who transmit my traditions…who teach the people…”) are not appropriate to those august personages. On the other hand, the referent cannot be mere traditionists (muḥaddithūn, nuqqāl) who pass on aḥādīth from generation to generation, as these are not necessarily qualified to “teach,” since doing so properly requires an additional skill-set. The possessor of this latter is the mujtahid/faqīh or scholar-jurist, and it is to him that the text alludes as “the prophet’s successor.”¹³² Elsewhere Ayatollah Khomeini would argue along a slightly different route, taking advantage of the fact that (as Hamid Dabashi puts it in another connection) “[w]ithin the Islamic context in general, and the Shiʿite in particular, legal and political are peculiarly metamorphical”:¹³³ Shaykh Ṭūsī (d. 1067 CE, author of two of the four main books of Shiʿi hadith – Z. M.), may God have mercy upon him, transmitted the following narration regarding Abū Khadīja, one of the loyal followers of [the sixth Imam Jaʿfar] al-Ṣādiq. Abū Khadīja said: “Abū ʿAbd Allah (al-Ṣādiq) sent me to our people and commanded me to instruct them: ʻO believers, take care! When a quarrel (khuṣūma) breaks out among you, or when you experience controversy regarding matters of commerce and the like – take care that you do not apply to one of those profligates (al-fussāq). Rather, appoint from among you a man who is well versed in that which we sanction and that which we prohibit – he have I placed over you in judgement. And beware lest

 The title of this section – in Persian: ma bayad eslam-ra hakem konim – was a slogan of Fadaʾiyan-e Eslam founder Navvab-e Safavi, long before Khomeini himself took up the cry.  Hamid Mavani, “Analysis of Khomeini’s proofs for al-Wilaya al-Mutlaqa (Comprehensive Authority) of the Jurist,” in Walbridge, The Most Learned, pp. 183 – 201. The anti-Akhbārī sentiment is clear.  Hamid Dabashi, “Early Propagation of Wilayat-e Faqih,” in Nasr et al, Expectation, p. 296. Cf. the widespread use of the root sh-f-t in ancient Semitic sources (e. g., the Biblical book of Shofetim, the Carthaginian shofets) to indicate both judging and ruling.

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you approach, in your quest to resolve disputes that erupt between you, the tyrannical ruler (al-sulṭān al-jāʾir).’” (Khomeini now proceeds to gloss the hadith concerning Abū Khadīja that he has just cited). The significance of the word “controversy” in this tradition is a disagreement regarding a legal question, and thus the intent of the Imam here is: “Do not turn in your civil suits and criminal cases to such profligates.” After this he (al-Ṣādiq) continues and declares [concerning the arbitrator who “is well versed in that which we sanction and that which we prohibit”]: “He have I placed over you in judgement” – and from this it is clear that the Imam’s intent when he referred, immediately prior, to “the profligates,” was to the judges who are appointed by the illegitimate rulers, princes and governors of that era. However afterwards [al-Ṣādiq] concludes: “And beware lest you approach, in your quest to resolve disputes that erupt between you, the tyrannical ruler,” that is, do not turn, as well, to those illegitimate rulers themselves (al-ḥukkāmu l-ghayru sharʿiyyīna anfusuhum) in matters connected to the executive prerogative (al-sulṭa al-tanfīdhiyya). For just prior he had forbidden us to turn to illegitimate judges, and since the infallible Imam would not repeat himself unnecessarily and waste words, there is no doubt and it is clear as the sun that his intent in the last sentence is not judges but rulers.

With the help of this close argument Khomeini upgraded or augmented the traditional wilāyat al-qaḍāʾ – the “authority to adjudicate” – with wilayat al-hokm or wilāyat al-faqīh – the authority to rule.¹³⁴ On such minutiae as this insinuated redundancy in the syntax of a long dead imam were the theoretical foundations of the Islamic Republic built: Khomeini is here at pains to show that Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, whose position is by definition inerrant, invalidated not just secular courts, but secular governments as well. The illegitimate judges are illegitimate because they do not adjudicate based on the sharīʿa (Islamic law); the illegitimate rulers are illegitimate because they do not run the affairs of state according to the sharīʿa, and do not enforce the prescription of the same upon their subjects. The implication is that both types of officials – judges and rulers – must be replaced by those who not only have the motivation to adjudicate and govern based on Islamic law, but are possessed of the requisite learning to do so. (The eminently Shiʿite Weltanschauung that informs Khomeini’s argument, as well as the argument contained in the passage it cites from over a millennium earlier, is evidenced in the particularly strong aversion to the reigning authorities as such evinced in both. A Sunni could not write words like these – at least not until he was profoundly influenced by Khomeini’s doctrine and accomplishments, as so many Sunni movements have been in recent times, whether they acknowledge this or not). It is incumbent, we  For a concise portrayal of the dispute concerning the parameters of velayat-e faqih in this regard, see Ayatollah Tehrani’s critique of the longstanding revolutionary slogan: “Death to the Opponents of the Guardianship of the Jurist!” https://www.isna.ir/news, 27 Mordad, 1401. Last accessed 10/09/2022.

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saw earlier, upon Shiʿite Muslim jurists to care for their communities (leaderless and therefore helpless since the occultation of the twelfth Imam); it is similarly incumbent upon the rank and file of Shiʿite believers, as we saw just above, to turn to no one but the ulama for guidance. This notion of duo-directional wilāya/walāya (the term evokes “covenant of loyalty” as well) was the penultimate stage in the intellectual process that culminated in the authority of the mujtahidūn (scholar-jurists) over the muqallidūn (imitators, followers) in Shiʿite doctrine. Ayatollah Khomeini expanded this notion – or, one might say, contracted it – focusing on a single presiding religio-legal scholar who is “most learned” (aʿlam) and “possessed of the whole range of requisite qualities” (faqih-e jameʿ al-sharayet), to whom the community of believers must tender obedience: the waliyyu l-faqīh (Pers. vali-ye faqih) or Guardian Jurist.¹³⁵

By God, whoever does not shout is guilty! No less important than the ijtihād-laced manipulation of seeming minutiae was the gusto, disgust and sarcastic fury with which Khomeini argued his point, to wit, that the prophets and imams had not herited their authority to the scholar-jurists so that these last should do nothing more than sit next to a pillar in the mosque and dissect abstruse texts concerning ritual duties: The [seventh] Imam Abu l-Ḥasan [Mūsa l-Kāẓim] said: “The fuqahāʾ are the Fortresses of Islam.” These words were not a mere expression of ceremonial courtesy, of the sort we exchange with one another: I call you “Support of the sharīʿa” and you return the favor and call me “Proof of Islam”! If a faqīh sits in the corner of his dwelling (yaqbaʿu fī kisri baytihi) and does not intervene in any of the affairs of society, neither preserving the laws of Islam and disseminating its ordinances, nor in any way participating in the affairs of the Muslims or having any care for them, can he rightly be called a “Fortress of Islam,” a protector of Islam? If the head of a government tells an army commander, “Go and guard such-andsuch an area,” will the duty of guarding that the guard has assumed permit him to go home and sleep, allowing the enemy to come and ravage that area?…Now if you [senior clerics] parry, “We are preserving at least some of the ordinances of Islam [by laying low and not provoking the authorities],” then let me ask you: “Are you implementing the penal law of

 Khomeini (and others) took notions like aʿlam and jāmiʿu l-sharāʾiṭ from Morteza Ansari (and others) and modified and expanded them to fit the new ideological-political project of Islamic government. In ensuing years Khomeini and many of his supporters would lay additional stress on the obligatory nature of obedience to the Guardian Jurist by tacking on the adjective motlaq (absolute) to the institution: “the Absolute Guardianship of the Jurist.” Other clerics, including many supporters of the Islamic Revolution, opposed this addition (and still do), and no small number felt and still feel uncomfortable with the very theory of velayat-e faqih.

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Islam and the sanctions it provides?” You will have to answer “No.” So a crack has appeared in the wall of your “fortress.” Then I will ask you, “Are you guarding the frontiers of Islam and the territorial integrity of the Muslim homeland?” Again you will be forced to answer in the negative. Perhaps you will protest: “Our task is only to pray!” This means that an entire section of the wall of your “fortress” has fallen down. Then I will ask: “Are you taking from the rich what they owe the poor and passing it on to them? For that is your Islamic duty, to take from the rich and give to the poor.” You will probably answer: “No, this is none of our concern. God willing, others will come and perform this task.” Now your whole fortress has collapsed, and you are like [the last Safavid] Shah Sultan Hosayn, waiting for the sack of Isfahan…We have abandoned almost all aspects of our duty, restricting ourselves to passing on from one generation to the next certain sections of the law and discussing them amongst ourselves. Many of the ordinances of Islam have virtually become part of the occult sciences, and Islam itself has become a stranger: only its name has survived…We recite the verse: “Administer to the adulterer and the adulteress a hundred lashes each” (Q. 24: 2), but we do not know what to do when confronted with an actual case of adultery. We merely recite the verse, as if seeking to improve the quality of our recitation and give each consonant and vowel its full value!¹³⁶

The lectures compiled into al-Ḥukūma al-islāmiyya – the Arabic version of The Guardianship of the Jurist – were complemented by additional arguments proffered in the context of the “commerce” section of Khomeini’s handbook of juristic responsa as well as several other sermons and letters. Altogether these proffered an outlook on the socio-political responsibilities of the clerisy already adumbrated by Khomeini way back in 1964, immediately upon being released from the Shah’s prison: I am not one of those akhunds who sits there with his worry beads in hand and prays. I am not the pope, who leads services on Sundays and during the remainder of the week exerts authority only over his own personal affairs and withdraws his hands from matters of society and state…Islam is in every way a political religion…¹³⁷

But velayat-e faqih (the Persian pronunciation of Arabic wilāyat al-faqīh) was not home yet. On the eve of the 1979 revolution itself, and indeed, even during and after that unparalleled national upheaval, Khomeini’s progress toward the notion of full-throttled, hands-on clerical control of the levers of power in Iran was slow and unsure, and not just for fear of public opinion or the reactions of his more radical (or more conservative) comrades-in-arms. Even from the towering heights of the realization of his – and the ancient Shiʿite – ambitions, as he stood firmly at the helm of the first genuine theocracy in modern times, the “Jurist Executor” (wali-ye faqih) could look back and attempt to justify his earlier wavering on

 Algar, Guardianship, pp. 42– 43.  Ettelaʾat ,18 Farvardin, 1343.

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this subject in a manner that illustrates in no uncertain terms that…he was still wavering. We cite at length from a sermon delivered in 1982 in the famed Jamaran mosque of Tehran to an assembly of Friday Prayer Leaders hailing from all parts of the country: You my dear sirs, and the entire nation, must remember well the notions that they used to feed us, the worldview that was previously cultivated among us by means of the propaganda machine of the plundering powers: that we [clerics] must separate ourselves from politics, that we must refrain from intervening in any social or political matter concerning the people. Rather, those that are ready and willing to carry out their mission as prescribed for them by the superpowers – they are the ones who must involve themselves in politics, who must take the reins of government into their hands and draw the people in the direction that their imperial masters desire: that is, either into the orbit of the East or into the orbit of the West. This approach is satanic. For even if these [Westernizing Iranian politicians or their foreign sponsors] are possessed of a modicum of humanity, they are possessed of only a single dimension thereof; for the prophets alone could lay claim to harbouring the knowledge of all aspects thereof, and they handed that knowledge down to the committed clerics (olama-ye mottaʿahed). Do not imagine that these great powers have now left us alone. As we speak, they and their lackeys (i. e., the “left wing” of the revolutionary movement, as well as “religious intellectuals” like first Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic Mehdi-ye Bazargan and the new regime’s first president Abolhassan Bani Sadr – Z. M.) are employing every weapon in their philosophical arsenals to distance you [clerics] from political matters, to prevent you from getting involved in social affairs, to keep you out of government. It is true, I myself during my time teaching at Najaf, said as much: that the [spiritual] level of the clerics is too high for them to get involved in practical affairs (umur-e ejraʾi). However, [I was referring to] a case where there are individuals committed to Islam who are capable of carrying out policy according to the principles of Islam [who can take up the reins of power], not to a case in which [those manning government and political posts] are either incapable of or unwilling to implement policy according to Islamic standards: [in the latter case] should we [clerics] be expected to sit by and watch as they drag our nation in this direction or that based on [foreign] interests? If politicians are at work who can lead the country on the basis of Islam – even only on the basis of its mundane dimension, that is, that they preserve our national independence and ensure that we do not fall into the clutches of the Eastern or Western bloc – then there is no problem: the clerics will go and tend to their own business, which is in itself political, but spiritual political (siyasi-ye ruhani).¹³⁸

The term “theocracy” was coined by the renegade Jewish general and historian Flavius Josephus, and defined by him as a polity “governed directly by God.”¹³⁹ Josephus attributes the ordination of this form of government to Moses, and intends by it the (ideal) Israelite polity. It is therefore quite clear – since that polity never en-

 Sahife-ye Emam, 13: 433 – 4.  Flavius Josephus, Against Apion, 2: 153.

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joyed truly unmediated divine rule – that Josephus’s intent was to describe government by God’s law, implemented by that pious individual or class of pious individuals most well versed therein. The Mosaic conception of good government is thus counterpoised to the Davidic, in which monarchs in varying measure pious and impious, knowledgeable and ignorant of God’s law, all took their turn as heads of state. Ayatollah Khomeini’s conception as intimated in the passage above is not easy to place along the spectrum spanning the Mosaic and Davidic models. On the one hand, he does not insist that scholars of the law (like Moses and the Elders) govern directly, but only that they intervene if and when the political leaders fall short morally and spiritually. On the other hand, he is unwilling to tolerate dynastic monarchy (as we saw in more explicit terms above), even if the prophets and priests, or their inheritors the jurist-scholars, function as mediators between subjects and sovereign – or advisors or gadflies to the ruling institution – or even if, as in the case of Cardinals Richelieu or Wolsey, they function as the “power behind the throne.” Such a situation is untenable because there is no guarantee that the individual seated upon that throne will pass the test of the ayatollah and show himself “committed to Islam [and] capable of carrying out policy according to the principles of Islam.” Khomeini wanted more political clout and involvement for the ulama than an Isaiah remonstrating with an Ahab – but it is not always clear to us (and probably was not always clear to him) just how much more.¹⁴⁰ Looking back, the choice of laymen to lead the government immediately after the revolution – Bazargan, Bani Sadr, Rajaʾi, Bahonar – can certainly be viewed as reflecting Khomeini’s initial preference (or an experiment, or a nod to the many secular and leftist forces who had cooperated with him to overthrow the Shah). Indeed, the “Imam” explicitly banned clergymen from standing for election at the time. The initial draft of the new constitution, sans any mention of the institution of the Guardian Jurist, was indicative of the same. In short order, however, both government and constitution were clericalized.¹⁴¹

 Foucault styled the Iranian revolution “a great joust, under traditional emblems” between “king and saint” (Afary and Anderson, Foucault, p. 87). At the same time, he was given to understand by an Iranian “religious leader” that “by Islamic government nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control…” (Afary and Anderson, Foucault, p. 89). Reza Hajatpour, a Qom seminary student who immigrated to Germany and joined the ranks of Western academia, once asked: “Why for centuries did the spiritual classes give their support to kings and princes? If power belongs exclusively to the spiritual classes, how come they have taken so long to recognize it?” (cited in Buchan, Days of God, p. 135). It is a very good question, and one which we have endeavored, to some extent, to answer in this chapter and in this volume in general.  Bazargan and Bani Sadr were pushed out; Bahonar and Rajaʾi were assassinated by the Mojahedin.

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There is much evidence scattered throughout the oeuvre of the “Imam” that portrays a deeply held belief that the Shiʿite Muslim clerics of modern times in general, and the mujtahidūn (high ranking religio-legal scholars) among their ranks in particular, must break out of their self-imposed sequestration in mosque and howzeh and devote themselves to the affairs of the world. Few notions were more central to Khomeini’s message than the need to politicize Islam and turn it into the premier guidebook for confronting contemporary problems. Religion must become relevant, he preached (in this sense sounding every bit like a modernist reformer). It must no longer confine itself, as it had done for centuries, to the minute ritual questions debated in the gloomy madrasehs, but must be brought out into the light of day and recalibrated for purposes of dealing with the pressing political, social and economic issues of our time. In line with this outlook, Khomeini regularly lambasted those ulama who “bury Islam in their books….and in their cells in the seminary” and who believe that “all they are supposed to do is offer prayers and give opinions on abstruse questions of religious law.”¹⁴² By propagating this misplaced emphasis on the picayune elements of faith at the expense of its larger and more meaningful concerns, the traditional clerics are, he averred – wittingly or unwittingly – participating in an imperialist plot: In order to make the Muslims, especially the intellectuals and the younger generation, deviate from the path of Islam, foreign agents have constantly insinuated that Islam has nothing to offer, that Islam consists of a few ordinances concerning menstruation and parturition, and that this is the proper field of study for the akhunds (religious scholars).¹⁴³ Present Islam to the people in its true form, so that our youth do not picture the akhunds as sitting in some corner in Najaf or Qum, studying the questions of menstruation and parturition instead of concerning themselves with politics, and draw the conclusion that religion must be separate from politics. These slogans of the separation of religion and politics and the demand that Islamic scholars not intervene in social and political affairs have been formulated and propagated by the imperialists; it is only the irreligious who repeat them.¹⁴⁴ Once, during the occupation of Iraq, a certain British officer asked: “Is the azan I hear being called now from the minaret harmful to British policy?” When he was told that it was harmless, he said: “Then let him call to prayer as much as he wants!” If you do not disturb the

 Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, ed. and trans. Hamid Algar (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1981), pp. 219 and 136. This, despite the fact that Khomeini himself, like all other senior ayatollahs, included hundreds of pages of rulings in his Risalat-i-tawdih-i-masaʾil on just such “abstruse questions of religious law.”  Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, p. 30. As several scholars have noted, such sentiments as these expressed by Ayatollah Khomeini and his cohorts against the picayune pursuits of the fuqaha’ are reminiscent of – and may even have been indirectly influenced by – the writings of Ahmade Kasravi himself.  Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, p. 38.

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policies of the imperialists, and consider Islam to be simply the few topics you are always studying and never go beyond them, then the imperialists will leave you alone. Pray as much as you like; it is your oil they are after – why should they worry about your prayers?¹⁴⁵

The shift in emphasis sought by Khomeini required a curtailment of what he claimed (with some justice) to have been the customary Shiʿite clerical and juristic preoccupation with matters of ritual and worship (ʿibādāt), in favor of an increased concentration on what he asserted (with somewhat less justice) to be the vast public and practical sphere of Islamic law (muʿāmalāt).¹⁴⁶ A shift of this sort required not only flexibility and creativity, but courage, because it would place the ulama on a direct collision course with the Westernizing, secularizing, “progressive,” power hungry elites that surrounded the Shah, and severely antagonize the imperialist forces that propped up the Shah’s regime in order to serve their own interests. For it was, after all – so Khomeini argued – those foreign forces and their domestic Iranian toadies who had been for decades, even centuries, hard at work propagating far and wide the notion that religion and politics have nothing to do with one

 Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, p. 39. Khomeini was not the first to voice such radical sentiments. In 1962, for instance, Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, author of the celebrated Gharbzadegi (“Westoxication”), lashed out acidly at the Shiʿite ulama for “continu[ing] to be wrapped up in the petty details of prayer or the problems of ritual purity, and continu[ing] to be nagged by paralyzing doubts: Did they perform the right number of prostrations or not?” (Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, Gharbzadegi, trans. Paul Sprachman, Plagued by the West [Delmar: Caravan Books, 1982], p. 24).  For obvious reasons related to their powerlessness (and to what eventually amounted to their philosophy of powerlessness), Shiʿites in history devoted even less attention to matters of “public law” than did Sunnis (the Sunni ulama themselves having for the most part carried on their legal deliberations far from the centers of temporal power, Sunni public law also remained relatively underdeveloped). Shiʿi scholars thus tended to focus less on the elucidation of regulations concerning man’s relation to his fellow man (i. e., civil law, muʿāmalāt) – this sphere they were prepared (and usually forced) to “render unto Caesar” – and more on the elaboration of precepts concerning man’s relation to God (i. e., ritual law, ʿibādāt). Amir Taheri, though prone to wild hyperbole, is here for a change exaggerating only slightly when he states that “it was not until the early fourteenth century that Mohaqeq Helli and Najm ed-Din Kobra revived Shiʿite scholarship by tackling subjects other than the traditional ritualistic questions concerning the ‘clean’ and the ‘unclean’” (Amir Taheri, The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution [London: Hutchinson, Ltd., 1985], p. 178). This does not mean that preoccupation with such matters ceased or even diminished from that point onward. Taheri himself complains that the seventeenth century Shiʿite colossus Muḥammad Bāqir al-Majlisī “has left behind thousands of pages on the minutest details of copulation, including with wild and domestic animals” (subjects which are indeed dealt with in the context of fiqh literature on sexual impurity [janāba] – Taheri, Spirit, p. 179. While “thousands of pages” is, as usual, an exaggeration, “hundreds” would not be). In general, it may be said that the lion’s share of hadith exempla in any compilation – Shiʿi or Sunni – concern themselves with ceremonial, as opposed to civil, criminal or governmental, matters

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another (it is important to remark that in Khomeini’s conspiratorially oriented mind sincere, homegrown Western philosophical and socio-cultural trends that had evolved independently of any imperialist venture – such as secularism, feminism, nationalism, freedom of religion, sexual libertarianism, etc. – and had then spread to Muslim countries for the most part through the variegated natural processes of intellectual diffusion and cultural osmosis – admittedly with some unconscious and occasionally even conscious assistance from the political, military and economic incursions of colonialism – from Khomeini’s perspective all of this was part and parcel of a historic, premeditated, epic European and American plot to undermine Islam and make off with the natural resources of Muslim lands. By the same logic, the primary purpose of Israel’s creation in Khomeini’s discourse, or at least the primary purpose of Western support for Israel, is the division and conquest of Islam). Here is Khomeini soon after the revolution: It is essential for us to grasp the full meaning of the term “Islamic Republic.” Until now, the satanic-tyrannical regime (nezam-e taghuti, i. e., the Pahlavi monarchy) has occupied itself with the eradication of any semblance of Islamic law from all parts of the country, from the courts and from the schools, from the provincial administrations and from the embassies, from the army and from everywhere else. The royal decree has been nothing other than the removal of Islam – as it is properly understood and practiced – from Iranian state and society. This has been done in obedience to their masters, those foreign powers who are bent on exploiting us and on doing so without being in any way disturbed. They know that genuine Islam and its champions the clerical class stand in unappeasable opposition to their imperial machinations, so they seek to suppress those forces. That aspect of [Islam] that is irrelevant to their exploitation (i.e. ritual and the like) they leave alone, but that dimension of our sacred religion that naturally opposes their plans of plunder they seek to undermine at every turn. Toward this end, they have done everything in their power to inculcate in the mind of the masses and the leadership – even in the minds of the clerics themselves! – that religion is separate from politics. They put about the notion that religion consists of a series of rules [that require believers] to go and pray, and preoccupy themselves with subjects that have no implications whatsoever for public affairs or the future of the country. [The imperialists and their domestic lackeys] go about looting and oppressing and tyrannizing, and the religious class should mind its own business, paying no attention to what goes own in this country, ignoring all the evil that foreigners bring down upon us. This was the program of the powers during the days of tyranny (i. e., under the Pahlavis – Z. M.). They spread the idea that clerics have no place in political matters, and many of the clerics themselves came to believe this, and the Iranian youth also began to see things in this light. Things have come to such a pass, that one of these corrupt intellectuals, who is beholden to foreign powers (roshanfekr-e fased-e vabasteh), wrote in one of our newspapers that “we wish to preserve the sanctity of the clerics; they should remain aloof from the affairs of state so as to preserve their sanctity and not dirty their hands with politics”! This is a notion put about by foreigners that the local lackeys have imitated: let those [clerics] stay put in their

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mosques and pray, and let them have no truck with Parliament, with legislation, with foreign policy, with society – so that they remain pure!…¹⁴⁷

For Khomeini at this point the truth is diametrically antithetical to the “separation of Church and State” propaganda preached to Iranian Islamic society by those who take their lead from what is essentially the Christian European ethos: “Hand politics over to the emperor; religion assign to the pope and his coterie” (siyasatra vagozarid beh emperator; va diyanat ham mal-e pap va afrad-e pap). Here he stresses that Islam and its institutions are intrinsically political, that they are ideally so and were always meant to be so – not (as we saw above) that the mixture of the two realms is merely the lesser evil when pious political leaders are not to be had: …The religion of Islam is a political religion; every aspect of it is political, even its rituals (dine eslam yek din-e siyasi ast; hameh chizash siyasist, hatta ʿebadatash)…the Friday prayer is a political gathering, at the same time that it is a ritual. During the Friday prayer sermon we are duty bound by our sacred law to discuss the political issues of the day, to discuss the problems and challenges of the Muslims. Indeed, all public prayer (namaz-e jamaʿat) consists of the gathering of the people in one place so that they can be apprised of the goings on in the country…The mosque is an information center, a center for the promulgation of orders, a center where town meetings (gerdehamaʾiha) were held and criticisms of the caliph – including the August Commander [of the Faithful, hazrat-e amir, i. e. the Imam ʿAlī] – were voiced to his face. At the outset of Islam from these very mosques military divisions and entire armies were dispatched, and it was the place for the announcement of Islamic political legislation. Whenever a public problem arose, the call would go out: “Communal prayer!” (al-salat bi-l-jamaʿa) and the people would gather in the mosque, discuss the problem and reach a solution. The mosque is a social-political center…¹⁴⁸

 Sahife-ye Nur, vol. 3, p. 296.  Sahife-ye Emam, 10: 14– 17. “They say this akhund is political,” railed Khomeini, responding to his critics. “So was the prophet of Islam!” (Amanat, Iran, p. 747). The political, this worldly “imam” that Khomeini became upon assuming control of Iran represented the diametric antithesis of the traditionally quietist Twelver imam, and especially of Henry Corbin’s mystic imam who sought only the higher realm of “spiritual kingship.” Corbin, who had studied with Allamah Tabatabaʾi and Morteza Motahhari among others (and had met the Shah in 1947), symbolically died in the Fall of 1978, just as the revolution crested. Khomeini’s project of pulling the ulama out of mosque and madraseh and into the world has ever encountered obstacles, including a longstanding (Islamic and especially Shiʿite) tradition antithetical to such a transformation and – on the other hand – a secular modernism that saw the rouhani (“spiritual [leader]”)’s place as within the walls of “religious” ceremony and institutions. Ex-Iranian author and commentator Mehdi-ye Khalaji quit the howzeh, according to his own admission, because “those studies had nothing to do with the practicalities of modern life.” He then complained, in the remainder of a BBC interview, that “the profession of rouhani has lost its meaning, since today [in Iran] clerics are involved in a wide array of mundane activities that go way beyond their purview” (BBC Persian, 20/11/2019). He would seem to be complaining about a thing and its opposite.

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Though many of these ideas took time to evolve in Ayatollah Khomeini’s writings, in retrospect not a few Khomeinists would locate the turning point in the events of 1963 – 4. The recently deceased Hojjatoleslam Sayyid Mahmud-e Doʿaʾi: The Islam in our society prior to the 15th of Khordad was a stagnant, extinguished, collaborationist Islam (eslam-e raked, khamud va sazeshkar), thoroughly lacking in a sense of responsibility concerning social affairs. In short, it consisted of a system of solely ritual obligations that ran from all positive social and political responsibility, and gave not a thought to its own destiny, or that of the country or the Muslim world at large.¹⁴⁹

Khomeini’s theory of a reunited sacerdotum and imperium, constructed in exile and in opposition, was a bold one, but it was still only a theory. The revolution was to put it to the test on the hard ground of reality.¹⁵⁰ Back in Iran, the emboldened sovereign further consolidated his rule. He delegated less and less, and insisted on being personally involved even in decisions regarding relatively minor matters such as the promotion of mid-level army officers. His loyal cadre of apparatchiks, mediocre intellectuals and security men stepped up the attacks on the clerics and their followers – as well as against oppositionists of every stripe – pillorying them in the press and torturing them in the jails.¹⁵¹ Prison time and a SAVAK dossier became badges of honor that most every revolutionary leader would later flaunt in his memoirs.¹⁵² Ayatollah Montazeri, Khomei-

 Khaterat-e 15 Khordad, vol. 1, p. 128.  One area in which the revolution may be said to have failed is its much-touted exportation – at least in the specific sense of the adoption by surrounding states of the institution of velayat-e faqih. “Khomeini’s vision of clerical dictatorship, while presented as a revival of the religious practice of the seventh century, has had no imitators. In a twist that is both paradoxical and the essence of history, in 1979 a phony modernity confronted a phony tradition in a fight to the death” (Buchan, Days of God, p. 5).  Among serious, (more-or-less) objective scholars assessments are divided. Some, including Ervand Abrahamian, claim that torture as a method disappeared completely from the Iranian scene under both Pahlavis (from the 1920s through the 1980s – Tortured Confessions, pp. 1– 2). Though Abrahamian has literally “written the book” on the subject, this sweeping claim ignores a goodly amount of testimony to the contrary. Others, including Abbas Milani, speak of “overwhelming evidence of torture by SAVAK” especially with the appointment of General Ne’matollah Nasiri as head of this organization in 1965, under whom “SAVAK became increasingly known for its brutality and use of torture” (The Shah, p. 312). Even earlier, he points out, torture was used against Tudeh activists, who were moreover executed by the dozen (Milani, The Shah, pp. 221– 223). Andrew Cooper, highly sympathetic to the Pahlavis, still saddles Mohammad Reza Shah with the ultimate responsibility for what he claims were decades of state-sanctioned torture (Fall of Heaven, pp. 165 – 167).  The Acronym stands for Sazman-e Amniyat va Ettelaʾat-e Keshvar, “The National Security and Intelligence Organization,” set up in 1957 with the help of American and Israeli intelligence officers. These were the days when many Iranians were convinced that among any group of students,

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ni’s student at Qom, tells of his incarceration in the early 1970s on the charge of participating in a Qurʿanic study session where criticisms of the Shah were allegedly voiced. Government agents tortured him brutally, and (so he claims) “roasted” his son Muhammad on a grill in front of his eyes. One of Khomeini’s students named Mustapha Rahnema, having arrived in Iran from Karbala, was promptly arrested and sent to the same facility. Upon discovering that Montazeri was there, too, but in solitary confinement, he asked the guards if they had any objections to him reciting a few verses of scripture in the prison yard. Whether out of piety or in mockery they gave their assent, at which point Rahnema, who also happened to be a mujawwid or professional Qurʿan chanter, held forth at a deafening decibel level. In the midst of his recitation he “smuggled” into the holy text a message in Arabic from Khomeini, in the hopes that Montazeri would hear. The guards, not Islamically uneducated, caught him in the act.¹⁵³ While Islamists were behind bars, the regime’s secularization and Westernization project proceeded apace.¹⁵⁴ The cult of pre-Islamic Iran was amplified still further at this time, together with the cult of personality surrounding the Shah, whose picture had to be on the wall in every household and place of business, and before whose visage, which was plastered across the big screen in cinema houses, moviegoers were expected to stand. The fusion of these two cults led in 1971 to the throwing of “history’s grandest party,” an unprecedentedly extravagant international affair that saw scores of heads of state and dignitaries from around the world flown into Persepolis and Pasargadae to celebrate “2500 years of Iranian monarchy.” During the early 1970s Mohammad Reza parlayed his increasingly powerful presence on the regional and even world stage into a victory over the oil companies and a surge in Iranian petrol revenues that his own father (and Mosaddeq) had failed to achieve. The inauguration in 1975 of the Rastakhiz or “Resurrection” single party

friends, neighbors or even within a single family, one or more members were SAVAK agents. During the revolution dozens of the organization’s headquarters were ransacked, and files found there on hundreds of trouble-making clerics are proudly displayed to this day on office walls or as the frontispiece in memoirs.  Montazeri, Khaterat, p. 187. Although one guard reacted by shouting, “Stop jabbering in Arabic!” (arabi bolghor nakon, the middle word, like our “vulgar,” connected to “Bulgarian”), the other said: “You’re inserting some sort of message in the middle there!” (to dari labela-ye Qur’an khabar midahi). This was, in a sense, the religious answer to the poetic hemistitches that prisoners would throw at one another as a means of communication and coping in the Shah’s jails.  Authors like Ali Mirsepassi and Zhand Shakibi have challenged the notion that Pahlavism of the 1960s and 70s was purely secularist and Westernizing, arguing that the monarch and his coterie adopted or coopted a critical stance vis a vis the excesses of American and European modernity, and placed a heavy emphasis on Iranian authenticity. We deal with this argument, which, on the whole, we do not accept, below.

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system, though possibly intended as a stepping-stone toward the eventual extension of public freedoms, in practice further curtailed what little dissent or political participation had been tolerated until that point. Nothing succeeds like suppress: foreign investors were relaxed, and foreign governments were unconcerned – the Shah was in full control. Iran was “an island of stability.”¹⁵⁵ Though Western intelligence agencies had regularly warned against imminent upheaval in Iran from the 1940s through the 1960s, citing problem areas ranging from the Shah’s insistence upon both reigning and ruling to rampant corruption among his family members, they had consistently ignored the sector of society where the trouble was actually brewing and whence the challenge would ultimately arise.¹⁵⁶ At any rate in the 1970s, with the king’s national and international

 The description belongs to President Jimmy Carter on his New Year’s Eve visit to Iran, Dec. 31, 1977.  The U.S. State Department, the British Foreign Office, the CIA, MI6 and a host of other government bodies (including the SAVAK) weighed in over the years with (often astute) assessments of the problems facing the Pahlavi regime, and indeed, regularly encouraged the Shah to remedy these problems for his and his country’s own good. On almost all occasions, these intelligence agencies expressed concern about the potential for instability and even revolution arising from communists – primarily the Tudeh – and democrats – primarily the National Front (whereas the clerics and traditional segments of society were perceived, as they often were by the Pahlavi court itself, as the natural allies of the monarchy). When voicing their concerns about Iran’s future, these analysts generally cited one-size-fits-all bogeymen like “a growing gap between the government and the people,” “rampant corruption,” “erosion of government credibility,” “insufficient political participation,” etc. – complaints which may be consistently heard regarding almost every polity on earth in modern times. At various points Mohammad Reza took the advice of his foreign well-wishers seriously, and sought to engage in reform (e. g., the White Revolution). Ray Takeyh notes that “successive American administrations insisted that stability would come from economic growth, a rational bureaucracy, and a growing middle class” (Last Shah, p. 52); Mohammad Reza, in fact, accomplished most of this – and the opposite of stability resulted from it. Moreover, the second Pahlavi was nowhere near as repressive as he was made out to be by opposition propaganda in the late 1960s and 1970s. Given this solicitousness on the part of Western governments and the king’s (at least partial) open-mindedness to their suggestions, why did the revolutionaries of 1979 seethe with such a fierce hatred of America, Britain and the Shah? Because all these would-be physicians were perennially focused on curing the wrong ailments. Though issues of Pahlavi suppression and corruption unquestionably played a role in galvanizing the elite (especially the National Front and its offshoots) into burgeoning opposition, it was – as we shall argue – the unrestrained secularizing policies of Pahlavis which led to the resentment, and to the aspirations for an alternative path, that eventually precipitated the groundswell of 1979 (as these religio-ideological factors had been primarily responsible for the “rehearsal unrest” of 1963 – 4, as well). The many overseas and indigenous analysts had, it may be said (at least with hindsight), laid stress on the right solutions for the wrong problems, primarily because those were the types of problems and solutions that were in their lexicon. They had also erred in identifying the loci of Pahlavi strength: the nineteen-fifties and sixties had seen more than one military coup overthrow adjacent

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standing having reached unprecedented heights, even these misdirected prophecies of doom disappeared almost entirely.

When the Victory of Allah Comes… Many have attempted to explain why the Islamic Revolution of 1978 – 9 came about as, and when, it did. The most common explanations revolve around the bottom line. Despite the dazzling economic success story that was Pahlavi Iran – between 1957 and 1977 the standard of living among the Persian populace rose no less than five hundred percent, to mention only one among dozens of impressive indicators – a great many Middle East specialists persist in seeking the underlying causes of the Khomeinist upheaval in economic woes of one sort or another. Scores of analysts

Middle Eastern monarchies, and because the Iranian military appeared to stand staunchly behind the Shah, the analysts generally felt confident about his prospects (at least by the late 1960s). But then, the army was not where the genuine trouble was brewing, any more than the communist party or the various pro-democracy associations. Nor was nationalist sentiment a source of worry, seeing as the increasingly confident Shah had become more and more defiant of Western powers in the late 1960s and 1970s: one could no longer accuse him of being a lackey of Europe or America. What animated most of the revolutionaries – or at least the most effective revolutionaries – more than any other factor was their Islamic nativism. They were not, contrary to the conventional wisdom, mostly communists, mostly democrats or mostly nationalists, as is often claimed (e. g., by Charles Kurzman in The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran and dozens of other works), but rather mostly Islamists, or at least participants motivated mostly by Islam (British Ambassador Anthony Parsons would recall “a well-informed professor at Aryamehr University [Iran’s MIT] telling me in 1976 that about 65 percent of his students were motivated by Islam and about 20 percent by communism, while the neutral remainder would always side with the Islamist groups if it came to trouble” (cited in Takeyh, Last Shah, p. 200). Indeed, elements within the CIA did realize that the mullahs were fiercely hostile to the Pahlavi regime (see, e. g., examples in Takeyh, Last Shah, pp. 202– 203), but failed to probe the implications of such religious opposition. The analysts’ lack of knowledge about, indeed, thoroughgoing lack of interest in, Iranian-Shiʿite religion and the traditional elites and masses for whom this religion was the guiding star – this, and not the reticence of operatives to make contact with opposition figures in the decade-and-a-half prior to 1979 or the failure to foresee the oil glut of the mid-1970s, etc. – was the fundamental reason for the huge intelligence failure surrounding the Islamic Revolution. After the violent suppression of the 15th of Khordad Uprising in 1963, the U. S. embassy in Tehran informed Washington that “Whatever the ups and downs of the Shah’s future relations with the mullahs, it seems clear that the standard bearers of Shiʿi Islam as it exists in Iran today are fighting a losing battle” (cited in Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 119), a sentiment fully shared by the man most responsible for crushing the uprising, Prime Minister Asadollah Alam. Today, forty some years after the 1979 revolution, analysts at home and abroad are still focused almost solely on Iran’s “practical” ailments, for which they regularly prescribe “practical” cures.

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have indited confident assertions like the following from the pen of astute student of Islamism Nazih Ayubi, basing himself on the assessment of no less astute Iran expert Fred Halliday: The revolution was the outcome of a complex and painful process of rapid and uneven economic development. The main reason why it occurred was that “conflicts generated in capitalist development intersected with resilient institutions and popular attitudes which resisted the transformation process.”¹⁵⁷

Ray Takeyh opens his recent study of The Last Shah with a question – “Why did Iran have a revolution in 1979?” – and an answer: “The immediate causes can be easily summarized: The economic recession of the mid-1970s had halted the Shah’s development projects and created expectations that the state could not meet…” (this is the well-known but fatally flawed “J-curve” theory). Thankfully, Takeyh contradicts his own assertion at the very end of the book: “The economic recession of the mid-1970s is sometimes casually blamed for the revolution, but the Iranian people were frustrated with the Shah’s dictatorship even when the economy was performing well.”¹⁵⁸ The main problem with such claims is that the various processes they saddle with responsibility for engendering discontent and consequent unrest in Iran – including “inflationary pressures,” “rising expectations” and the catch-all urbanization and its manifold consequences – were in no way unique to that country, and were in many if not most cases more moderate versions of their counterparts in other contemporary third world polities where no comparable revolutionary developments ensued. Even the great Abbas Amanat advances an economic-based argument concerning the factors underlying the revolution that envisions a process not only questionable in itself, but – even if genuinely representative of social, economic and political reality – certainly as characteristic of any other developing political entity as of Iran: Since the beginning of the Pahlavi era, the Iranian population had improved in every generation physically, hygienically and medically, from the frail, malnourished and diseased population at the turn of the twentieth century…to a relatively healthy, sanitary and better nourished people in the last quarter of the century. The need for greater quantities and greater

 Nazih Ayubi, Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World [London: Routledge, 1991], p. 148).  Ray Takeyh, The Last Shah: America, Iran and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), p. 1 and p. 261.

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varieties of food, home appliances, electronics and cars thus was bound to become a burden for a government anxious to keep its population economically content.¹⁵⁹

None of this holds water. The citizens of Iran did not bear their chests to the bullets of the largest and most well-accoutered army in the region, overthrow their sovereign and put an end to a millennia-old tradition of Iranian kingship, and install the first theocracy in modern history – all for the lack of a toaster oven or a color television. The Washington Post had it right all the way back in Fall, 1978: “Rarely would contemporary history appear to provide such an example of a people’s ingratitude towards a leader who has brought about an economic miracle of similar proportions.”¹⁶⁰ In truth, many factors played a far greater role in the Iranian Revolution than economic discontent, among them: (a) rejection of the humiliation entailed by Westernization (which latter often went hand-in-hand specifically with economic improvement);¹⁶¹ (b) a quest for cultural authenticity and a disgust for cultural abdication; (c) the “challenge authority” and “people power” ethos of the nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies that was animating youth across the globe and had recently caught up with Iran; (d) the powerful draw of Shiʿite-Islamic motifs and the new and exciting interpretations put upon them by Ali Shariʿati and other “trendy” preachers, which led to a religious revival and radicalization that reached as high as members of the Shah’s own family; (e) anger at violent suppression by the regime and the spiraling cycle of (1) dead protesters followed by (2) fortieth-day commemorations of their deaths that themselves turned into (3) new protests that led to (4) more deaths, and so on (“doing the forty-forty”);

 Amanat, Iran, p. 655.  Cited in Cooper, Fall of Heaven, p. 318.  Certainly, there were other modernizing rulers in other Middle Eastern countries who antagonized their Muslim constituents, both before and after the Iranian revolution. Taking Islam seriously as a motivating and enabling factor means, however, familiarizing ourselves with this confession’s considerable inner diversity. Iranian Islam has been Shiʿite Islam for over five hundred years, and though it has become a bit of a cliché to say so, Shiʿism – on whose DNA is encoded the slogan: “Fight the Powers that Be” and whose clerics are comparatively independent of temporal rulers while enjoying the wall-to-wall obedience of their flocks – is arguably a revolutionary vehicle like no other. Not for nothing did Khomeinism succeed so spectacularly where other Islamist movements had succeeded only partially or failed: its ideology provided both the impetus and the instrument for triumph.

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(f ) a desire for genuine political participation (again, specifically as a result of economic growth, not contraction, as well as of an impressive expansion of the educational system, two ingredients that combined to produce a burgeoning intellectual class hungry for control of its own destiny and fulfillment of its ideological aspirations). All these phenomena, we would argue, played larger roles than issues of rising inflation or falling living standards in the mass citizen rebellion of 1979.¹⁶² A short elaboration on items a) and b) above is in order. Ask most educated laypersons – that is, non-Iranologists – who were paying attention at the time, and they will of a surety explain that, in a nutshell, the Persian populace rose in revolt because the king had spat on his people’s most hallowed traditions, and they had had enough. Mohammad Reza and his coterie of “Westoxified” sophisticates had mocked his nation’s rituals, stripped their women, insulted their clergymen, blasphemed their god, abolished their age-old calendar, gender-desegregated their schools, replaced their sacred paragons with pagan nymphomaniacs, gotten drunk on their solemn holidays, razed their mosques (sometimes building banks and stadiums in their place), and made common cause with heretics, infidels and oppressors of Muslims on the foreign policy front – all in the name of progress. Incurable rationalist-materialists that so many Western thinkers are – and this assuredly includes the majority of Middle East specialists – it is extremely difficult for them to credit the power of the spiritual or theological, and they accordingly search high and low for alternate motivations to explain the behavior of individuals and collectives (an approach that both informs, and is informed by, methodologies like neo-Marxism and realpolitik, as well as not a few Social Science disciplines). Whereas Ayatollah Khomeini and company were sure that they had risen in revolt because Westernization in Iran had gone too far, many authors remain convinced to this day that the revolution occurred because Westernization had not gone far enough. A related argument is advanced by the well-known post-modernist Middle-East scholar Ali Mirsepassi. In Iran’s Quiet Revolution (Cambridge, 2019), he notes correctly that intellectuals close to the Pahlavi court, and the Pahlavi sovereign himself, did not balk at coopting the anti-Westomania discourse of leftists and even Islamists in order to take the wind out of their sails and, at the same time, delegitimize democracy as a foreign implant. Mirsepassi then main Regarding the final factor noted here, Abbas Milani states the problem succinctly: “[Mohammad Reza Shah was] a ruler who promoted social and economic policies that hurled Iran into the modern age, yet was insistent on ruling the country like a nineteenth-century Oriental despot” (The Shah, p. 280).

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tains, based on this paradox, that it was the Pahlavi rejection rather than the Pahlavi adoption of modernity that led to the dynasty’s destruction – a theory as creative and counterintuitive as it is thoroughly unconvincing. Mirsepassi’s deliberately abstruse style and his preference for airy theorizing over the adduction of facts (a malady common to all of his works) makes this book, at any rate, all but unusable. A similar revisionist thesis is advanced in a better researched, more informative and – despite its inescapable nods to academese – eminently more readable volume: Zhand Shakibi’s Pahlavi Iran and the Politics of Occidentalism. ¹⁶³ The burden of Shakibi’s work is to demonstrate that the “axiomatic binary” that informs most studies of the late Pahlavi period should be challenged: [D]uring the last quarter of [Mohammad Reza] Shah’s reign the state initiated discourses of anti-West Occidentalism, which the I[slamic] R[epublic of ] I[ran] subsequently reformulated and expanded. Thus, IRI anti-West Occidentalism did not constitute a complete break with the discursive dynamics of the late Pahlavi state.¹⁶⁴

In the matter of Westernization, Shakibi asks his readership both to treat the waning years of the Pahlavi dynasty differently from the decades that preceded them, and to evaluate the period immediately preceding the Gotterdammerung in nonteleological fashion, or in other words, without the help of the historical rewrites of Khomeinism or the perspective of historical hindsight. He urges us, in short, to refrain from studying the developments in Iran of the 1970s in the context of a prelude to the upheaval of 1978 – 9 (or “in the shadow of the revolution,” as he puts it). This refocusing allows the author to dig up a treasure trove of material that throws into relief a significant intellectual-ideological trend, evident among “Pahlavist” thinkers already in the 1960s but culminating in the discourse and doctrine informing the short-lived Rastakhiz party of the mid-1970s. This new emphasis, or even reversal, was characterized by what Shakibi portrays as (1) an (often sincere)

 Ironically, given the similarity of their arguments and the chronological precedence of Mirsepassi’s work, in Shakibi’s sole reference to Mirsepassi he employ’s this author as a foil, i. e., specifically as a source for the “traditional” narrative – against which Shakibi will argue – according to which Pahlavi Westernization ran rampant and roughshod over the feelings of the Iranian populace, and the Khomeinist backlash was not long in coming (Zhand Shakibi, Pahlavi Iran and the Politics of Occidentalism – The Shah and the Rastakhiz Party [London: I. B. Tauris, 2020], p. 2). The comparison to Romanov Occidentalism and the reactions thereto makes Shakibi’s study even more edifying, and displays an enviable level of virtuosity and erudition.  Shakibi, Pahlavi Iran, p. 2.

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critique of the considerable harm done to Iranian society by runaway Westernization; (2) a “counter-offensive” in the form of a negative judgment and active censure of the ills and excesses of Western civilization itself; (3) a celebration of “authentic” Iranian nationalism rooted in a glorious Persian (and even to some extent Islamic) past that in fact rendered its own significant contribution to Western culture;¹⁶⁵ and finally (4) the adoption by Iranian Islamist revolutionaries of many of these modes of thinking and their deployment in the project of deposing the monarchy and establishing the Khomeinist regime. In a word, this researcher is arguing – like de Tocqueville in his time – that there was no real revolution. Shakibi has done his homework. He details the coalescence and propagation of an outlook often articulated in phraseology that smacks decidedly of, among others, Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariʿati, including the emphatic promotion of “the return to ourselves” (Sharʿiati’s baz gasht beh khish) and the censure of “the mentality of loving all things Western” (Al-e Ahmad’s gharbzadegi). He quotes the King of Kings himself in Towards the Great Civilization to the effect that The adaption of today’s Western civilization as a unified example for other peoples of the world is not acceptable, and any attempt by the West to impose [its culture on other peoples] cannot have a positive consequence.

The second Pahlavi monarch, the author notes, insisted moreover (in Mission for My Country) that “I will never accept that we lose our rich ancient heritage.”¹⁶⁶ Shakibi shows the celebrated periodical Ferdowsi playing host to anti-Western sentiment already the mid-1960s, catering to a burgeoning class of intellectuals who unquestionably imbibed their own anti-Westernism from the counter-culture of Europe and America. He arrays before the reader a panoply of Persian voices, including that of the monarch, raised against the “corruption of morals” exported into Iran by the decadent West. He even presents us with a Religious Revival a la Pahlavism, replete with an “ethical” and “spiritual” Islam shorn of superstitions and clerics.¹⁶⁷ Though all of this represents a highly edifying and important corrective, the notion of Khomeinism as a continuation of, instead of a fierce backlash against,

 The notion that Persian civilization contributed greatly to the rise of Western civilization was already adumbrated in materials produced under Reza Shah, but reached its full fruition under his son.  Shakibi, Pahlavi Iran, pp. 243 and 153.  Here there is admittedly some overlap with the likes of Ali Shariʿati, who preached – as we shall see – an anti-clerical and more profound Islam than the traditional religious experience of his time, but the comparison is superficial.

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Pahlavist ideology simply cannot be accepted. First of all, the Islamic revolutionaries were not impressed but disgusted by Pahlavist appeals to Iranian national-cultural authenticity, as these almost always involved the glorification of the country’s pagan past and the denigration of Arab Islam. Shakibi side-steps this obvious problem with his thesis by adopting an outlook which has become widespread in recent years in the academy in general and among Iranologists in particular, according to which what appear on the surface to be religious movements are in reality and at bottom nationalist movements. Like Ali Ansari and so many others who second guess Khomeinism’s emphatic anti-nationalist discourse, Shakibi cannot really conceive of a religiously motivated revolution, and sees and conceives of this phenomenon in terms of nationalism: Revolution proclaims either a new authenticity of national and cultural identity, as in the case of the French and Russian Revolutions, or the return to some form of national authenticity, as in the case of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Islamic Revolution.¹⁶⁸

This erroneous conflation of the religious with the national is what leads Shakibi to believe that the increasing salience of a Pahlavi nationalist-based anti-Westernism had a major impact on Khomeini-and-company’s religious-based anti-Westernism. Also, we should not let Shakibi get away with the following self-contradiction, occasioned – it is only fair to admit – by his penchant for thoroughness and fairness. He notes that the Pahlavi state, in order to “limit its threat to state legitimacy,” “coopted and reformulated discourses of anti-Occidentalism,” adopting “the main tenets of a strategy expanded by Ayatollah Khomeini.”¹⁶⁹ So who borrowed from whom? Are we to understand that Khomeinism influenced Pahlavism which in turn influenced Khomeinism? Certainly, such mutual pollination is possible, but that is not, for the most part, what happened in the 1960s and 70s in Iran. Second, the disingenuity of a Pahlavist attack on a degeneration of societal morals for which five decades of Pahlavi Westernization was itself directly and almost solely responsible was not lost on the Khomeinists. The regime’s eleventh-hour turn-around, even when it represented sincere apprehension about moral deterioration and not just a public relations campaign, impressed not a single Islamist, all the more so since it was little more than lip-service: virtually nothing substantial was done during this period to curb the increasingly rapid descent into Western libertinism and latitudinarianism that characterized the Iranian upper-classes (and not just the upper classes). The Pahlavis moralized – and went right on partying.  Shakibi, Pahlavi Iran, p. 4.  Shakibi, Pahlavi Iran, p. 8.

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Third, not only every seminary-educated cleric, but even the relatively ignorant and not particularly observant Muslim masses, saw Mohammad Reza’s “ethical Islam” and “spiritual Islam” for the sham that it was, indeed, for the very antithesis and nemesis of traditional religion that it represented. From the days when Reza Shah declared that “Many people erroneously believe that the acquisition of modern civilization is identical with abandoning religious principles and the sharīʿa…”¹⁷⁰ and oversaw the establishment of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Tehran, all the way down to the prayer performed at the opening ceremony of the Rastakhiz party by Hojjatoleslam Gholam Hosayn-e Daneshi, no one in Iran was fooled – not even the propagandists themselves.¹⁷¹ Indeed, few aspects of the Pahlavi program infuriated the ulama and the lay Islamist activists more than this farcical, transparent attempt at cooptation. Finally, Shakibi admits early on in his study that “the extent to which the Pahlavi state was able to shed its popular image as the leading agent of Occidentosis is a separate issue.”¹⁷² But it is not, of course, a separate issue. It is the main, indeed, the only issue in regard to Shakibi’s thesis, and the answer to the question is: to no extent. No one in Iran, whether communist, nationalist, Islamist or even monarchist, was convinced by the too little, too late charade of Mohammad Reza Shah and his cohorts, according to which the Pahlavi royal family had metamorphosed from the locus of Westernization and secularization into the locus of Persian nativism and Islamic authenticity. As for those who would soon become the revolutionary clerics, the Pahlavist trajectories elucidated with such aplomb by Shakibi elicited nothing but disdain. The quickest way to apprise oneself of this fact involves doing what so few scholars in the field feel it necessary to do: read the (pre- and post-revolutionary) oeuvre of those clerics. Islam as the central propelling factor in the resistance movement to the Shah receives, in short, extremely short shrift in this and most other studies: indeed, the scholarly campaign to, as it were, re-frock the Shah, has increasingly gone hand in hand with a scholarly campaign to de-frock Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor, Ayatollah Khameneʾi (as we saw, for instance, in the work of Ervand Abrahamian). The Iranian revolution was not, then, primarily the result of economic factors, or primarily galvanized – as a positive influence – by intellectual trends inside Pahlavism. Moreover, pace the prevailing outlook on the matter, it was not primarily impersonal but rather for the most part personal forces that directly and indirectly brought about this unprecedented nation-wide upheaval, premier among

 Shakibi, Pahlavi Iran, p. 107.  Daneshi was executed by the revolutionaries.  Shakibi, Pahlavi Iran, p. 8.

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them the outlook, faith, dedication, creativity and fury of a cadre of religio-progressive teachers and students.¹⁷³ As Sussan Siavoshi puts it – understating the case – “[t]he peculiarity of Iranian experience cannot be explained solely through an analysis of macro-systemic factors; there were specific individuals whose characters, thoughts and actions deserve our thorough attention.”¹⁷⁴ There are many candidates for the immediate spark that ignited – or at least the decisive turning point that led inevitably to – what would ultimately become the all-engulfing conflagration of 1978 – 9: (1) the resumption of cordial relations between Iran and Iraq – after six years of tension over Khuzestan and the Shatt al-Arab/al-Fars waterway – allowing for intensified communication between Ayatollah Khomeini in Najaf and his Iranian supporters; (2) the exacerbation of the Shah’s terminal blood cancer to a level that began to affect his mental and emotional fitness;

 The question of which groups played the largest roles in the revolution is a knotty one, which we will, to some extent, take up afterward. Certainly, more “secular” forces – nationalists, democrats, communists, Islamic socialists and others – were profoundly involved at various points, often even taking the lead. In his recent annual speech (2021) in commemoration of the Qom uprising – Jan. 7, 1978, in response to a calumnious article about Ayatollah Khomeini planted by government agents in the Ettelaʾat newspaper – Supreme Leader Khameneʾi was still at great pains to depict that uprising, as well as its predecessors in 1963 – 4 and the 1979 revolution as a whole, as carried out primarily by religious forces and for religious reasons. Ultimately, this author will agree with him.  Sussan Siavoshi, Montazeri: The Life and Thought of Iran’s Revolutionary Ayatollah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 3. The current polite academic term for this methodological approach is “prosopography.” Once one accepts – or, rather, re-accepts – the common-sense notion that leader-types and their ideas play a major role in fomenting political and social change, the long-standing argument may be joined regarding the question whether it was primarily “secular” or primarily religious forces that brought about the revolution of 1979. One way, among many, to have this argument is to look at the various candidates for “dress rehearsal”: the 15th of Khordad movement of 1963 was clearly religious, even largely clerical, in character, with only sparse support from the sidelines on the part of the Freedom Movement and a smattering of other secular intellectuals. On the other hand, the oil nationalization movement under Mosaddeq in 1953 was more secular in nature, buoyed up by (among others) the Tudeh communists and receiving only sparse support from religious circles. Going back even further, the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 – 11 was quite mixed, with both religious and “progressive” elements working in tandem or pulling the movement in different directions. One could continue scouring Iranian history for precedents, but in the end, the conclusion cannot be escaped that the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was the product of a complex interplay of both types of activism, secular and religious – and not a few shades in between – but that by the time the Shah left Iran in February 1979 the emphasis was heavily on the Islamic aspect of the enterprise. From that point forward, residual secular elements either assimilated into the general stream of Khomeinism or were forcefully eliminated.

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the accession to power of the Democratic party in the United States – after years of Republican domination – in 1976 and President Carter’s subsequent pressure on behalf of human rights that led the Shah to relax restrictions on opposition activity (a repeat performance of the accession to power of the Democrats after years of Republican domination in 1962 and President Kennedy’s subsequent pressure on behalf of reform which led the Shah to take steps that ultimately ignited the “rehearsal revolution,” i. e., the Fifteenth of Khordad Uprising); (4) the tenth annual Shiraz-Persepolis Arts Festival of August, 1977, held during the holy month of Ramadan, in which avant garde productions – especially the Hungarian Squat Theater’s Pig, Child, Fire! which included graphic sex scenes – caused an uproar among local and national religious circles and induced Ayatollah Khomeini in Najaf to deliver a fiery address which was recorded, copied and distributed throughout Iran; (5) the October, 1977 attack by student Islamists on Tehran University’s non-sexually segregated cafeteria; (6) the “Ten Nights” (dah shab) of subversive poetry reading at the Goethe Institute in Tehran, from October 10 – 19, 1977, attended by thousands; (7) the death of Ayatollah Khomeini’s son Mostafa later that month, attributed by much of the Iranian public to SAVAK poisoning (and compared by many to Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ismāʿīl/Isaac); (8) the publication in a January, 1978 issue of the Ettelaʾat newspaper of an article that scandalously insulted Khomeini, implying among other things that he was an Indian, a British agent and a homosexual; (9) the fire that burned down Cinema Rex in Abadan in August of that year and killed hundreds, evidently set by Islamists but widely blamed on the government; (10) “Black Friday” in Tehran’s Jaleh Square in September of 1978, in which scores of demonstrators were gunned down by government forces, but the numbers were inflated to thousands and the shooters transformed by rumor into no less than Israeli paratroopers; (11) the widening strikes by oil workers during the fall of 1978 that “slit the Shah’s jugular vein”; (12) the transfer of Ayatollah Khomeini from Iraq to France at the behest of the Shah, a tactic which backfired because Paris turned out to be a media axis mundi for the “Imam,” boosting his exposure sevenfold;

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(13) the onset of the Muḥarram mourning period in December, bringing millions out into the streets and inaugurating the nationwide nightly rooftop chant of “Allāhu akbar!”; and many more events and factors in between.¹⁷⁵ As the Fall of 1978 wore on, the demonstrators became increasingly numerous and intrepid. In the central squares of city after city, crowds joined rabble rousers, many of them clerics, in responsive chanting, with the king’s soldiers on all sides, rifles trained upon them and cocked: “Pahlavi is a criminal, Khomeini is our leader!”; “Every moment I shall say it, under torture I shall say it: either death or Khomeini!” “This American Shah must be executed, this mercenary of the West must be exterminated: we want an Islamic Republic!” – and hundreds of other similar slogans. Though some soldiers opened fire, more and more of them laid down their weapons (or allowed demonstrators to place flowers in their gun barrels), embraced and even joined the protesters. The Shah fled in January 1979: his farr or royal charisma, like that of the Shahnameh’s Jamshid, had already departed several months earlier.¹⁷⁶ The euphoria and tremendous sense of achievement among the religious wing of the revolutionaries is reflected in the hyperbolic words of Ayatollah Tavakkol-e Kermani:  Andrew Cooper, for one, adduces a milk shortage, an egg shortage, a power outage, drought (on the one hand), unseasonably heavy rains (on the other), a cholera outbreak, a heatwave, a UFO sighting, an earthquake, increased taxes, the kidnapping and murder of a young boy, “a slew of disaster movies” in the theaters which “emphasiz[ed] failure of leadership, loss of control and public panic,” the fact that according to the Asian zodiac 1978 was the Year of the Horse when people are prone to “let loose” and “ignore the consequences of their actions” and… an attack of locusts (Fall of Heaven, passim).  As the unrest in Iran gathered strength, Israeli intelligence and foreign policy analysts began referring to Mohammad Reza Shah as Shah-ul, the Hebrew name of the Biblical King Saul, who lost the divine favor midway through his reign, largely due to being insufficiently possessed of the “killer instinct” (I Samuel, chapter 15). The Talmud hints that Saul and his line were unfit to rule because they were too virtuous (lo haya bahem dofi). Abbas Milani makes the compelling point that “many of [the Shah’s] weaknesses as a leader were his virtues as a human being” (The Shah, p. 4). There are many excellent specific histories of Pahlavi rule written from a variety of different angles. For the basic political history of the period a short but highly edifying volume is Reza Ghods’ Iran in the Twentieth Century (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1989). Ervand Abrahamian’s Iran between Two Revolutions is the classic social history of the period. The second half of Amanat’s Iran: A Modern History is the most thorough and wide-ranging treatment to date. Ray Takeyh’s The Last Shah provides the most incisive analysis of the interplay between domestic Iranian politics and foreign influence and intervention. Andrew Cooper’s The Fall of Heaven – a stupendous achievement – contains the most detailed, fleshed-out, human chronicle yet published of Mohammad Reza’s reign and the coalescence of political, social, economic, cultural and personal forces that brought about his downfall. Like Milani and others, however, all these authors fail to give religion its due.

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For fourteen hundred years, ever since the time of the Commander of the Faithful (ʿAlī) and his son the Prince of Martyrs (Ḥusayn), we have tried and failed to bring about this revolution. Now, with the blood of our martyrs and the guidance of the Imam (Khomeini), we have finally done it!¹⁷⁷

Thenceforward a new, militant version of Shiʿite Islam was in the driver’s seat. Its purveyors set about, with varying degrees of success, constructing the first genuine theocracy in modern times, indeed, one might say in all of Islamic history since the death of the Prophet Muḥammad (or the five-year term in office of his son-in-law ʿAlī). The theocratic dimension of this polity was offset by a democratic one, to produce an ambitious, unprecedented, counterintuitive, almost impossible hybrid: the “Islamic Republic.”¹⁷⁸ Ayatollah Khomeini, who had returned to his homeland on February 1, 1979, two weeks after the Shah’s departure (and like Mosaddeq, fifteen years after his own exile), presided over this project – marred by much in-fighting and the horrific carnage and destruction of the Iran-Iraq war – dying in 1989 at the age of 87. He “now sleeps forever alongside those – all too numerous – who were killed in their youth for his sake.” He was “the first Iranian head of state since Mozaffarodin Shah (d. 1907) not to die in exile and held in contempt by his people,”¹⁷⁹ as well as the only leader of the country in modern times who was neither created nor manipulated by foreign powers. Khomeini was replaced as Supreme Leader (rahbar) by one of his students and loyal followers, Ali Hosayni-ye Khameneʾi, whose clerical rank was bumped up to Ayatollah upon assuming office, but who has never been able to achieve the status of marjaʿ. ¹⁸⁰ Khameneʾi has steered the ship of the Iranian state, or supervised the

 IRIB Qurʾan, 16/6/2021. Ayatollah Kermani went on to say that “if the Islamic Republic were to fall – which it will not, by the grace of God – then prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, testimony, mourning events, Muslim holidays, even belief in God…they will all fall together with it.” Non-Khomeinist Shiʿi exponents like al-Shaykh Talib al-Salihi in Iraq agree that since the time of the Prophet (and to a lesser extent ʿAlī’s caliphate) Islam has not governed a single political entity, but add: “This is true until the present day” (Marjaʿiyyat 2 Channel, 13/07/2021).  The language of “Republic” was not sufficient, in the eyes of Grand Ayatollah Shariʿatmadari, to offset “Islamic.” He urged the designation “Democratic Islamic Republic.” Though without this “Focus of Emulation” the Fifteenth of Khordad Uprising may not have occurred and indeed, Ayatollah Khomeini may not have made it through those events alive, Shariʿatmadari’s later opposition to velayat-e faqih led to his disgrace. Andrew Cooper marshals a modicum of evidence to support the claim that Shariʿatmadari had even sought Khomeini’s assassination in March of 1978.  Both quotes are from Richard, Shiʿite Islam, p. 12.  It has been argued that Khameneʾi’s attempt to achieve the status of marjaʿ – and in general the post-revolutionary project of combining religious with temporal power – has weakened the Shiʿi institution of marjaʿiyya, or has shifted its center of gravity to the Arab world (see, e. g.,

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steering thereof, for over thirty years now. During his tenure two rival politicalideological camps have coalesced in the country: the eslah-talaban (“Reformers”) and the osul-garayan (“Principlists”), both of which claim to represent the “Line of the Imam [Khomeini]” (katt-e emam).¹⁸¹ At this writing, in 2022, the Principlists have the upper hand, but as we shall see, their ascendancy is in no way secure. The revolution is tired, even exhausted, but nowhere near dead. It regularly revives and even shows signs of renewal in the wake of various (often external) stimuli. If Reza Shah ran the country like the military, the cleritocracy runs it like a seminary, a howzeh writ large.¹⁸² How many citizens are listening raptly and how many

Linda S. Walbridge, “The Counterreformation: Becoming a Marjaʿ in the Modern World,” in Walbridge, The Most Learned, pp. 230 – 246). I personally believe this argument to be overstated. The constitution of the Islamic Republic was duly altered in order to accommodate the new reality of a vali-ye faqih who wasn’t a marjaʿ. Ayatollah Khameneʾi’s status as a mojtahed-e motlaq – one who has mastered all the major fields of fiqh and is authorized to engage in the “derivation” (istinbāṭ) of sharīʿa prescriptions – was confirmed by the likes of ayatollahs Mohammad-e Yazdi, Lankarani, Qommi, Meshkini, Saneʿi and others (this despite the fact that he has never taught the highest level course at the howzeh, the dars-e kharej-e feqh, generally a requirement for such a “promotion”). To get from this level to that of marjaʿ Khameneʾi would at least have to put out a resaleh, and he himself has (sincerely or otherwise) rejected all attempts to “cardinalize” him. These attempts – e. g., on the part of the same Ayatollah Yazdi, recently deceased chairman of the Assembly of Experts (majles-e khobregan) – have provoked serious resistance on the part of other high-ranking clerics – e. g., Ayatollah Azeri-ye Qommi, member of that same body (d. 2010) – who argue straightforwardly that Khameneʾi is bereft of the requisite qualifications. A sort of compromise has been reached according to which Khameneʾi is officially considered (by Islamic Republican authorities) a marjaʿ for non-Iranian Shiʿite communities only.  There is nothing simple about the characterization of these two camps, and the confusion and overlap between them is reflected in their full names: “Eslah-talaban-e osulgara” versus “Osulgarayan-e eslah-talab” (Ehsan Bakhshandeh, Occidentalism in Iran: Representations of the West in Iranian Media [London: I. B. Tauris, 2015], p. 91) – but they nevertheless attack each other mercilessly in the print media. Note that the terms islāḥ and musliḥūn are from the Qurʾan – the favorite source of modern reform movements – whereas uṣūl comes from the literature of fiqh (jurisprudence). So-called “reformists” are often styled tondro-ha, “extremists” (lit. “fast walkers”) and their clerics dubbed foqaha-ye motarraqi (“progressive jurists.” Most of these last are members of the “Society of Militant Clergy” (Majmaʿ-e ruhaniyin-e mobarez) whereas their principlist counterparts generally join the “Militant Clergy Association” (Jameʿe-ye ruhaniyat-e mobarez). Ayatollah Khomeini was not the only modern-day Shiʿite cleric whose followers bestowed upon him the title “Imam”: Musa al-Sadr of Lebanon and Muhammad Hosayn Kashif al-Ghitaʾ are two other famous twentiethcentury examples. In recent years the “committed” print press has begun – hesitantly and intermittently, as if it were a trial balloon – calling Ayatollah Khameneʾi “Emam Khameneʾi.”  One would be hard pressed to find a leader of another polity anywhere in the world – including the Muslim world – who teaches textual-based classes on a regular basis to his fellow countrymen. The Iranian media, for instance, repeatedly broadcasts a three minute-long tafsīr-e kutah (“mini-Qurʾanic exegesis”) segment – renewed every couple of days – in which the Guardian Jurist

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are acutely truant is an open question. The Islamic Republic today is a pariah in the eyes of some, a beacon in the eyes of others. It wrestles with its contradictions and failures at home, and with Sunni, American and Israeli adversaries – and at times with Russian, Chinese, Indian and even Shiʿite allies – abroad. It is, all told, a unique and fascinating, great and terrible experiment.

parses scriptural verses and passages for his television audience. In the midst of steering the ship of state Ayatollah Khameneʾi (or a clerical aide) also finds time – perhaps as part of his never-ending quest for marjaʿ status – to answer hundreds of religio-legal questions (istiftāʾ) such as “Can I steam ritual impurity off of my shirt prior to prayer or must I use liquid water?” (answer: only water), or “Should I perform scriptural bibliomancy (estekhareh) prior to granting consent to my son’s engagement?” (answer: only if you are in doubt – ISNA, 16/12/2020). He also renders religio-legal decisions regarding more weighty issues, such as whether a Muslim who was killed by hostile forces, though not in the midst of battle, should be considered a martyr, thereby exempting his corpse from ritual washing or shrouding (lā yughassalu wa lā yukaffanu – a shahīd’s body is considered pure). Ayatollah Khameneʾi ruled in the affirmative, with specific reference to the remains of assassinated Qods Force commander Qasem-e Solaymani, whose body was torn into five pieces by a U. S. missile. The large amounts of blood on the various appendages precluded their washing, since the blood must be buried together with the body. The Supreme leader’s fatwa – which partially contradicts that of Ayatollah Khomeini regarding residents of cities killed by Iraqi bombardment during the war – neatly solved the problem (though too late) and established an important precedent (KhabarOnline, 29/12/2020). Ayatollah Khamene’i’s dars-e kharej class in Islamic law is broadcast regularly on most channels. To the pedagogy and responsa of the Guardian Jurist should be added the countless hours of religious programming on television and radio primarily starring Iran’s hojjatoleslams (one rank below ayatollah), as well as entertainment – movies, series, game-shows, talk-shows, documentaries, children’s programming, even some Reality TV – that is almost invariably designed to convey the desired religio-political messages. A new daily segment (as of 2021) known as jari-ye ayat – “The Course of the Verses” – has dozens of average citizens approached by reporters on the streets of major cities and asked for their take on particular Qurʾanic passages.

Chapter Five: After Khomeini – Divergent Paths in the Islamic Republic If Ruhollah Khomeini was the Islamic Revolution’s Vladimir Lenin – and that he indeed was in many ways, from his intolerance of compromise and physical absence at the time of the countrywide upheavals, to his increasingly dictatorial disposition and willingness to sacrifice countless lives in the name of the cause once in power – then Ayatollah Hosayn Ali-ye Montazeri was the revolution’s Leon Trotsky (though he did not share the latter’s taste for blood).¹ Montazeri (1922– 2009) was an early student of Khomeini’s at Qom, together with, among others, Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari (who, had he not been assassinated by Iranian communists hard on the heels of the revolution, may have been Khomeini’s first choice as successor instead of Montazeri). Montazeri was central to the protest movement initiated by Khomeini in the nineteen sixties, was jailed several times by the Shah’s regime for his part in fomenting popular unrest in response the exile of his teacher, and spearheaded the consolidation of the Islamic Republic after 1979, especially by forging its constitution, for which purpose he drew upon his voluminous treatment (in Arabic, as befitted an Islamic legal study) of the concept and institution of “the Guardianship of the Jurist” (Dirāsāt fī wilāyati l-faqīh). He was in many ways, both before and after the revolution, the closest person to the “Imam,” who called him “my dear son,” “my pride and joy,” “the towering turret of Islam” and the like. Khomeini chose him as his designated successor not just because of the closeness between the two men, but because no other cleric with similar credentials (Montazeri was on the brink of assuming marjaʿ status in the late 1980s) fully supported the Imam’s ideas. Montazeri was confirmed as heir apparent by the Assembly of Experts (majles-e khobregan) in 1985. Soon, however, relations between master and disciple began to sour under the strain of running a huge and complex country at war with itself, at war with its immediate neighbor and at war with the world. In particular, Montazeri became increasingly perturbed by what he saw as the curtailment of citizens’ rights domestically, the inept prosecution of the war with Iraq, and the violent methods of “exportation of the revolution” on the foreign front (though here, as in other areas, he cannot be exonerated of con-

 Like Trotsky, Montazeri was a major theoretician of the revolution. Like him, he was the leader’s right hand. Like him, he played a central role in the war effort. And of course, the miserable end of the two men – portrayed by the regimes they helped found as enemies of the people – was comparable. For excellent overviews of Montazeri’s thought, especially his evolving outlook on human rights, see now Siavoshi, Montazeri, as well as Ulrich von Schwerin, The Dissident Mullah: Ayatollah Montazeri and the Struggle for Reform in Revolutionary Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-015

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tradiction, since his own people supported the very sanguinary operations of Hezbollah). In general he did not ascribe these wrongheaded policies directly to Khomeini: either out of respect for the Imam, out of prudence, or out of sincere conviction – or out of a combination of these – Montazeri blamed those surrounding the great leader for feeding him disinformation. He began calling, both publicly and in private letters to “the Imam,” for reassessments and rectifications of what he claimed were the revolution’s major failures, and when the regime carried out a mass execution of political prisoners in the summer of 1988 and Montazeri raised a hue and cry – this time assigning responsibility unmistakably to Khomeini himself – the rift between teacher and student began to widen. The correspondence between the senior and junior clergymen on the subject is instructive, and we excerpt below several passages. The prisoners executed in jails across the country in 1988 belonged for the most part to the mujahidin-e khalq (People’s Army), a movement inspired by the writings and speeches of Ali Shariʿati that combined a homegrown version of radical socialism with a no less sui generis brand of Islamic modernism. This “eclectic” (elteqati) ideology was anathema to Khomeini (a fact which should help illuminate the extent to which his own purported eclecticism is exaggerated by many writers). The Father of the Revolution was willing to cooperate with and exploit the mujahidin’s considerable forces in order to topple the Shah. (No less a personage than Ayatollah Beheshti would ascribe the revolution’s success to three factors: “The ideology preached by Dr. Shariʿati, the armed insurrection of the mojahedin, and the timely leadership of Imam Khomeini”).² Soon after victory the Imam began working for the movement’s marginalization, comparing its ideology to that of the Jew ʿAbd Allah b. Sabaʾ, who supposedly introduced “extremist” notions into Islam in the religion’s formative period, and branding its members “hypocrites” (munāfiqūn, a reference to a particularly despised group of insincere converts to Islam during the time of the Prophet Muḥammad. The term also harbors the meaning of “those who sow division”).³ The mujahidin for their part accused the Islamic Republican Party (hezb-e jomhuriy-e Eslami) surrounding the Imam of betraying the revolution’s populist principles and dragging the country back into the dust of petrified tradition, and launched a series of mass protests. When these were put down with much violence, the movement resorted to violence itself and carried out assassinations of major government figures, including the bombing of Islamic Republican Party headquarters in August, 1981 that killed both president and  Masʿud-e Razavi, Motefakkeranʾe Moʿaser va andishe-ye siyasi-ye eslam (Tehran: Nashr va pazhuhesh-e farzan-e ruz, 1378), p. 187.  The comparison to ʿAbd Allah b. Sabaʾ is somewhat cynical, given the extent to which this shadowy figure has historically been exploited by Sunnis to blacken the face of Shiʿism.

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prime minister (and Ayatollah Montazeri’s own son). The regime’s reaction was swift and fierce, and in addition to the hundreds – if not thousands – of mujahidin activists killed by the pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards), a large number were arrested and incarcerated. What was left of the organization went underground and made common cause with Saddam Hussein during his invasion of Iran and throughout the ensuing eight-year long war, relocating (after a period of several years when the leadership took refuge in France) to Iraq in 1986. As the end of this almost incomparably bloody conflict finally drew near – indeed, it would be claimed, after Khomeini had already accepted the U.N. brokered ceasefire – the mujahidin (now styled the National Liberation Army of Iran, N.L.A.I.) crossed the border into their homeland with some seven thousand soldiers under Iraqi air cover and devastated the border town of Eslamabad in an operation designated “Eternal Light” (forough-e javidan). They were eventually rolled back by Iranian forces (in operation “Ambush,” mersad), but Khomeini’s anger and fear – on top of his burning resentment at having had to “drain the poisoned chalice” of cease-fire (nushidan-e jam-e zahr) – were kindled to an exceptional degree. Unable for the time being to get his hands on the treasonous attackers themselves, the revolutionary leader and his cohorts took out their frustrations on those mujahidin that they could lay hands upon.⁴ The Imam issued the following fatwa (decree) or firman (order): In the name of God, the Merciful the Compassionate: In view of the fact that the members of the traitorous “Hypocrite” movement are not and never have been in any manner Muslim believers, and whatever they claim in this regard is no more than trickery and deceit, and according to the admission of their own leadership they have backslid from Islam (az eslam ertedad payda kardeh-and); and taking into account that the members of this group are defined by Islamic law as those who war against religion (mohareb), and that they are engaged in classic battles (? jangha-ye kelasik) against the Islamic Republic in the North, West and South of the country in full cooperation with the Iraqi Baʿth party, and that they spy on our Muslim nation in the service of Saddam; and in view of their relations and collusion with the powers of International Arrogance (estekbar-e baynolmelali, i. e., especially the United States and Britain) and the underhanded blows that they have struck against the Islamic Republic since its inception – given all this, those persons [currently detained] throughout the country who cling stubbornly to their hypocritical ideology are warriors against the faith and are condemned to die…showing mercy to such as war against the faith is simple

 In the words of the Qadi of Khuzestan: “[The leadership] is deeply distressed by the military operation of the Hypocrites, and they are taking it out on the prisoners” (inha az amaliyat-e monafiqin besiyar narahatand va oftadand beh jan-e zendanian) – Montazeri, Khaterat, p. 354. Amanat, however, asserts that Khomeini’s order was issued four days before the initiation of the mojahedin’s operation, which “reaffirmed” its urgency in his eyes (Amanat, Iran, p. 851– 2).

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minded. The decisive manner in which Islam deals with the enemies of God is one of the fundamental principles of the Islamic Republic…⁵

This is the same Khomeini who had striven to contain vigilante justice and drumhead court martials carried out by the komitehs in the months after the revolution, and who had himself warned against the vicarious abuse of (specifically mujahedin) prisoners: We must never allow [our anger at the outrages committed by members of this organization, specifically the mass assassinations of 1981] to cause us to act with excessive violence against prisoners, or to incarcerate and punish the innocent, God forbid. Muslims, according to the laws of Islam, must proceed with composure and deliberation, without losing control, and must conduct themselves properly and with kindness toward prisoners, and [prisoners] must be treated as Islamic law prescribes. Anger and haste (dastpachegi) must never enter into our decisions concerning them, and they must be judged in a spirit of calm and moderation according to the criteria of the law and of Islam. God forbid, for instance, that the martyrdom of our dear ones should lead us to behave more fiercely than we should toward those whom we have behind bars.⁶

Although most of the prisoners subsumed under the above-mentioned all-encompassing decree (in the wake of the attack on Eslamabad) had already been tried years before and sentenced by revolutionary courts to varying periods of jail time, which they were in the midst of serving – and although no small number of them were women and some even teenage girls – nevertheless of the many links in the chain of governmental hierarchy responsible for carrying out this order, only one individual, Khomeini’s own son Haj Ahmad Aqa, dared to question aspects of the firman (and even then in the most hesitant and deferential of tones). Ahmad-e Khomeini’s queries were invalidated and dismissed out of hand by his father in a terse rejoinder: “Regarding all the cases mentioned [in your letter]: every hypocrite at whatever stage of serving his sentence is to be executed. Eradicate the enemies of Islam with all due alacrity.”⁷ But Montazeri, the designated successor (qaʾem maqam) to the office of Guardian Jurist (vali-ye faqih), could not keep silent. He had been told by various informants that there was no real attempt to ascertain whether the mujahidin prisoners “remained loyal to their crooked ideology” or not; and that even on the occasions when such attempts were made, they were insincere, and sounded like this:

 Montazeri, Khaterat, pp. 351– 352.  Sahife-ye Eslam, vol. 15, p. 150. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and years of war and struggle took their toll. The Khomeini of 1988 was not the same man.  Montazeri, Khaterat, p. 352.

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Interrogator: “Are you willing to condemn the mojahedin-e khalq?” Prisoner: “Yes.” Interrogator: “Are you willing to give an interview to that effect?” Prisoner: “Yes.” Interrogator: “Are you willing to go to the Iraqi front?” Prisoner: “Yes.” Interrogator: “Are you willing to jump onto a landmine?” Prisoner: “Are all the soldiers willing to jump onto landmines?” Interrogator: “So you remain loyal to the Hypocrites! Take him away to be executed…”⁸

According to the many provincial legal officials whose complaints in this regard reached Montazeri, the above was the best case scenario: more often than not, the imprisoned former members of the mojahedin-e khalq were simply shot en masse, one after the other, with no questions asked. Incensed, Montazeri first sent a message to Chief Justice Ayatollah Mousavi-Ardebili (now, some thirty years later, a supporter, like Montazeri himself was, of the Green Movement) to the following effect: Did not your judges sentence these people to five or ten years imprisonment? Were you not in charge of the justice system when they did so? And now you call the wardens at the prisons of Kashan or Isfahan or wherever and say, “Execute these!”? Did you bother to go yourself and ask the Imam how persons who have served much time in jail and have no knowledge whatsoever of the crimes perpetrated by their former movement outside the prison walls – on what basis do we execute them? Have they committed a new crime since being sentenced and incarcerated that they deserve execution?⁹

Montazeri was no less upset by the presence of young girls and pregnant women or mothers of children on the long list of those slated for execution. He communicated his concern to Khomeini, drawing on religio-legal precepts that relate to the psychological weakness of the female who is easily roped into such prohibited activity despite herself, and asked the Imam to intervene. This the latter purportedly did, instructing his representatives throughout the country that the girls, at least, were not to be harmed, but later this counter-order was either itself countermanded by the Guardian Jurist or was honored in the breach, for hundreds of young women and mothers were executed anyway (hard upon this incident, the international propaganda apparatus of the mojahedin claimed that Ayatollah Montazeri had urged Khomeini to save the female prisoners for purposes of turning them

 Montazeri, Khaterat, p. 355.  Montazeri, Khaterat, p. 352. These protests by Montazeri are all the more damning considering the fact that the mojahedin were responsible for the death of one of the Ayatollah’s sons.

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into [legally sanctioned] prostitutes (sigheh kardan) for Iranian soldiers, and then afterward having them executed. Montazeri vehemently denied this). Finally Montazeri, after much inner deliberation and after conducting a “query of the Qurʿan” (estekhareh, in which a question is asked and the sacred book opened at random in search of an oracular answer) which returned the verse “They were guided toward good speech and toward the path of the Praised One,” penned a fateful letter to his erstwhile mentor. In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate: To the Blessed Presence of Grand Ayatollah Imam Khomeini, may his exalted shadow persist; after extending greetings and best wishes, regarding His Excellency’s recent decree (dastur) ordering the execution of the Hypocrites currently imprisoned: while the execution of those prisoners of war taken in the most recent encounter (the mojahedin operation Eternal Light and the Iranian counter-operation Ambush) is acceptable to the populace and will not therefore have negative reverberations, the execution of those who have long since been imprisoned is liable to create, under the current conditions, much rancor and a desire for vengeance. How much more so since so many of the families of the prisoners slated for execution by your order are deeply religious and revolutionary families (motedayyen va enqelabi). Moreover, many of these prisoners are no longer loyal to mojahedin ideology, but the officials [charged with distinguishing those who remain loyal from those who have renounced their former allegiance] make short work of the interrogation and send them to the firing squad. Add to this that we are losing the moral high ground internationally that we had gained by being the victim of Saddam’s aggression, and that putting to death those who have already been sentenced to imprisonment without any new legal processes is against every religio-legal principle and precedent known to us. And finally that the officers in charge of implementing your decree are not uniformly principled and reliable, and thus a goodly number of innocent or only half-guilty people are being killed due to your decree. If you insist on maintaining and not rescinding your decree, at least insist as well that the local justice, the local prosecutor and the local intelligence officer reach a unanimous agreement [before executions can proceed] and not just that a majority of the three must vote for the death sentence.¹⁰ And exempt women from your decree, especially pregnant women. In the end, the execution of several thousand people in the space of a few days will not only produce negative reactions domestically and internationally, it will also perforce involve no small degree of error – for this reason many of the pious Qadis are profoundly uncomfortable. It is fitting that the following prophetic tradition (hadith) should be taken into account: “The Apostle of Allah said: ‘Avoid carrying out the Islamic corporal punishments (ḥudūd) on the Muslims to the extent possible, and if the perpetrator has a way out [of receiving punishment – makhraj] then clear the path before him, for it is better for a judge/leader (imam) to

 According to some of Montazeri’s sources, the intelligence officer made the real decisions in each case and the other two were more or less rubber stamps.

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err on the side of pardon than for him to err on the side of punishment.’”¹¹ Peace be upon you, and may God make your shadow persist.¹²

This letter was followed by two others, the second of which contained nothing but a Qurʿanic passage and several hadiths in Arabic all designed to urge Khomeini not to listen to malicious rumors being put about regarding his devoted disciple (i. e., Montazeri himself ) to the effect that he was becoming soft on “the enemy,” but the first letter, above – with its unmistakable moral censure of the Imam’s behavior – must have been the last straw. In late 1988 Ayatollah Khomeini wrote the following letter to Montazeri: In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate: to His Honor Mr. Montazeri (already an impersonal and disrespectful opening – bereft of the usual titles, praises and well-wishing – that boded ill). With a bloodied breast and a broken heart I pen the following few words to you, so that the people will one day know what transpired in this matter… Since it has become clear to me that after I die you will hand over this country and this precious Islamic Revolution that belongs to the Muslim people of Iran to the liberals (libralha), and via them to the Hypocrites, you have forfeited your right and legitimacy to lead this nation. You have shown in your many letters, speeches and the positions you have taken that you believe that the liberals and the Hypocrites should govern this country. A goodly number of the letters and articles you have written have clearly been dictated by Hypocrites, and I have accordingly seen no point in responding to them. For instance, in this recent defense of yours of the rights of the Hypocrites, the exiguous number who as a result of taking up arms against Islam and the Revolution were condemned to death were turned by the Hypocrites – who made excellent use of the words of your mouth and your pen – into thousands upon thousands. And look what a great service you have performed for the powers of Arrogance! And in the matter of Mehdi Hashemi (a controversial revolutionary activist and Shiʿite cleric who blew the whistle on “Irangate” and for this and other acts of “corruption on earth” was executed in 1987 over Montazeri’s strenuous objections), that murderer of yours: you have painted him as more pious than anyone, and despite the fact that it has been proven to you that he is a murderer you continued to spew messages in support of him. There are too many affairs of this sort involving you for me to mention here. From this point forward you are no longer my deputy, and if money is brought to you (i. e. the zakāt and khums taxes that are to be remitted to the Grand Ayatollahs, in this case Khomeini) you need not receive it: tell them to send it to [Khomeini’s older brother] Ayatollah Pasandideh at Qom or to the Jamaran mosque in Tehran – Praise God you are no longer responsible in such matters … I warn you that you write things that are liable to undermine your afterlife (akheratetan ra kharabtar mikonad) even more than it has already been undermined. With a

 Idraʾu l-ḥudūda ʿan al-muslimīna ma staṭaʿtum fa-in kāna lahu makhrajun fa-khallū sabīlahu fainna l-imāma an yukhṭiʾa fi l-ʿafwi khayrun min an yukhṭiʾa fi l-ʿuqūba.  Montazeri, Khaterat, 353 – 4.

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broken heart and a breast melted by misery, and relying on God the Exalted, I offer you – who were the fruit of my life’s work (hasel-e ‘omr-e man budid) – the following advice: 1. Try to change the personnel of your house, so that the remittance due to the imam (sahm-e emam, a part of the khums tax that in Shiʿism is given – since the Occultation of the last Imam – to a leading mojtahed) does not end up in the coffers of the Hypocrites, the people of Mehdi Hashemi and the liberals. 2. Since you are naïve (sadelowh) and easily stirred and disturbed, remove yourself from all political activity – perhaps God will overlook your past shortcomings. 3. Please write me no more letters; and please do not allow the Hypocrites to reveal any more state secrets on foreign radio stations. 4. The letters and speeches of the Hypocrites that through your offices reach the people via the conduit of the mass media strike heavy blows against Islam and the revolution, and are the cause of treason against the unknown soldiers of the Hidden Imam (may my soul be sacrificed for his redemption) and the pure souls of the martyrs of Islam and the revolution. In order that you do not burn forever in the lowest depths of hell (dar qaʿar jahannam), admit publicly your sins and mistakes, perhaps God will help you.

In the remainder of the letter (which was subsequently broadcast on national radio) Khomeini stresses his sincerity and complains of the terrible difficulties of office, and finally asks God to take him “so that I do not have to endure the betrayal of any more close friends.”¹³ Several intermediaries pleaded in tears with Montazeri to write back to the Imam expressing contrition and admitting that all the accusations against him were true. Montazeri adamantly refused, but nevertheless wrote a very humble letter to his estranged teacher in which he explained that he had never wanted the position of Khomeini’s successor in the first place, did not deem himself worthy of it, and therefore happily relinquished it. Khomeini wrote back in a kinder tone this time, praising Montazeri as a jurist and commending him to a future life of teaching and research – but no politics. Soon thereafter the Imam passed away, and – at the hand of his son Ahmad among others – a widespread campaign to besmirch Montazeri’s name was launched, and continued through to the end of his life some twenty years later, much of which time he spent under house arrest. The Supreme Leadership of the Islamic Republic passed after the Imam’s death into the hands of another of Khomeini’s former students and a previous president of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Hosayni-ye Khameneʾi. Khameneʾi was emphatically unqualified for the position in terms of his scholarly accomplishments: he was not a marjaʿ by anyone’s standards, and indeed the constitutional requirement that the vali-ye faqih (Guardian Jurist, Supreme Leader) had to have achieved such lofty status was altered soon thereafter for his sake. Many have  Montazeri, Khaterat, 375 – 6.

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maintained that, lacking not only his predecessor’s religious credentials but anything even remotely approaching his level of charisma and redoubtable personality, Khameneʾi has shored up his position and maintained and increased power and legitimacy primarily through the cultivation of patronage channels, energetic institution building and a well-oiled propaganda machine. Such assessments, which are repeated like a mantra, do not mean much: all of these methods of holding onto and augmenting power require charisma and a strong personality. Indeed, Khameneʾi’s personality is sufficiently strong that he can maintain a large degree of personal independence. In the thirty year-long intra-Iranian battle for the Imam’s legacy, Khameneʾi is – largely by design – the hardest figure to categorize or assign to a particular pole or party. In what follows we shall offer the reader a taste of the overall worldviews of the opposing camps that continue to the present time to battle each other for power in the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is tempting to employ the schism between Khomeini and Montazeri as a model, or at least a launch point, for the polarization of the Iranian religio-political sphere in the second, third and fourth decades of the Islamic Republic. Those who would later be referred to as hardline “conservatives” (mohafezeh karan) or “principlists” (osul-garayan) would thus be identified with what appears from the above exchange to be the comparatively uncompromising, compassionless, belligerent, authoritarian and repressive outlook of Khomeini, while those who came to be styled “reformers” (eslah talaban) would be seen as deriving their positions from the relatively flexible, merciful, peace-oriented and tolerant stances of Montazeri. But this would be a misleading simplification. Green movement leader Mir Hosayn Mousavi, for instance, who spent the last nine years under house arrest for his reformist protest until his release in 2018, was Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic (from 1981– 89) and sided with Ayatollah Khomeini against Ayatollah Montazeri. To this day he sees himself, together with most of the Green Movement and Reformist leadership (especially his fellow candidate in the 2009 elections Ayatollah Mehdi Karroubi), as an ardent Khomeinist, and accuses Ayatollah Khameneʾi, Mahmud Ahmadinejad and the remaining members of the country’s “Principlist” faction of betraying the Imam’s legacy and practicing “American Islam.” When the “pragmatist” president Ayatollah Hashemi-ye Rafsanjani (in office 1989 – 1997) pursued a policy of “opening” to the West, it was the Iranian left – the same people, more or less, who currently lead the “reformists” – who opposed that policy tooth and nail. During the tumult following the second electoral victory of Mahmud Ahmadinejad in 2009, Ayatollah Rafsanjani delivered a sermon, as we saw, on behalf of political participation and the rights of the people, all the time referencing and quoting none other than Ayatollah Khomeini in favor of such liberal positions – and he is far from alone in this. Such seeming contradictions point up the complexity of Iranian political-ideological-religious alignments.

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Indeed, even the correspondence we excerpted above can easily mislead without the proper background: “lay” readers might quickly conclude that Ayatollah Khomeini was a rigid, strict, conservative, religious dogmatist for whom Islam and Islamic law do not bend and in whose eyes loyalty to God takes precedence over the needs of people. In fact, the opposite is in many ways true of the father of the Islamic Revolution. Long before he came to power it was clear that Khomeini identified, and set out to do battle against, two primary enemies of Islam: the West and its lackey the Shah, on the one hand, and what he saw in many ways as the unwitting collaborators with the latter, the stagnant, backward, ultra-conservative, “petrified” traditional Shiʿite clergy, on the other. Throughout his tenure as leader of the republic Khomeini demonstrated time and again his willingness to be “creative” with Islamic law – indeed, at times even to ride roughshod over it – in the name of the needs of the people (as we saw immediately above, those needs included the brutal suppression of “counterrevolutionaries”). He was in many ways a great deal more open-minded and “progressive” than his clerical peers, and far more tolerant – for instance – of Sunnis than the average Shiʿite scholar of his time. Again, not for nothing did the leader of the Green Movement, Mir Hosayn Mousavi, among so many others, constantly hark back to Ayatollah Khomeini to support his calls for democracy, the sovereignty of the people, flexibility and gentleness in matters of religion, and the like. When our compassionate father [i. e., Khomeini] planted this sprout [i. e., the paramilitary basij force], he said: ‘A country that has twenty million young people must have twenty million basijis.’ Now how could such an objective be achieved if the basij was bound to a single style, or a single mode of thought, or a single segment or single class of society? Rather, the Imam’s intent in describing an army of twenty million people was the creation of a vessel, of a color that could assemble unto itself all of, or at last the vast majority of, the different hues that make up our society. [The Basij should represent] the closest analogy to the banners of the Prince of Martyrs (Imam Ḥusayn), upon whom be peace, which are raised every year in our country by all of the strata of the people, including even the [religious] minorities. Thus the message of the Imam is one of tolerance and pluralism.”¹⁴

For Mousavi the Green Movement in its entirety comprises a struggle to place a derailed Islamic Revolution back on the track upon which it was originally set by Ayatollah Khomeini: “Reviving the luminescence of the days of the Imam” (tajdid-e nuraniyyat-e ayam-e emam) is the “principle uniting the many diverse components making up the Green Movement.”¹⁵ Imam Khomeini is, for him, the emblem of good and inclusive government and the great enemy of autocracy:  Mousavi, Communique # 15.  Mousavi, Communique # 6.

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[The destruction of the republican element of the regime as a result of the ratification of the fraudulent election of 2009] will make one group happy beyond all others: those who, from the very inception of the revolution, arrayed themselves against the Imam and conceived of Islamic government as the same old “enlightened despotism” (estebdad-e-salehan).¹⁶

The crackdown that resulted in the injury and deaths of hundreds of protesters in the wake of the 2009 election led Mousavi to mourn: “This is not what our beloved Imam wanted the Basij to be. He did not intend for them to turn into an instrument for purloining the rights of freedom and voting from the people.”¹⁷ Khomeini, according to Mousavi, who spent the entire first decade of the post-revolutionary period by the Imam’s side, was deeply concerned to maintain the freedom and sovereignty of the people at all costs. He feared that after his passing, various trends would encroach upon the Islamic Republic’s hybrid “theo-democracy” and bring back the dictatorship of the Pahlavi monarch in new clothing. He therefore instituted rituals that were designed to rally the people and bring them out in numbers to the streets, thereby demonstrating to any would-be tyrants – and most importantly to the people themselves – the power of the masses, and raising the spectre of a new revolution if the reins of power were pulled too tightly by the center. The Imam erected all the pillars of the Islamic Republic solidly on the foundation of the people’s trust (tamami-ye-sotun ha-ye jomhuri-ye-eslami ra bar payehaʾi az eʿtemad-e-mardom barafrashteh), and in addition to this, he prescribed annual festivals and occasions during which the people would be “present in the arena” (hozur dar sahneh), so that no one could ever succeed in overturning this edifice [of the people as foundation].¹⁸

Mousavi, again together with many of his reformist comrades, views Ayatollah Khomeini as a fount of clerical progressivism, as the forward-looking Uṣūlī mujtahid (as opposed to backward-looking Akhbārī muḥaddith) par excellence. “I have come to repeat our Imam’s dire warning against religious petrifaction (tahajjore-dini),” he emphasized, adding that “nobody displayed more flexibility (qabeliyyat-e enʿetaf ) in matters of religion – and sought to bring religion into the modern world in which we live – to the extent that our beloved Imam did.”¹⁹ As Eskandar Sadeghi-ye Boroujerdi reminds us, however, it is somewhat disingenuous of the “left” to make use of Khomeini’s war on tahajjor – which was at least partially waged in order to “justify the abrogation of the primary ordinances of the

   

Mousavi, Communique Mousavi, Communique Mousavi, Communique Mousavi, Communique

# # # #

13. 2. 11. 5.

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sharīʿa in the name of ʻthe expediency of the system’ (maslahat-e nezam)” – in service of liberal goals.²⁰ In the wake of the upheavals of 2009, Ayatollah Khameneʾi took steps to ensure that this principle could not be “hijacked” by the reformists and placed in the hands of the more democratic/pragmatic bodies comprising the government. In the same context and at the same time, explains Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, the Supreme Leader “put the Expediency Council in its place,” boosting the authority of the Guardian Council at its expense.²¹ The hardline “principlists” (osulgarayan) are no less vigorous in claiming Khomeini’s mantle, and in deploying his statements and their memories of him for the purpose of condemning the “eclectic” worldviews of their opponents, whom they invariably accuse (as the “Imam” himself accused his own opponents) of being in bed with the West, the Zionists and/or the “Hypocrites.”²² Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi, one of the premier opponents of the reform movement in Iran, was in charge of the Institute of the Legacy of Imam Khomeini. He himself was an adamant opponent of democracy and of free speech, and he regularly quoted the founder of the Islamic Republic to the effect that (for instance) “freedom of the press means that the media is free to instruct the public about the moral law of Islam, about what is right and what is objectionable, not that it is free to spread deviationist ideas or to support those who would undermine the Islamic Revolution.”²³ This, of course, is a far cry from – indeed, is the antithesis of – the modern Western notion of freedom of the press (or freedom in general). Equality among citizens is another victim of the fundamentalist outlook of Mesbah-e Yazdi, freedom and equality comprising – despite the rampant apologia to the contrary emanating from religious circles of various persuasions – two notions that are antithetical to traditional religion (and to each other) in almost every way. He writes:

 Eskandar Sadeghi Boroujerdi, Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 172.  Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, Religious Statecraft: The Politics of Islam in Iran (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 260.  Similarly during the Constitutional Revolution both sides relegated to themselves the halo of jihad on behalf of religion, and accused their opponents of “warring against the imam of the age.” Earlier still, religious claims were the primary arguments deployed for and against Abbas Mirza’s nezam-e jadid (and that of others), e. g. that army boots were hard to take off for ablutions (Chehabi, Culture Wars, p. 21, n. 13). Regardless of the sincerity or lack thereof of those advancing such arguments, the fact that they were (and still are today) considered the most potent weapons in the arsenal in terms of influencing both the powers-that-be and public opinion is highly significant.  Mohammad Taqi-ye Mesbah Yazdi, Aftab-e velayat (Tehran: Khomeini Educational Institute, 1384), p. 43.

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An ideal “civil society” (jameʿeye madani) is rooted in Islamic law and Islamic civilization. But there is another definition of civil society that is unacceptable to us. Today in the West, civil society is considered to be the opposite of religious society and is seen as a society in which there is no religion and religion has no role to play in social formations or activities. In such a non-religious society – the type that many here in Iran advocate today – all members of the population have equal access to government employment. This means that if Iranian society becomes a civil society, a Jewish person can become the country’s president, since all people are equal and we do not have first class and second class citizens. Under the guise of civil society, then, the advocates of deviancy and hypocrisy are attempting to grant official status to a distorted, corrupted, anti-divine religion that is linked with Zionism. Under the pretext that all people are equal, they are trying to install into high positions, such as the presidency, individuals who are puppets of the United States and Zionism. This is the diametric antithesis of what the Imam sought in leading the historic revolution that restored the honor of Islam in Iran and throughout the world.²⁴

During the 2009 post-electoral disturbances Hosayn Shariʿatmadari, vociferous, hard line conservative editor of the widely circulated Kayhan newspaper, regularly penned in weekly editorials – as if he were broadcasting a weather report – that “the holy Imam is weeping copiously in his grave over the outlawry and ‘structurebreaking’ (sakhtar shekani) being perpetrated in his name by his erstwhile disciples.”²⁵ And those who militated forcefully for reinforcing the office of velayat-e faqih with the additional modifier motlaq, that is, “the Absolute Guardianship of the Jurist” – and argued with no less vigor that the supreme clerical leader must be appointed (entesab) rather than in any way elected – all of these turned for support to the purported positions of Ayatollah Khomeini, which they now buttressed with proofs from classical precedents and paradigms as well: The Imam taught us that based on the perspective of “appointment” (entesab), during the era of Occultation those jurists who meet the requirements for velayat will be proclaimed as such by their students and peers, and among those thus proclaimed whichever one meets all the requirements can take control of the Islamic government. It is then incumbent upon the people to obey him absolutely (muṭlaqan). Based on this perspective, just as the Prophet and the Imams were called to their missions by the Almighty, the jurists (fuqahāʾ) have also been called upon and appointed to their guardianship by the consensus of the clerics (niyāba ʿāmma) which is tantamount to the voice of the Awaited Imam, which is tantamount to the voice of God. All guardianship is from and through God, and if someone claims to have ascended to this office through means other than divine sanction, such as popular elections, his guardianship is null and void.²⁶

 Kamrava, Intellectual Revolution, p. 117.  E. g. Kayhan, 04/09/2013.  Abd Allah Darabkalaʾi, Negareshi dar falsafeh-ye siyasi-ye eslam (Qom: Gorgani, 1385).

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Both competing camps in the Islamic Republic, then, forcefully claimed, and continue to claim, the mantle of Imam Khomeini (just as each insists that it loyally represents the principles enshrined by the Prophet Muḥammad, ʿAlī, Ḥusayn and the remainder of the Shiʿite Imams and heroes). The struggle between these two interpretations of the thought of the charismatic ayatollah will help decide the direction that Iran takes and mold its strategies in a wide variety of domains: foreign policy, the nuclear issue, relations with the Sunni world, the ratio between release and repression at home, the place of religion in politics, the status of women and minorities, and a host of other questions. It is to the plausible trajectories that the Islamic Republic will follow in several of these areas that we now turn.

Chapter Six: Whither Iran? Successes, Failures, Challenges The Islamic Republic has been with us now for more than four decades. It has survived the persistent predictions of its imminent demise offered up by analysts on an almost weekly basis since the first days of the revolution and down to the present. It has weathered counterrevolution; a full scale invasion and an eight year long war; a pincers movement by the Western powers that deployed well-armed hostile forces on the country’s Eastern and Western borders; internal upheavals such as the nationwide “Green Movement” protests following the second election of Mahmud Ahmadinejad in 2009; a surrounding region undergoing the regime-engulfing turmoil known as “the Arab Spring”; and most recently – indeed, currently – an aggravation and escalation of the traditional Sunni-Shiʿite schism that has seen the rise of fundamentalist forces in the former camp that aspire to the revival of the Sunni caliphate and the concomitant erasure of Shiʿism, especially in its political iteration (that is, the Islamic Republic, first and foremost). The house that the revolutionary religionists built back in 1979 has run a fearsome and lengthy gauntlet and remains standing despite the incessant prophecies of its doom (the propagators of which nevertheless continue unabated to cast doubt upon the durability of the Iranian theocratic entity, with even Oxford’s Michael Axworthy writing in 2014 that “[T]he nezam (regime) may endure under Khamenei, but with change sweeping through other countries of the Middle East, prompted by similar conditions of social, political and economic exclusion that persist in Iran, one has to question how long that will be possible”).¹ The most radical state in the region, consigned by the cognoscenti year after year to imminent oblivion, is fast becoming a fixture, has, indeed, ironically metamorphosed into a comparative “island of stability” in an otherwise tumultuous and unpredictable Middle East (to borrow the phrase once used by American president Jimmy Carter to describe the Shah’s Iran). This reality does not prevent the proffering of a seemingly endless series of pessimistic evaluations concerning the post-revolutionary commonwealth’s shortand long-term viability. Analysts of all stripes, including a great many Iranologists, regularly detail the “dire challenges” facing the Khomeinist regime, including inflation, corruption, unemployment, water shortages, gas shortages, climate change, pollution, overpopulation, underpopulation, the “brain-drain,” infrastructure shortcomings, inter-agency rivalry, “deep-state” interference, prostitution, drug ad-

 Axworthy, Revolutionary Iran, p. 417. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-016

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diction, social media addiction, rising individualism, consumerism, alienation, ethnic tension, labor strikes, militarization of the economy, pension fund deficits, the Corona virus, the generation gap, rising divorce rates, an over-extended healthcare system, low voter turnout, excessive taxation, inordinate urbanization, redundant government powers, privatization, the lack of privatization, widespread financial mismanagement and a lengthy litany of additional “existential crises” that are, in fact, the lot not only of nearly all developing countries the world over, but of the vast majority of post-industrial states as well, and that somehow never seem to swell into the regime-demolishing deluge predicted by the myriad prophets of the Islamic Republic’s imminent demise. Indeed, the Khomeinist state has weathered all of these crises in addition to eight years of devastating conflict with Iraq and her allies and the longest-lasting and most punishing set of economic sanctions levelled at any polity in modern history. Regime opponents at home are themselves not immune to such “wishful” thinking: soon after the Iranian New Year (Nowruz) in March, 2020, well known, “reformist”-leaning pundit Sadeq-e Zibakalam noted that according to government estimates, some three-million citizens of the Islamic Republic ignored authorities’ instructions to remain in their home counties – so as not to contribute to the spread of Covid-19 – and travelled far and wide for the holiday. This phenomenon, argued Zibakalam, demonstrates clearly the profound extent of the people’s mistrust of the regime. Now, leaving aside the fact that the government was itself the source of this data, which Zibakalam somehow finds exceptionally trustworthy; and leaving aside the fact that if mistrust of the regime is what this data so clearly reflects then the “deep state” would presumably have prevented it from being published at all (unless, indeed, the “deep state” is not quite as deep as many would have us believe); and leaving aside the fact that this government estimate, if at all accurate (which it appears to be), points up the thoroughgoing lack of totalitarian-type monitoring and enforcement of quarantine directives characteristic of countries like China, thereby belying the widespread image of the Islamic Republic as a police state in which freedoms are consistently repressed; leaving all these points aside, we should at least remark in connection to Zibakalam’s “thesis” that such disobedience of Covid restrictions was rampant the world over, and was lamented regularly by commentators in the media of Europe, America, Brazil, India, Israel and dozens of other countries no less than in Iran. In a similar vein, indigenous oppositionists to the Islamic Republic were wont to refer to the accidental (or, according to the usual Iranian conspiracy theories, deliberate) shooting down of a Ukrainian airliner by the Revolutionary Guard Corps in January 2019 and the killing of its 176 passengers as “the Chernobyl of Iran,” and to wonder out loud on social media and elsewhere whether, as the meltdown of the Russian reactor presaged the demise of the Soviet Union, the air dis-

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aster augured the end of the Islamic Republic. Perhaps a better analogy would have been Korean Airlines Flight 007, mistakenly shot down by the Soviets in 1983, but then one has to wonder why the unintended shooting down by the U. S. S. Vincennes of Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988, killing all 290 people on board, did not precipitate pondering as to whether this event portended the collapse of the United States. Many are the observers who have pointed out over the years, with glee, with sadness or objectively, that the revolutionary holidays of the Islamic Republic – from Islamic Revolution Day (22 Bahman) to Martyr Ḥusayn Fahmideh Day (8 Aban) to Struggle Against Arrogance Day (13 Aban) – have long since ceased to function for most citizens as occasions for the expression of genuine ideological zeal or sincere empathy for fallen heroes, and have metamorphosed into little more than opportunities for enjoying a colorful parade or participating in an outdoor barbecue. Have any of these commentators visited an American town on the Fourth of July or on Memorial Day?). The Islamic Republic of Iran is not just surviving; in more than a few ways it is thriving. Recently reinvigorated by the likes of President Mahmud-e Ahmadinejad and his successors Hassan-e Rouhani and Ayatollah Raʾisi, Iran is presently carrying the day in many aspects of its self-proclaimed struggle against the legions of “international arrogance” (a code word for the West). Despite immense challenges and regular setbacks, the past two decades have witnessed overall an astounding battery of Iranian successes on the regional and international fronts: in the sphere of geo-politics, the creation of the much feared “Shiʿite Crescent,” arching its way from Tehran through Baghdad and Damascus to Beirut – and now sporting a star in its middle, namely Sanʿa (in Yemen) – all capitals of polities currently controlled, or about to be controlled, by Shiʿite Muslims (counting the Syrian Alawites and the Zaydī Houthis as sub-sects of the Shiʿites, a description that harsh geopolitical realities are rendering more accurate all the time as these minorities within a minority gravitate closer to their mother sect for protection); in the diplomatic and strategic arena, the world-wide retreat (with the significant recent exception of the Trump administration and, of course, Israel) in the face of Iran’s nuclear program, and the acquisition by Tehran of important allies such as China, Russia and even several European and Latin and South American states; on the military end, the undeniable successes in the field against American and Israeli (or Americanand Israeli-backed) forces attained by Iran-trained, financed and equipped guerilla organizations including Hezbollah (2006), Hamas (2007 and again in 2014), the various Iraqi Shiʿite militias and (lately) the Taliban; in the area of economics, Iran’s relative prosperity despite the pressures of heavy U. N. and especially U.S. sanctions compounded by what was, for a while at least, a paralyzing world-wide oil glut; in science and technology, major achievements ranging from the launch into orbit of domestically manufactured satellites – a feat accomplished by only

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eight other countries – to the cloning of a sheep and goat – only five countries have that on their resume – to rapid progress in various branches of industry, as well as in software engineering, internet exploitation, medium-range missile development and, of course, uranium enrichment; and in terms of geo-politics – both international and intra-Islamic – the astoundingly successful propping up by the Iranian regime of their embattled allies, especially Syria, Iraq and Yemen, to the extent that even the (pre-Trump) United States had been brought into their corner and had begun to fight the battles of Nuri al-Maliki and Bashar al-Asad for them against the demonic Sunni fundamentalists – whereas Iran was conceived as representing the comparatively angelic Shiʿi fundamentalist strain (how recently had the diametrically antithetical perception held sway in Washington!). With the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House the U. S. position on Iran albeit underwent a sea change, but America was still fighting Iran’s enemies, premier among them ISIS. The Biden administration, though it will be loathe to forego the leverage afforded by Trump’s successes in this area, will gradually move the pendulum back to the middle, benefiting the Islamic Republic. The Islamic Republic is unquestionably wary of the United States, and all the more so since the advent of Donald Trump, whose extremely hawkish stance on Iran, penchant for bold, dramatic moves (specifically his withdrawal from the nuclear deal struck under Obama and his reimposition of sanctions, this time with teeth), and what is perceived as his overall recklessness and unpredictability had no small number of ayatollahs seriously concerned, if not actually quaking. Trump’s possible return to office is a source of profound concern for the Iranian leadership: the Islamic Republic, as we have argued, is far more stable and predictable than its reputation in the West; Donald Trump, on the other hand, is far less stable and predictable than the Islamic Republic. Still, Iran to date has emerged unbowed and largely unscarred from the cold war with the West, which even under Trump did not hinder – and indeed on several fronts continued to facilitate – its progress toward Middle East dominance. Nor does the re-emergence of Russia – Iran’s traditional historic enemy (even if currently a fair-weather friend) – as a major player on the world and Middle East scene make the successors of Khomeini exceptionally nervous. In both cases this is because, at bottom, the leaders of the Islamic Republic are convinced that both the capitalist and communist camp have lost their ideological raison d’etre, their “propelling force,” and are therefore not to be viewed as entities in the ascendant, while Iran (so they claim) has maintained and renewed its ideological motivational force, with all its cracks and flaws, and is therefore on the rise. The true nemesis of the Iranian-Shiʿite state today is, rather, rising militant Sunni fundamentalism, otherwise known as the Salafi-Jihadi strain of Islam. With Sunnis representing, it will be recalled, some eighty-seven percent of the

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Muslim world population and the Shiʿa about eleven percent, the Sunni revival – in so many ways inspired by the Iranian revolution itself – bodes ill for the future of the Islamic Republic (even though it should be born in mind, again, that within the confines of “the Middle East,” as this geographic unit is variously demarcated, the ratio of Shiʿites to Sunnis is almost one to one). Much will therefore depend on Iran’s ability to rein in and defuse the Sunni-Shiʿi conflict, and here, as well, a knotty paradox stands in the way.

Chapter Seven: Unity or Truth? The Sunni-Shiʿi Schism Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 Iran has striven to fulfill the role of flagship of the Islamic revival and leader of the Muslim world. As with the Soviet Union in its day, there are times when domestic preoccupations distract the Iranian administration from this central objective, and other times when regional or international circumstances dictate a policy of relative isolationism. But the Islamic Republic always returns to the program of “exporting the revolution” (sodur-e enqelab), which represents as much a defensive as an offensive necessity and which is, moreover, the regime’s very raison d’etre. Iran’s ability to win friends and influence people in the Muslim community at large is hampered, however, as we have discussed above, by the country’s allegiance to the minority Shiʿite branch of Islam. Somewhat ironically, the impetus provided by the Khomeinist revolution toward an intensification and politicization of Islamic religiosity also brought about an increase in sectarian conflict: the more serious and activist (and knowledgeable) Muslims became about their faith, the more they viewed other Muslims who adhered to alternate versions of that faith as heretics, and the more they were motivated to do something about it. In this sense, the Shiʿite-inspired Islamic awakening has backfired against the Shiʿites. Or, put another way, at the same time that it has empowered Shiʿite populations throughout the Middle East, the Islamic Republic has also galvanized their Wahhabi-Salafi and even more traditional Sunni enemies, amplifying the antagonism between the two camps sevenfold. This state of affairs represents a major challenge that needs to be met by the Iranian regime if it is to achieve its two fundamental goals: first, self-preservation, and ultimately, regional domination. Indeed, the increase in rancour between Sunnis and Shiʿis may well play into the hands of Tehran: frightened Shiʿites look more and more to the Islamic Republic as their patron and protector, a phenomenon the Iranians can exploit at the same time as they seize the opportunity to pose as the preeminent force for Muslim unity and thereby gain the sympathy and support of frightened moderate Sunnis, as well. The age-old Sunni-Shiʿi conflict was exacerbated by Iran’s Islamic Revolution. “There can be no question,” writes Rainer Brunner, “of the confessional quarrel having moved into the background, or a resolution for it having been found, after 1979; the opposite was the case.”¹ This intermittent religious struggle reached

 Rainer Brunner, Islamic Ecumenism in the 20th Century: The Azhar and Shiism between Rapprochement and Restraint (trans. J. Greenman; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004), p. 376. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-017

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a fever pitch during the Iraqi civil war (in the wake of America’s post-9/11 invasion), and has escalated to arguably unprecedented heights since the “Arab Spring” of 2011 loosened the authority structures and nationalist ideologies that had heretofore held the mutually hostile Muslim sects in check. What approaches have been, are being, and will be adopted by the Islamic Republic in order to contain this extremely destructive intra-Islamic civil war? In what ways is Tehran taking advantage of the deterioration in Sunni-Shiʿi relations and making this state of affairs serve their short- and long-term policy goals? How do the high-ranking mojtaheds, in and out of official government, view the contemporary manifestations of this eternal contest? While the modern movement for ecumenical rapprochement (taqrib, taqarob) between Sunnis and Shiʿa dates back to the mid-twentieth century and even earlier, Khomeinism transformed it – rendered it, among other things, more political than ever – and in recent decades the Iranians have embarked on a heavily funded and wide-reaching (essentially unilateral) campaign designed to promote the ideal of ensejam-e-Eslami, “Islamic harmony.” Involving speaking tours, international conferences, leadership summits, media advertisements, articles in the Persian and Arabic (and Urdu, and Indonesian, and…) press, books by religious scholars, billboards, music, specialized websites and much more, Iran’s Islamic Harmony campaign delivers the message far and wide that Sunnism and Shiʿism are virtually identical, twin siblings born of the same spiritual-historical womb. What differences do exist between these two factions of Islam are downplayed as minuscule and technical, whereas the legal, theological and cultural points of agreement (same God, same scripture, same Prophet, same prayer service, same hatred for Israel, etc.) are said to be legion and are enthusiastically emphasized. The attempt on the part of Iranian-Shiʿite clerics and Islamist ideologues to minimize those factors that distinguish Shiʿites from Sunnis and accentuate the theological and socio-cultural ties that bind these two sects of Islam began long before the current unity campaign, and indeed, decades prior to the Islamic revolution itself. In the late 1940s Navvab-e Safavi, founder of the underground terrorist network Fadaʾiyan-e Eslam that would eventually assassinate Iranian Prime Minister Razmara (d. 1951), travelled to Damascus to be keynote speaker at an event hosted by the local chapter of the Ikhwān al-Muslimīn or Muslim Brotherhood. Mustafa al-Sibaʿi, the leader of the Brotherhood in Syria, had invited Savafi to “come and fulfill for our quarreling Muslim factions the role played by the Prophet in the town of Medina,” that is, the role of arbitrator and unifier. The speech was attended by a vast crowd composed of both Sunnis and Shiʿites (and Alawites), to whom Safavi held forth in almost flawless Arabic: I stand here and gaze out on a sea of Muslims, far too many of whom have forgotten the precious words of Almighty God which He spoke through His Holy Prophet: “This, your nation of

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believers, is one nation” (inna hādhihi ummatukum, ummatun wāḥida). While the armies of the infidel surround the city and prepare to storm the gates, you are busily engaged in squabbling with one another over the most trivial of historical and legal issues. Did ʿUmar b. alKhaṭṭāb dishonor ʿAlī’s daughter, or did he not? Did the Messenger of God, God’s peace and blessings be upon him, leave an inheritance of land for his daughter Fāṭima, or did he not? Did Abū Bakr lead the Friday prayers during the Prophet’s final illness, or did he not? Have you all gone mad?! They are coming to kill you, to rape your wives, enslave your children, steal your belongings and conquer your country! Will you not wake from your thousand year nightmare of sectarian conflict and useless quibbling? Enough of this! Though I arrived here last night directly from the trenches of jihād against the imperialist tyrant (i.e., the Shah) and headed straight for the mosque to perform the maghrib and ʿishāʾ prayers, was I welcomed in a proper fashion by the people of this place? Or did their first words to me consist of scornful criticism because I filled my ablution bowl in the manner prescribed by the Jaʿfarī (i.e., Shiʿi) school? And you, my Shiʿi brethren, do you honor the mighty conquerors in the name of Islam, the two shaykhs Abū Bakr and ʿUmar, or do you deride them as I heard some of you do on the way to the mosque this morning? I take refuge in God from such sacrilegious vulgarity! Only unbelievers talk in this manner! I tell you now: he who would be a true follower of the Jaʿfarī school today must fulfill one obligation before all others: join the Muslim Brotherhood!²

Safavi in this extract epitomizes the radical nature of the emerging Iranian-Shiʿite Islamist movement: the sentiments he expresses in this and in dozens of other speeches and essays in no way jibe with the traditional historical Shiʿite outlook on the Sunni majority, and evince more than a modicum of that almost antinomian flexibility that would come to characterize the worldview of Ayatollah Khomeini several decades later (Khomeini himself would soon permit his muqallidūn or “imitators” to pray behind a Sunni prayer leader). Safavi was far from alone in this approach to Sunnism, nor was he the first Iranian thinker to argue that the two major Muslim sects had emerged min sirājin wāḥid, “from a single lamp,” and that they must put away their petty disputes in the name of religious brotherhood. Already in the 1930s, Grand Ayatollah Tabatabaʾi-ye Qomi proclaimed that while Sunnis and Shiʿis differed regarding a number of furūʿ or specific legal prescriptions, they were in complete agreement about the uṣūl or fundamental principles of the Islamic faith, such as belief in Allah and his Apostle, acceptance of the Qurʿan as the inimitable book of God, reverence for and pilgrimage to the Kaʿba in Mecca, admiration for ʿAlī son of Abū Ṭālib and his holy offspring Ḥusayn, and the like.³ Ayatollah Abu l-Qasem-e Kashani, a contemporary of Safavi’s, stressed the theme in sermon after sermon that “the central principle of Islam is tawḥīd, which denotes not just monotheism in the divine realm or mon-

 Isam Marʿi, al-Sunna wa l-shiʿa (Beirut: Dār al-kutub, 1994), p. 123.  Montazeri, Khaterat, 56.

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ism on the metaphysical-ontological level, but no less importantly, unity among the nation of believers and harmony between Muslims of the various strands of the faith.”⁴ Long-time Islamist intellectual and first Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic Mehdi-ye Bazargan focused on the question of Sunni-Shiʿi relations in the inaugural address he delivered after his interim government was installed: The glorious revolution for which our brave multitudes have shed their pure and fragrant blood is not a Shiʿite revolution, but an Islamic revolution. Let no one here stand up and tell me that we have worked so hard and sacrificed so much solely in order to gain the upper hand over our Sunni brethren or to take revenge for their persecution of our ancestors. For those who carried out such persecution – the corrupt and irreligious caliphs of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, and the so-called Sultans whose “legitimacy” was backed up only by the sword – were not by any stretch of the imagination faithful Muslims. Indeed, we may divide the Islamic community over history into three sects: the Sunni sect, the Jaʿfarī (i. e., Shiʿi) sect, and the taghuti (tyrannical) or motafarʿaneh (Pharaonic) sect, the latter comprising all those oppressors of the various “houses” who not only violated the laws of God in the most flagrant fashion themselves and neglected to enforce them on others throughout their jurisdictions, but slaughtered both Sunni and Shiʿi alike with reckless abandon and without limits. Thus has the blood of our two schools of Islam – both of them acceptable to God and beloved of his Prophet – flowed together down the centuries at the hands of hypocrites posing as Muslim rulers, and merged into a single life-giving fluid which will animate the awakening lion of resurgent Islam and allow it to triumph over the Western-funded dictators and slave-drivers of today. The entire Muslim world is now one enormous, resurrected, unified body! (tamam-e-jahan-e-Eslam inak yek tan-e-kalan-e-rastakhiz shodeh-ye-vahed ast).⁵

Sunnis and Shiʿis, asserts Bazargan, have suffered together under the whip of the false, secular, megalomaniacal rulers who have held sway over the Muslim world almost since its inception, and the devout members of the two sects are now united in their desire to throw off the yoke of these oriental despots and forge a common future for the Islamic world. Whatever minor differences they may have had in the past have been washed away by the common experience of suffering under the taskmasters of medieval and modern absolute rulers (and Western imperialists). Such statements, striving to dismiss any bases for the Sunni-Shiʿi schism, proliferated greatly in the years after the revolution, and by now represent an integral component of the official rhetorical repertoire of the Islamic Republic. Ayatollah Khomeini himself put the matter succinctly: “The distinctions between Sunnis and Shiʿis amount to less than the sneeze of a goat.”⁶ In 1982 Ayatollah Montazeri presided over the first celebration of hafte-ye vahdat or “Unity Week, an event  Mashrutiyat, 104.  Mahmud-e Taleqani, “Nokhostin ruzha-ye-pas az enqelab chetor budand?” Hamshahri, 06/8/1998.  “Tafavot-e-sonni-ha va shiʿayan kamtar az ʿatse-ye boz miarzad,” Ruhollah Khomeini, Sahife-yeNur, vol. 13, p. 54.

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dedicated to the emphasis of the points of consensus between Islam’s two major sects and organized to coincide with the birthday of the Prophet Muḥammad (mawlid al-nabī), the point of consensus par excellence. Especially but not exclusively during that week, Iranian television broadcasts artistically produced documentaries that have matured into a veritable genre of their own known as “Unity Tales” (qesseha-ye vahdat). They comb the Muslim world for common denominators between Sunnis and Shiʿites: sacred personages adulated by both sects, causes for which Sunnis and Shiʿa work shoulder-to-shoulder, Sunnis (and Christians) who participate in Ashura ceremonies, similar methods of study in Cairene and Najafi madrasas, a Sunni village in Afghanistan where most of the males are named Ḥusayn or ʿAlī and most of the females Zaynab or Fāṭima, etc.⁷ In 2001 Supreme Leader Khameneʾi established “The International Committee for the Reconciliation between the Schools of Islam” (majmaʿ-e jahani-ye taqrib-e madhaheb-e Eslami), as well as a university of the same name, the declared goal of both of which is to “educate Muslim believers about each other so that they may independently reach the veracious conclusion that the Islamic nation is one.”⁸ Islamic harmony means that we must not awaken inter-sectarian bigotries (ʿasabiyyat-ha-ye bayn ol-madhahebi). You must not do anything that could provoke the animus of the non-Shiʿite Muslim against you, and he, for his part, must not do anything to excite your zealotry (ghayrat) against him. This is what [the Western imperialists and Zionists] want! Our illustrious Imam [Khomeini], who issued a clarion call for Muslim unity, was possessed of a greater faith in, loyalty to, and love of the imams, upon whom be peace, than any of those who claim [that we should not engage the Sunnis in dialogue]. Who understood velayat (i.e., walāya, attachment to the imams – Z. M.) better – he, or some ignorant fellow (folan adam-e ammi) who, in the name of velayat does that which should not be done or says that which should not be said among his own or in front of all? Preserve [trans-Islamic] unity! If you encounter among those that surround you people who behave otherwise, banish them from your midst. Make clear to them publicly your opposition to their actions. They cause damage. They deliver a blow to Islam, a blow to Shiʿism, a blow to the worldwide Muslim community… …Today Islamic unity benefits the Islamic regime, benefits the Islamic Republic. Arraying oneself against that position benefits America, benefits the Zionists, benefits those bullying rednecks (garden koloft-ha) of the Muslim world whose pockets are stuffed full of oil dollars, and whose hearts do not want a phenomenon like the Islamic Republic, like the people of Iran, to exist at all. I pray to God that He will guide us!⁹

 Today (2022) these are shown primarily on IRIB Mostanad.  http://www.mazaheb.ac.ir/page/20, Statement of Purpose. Last accessed 10/10/2022.  Khameneʾi, Jehad-e farhangi, pp. 49 – 50.

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Why, despite all of this advocacy and all of these efforts, is Islamic unity still beyond reach? Why, according to the purveyors of this message, are Shiʿites and Sunnis still – indeed, more than ever – at each other’s throats today in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, the Gulf States, Iran and elsewhere? The Iranian answer to this question is emphatic and unanimous, running like a thread through almost every speech, essay, interview, poem, sermon, broadside, text-book and satellite round-table: it is because of the Jews (or the Israelis). The Jews, writes Iranian journalist Dawud Khodadadian, are the world’s experts at internal dissension and civil strife: witness the immediate division of their biblical polity into two states ever warring with one another (after the death of Solomon), as well as the Qurʿanic stipulation that “their hearts are forever divided” (Q. 59: 14). The Jews/Israelis have instructed the British and Americans in the fine art of fomenting division, says Khodadadian, and these Western powers have put their newly acquired skill to work pitting Sunni against Shiʿi and Shiʿi against Sunni throughout the Middle East and beyond.¹⁰ Thus, the widening rift in Islam is – like almost all other evils – ultimately the doing of the Zionist conspiracy. Indeed, the Israelis are even hard at work, it would appear, undermining intra-Shiʿite solidarity and even religiosity. A front-page article carried in September of 2019 primarily by the “reformist” media (affording yet another proof that contrary to popular assumptions, the eslah talaban are often more “radical” or hardline in matters of foreign policy than the osulgara or “principlists”) accused the Mossad of training “Zionist Ḥusayn-praisers” (maddahan-e Sahyonisti), that is, of teaching Israeli Jews Persian at a high level, instructing them in all the special skills and nuances required by this most Shiʿite of professions, and then sending them clandestinely to Iran where they regularly trick frenzied crowds of Muslim worshippers into cursing their imams instead of blessing them, or else go overboard in their condemnation of Abū Bakr, ʿUmar and ʿĀʾisha in order to sow dissension between Islam’s two major sects.¹¹ (The Jews are not the only culprits: Hamid Dabashi accuses Seyyid Hossein Nasr’s son, Vali Nasr, of “seeking to teach his employers [i. e., the U. S. military – Z. M.] how to divide the Muslims along their sectarian lines in order to rule them better (it’s an old colonial practice).”¹² But if Israel and the Jews are the problem in the Iranian view (or, at least, according to official Iranian propaganda), they also comprise a significant part of the solution. This is so because in order to blur the borders between Sunnis and Shiʿites – thereby protecting the latter and perhaps even paving the way for them to

 Dawud-e Khodadadian, “Soʾal-e-hayavi-ye-ʿasr-e-no,” Resalat, 26/03/2008.  E. g., Arman-e Melli,09/01/2019, p. 1: “Dastgiri-ye maddahan-e esraʾili dar Iran.”  Dabashi, Shiʿism, p. 280.

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take the helm someday despite their minority status – a common focal point is required toward which all the world’s Muslims can collectively channel their aspirations, a central hub around which they can, as it were, circumambulate. Mecca is not suited to this purpose: it is the present day capital of Wahhabi-Salafi Sunnism, the inveterate enemy of the Shiʿites. Karbala, the preeminent Shiʿite shrine, is also naturally unfit for this function. There is only one location, one destination that enjoys unanimous, trans-sectarian Muslim reverence, and that is al-Quds, Jerusalem: Imam Khomeini, the great revivalist of the current century and of modern history, strongly believed that the most worrisome problem faced by Muslims in our time was the lack of unity between them. Consistently calling upon all Muslims, of every color, language and school, to unify under the banner of Islam, he also forged the ultimate instrument for achieving that noble end. Muslim unity requires an axis around which to revolve, the greatness of which is worthy of the greatness of the Nation of Muḥammad. Jerusalem, the first direction of prayer and third holiest shrine, would perform this role admirably. Henceforward, therefore, it was to be known as “Jerusalem: The Axis of Unity” (Qods, mehvar-e-vahdat).¹³

Jihad to conquer Jerusalem – a conquest which is tantamount to the annihilation of the State of Israel – will unite the Muslims, so it is hoped, under the leadership of Iran, or at least serve to divert Sunni energies away from confronting the still fledgling Shiʿite Republic. The unprecedented and exponentially increasing fanfare surrounding Khomeini’s novel Islamic holiday of Ruz-e-Qods or “Jerusalem Day” – celebrated on the last Friday of Ramadan, the holiest moment on the Muslim calendar – is expressly and emphatically geared toward achieving these goals. Participation in the parades and other events marking Jerusalem day is “a prescribed religious ritual (ʿebadat) of the concluding week of Ramadan,” declares Ayatollah Makarem-e Shirazi, dedicated to “strengthening the ring that connects the Muslims of the world” (halqe-ye ettesal-e moslemin-e jahan) and “demonstrating to the enemy that Sunnis and Shiʿis are united on the fundamentals.”¹⁴ But anti-Israel sabre-rattling cannot by itself heal the breaches between Sunnis and Shiʿites, and the Iranians know this. They therefore supplement this neg-

 ʿAli Asghar Mohammadi, “Qods, mehvar-e-vahdat,” Hamshahri, 11/01/2007.  https://makarem.ir/news/fa/News/Details/420986/%D8%A8%DB%8C%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%A7% D8%AA-%D8%AD%D8%B6%D8%B1%D8%AA-%D8%A2%DB%8C%D8%AA-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9% 84%D9%87-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%B8%D9%85%DB%8C-%D9%85%DA%A9%D8%A7%D8% B1%D9%85-%D8%B4%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%B2%DB%8C-%D9%85%D8%AF%D9%91-% D8%B8%D9%84%D9%91%D9%87-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%A7%D9%84%DB%8C-%D8%AF% D8%B1-%D9%85%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D9%87%D9%85%DB%8C%D8%AA-%D8%B1% D8%A7%D9%87%D9%BE%DB%8C%D9%85%D8%A7%DB%8C%DB%8C-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B2%D9%82%D8%AF%D8%B3. Last accessed 08/03/2022.

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ative campaign with the positive unity campaign of which we spoke above. This crusade for universal Muslim brotherhood is designed to serve a dual purpose: (1) to reduce sectarian tensions, from which the minority Shiʿa in general and the Iranian state in particular stand to lose the most; and (2) to encourage Muslim states, NGOs and individuals to line up behind the leadership of the Islamic Republic. In this way regional unity becomes a stepping stone toward regional hegemony, and the much feared “Shiʿite arc” or “Shiʿite crescent” (comprising Iran, Iraq, Alawite Syria, a Hezbollah dominated Lebanon and now a Houthi-Zaydī Yemen) threatens to expand itself – in Council of Guardian Chairman Ayatollah Jannati’s recent extension of the metaphor – into a “round, 14th of the month, shining Shiʿite moon.”¹⁵ The tensions inherent in the unity campaign – inter alia between defensive and offensive objectives – represent a microcosm of the contradictions coloring the Iranian perception of, and strategy vis-à-vis, the Sunni-Shiʿi conflict in general. In the following pages we shall attempt to sketch in broad strokes a number of these contradictions, and examine the manner in which they play themselves out in the fields of opinion and action.

Who is the Enemy? The first contradiction or paradox we shall entertain concerns the Iranian conception of the nature of the battle being waged by the Islamic Republic. Against whom are they – or should they be – fighting? Who or what, in Iranian eyes, represents the genuine adversary of the Khomeinist theocracy, the devil pulling the strings and fanning the flames of war for the ultimate purpose of erasing the revolutionary regime from the face of the earth? At first glance, the answer to this question is obvious and straightforward, and has been supplied over and over again during the last several years (and indeed, throughout the revolutionary period) by everyone from the highest ranking government representatives in Tehran to the humblest neighborhood preachers in the mahallat (and no small number of dependent and independent bloggers on the Internet as well): the arch adversaries of Iran – and the true culprits responsible for creating and exacerbating the Sunni-Shiʿi rift – are the shaytan-e-bozorg and the shaytan-e-kuchak, the “Great Satan” and the “Little Satan,” the United States and Israel. These two foes of all that is good and right (and sometimes

 “Dabir-e-shuraye-negahban va-emam-e-jomʿeh-ye-movaqqat-e-Tehran: ‘Gharb as cheh milarzad?’”, Resalat, 16/08/2008: “mah-e-gerdi-ye-derakhshan-e-shab-e-chahardah.”

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Great Britain together with them) are accused of pursuing vis-à-vis the Muslim world a dogged policy of tafraqeh biandaz va hokumat kon – the Persian equivalent of divida et impera, divide and rule. In an interview with al-Jazeera in January 2008, President Ahmadinejad called President Bush’s speech, delivered a day earlier in the United Arab Emirates, “nothing but [an attempt to] sow sedition and strife between followers of Muḥammad’s religion,” and declared his confidence that the Muslim rulers of the Gulf principalities, “our true and lasting friends,” will never be taken in by the “well known American and Zionist ruse whose vile and relentlessly pursued goal is (and here Ahmadinejad shifted into Arabic) shaqqu ʿaṣa l-muslimīn, the shattering of Muslim unity.”¹⁶ The Supreme Leader and Guardian Jurist Ayatollah Khameneʾi rarely misses an opportunity to hammer home the same idea: International Arrogance (estekbar-e-baynolmelali – a codeword for America, as we have seen – Z. M.), by means of propaganda, psychological warfare and insidious forays into every field of endeavor, is attempting to produce cracks in the Iranian national edifice and introduce disharmony into the ranks of Iran’s citizens. They exploit sectarian differences, class distinctions, ethnic grievances and the like in order to undermine the community of spirit in Iran. Moreover, in the context of the Islamic world at large, a vast and profound effort on the part of the same obstinate enemy is in evidence, toward the end of driving a wedge between Iran and a diverse array of its Muslim neighbor states and populations. They seek with all their might to amplify dissension between the different Muslim religious schools (ekhtelaf-e-mazhabi ra bozorg konand); to bring into being, in every locale in which it is possible to do so, a Sunni-Shiʿi war; and to trod underfoot the greatness and glory of the people of Iran, which is, praise God, daily on the increase in the eyes of the Muslims and freedom loving peoples of the world. To administer a humiliating slap in the face to these purveyors of intraIranian and intra-Islamic discord, I hereby declare this year (1386 h.q. – Z. M.)¹⁷ “The Year of National Unity and Islamic Harmony” (sal-e-ettehad-e-melli va ensejam-e-eslami).¹⁸

Guardian Council Chairman Ahmad Jannati echoed the Supreme Leader’s words in a more concise fashion: “The rise of dissension between Sunnis and Shiʿites on the international and Iranian domestic planes is solely the work of American and Zionist agents. By means of prevarication and libel, they incite our Sunni brothers against us, and they pit Muslim against Muslim in a diabolical attempt to eradicate

 “Raʾis-e-jomhur dar goftegu ba al-Jazireh,” Khabargozari-ye-Daneshjuyan-e-Iran (ISNA), 01/19/ 2008.  H.q. = hejri-ye-qamari or hegirah-lunar; 1386 corresponds to 2007– 8.  “Payam-e-nowruzi-ye-rahbar-e-mo‘azzam-e-enqelab-e-Eslami beh monasebat-e-holul-e-sal-e1386,” Hamshahri, 21/03/2007.

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Islam entirely.”¹⁹ Majles speaker Gholam Ali Haddad-ʿAdel called the West in general, and the United States in particular, “the inveterate enemy of Iran and of Islam” that “incessantly pours oil on the fire of sectarian strife” and afterwards “sits back and enjoys the spectacle of Muslims murdering Muslims in their hundreds and thousands.”²⁰ Hashemi Shahroudi, former head of the Iranian Judicial System, described the founding ideology of the State of Israel in terms that go beyond the usual invective of Islamic fundamentalism or Shiʿite radicalism and approach the cosmically dichotomic outlook of ancient Zoroastrian dualism: Zionism has sunk its tentacles deep into the soil of the vast majority of the earth’s countries, and has enslaved all of the world’s peoples (hame-ye mellatha-ye jahan-ra beh bardegi keshidand). Even the states of the Muslim world are under the spell of the racist, anti-human ideology purveyed by Zionism, which is why they cooperate – some wittingly, others unwittingly – with the Hebrew polity’s conspiracy to sow enmity between the followers of Muḥammad’s religion, and brainwash Sunnis into castigating and calumniating their Shiʿi brethren.²¹

Ayatollah Emami-ye Kashani warns Muslim states and individuals to be ever wary in the face of Western conspiracies to split Islam apart and then crush it;²² Iranian parliamentarian Emad-e Afrugh avers that “Jewish rabbis” are behind Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s recent volte face away from his previous moderation in the matter of Shiʿism;²³ commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ navy Alireza Tangsiri repeats in 2022 the well-worn assertion that the Saudis are descended from the Jews of Medina and Khaybar who were the Prophet Muḥammad’s nemesis;²⁴ and Supreme Leader Khameneʾi, in a reversal of the scenario most commonly proffered in this connection (including by himself on other occasions) according to which World Zionism manipulates America/Britain into fomenting disunity in the Muslim ranks, recently explained to an audience of college students that Israel was created by the Western powers for the sole and express purpose of preventing Muslim states from making common cause.²⁵

 “Khatib-e-Jom’eh-ye-Tehran: ‘Bahs-e-tahdid-e-nazami-ye-Vashington dar Amrika tarafdar nadarad,” Ettelaʾat, 12.7.08.  “Doshman va-towteʾe-ye tafraqeh-zani,” Mehr, 25/11/07.  “Ruz-e-jahani-ye-Qods az didgahe-Emam Khomayni,” IRNA, 07/03/2008.  “Mosalmanan bayad towteʾeha-ra khub shenasaʾi konand,” Jam-e-Jam, 17/06/2008.  IRIBTV1, 24/11/2008.  https://www.jns.org/top-iranian-general-the-saud-clan-are-actually-the-jews-who-fought-mu hammad/?utm_source=The+Daily+Syndicate&utm_campaign=a6446b54b5-Daily+Syndicate+1-9-22+% 28new%29_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8583953730-a6446b54b5-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ ID%5D&ct=t%28Daily+Syndicate+1-9-22+%28new%29_COPY_01%29. Last accessed 05/12/2011.  “Tarikh-e-Felestin va nahve-ye eshghal-e-an,” Khotbeha-ye Namaz-e-Jomʿeh-ye-Iran, 10/07/2008.

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Hundreds if not thousands of such statements emanate from the mouths of officials and intellectuals in the Islamic Republic, this being perhaps the most central and widespread motif in post-revolutionary Iranian discourse (indeed, it is in many ways a continuation of a highly prevalent pre-revolutionary conception, which attributed all major events occurring in Iran to the clandestine intervention of foreigner powers, especially the British and Russians, and later the Americans). The underlying theme of all of these asseverations is the demonization of Israel, America and the West – all of which are depicted as the implacable enemies of Islam and Iran – as well as (most importantly for our purposes) the assignment to them of the blame for all instances of Sunni-Shiʿi friction. But does this represent the genuine Iranian perception of the matter? Herein lies the paradox. For the simple fact that is easily forgotten amidst this cacophony of anti-Zionist and anti-Imperialist vociferation, is that the true and lasting enemies of the Shiʿa are neither the Israelis nor the Americans nor the Christians nor the secular West, but rather the Sunnis. ²⁶ Shiʿism is, after all, the anti-Sunnism (mā khālafa l-ʿāmma fa-fīhi l-rashād – “Correctness consists in that which is contrary to the Sunni worldview”).²⁷ It is first and foremost a party of opposition, the premier mission statement and raison d’etre of which is eternal resistance to the straying and oppressive Sunni Muslim mainstream. Shiʿism came into this world, and remains in this world, not merely in order to protest, but in order to seek the thoroughgoing eradication of the Sunni system and all that it stands for (just as the historical consolidation of the ahl al-sunna wa l-jamāʿa or Sunnis during the early centuries of Islam was, at least in part, a negative reaction to the principles and provocations of proto-Shiʿism). A Shiʿite who genuinely (that is, not as a function of taqiyya or “prudent dissimulation”) accepts and approves the tenets of Sunnism – in the context, for instance, of some ecumenical effort or other – is quite simply and by definition no longer a Shiʿite. Ayatollah Javad Fazel-e Lankarani, responding to lapsed Shiʿi co-religionists who are “repelled by all this cursing [of sacred Sunni paragons] and ask, ʻHow does such rude, negative behavior bring me closer to God?’”, explains that Those who speak thus are abysmally ignorant of the most fundamental reality of [the Shiʿite] religion: that there is no tavalla (closeness to God) without tabarra (dissociation from evil). These two essential principles are as two wings of a bird, each of which requires the other, each of which acquires meaning only through the other. Those who reject the ritual of cursing the [first three “righteous”] Caliphs and the Companions [of the Prophet] do not understand

 Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq: “It is better to have one’s child nursed by a Jewish or Christian woman than to entrust it to a nurse who is of the nāṣibiyya” (Goldziher, Introduction, p. 217, n. 146).  Goldziher, Introduction, n. 147.

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that which a holistic grasp of the message of the Noble Qurʿan would have made clear to them: that those who are beyond the reach of guidance (anan keh hich omidi beh hedayateshan nist) and who constitute a barrier between believers and their faith or between submitters and their Submission – such villains must be removed from the mercy of the Exalted Truth. Now our Lord on the most basic level has always removed such individuals and groups from His mercy and placed them under His eternal execration. The cursing of these by pious [Shiʿite] Muslims effects no ontological change whatsoever: it simply confirms the immutable divine wont (sonnat-e la yataghayyar-e elahi) and in this way, as well, brings the believer closer to his Lord.²⁸

When, in the throes of one of his many Islamic unity crusades, Ayatollah Rafsanjani adduced a Qurʿanic verse as a prooftext for the prohibition against abominating Sunni sacred personages – “Imprecate not that which they worship aside from God, lest they in response imprecate God Himself in their ignorance” (Q. 8: 108) – Iranian clerics junior and senior lost no time in issuing sharp refutations of this exegesis, some of them even bordering on the cynical: [The verse in question] explicitly grounds the interdiction against excoriating the false gods of the pagans in the fear that these latter might be tempted to blaspheme the one true God in response. But Sunni Muslims cannot react to our vilification of “Porcupine” (qunfudh, a disrespectful nickname for the first caliph Abū Bakr) by vilifying in their turn ʿAlī or Ḥusayn, upon both of whom be peace, since they rightly harbor nothing but profound veneration for these holy figures.²⁹

All present day Iranian unity rhetoric to the contrary, there is no escaping this rigid, definitional reality. While Sunnism and Shiʿism are indeed two branches growing out of the same tree trunk, the same may be said, for instance, of Judaism and Christianity, the enmity between which simmered for centuries (and which has softened in our times, in truth, largely due to irreligion): the representatives of Judaism had Jesus killed; the representatives of (what was to become) Sunnism

 Ayatollah Javad Fazel-e Lankarani, “Piramun-e Laʿn…” Official Website, 15 Farvardin, 1394. See also Goldziher, Introduction, p. 181: “The cursing of enemies is a Shiʿi religious law; to fail to practice it is a religious lapse.”  Hojjatoleslam va l-Muslimin Esmaʿil-e Ferdowsi-Pur, IRIB Qurʾan, 21 Mordad, 1383. This explication put the present author in mind of a phenomenon that occasionally takes place when the Palestinian-Muslim soccer team from the town of Sakhnin plays the Israeli-Jewish soccer team from the city of Jerusalem. Some of the less genteel among the Jewish fans will, when tempers flare, launch into a series of execrations of the Prophet Muḥammad, secure in the knowledge that the other side cannot requite in kind by, say, cursing Moses or David.

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had Ḥusayn killed.³⁰ As we have seen more than once in earlier chapters, from the Shiʿite perspective a Muslim who does not believe in the Twelver imams is not a Muslim at all: The criterion for membership in, or alternately egress from, the Islamic nation is the acceptance or rejection of walāya: whoever swears the oath of loyalty (bayʿa) to the imam and thereby demonstrates his fealty to God and His edicts, is considered a member of the religious community; whoever does not swear this oath of loyalty, or breaks that oath, has left the Islamic nation.³¹

Many of the most important rituals of the Shiʿite religion are directed specifically against venerated Sunni heroes and sacred Sunni institutions; none of Shiʿism’s classic rituals are directed against Jews or Christians, let alone (of course) modern secular states like Israel and America. Iranian Shiʿism’s conflict with the West is quite new, and is as much a matter of expediency as of principle. The same may be said, with mild adjustments, of the Islamic Republic’s conflict with the State of Israel. Despite all appearances (and with a modicum of exceptions, especially during the storm of the revolution itself ), neither of these conflicts was or is informed by genuine, heartfelt emotion on the part of the Iranian masses or even their religious and lay leaders. By contrast, the conflict with Sunnism is 1400 years old and has been accumulating precedent and venom throughout much of that time; derives from weighty tradition and hoary theological notions more than it does from momentary tactical considerations; and evokes gushing rivers of sincere, vehement and often violent feeling. Historically, even historiographically, neither Jews nor Christians can be said to have hurt or humiliated the Shiʿites, whether collectively or individually; whereas the Sunnis not only persecuted the Shiʿites as a group throughout history – during many periods with exceptional ferocity – but all Shiʿites are reared on the specific stories of Shiʿi saints and Shiʿi semi-divinities who were oppressed, hounded, disgraced and even murdered by the Sunni religio-political establishment, from the initial injustices borne by ʿAlī – into whose wounds the most stinging salt was thereafter poured when ʿUmar reputedly dishonored and then forcibly married his daughter – to the suffering of his wife Fāṭima, who according to various Shiʿite records endured beatings from the same ʿUmar that caused her to miscarry and died in a state of abject pen-

 Conscious and unconscious comparisons between Jesus and Ḥusayn are rife, and extend to (even present day) descriptions of Fāṭima as “the mother of her Father” – ummu abīhā in Arabic, madar-e-pedaresh in Persian, as we have pointed out above.  Mesbah-e Yazdi, Porsesh-ha va pasokh-ha, p. 160.

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ury after this second caliph had denied her father Muḥammad’s inheritance.³² When Grand Ayatollah Safi-ye Golpayegani wants to refer to (what is adulated by Sunnis as) the khilāfatu l-rāshidīn or the Righteous Caliphate, he employs the term nezam-e-ghaseb, “the regime of the usurpers”;³³ when Supreme Leader Khameneʾi begins a speech of almost any kind anywhere, he opens with “Peace be upon Abu ʿAbd Allah (the Imam Ḥusayn) and the curse of God be upon his enemies (in the present tense, which means, basically, Saudi Arabia); when an Iranian Shiʿite child receives a pair of shoes, he will often scrawl Abū Bakr’s name on the sole of one, ʿUmar’s name on the sole of the other, and then go walk in manure in order to “break in” his new footwear. Even under the last Shah, hatred and suspicion of Sunnis was par for the course in Iran: because Ayatollah Mahmud-e Taleqani – a renowned and beloved theoretician of the revolution – used to attend the annual meetings of the Organization of the Islamic Conference during the nineteen-sixties and seventies, his colleagues used to call him a Wahhabi. “In those days anyone who advocated Islamic unity was stigmatized as a Sunni or Wahhabi.”³⁴ All Shiʿite children know the story of Ḥujr b. ʿAdī who was hurled off of a roof by agents of the Sunni caliph for refusing to repudiate ʿAlī in public; of the infant ʿAli l-Aṣghar suffering the searing agony of thirst as the Umayyad forces mercilessly denied his family access to the Euphrates; and of the poisoning of every one of the holy twelve Imams at the hands of the Sunni authorities or their collaborators.³⁵ Of these things do Iranian-Shiʿites weep, and weep copiously (and often sincerely). When the late Ayatollah Rafsanjani railed against the United States or Israel for public consumption, one could see that he was paying lip-service and going through the motions; but when he spoke of Wahhabis – whether modern or medieval (the latter referring to the ahl al-hadith, who formed the backbone of early Sunnism) – he waxed fierce and his barely bearded cheeks became flush with fury. When the same religio-political leader described the final days of the eighth imam ʿAli l-Riḍā, who was purportedly assassinated by a treacherous Abbasid caliph, the tears streamed down both from his own eyes and from the eyes of many  The miscarried fetus is named Muhsin/Mohsen by many Shiʿi sources. According to the Shiʿa, Fāṭima died at the age of eighteen. Most Sunni texts have her live on to the age of twenty-nine.  Safi Golpayegani, “Piramun-e-estemrar-e-nezam-e-emamat,” IRNA, 28/02/06: “Abu Zarr va Salman va Miqdad va in guneh shakhsiyatha, dar hal-e-tasallot-e-nezam-e-ghaseb farmanbar-enezam-e-emamat budand.”  Dar an ruzha har kas keh be vahdat-e-eslami moʿtaqed bud beh u ang-e-sonni ya vahhabi zadand. Shaʿban ʿAli Lameʿi, Hekayathaʾi az zendegi-ye Ayatollah Taleqani (Tehran: Pezhman Press, 1376), p. 198.  Even Muḥammad, who by all accounts died peacefully in his bed, is regularly described by Shiʿite exponents as having been “martyred.” This could, however, refer to the poisoned mutton served him by a vengeance-seeking Jewish woman of Khaybar four years before his demise.

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of his five thousand-strong audience of mosque-goers (and no doubt many of his millions of viewers). When Ayatollah Shubayri-ye Zanjani occasionally speaks for wider public consumption, he half-heartedly casts the de rigueur aspersions on the Western enemies of Islam; when he speaks to his students at the howzeh, he holds forth in misery and fury about Sunnis in general, and Saudis in particular: When [the Shiʿi students of Saheb-e Riyaz] arrived at Karbala and rushed to the Sacred Enclosure, they saw that the Wahhabis – may the curse of Allah be upon them and their vile present-day representatives until the end of time! – had set fire to the holy sepulcher [of the Imam Ḥusayn] and – despite their own sect’s ban on this beverage – were busy using the flames to make coffee!³⁶

The greatest villains in Shiʿite lore are Sunnis or proto-Sunnis, not Jews or Christians. “True Islam,” urged Ayatollah Sadeq al-Shirazi recently, “must be distinguished from the false Islam of the Umayyads, Marwānids and Abbasids and that of their hundreds of millions of misguided followers.”³⁷ In our times it is the Sunnis, not the Jews or Christians, who (so it is often claimed) purposefully deck themselves out in newly purchased finery and celebrate with abandon on Ashura, the most doleful day on the Shiʿite calendar. It is the Sunnis (i. e., the Saudis), not the Jews or Christians, who deliberately maintain in a state of utter desolation what was once the ancient Baqīʿ cemetery outside of Medina, where four of the twelve imams – Ḥasan, ʿAlī Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn, Muḥammad al-Bāqir and Jaʿfar alṢādiq – are buried. Iranian television broadcasts images of the mounds of sand that were once their graves prior to Wahhabi pulverization – and of Shiʿite pilgrims standing behind a fence and weeping pathetically at the sight – nearly every day on nearly every official channel.³⁸ Going on the offensive, so to speak, Iranian Shi’ite exponents have over the last decade increasingly emphasized the value of the pilgrimage to Karbala’ at the expense of that to Mecca, citing (genuine or invented) imamic traditions to the effect that “Each step on the way to visit the

 Shubayri-ye Zanjani, Hamle-ye vahhabi-ha beh karbala va majara-ye bardasht-e torbat tavasot-e sahebe riyaz, 12/9/1399. The Saudi-Wahhabi raid on Karbala took place in 1801, reportedly on the holiday of Ghadīr Khumm. Some five thousand Shiʿa were killed. Seyyed ʿAli Tabatabaʾi-ye Haʾeri, known for his composition Riyaz al-Masaʾil, was a student of Vahed-e Behbehani at Najaf. ʿAbd al-Samad-e Hamadani, another disciple of Behebehani and author of Baḥr al-maʿārif, was also murdered.  Marjaʿiyyat Channel, 4/25/22.  The fact that the Wahhabis, who since the inception of their particular brand of Islam in the eighteenth century have been strenuously opposed to what they see as polytheistic tomb-worship, also destroyed the sepulchers of Abū Bakr, ʿUmar and ʿUthmān is rarely mentioned by Iranian television. Ayatollah Khomeini’s last will and testament opens with a castigation of the Saudi royal house.

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grave of Husayn is worth an entire hajj and ’umra.” To say that Sunnis in today’s Iran are under-represented in the various organs of state authority would be a great understatement. There are eighteen synagogues in Tehran, but not a single Sunni mosque. So fierce and deeply rooted is the antagonism between the two Islamic sects that even carefully orchestrated attempts at constructive dialogue fall apart. Take, for example, the live satellite “summit” hosted in late 2007 by the al-Jazeera television network between Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaraḍawi (before this preeminent Sunni scholar regretted and altered his “moderate” stance toward Shiʿism) and chairman of the Iranian Expediency Council Ayatollah Rafsanjani. Billed in the weeks leading up to the event as an historic opportunity to bring about peace and brotherhood between Sunnis and Shiʿites, the program itself was anything but that. From the first moments, al-Qaraḍawi let loose with a series of traditional accusations about Shiʿite excesses in deifying ʿAlī and the imams, and when Rafsanjani protested that this was not the case al-Qaraḍawi responded by citing the Shiʿite principle of taqiyya (prudent dissimulation) and asking why he should believe his interlocutor’s denials – in other words, he called Ayatollah Rafsanjani a liar to his face on international television. Then al-Qaraḍawi began laying into the Shiʿites for their continuing practice of insulting the Companions of the Prophet and demanded an explanation for such behavior, to which Rafsanjani responded that he refused to discuss that subject because doing so would play into the hands of the Americans and the Zionists. At the end of the program al-Qaraḍawi, apparently at the urging of the station’s worried producers, tried to improve the highly negative atmosphere that had been created and at least end on a positive note, by declaring with much pomp that “if the Islamic Republic of Iran is attacked by any force whatsoever, we Sunni Arabs will support her just as we supported Hezbollah last summer!” There was a long and embarrassing silence, after which Rafsanjani in Tehran leaned forward into his microphone and answered in Arabic with a bitter smile, shukran (“Thanks!” – because the Arab states did not lift a finger on behalf of Hezbollah in the 2006 war with Israel). After several decades at the forefront of the Sunni-Shiʿi reconciliation effort, Qaradawi officially threw in the towel in 2014, citing what amounted to “irreconcilable differences” between the two sects and accusing Iran of exploiting the détente process for purposes of Shiʿification. Here we must stress again, as we did earlier: the exponential Islamization of the Muslim world over the past four decades³⁹ has brought with it a rapid rise in

 Not its “re-Islamization,” because such levels of observance and affiliation as are being ach-

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sectarian strife, both because the more religiously aware and pedantic Muslims become the more they tend to excoriate those who deviate from what they consider “the straight path,” and because as Islamdom’s common enemies retreat before its rising might, it is freer than before to engage in internal squabbles. This means that the differences and disputes that pit Shiʿites and Sunnis against one another have far greater resonance today than they did in the medieval or modern period to date. As fundamentalism grows – and it has arguably not yet reached its apogee – and as it racks up more and more victories in the regional and international arena, the Sunni-Shiʿi rift will widen still further. Thus, Iranian Islamists may be suspected of protesting too much: for all their politically correct talk about the necessity for Muslim unity against the satanic West, and for all their far-fetched claims to the effect that the Sunni-Shiʿi schism is a Zionist or American concoction, underneath they know and feel differently: it is vengeance for one thousand four hundred years of humiliation by Sunnis that they seek, and it is the age-old enmity of the Sunni world – most of which, they well realize, is undergoing a rapid process of Wahhabization – that they fear. This argument must be qualified: it would not be correct to say that when push came to shove, the Iranians would ally with the West or with Israel against the Sunni Arabs. For the dynamic here is complex. Human beings tend to seethe most vehemently against their closest adversaries: ultra-orthodox Jewry and modern orthodox Jewry (to take an example from the writer’s immediate milieu) detest each other with far more vehemence than either of them detests secular society. Yet whenever the latter presses for anti-religious legislation, the two mutually antagonistic branches of orthodoxy close ranks. Most activist or fundamentalist Sunnis and Shiʿis harbor greater genuine hostility for one another than either does for non-Muslims – even Jews or Israelis – but when the Muslim world as a whole perceives itself as under attack from outside forces, the same hostility is put on the back burner (which is one of the reasons why Iran excels all others at warning of Western conspiracies to undermine Islam). Today’s Iran is at one and the same time an embattled polity, and a polity with trans-national ambitions. Its foreign policy is driven by a counterintuitive combination of existential fear and extreme confidence. Together these opposing motivations have led the Islamic Republic into cooperation and even alliances with Sunni forces, including the Taliban in Afghanistan, occasionally al-Qaeda, and especially the Palestinian Hamas (an organization rooted in the emphatically Sunni Muslim Brotherhood) and the even more radical Islamic Jihad. Preservation and extension

ieved of late have apparently never even been approached in the Muslim past, at least among the masses.

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of its power in the region, the attempt to trap Israel with a gradual pincer movement (with Hezbollah to its North and Hamas to its South), the ever-present aspiration to export the revolution and the lingering Khomeinist ideology of pan-Islamism, all underly the “pragmatic” support of the regime of the ayatollahs for proxies that represent rivals on the purely religious plane. Still, the severe upswing in inter-sectarian hostilities since the Arab Spring of 2011 has sobered Iranian decision makers on this score, and helped bring about a new strategy: the creation and cultivation of Shiʿite “hothouses,” that is, budding Shiʿite activist communities deliberately inserted amongst Sunni majorities. These fledgling organizations, recruited for the most part from local populations and currently engaged in little more than preaching and protest, represent both a short-term tactic and a longterm investment. At present they function as a threat to the Sunni groups currently working with the Islamic Republic: should these revert to a sectarian position and betray their Iranian benefactors, the latter are apt to throw their considerable support behind their more reliable co-religionists. For the future, they symbolize the never-dying hope for a genuine process of Shiʿitization, that is, of actual conversion to Shiʿism in large numbers. The most developed of these hothouses is the Sabirin association of the West Bank and Gaza strip, which helps keep Hamas in line.⁴⁰

A Revolution for what? The second contradiction or paradox that we shall entertain concerns the motivations and aspirations – and consequently the characterization – of the revolution in 1979: was it an Islamic revolution or a Shiʿite revolution? Khomeini famously and definitively answered this question by coming down hard in favor of the former option, and such seeming ecumenism was a central aspect of the radicalism of the great leader and his many hangers on. Under the new regime efforts were made in many circles, official and unofficial, to tone down and rein in antiSunni sentiment, and especially during the early years after the Shah’s fall, when hopes ran high of exporting the revolution to the entire Middle East and beyond, much was made in the government sponsored media and in the sermons in the mosques of the pan-Islamic nature of the mighty movement set on its course by Khomeini. Like the great anti-imperialist and Muslim modernist Jamal al-Din alAfghani (al-Asadobadi), who disguised his Shiʿism the better to influence the Muslim world at large, the Islamic Republic (as the first part of its name itself adum-

 Roni Shulman, al-Sabirin: A New Iranian Outpost in Judea and Samaria (Hebrew: unpublished Masters Thesis, Bar-Ilan University).

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brates) played down its specifically Shiʿite coloring and laid heavy stress on the religious elements common to both Muslim sects. A paragon example of this tendency is the renewed emphasis on the figure of the Prophet Muḥammad – whose persona had been dimmed to various degrees during medieval and modern Shiʿite history, taking a backstage to ʿAlī, Fāṭima, Ḥusayn and others – a reversal which reached its culmination with the declaration by the Supreme Leader of 2006 – 7 as “The Year of the Apostle of Allah” (i. e., Muḥammad) in Iran. On the negative side, Ayatollah Khameneʾi, together with other high ranking Iranian clerics, have sounded off regularly against any activities that might fan the flames of “inter-sectarian partisan fanaticism” (ʿasabiyat-e-bayn ol-mazahebi). You must not do anything (Ayatollah Khameneʾi warned Iranian Shiʿite preachers on the eve of Ashura) that will arouse the indignation of non-Shiʿi Muslims – this is exactly what “they” (i. e. the Americans/Zionists) want! (anha hamin-ra mikhahand)…Why do you make it easy [for the enemies of Islam to create division within its ranks]? They go to our Sunni brethren and say: “These people are Shiʿites; they vilify the Companions of the Prophet (anha sahabeh-ra sab mikonand); they blaspheme and spit upon that which is sacred to you; and they deify their imams…” [Preachers who provide the conniving West and hostile Sunnis with such ammunition through their fanatical sermons] have no place among the ranks of the madahhan (the “praisers”).⁴¹ As far as the defense of Palestine goes, for instance, no country comes up to the ankles of the Islamic Republic. The entire world knows this. From the Leadership to the Presidency to government officials to the people at large, from demonstrations to material and military assistance – we have given all this and more to help our oppressed Muslim brethren in occupied Palestine. In the midst of all this, a “virus” breaks out, and starts making the rounds of intellectuals, respected citizens, even clerics: “Sir!” they hold forth. “Who are you helping!? The people of Gaza are nāṣibīs!” I seek refuge in God! A nāṣibī is an enemy of the Prophet’s family (ahl al-bayt)! The Mosque of the Commander of the Faithful, ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, is in Gaza! The Mosque of Ḥusayn, Prince of Martyrs, is in Gaza! How can you call them nāṣibīs!? Sunnis, yes – but nāṣibīs!? I seek refuge in God! The curse of God be on the vile satans [who make this claim]!⁴²

In the name of Muslim unity (or Shiʿite security/hegemony), Ayatollah Khameneʾi in this latter passage is even willing to contradict the tenth Shiʿite imam, ʿAli l-Hādī, who defined a nāṣibī as “anyone who believes that Abū Bakr and ʿUmar should have been given precedence over ʿAlī [in the succession to Muḥammad], or that

 “Palayesh-e-mahafel-e-mazhabi az khat-e-tafraqeh,” Jomhuri-ye-Eslami, 18/06/2007.  Speech to Kurdistan madraseh students and teachers, IRIB4, 23/02/1988.

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these two had any right at all to leadership [of the Muslim community].”⁴³ The Muslim Brothers of Hamas in Gaza certainly fall into that category. So does the rest of the Sunni world. Such has been the sensitivity to Sunni feelings in Iran during the decades since the revolution that (for instance) when the newspaper Siyasat-e-Ruz mistakenly styled the second Sunni Caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb an Umayyad (probably having confused him with his later namesake, ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz) – and even after the editors had issued a profound apology in writing for this oversight – this periodical was closed down by the government forthwith.⁴⁴ For the same reason, in the upper echelons of the Iranian religious establishment it is no longer entirely out of the question that the figure of Muḥammad’s wife, ʿĀʾisha – Shiʿism’s number one villainess – will be evoked in the context of a legal proof-text or as a model for a given aspect of female behavior.⁴⁵ Allama Tabatabaʾi, even before the revolution, was able to speak in positive terms of the Companions of the Prophet and of the “selfless efforts of the Muhājirūn and the Anṣār.”⁴⁶ The Kaʿba began after the revolution to upstage Shiʿite shrines in official propaganda posters, and Sunni hadith collections found their way into college (though not high school) curriculums and onto the shelves of mosque libraries. An irate Iranian-Shiʿite layman described what he saw as the “systematic de-apotheosis of ʿAlī in this country over the past decade.”⁴⁷ All these ecumenical efforts – which one writer describes as “the Sunnization of Iranian Islam”⁴⁸ – combine to produce the image of a regime and a society bending over backwards to avert schism, promote Islamic unity and pave the way for the acceptance and participation of Iran in the affairs of the wider Muslim community. But at the same time that these “cosmopolitan” Iranian waves wash the sand of the Islamic seashore, a fierce undercurrent is pulling back in the opposite direction, towing the Islamic Republic even deeper into religious isolation than it has been to date. For the aforementioned slogan of “an Islamic, not a Shiʿite, revolution” notwithstanding, the overthrow of the monarchy in 1979 and its eventual

 Biḥār, vol. 69, p. 135. There exist, admittedly, other opinions on the definition of nāṣibī, some of which restrict it to those who actively combat “the Muslims” (which generally means, in such contexts, the Shiʿites).  “Bardasht-e-towhin be khalife-ye-dovom ʿellat-e-towqif-e-‘Siyasat-e-Ruz,’” Baztab, 04/02/2007.  See, for example, Ayatollah al-Ozma Muhammad Ebrahim Jannati (not to be confused with the chairman of the Guardian Council), “Zan va hoquq az dast rafteh,” Payam, 15/11/2008, esp. p. 3.  Nasr et al (ed.), Shiʿism, p. 135.  Hosayn-e Behruz, “Pasokhi beh yek dust,” Parsiblog, 22/08/2008.  Ervand-e Daneshvar, “Beh atesh daman nazanim,” ISNA, 16/05/2008.

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replacement by the world’s only thriving Muslim theocracy was first and foremost about the reinvigoration of Shiʿism. In his memoirs, Ayatollah Montazeri – whom we have styled the Trotsky of the Islamic Revolution – spends some time justifying the nearly unanimous decision on the part of the framers of the new Iranian constitution in 1979 to adopt Shiʿism and the Jaʿfarī school of jurisprudence as the official religious doctrines of the country. He begins by almost apologizing for the fact that – what can we do? – the Islamic world is sadly split into diverse camps, and “two swords cannot fit into a single scabbard.” But the remainder of his lengthy disquisition is an unabashed and systemic exposition – sometimes based on his own arguments, sometimes quoting other members of the original constitutional committee – of the comparative merits of the Shiʿite legal method and theological outlook as against those of Sunnism. The idea that the Islamic Republic should lay its foundations in an ecumenical fashion had been raised at the outset – and summarily quashed.⁴⁹ Ayatollah Khomeini himself struck different tones depending on his audience. When addressing the Muslim world at large (and through it the international community) he stressed the necessity to unite the disparate forces of Islam. Even when he turned inward toward the Iranian-Shiʿite community, his attack on the traditional clerical obsession with ritual minutiae at the expense of engagement with politics and life, and his disapproval of excessive Shiʿite “whining” (naleh – in the context of bewailing Shiʿism’s classical martyrs), can be and has been interpreted as indicative of a tolerant attitude toward Sunnism and a desire for interdenominational rapprochement. But the matter is not that simple. Khomeini, it is true, appears to have despised Shiʿite bellyaching – he saw it as a sign of weakness that painted the Shiʿa as pathetic and only egged their enemies on – and thus his attitude to “negative Shiʿism” (for lack of a better term) may be described as lukewarm (he opposed taqiyya or prudent dissimulation, as well, calling it “dishonorable”). Khomeini was, instead, what we might style a positive Shiʿite, by which I mean to say that what most attracted him to, and energized him about, the religious sect of which he was a member and leader, was not the community’s perennial preoccupation with its own wretchedness and that of its forbears (his emphasis on the plight of the mustazʿafin or “miserable ones” belonged to the realm of economics and anti-imperialism, not to the realm of religion and anti-Sunnism).⁵⁰ What really resonated for Khomeini

 Montazeri, Khaterat, pp. 251– 254 and 489 – 492.  When it came to the West, the Shah, Zionism, etc. Khomeini was, of course, overwhelmingly negative.

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in Shiʿism is what one would expect to resonate for a life-long seminary student and teacher: the intellectual and philosophical elitism; the preservation of ijtihād or independent analysis in jurisprudence; and the moral and mystical heroism of the sect’s great paragons. Ḥusayn was a potent symbol for Khomeini in his war against the oppressive regime of the Shah (and in his war against the Iraqi aggressor); but ʿAlī was his man when things were going well – that is, when his focus was a matter of free choice rather than exigency – and not the poor, humiliated ʿAlī who nursed his wounded pride after being passed over for the caliphate, but the brilliant and uncompromising legal thinker, the austere mystic and unique master of esoteric knowledge, the valiant Lion of Allah brandishing his lethal sword Dhu l-Faqār, and the zealous champion of Islamic purism. ʿAlī, averred Ayatollah Khomeini – in a shocking bit of Shiʿite boldness – possessed the same fitness and qualifications as did Muḥammad to be the Seal of the Prophets, and God only chose the latter over the former as a result of his chronological precedence.⁵¹ Khomeini was such a proud and natural Shiʿite that Sunnis were not much of a presence in his mind. When his back was not against the wall, and when he had the leisure, he spent more time thinking about the tremendous heights to which Shiʿites had and could attain, and less about the awful depths wither they had been plunged by the ignorant and hatemongering Muslim majority. He did not harbor a grudge against the Sunnis as most Shiʿites did – this was beneath him. Rather, he was condescending and patronizing toward them. He did not hate Sunnis: if anything he despised them. But for the most part he saw them as strayed sheep, and himself and his activist clerical cohorts as the shepherds who would bring them home. Early Shiʿism was, after all, as much elitist as it was sullen: scores of Shiʿite traditions echo the following statement attributed to Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq: “We [the Imams] are the possessors of divine knowledge (ʿilm), and our Shiʿa (adherents) are those seeking that knowledge, and the rest of the people are scum (ghuthāʾ).⁵² Sunnis and Shiʿa are, albeit, both muslimūn, Muslims, but only the

 “Bayanat-e-hazrat-e-Ayatollah al-ʿUzmaʾ Saneʿi dar dars-e-kharej-e-feqh piramun-e-shakhsiyat-ehazrat-e-Zahra,” Iran, 16/02/2006: “Emam goft: qabeliyyat-e-Amir al-Muʾminin (a.h.) ba qabeliyyat-eRasul Allah (s) mosavi bud, yaʿni agar Rasul Allah nabi va khatam al-anbiya shod, ʿAli ham az nazare-qabeliyyatha va qodratha-ye-maʿnavi va kamalat-e-nafsani mitavanest beh an maqam beresad va agar in amr ettefaq nayoftade ast ‘ellat-e-an taqaddom-e-zamani-ye payambar-e-eslam dar residan beh in maqam ast.”  al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī, 1: 34. See also Dakake’s brief discussion of the “inherent spiritual qualification and distinction” of Shiʿites from the regular run of Muslims (Charismatic Community, pp. 23 – 25) and more extensive treatment of Shiʿite “racial” elitism (Charismatic Community, chapters 7 and 8).

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Shiʿa are muʾminūn, genuine believers. They are the firqa nājiya, the sole “saved sect” of Islam, the other seventy-one being damned. Shiʿism sees itself as the ideology of the khāṣṣ (“the special ones”) and Sunnism as that of the ʿāmm (“the masses”), and Khomeini epitomized this elitist strand. He was determined to create a haven where Shiʿism could shed its fear and regain its superiority complex, and he appears to have succeeded. Two highly interesting examples of this success will have to suffice here. First, a recent speech by Hojatelislam Mohammad Khatami, former president of the Islamic Republic and “spiritual father” of the Iranian reformist camp, and (one would have thought) an unlikely candidate for the role of Shiʿite elitist, let alone Shiʿite “extremist” (ghālī). If Khomeini, as we saw above, put ʿAlī on a par with Muḥammad, Khatami does not hesitate to place the former above the latter: The remembrance of the Commander of the Faithful (= ʿAlī) is the greatest form of worship; the struggle to know the Commander of the Faithful and to follow him is the loftiest divine service. “Prayer” means that we strive to comprehend ʿAlī and beseech God to set us on the path to the understanding of him. ʿAlī is the model, the mentor, the leader and the shining example of the perfect person, for the sake of the creation and cultivation of whom all of the prophets were sent (Ali olgu, moʿallem, rahbar, va mesal-e-barez-e-ensan-e-kameli ast keh tamam-e-payambaran baraye sakhtan va tarbiyat-e an ensan omadand).⁵³

Here is ʿAlī as ubermentsch, and vir perfectionis to boot; Muḥammad, together with all the preceding (120,000 or 240,000) prophets, were a mere means to the achievement of ʿAlī. Our second example comes from the pen of a highly popular present day Iranian preacher, Rasul-e Jaʿfarian. In June, 2008, he wrote a widely syndicated essay entitled: “Moderate Islam: The Axis of Shiʿi-Sunni Unity” (Eslam-e-eʿtedali, mehvar-e-vahdat-e-tashayyoʿ va tasannon). The title, however, constitutes the last “moderate” statement in this three thousand-word article. From about the third or fourth paragraph onward it becomes clear that we have to do with a concerted, pull-no-punches polemic on behalf of Shiʿite supremacy in all fields. Sunnism is portrayed as backward, bigoted and anti-intellectual; Shiʿism as progressive, tolerant and cerebral. The piece is a barely disguised proselytization pamphlet, and shows how the slogan of “unity” essentially means – in the eyes of much of the Iranian-Shiʿi intellectual class – the exposure of the Sunni world to the irrefragable asseverations of the supporters of the ahl al-bayt, and the consequent, swift or gradual, realization on the part of the former that Shiʿism is the way, the truth and the light.

 Mohammad Khatami, “Didgah-e-ʿAli as goft va gu-ye farhangha va tamaddonha,” ISNA, 22/09/ 2008.

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Jaʿfarian argues that Shiism is the essence of Islam, not one of its factions, and that it must now resume its rightful place as such. In this connection, his somewhat novel notion of taqiyya (the traditional Shiʿite practice of “prudent dissimulation”) is particularly telling. For instead of being defensive – we mustn’t insult the Prophet’s Companions because doing so may bring persecution down upon our heads and even threaten our very survival – it is offensive: avoid insulting the Prophet’s Companions so that you might more effectively spread Shiʿism. ⁵⁴ These days in Iran, Jaʿafarian is far from alone in this bold approach. Ahmad Ghadiri, a self-styled researcher on religious subjects, participated in a televised panel in 2014 and claimed that whereas in the past conversion of Sunnis to Shiʿism was sparse, the twentieth century saw no less than 2 million (!) such conversions, as the information revolution brought the two major sects of Islam into direct contact with each other’s claims.⁵⁵ (Many Shiʿite exponents write as if much of the Sunni world already consists of “closet Shiʿites”: Ayatollah Mesbah-e Yazdi, for instance, noted in passing that “all of us Shiʿites, together with a great many of our Sunni brothers, believe that this sacred entity [the Hidden Imam – Z. M.] is alive, is in a state of occultation and will one day return”).⁵⁶ Hojjatoleslam Reza-e Eslami, for another instance, was recently interviewed under the headline: “Shiʿites and Sunnis must put their relations on a more logical basis.” Only after thrashing our way through several paragraphs of hackneyed lip-service to the sacred cause of Islamic unity, do we arrive at the crux of the matter. Eslami, who is speaking in Persian to a Shiʿite audience, minces no words: The main benefit to be derived from the establishment of closer relations between Shiʿa and Sunnis is that by presenting the precepts of Shiʿism, and proving their correctness with the help of solid arguments, we will be able, by virtue of the clarification of truths, to guide the Sunnis to the correct path.⁵⁷

Supreme Leader Khameneʾi himself regularly indulges in this double game. In a speech commemorating the 18th anniversary of Khomeini’s death, he echoed the

 Rasul Jaʿfarian, “Eslam-e-eʿtedali mehvar-e-vahadat-e-tashayyoʿ va tasannon,” Ettelaʾat, 14/06/ 2008.  IRIB 3, 29/03/2014.  Mesbah-e Yazdi, Aftab-e velayat, pp. 140 – 141. There are scores of statements of this sort. Similarly, the Supreme Leader is convinced – or wants to convince his audience – that “all Islamic communities now support the Islamic Republic” (Hovsepian, Political Ideology, p. 299).  Bozorgtarin faʾide-ye nazdiki shodan-e-Shiʿe va Sonni in ast keh ba tarh-e ahkam-e Shiʿe va estedlal-e sahih [‐e-anha] mitavanim zemne tabyin-e-haqayeq ahl-e-tasannon-ra beh rah-e sahih hedayat konim. “Bayn-e-Shiʿe va ahl-e-tasannon bayad ravabet-e-manteqi ijad shaved,” Pazhuheshkade-ye Olum va Farhang-e-Eslami, 0/08/2008.

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great leader’s slogan that Iran’s is an Islamic and not a Shiʿite revolution, but went on to adduce support for this claim by pointing out repeatedly how all the world’s Muslim youth, both Sunni and Shiʿi, stand in awe of Iran’s achievements and see her as the leader of the Islamic world.⁵⁸ On another occasion, the Supreme Leader warned Wahhabi/Takfīrī elements not to sow dissension at the ḥajj; in the same breath, however, he went on to encourage his audience of Iranian pilgrims to take advantage of their visit to the Ḥaramayn (the two holy cities, Mecca and Medina) in order to propagandize for the principle of velayat-e-faqih, the Guardianship of the Jurist.⁵⁹ A widely heard assertion on the part of Shiʿi ulama is that as the Resurrection draws nigh, the Sunnis will adopt the belief in the Hidden Imam just as the Jews will adopt the belief in Jesus. What we have tried to show in this short discussion is that the Iranian attitude to the Sunni-Shiʿi rift is quite complex and awash with internal contradictions. While the Iranians paint the Sunnis as their natural allies in the fight against the encroaching West and do their best in a vast variety of forums to minimize the rancor between, and the differences dividing, the two sects, other evidence – no less plentiful – demonstrates the profound extent to which the Sunnis are seen as the true and ultimate enemy. America and Israel are saddled with the blame for Sunni-Shiʿi antagonism in the official discourse of the Islamic Republic, but scratch the surface and it becomes amply clear that the real culprits in Iranian eyes are the Wahhabis: You [Shiʿite Muslim preachers] must make clear to the people what hand is behind the fomenting of disunity [between the two sects of Islam]. Tell the people straight: today, that instrument which America employs to dash the prospects of such unity is none other than the filthy hand of Wahhabism. Do not hold back and do not mince words. From the first this evil – Wahhabism – was brought into being [by Western imperial powers] for the express purpose of throwing a wrench into Muslim unity. Just as they established Israel as a base whence to attack Islam, they established Wahhabism and these chieftains of the Najd (i.e., the Saudi rulers – Z. M.) to secure [the imperialists] a bridgehead, a foothold that would be ever loyal to their masters – and as you can see, they always are. Nor do they even try to hide this. They are proud to support America! They are proud to be the friends of the enemies of Islam and the enemies of the friends of Islam!⁶⁰

Scratch the surface a little harder and we begin to realize that the “politically correct” distinction consistently insisted upon by the Iranians between the minority of  “Bayanat-e-rahbar-e-moʿazzam-e-enqelab dar marasem-e-hijdahomin salgard-e-ertehal-e-hazrat-e-Emam Khomeini,” ISNA, 14/03/1386.  “Sokhanrani-ye-maqam-e-moʿazzam-e-rahbari dar astane-ye shahr-e-dhul-hejje,” IRNA, 06/11/ 2008.  Khameneʾi, Jehad-e farhangi, p. 52.

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extremist Wahhabis and the majority of moderate Sunnis, does not represent the genuine outlook of the regime of the Ayatollahs; in truth they believe that almost the whole of the Sunni world has been Wahhabized, and even were it not so, their hostility toward and suspicion of traditional Sunnism, we discover, has not abated one iota (in a recent sermon by Ayatollah Sadeq Hosayni-ye Shirazi – great grandson of Ayatollah Mirza-ye Shirazi, whose fatwa ignited the Tobacco boycott in 1891 – this highly influential cleric distinguished between two types of Islam: “the Islam of the Prophet’s family [ahl al-bayt]” and “the Islam of the Companions of the Prophet [sahabe], that is, Wahhabi Islam”).⁶¹ The paradoxes continue with the two ships of ecumenism and strengthened Shiʿism passing each other in the Iranian revolutionary night. Despite the constant emphasis on the part of Iranian religious and political authorities on the all-encompassing nature of the Islamic Republic, and despite many signs of moderation and even creeping Sunnization in post-revolutionary Iranian Shiʿism, a powerful undercurrent is tugging in the opposite direction, in which an emboldened Shiʿism is flexing its muscles, flaunting its most controversial beliefs, and in fact hardening its position against Sunnism. Part of this trend, as we saw, is an old-new condescension on the part of Iranian Shiʿite clerics and neo-mutakallimūn (philosophers) toward the Sunni fundamentalist mujassimūn (crass literalists), those “lizard-eating Arab camel drivers.” The much touted Iranian unity campaign thus becomes a vessel for Shiʿite missionary activity, and, ultimately, a launch-pad toward the ultimate goal of Iranian regional and religious hegemony. Recent efforts at Iranian-Saudi détente notwithstanding, the fires of the Sunni-Shiʿi conflict are not even close to being doused.

 Marjaʿiyyat Channel, 01/011/1441 (September 1, 2019). The equation is crystal clear: the ṣaḥāba were Wahhabis. The Shirazis are in an ambiguous relationship with the Islamic Republic.

Conclusion: The Islamic Republic of Iran On July 30, 2019, a Tehran district court judge pronounced the capital city’s recently resigned mayor, Mohammad Ali-ye Najafi, guilty of murdering his wife. In fact, Najafi, who is also Iran’s former education minister and one-time vice president, confessed to the crime only hours after his spouse, Mitra Ostad, was discovered on the floor of their bathroom in a pool of blood. The conviction was announced together with the sentence: death. With appropriate minor changes, primarily to the names of perpetrator and victim, the above could pass for a news item in a great many countries across the globe, including the United States. On closer inspection, however, there is much to this story that is uniquely Iranian. Take the death sentence, for example: its implementation is… provisional. In the Islamic Republic capital punishment – known as qiṣāṣ (“eye-for-an-eye” retributive justice) – can be averted by the expedient of “satisfying the blood redeemers,” that is, obtaining a pardon from the victim’s family. This clause has often been the occasion for suspense-filled drama on the local and even national stage, with segments of the populace on the edge of their seats as the murdered man or woman’s relatives agonize or bargain (or both), sometimes up until the last moment. Less than a decade ago, two close friends from the city of Isfahan quarreled, and one fatally stabbed the other. The juvenescent killer’s parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins and a host of others (including several celebrities) begged and pleaded with the bereaved next-ofkin over a period of three weeks to spare their condemned loved one, but to no avail. The day of the hanging arrived, the young perpetrator was marched up the scaffold in front of a large, emotional audience, the noose was placed and tightened around his neck, and a hush fell over the crowd as the executioner extended a hand to pull the chair out from under his feet. Just then a scream was heard from below: the mother of the “martyr” (the slain friend) rushed up the staircase, pulled the noose off the condemned boy’s head, administered a resounding slap to his face that sent him reeling, and announced: “I am satisfied.” A different case ended less happily: relenting literally at the last second, another heart-broken parent shouted out his absolution just after his son’s (profoundly remorseful and possibly even inadvertent) slayer had been hoisted into the air. Amid the collective gasp of the assembled onlookers, the surrounding officials rushed to seize and support the convulsant figure, but alas: the trauma or degree of asphyxiation had already been such that though rescued from the grave, the unlucky offender was left paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-018

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Ex-mayor Najafi’s amnesty was, albeit, not quite so “down to the wire,” but it still came as a surprise to many when his murdered wife’s brother read out a statement in the neighborhood mosque only a week after the conclusion of the trial: Our story has ended; your story will go on… We forgive Mr. Najafi, and forego the right of revenge for our beloved sister and daughter’s blood. We are proud to affirm that we did not barter dear Mitra’s soul for money. We hope that Mr. Najafi will spend the remaining mornings [of his life], far from the realm of politics, in pursuit of the purification of his soul.”¹

Why would the family of a lovely young woman gunned down in cold blood by her husband be so quick to forgive the assassin? And even if we take the cynical view and note that her relatives will still have the opportunity, at a future civil hearing, to “barter dear Mitra’s soul” for quite a bit of money indeed, that leaves an even more curious question: why would the Iranian public – to judge by the mood reflected in the various social media networks – look for the most part favorably upon such forgiveness (it was lauded by many as kar-e Yusuf-var, “an act worthy of Joseph”)? After all, the citizens of the Islamic Republic are anything but sycophantic toward, let alone worshipful of, the politicians running their country, and these elected leaders are regularly pilloried in every kind of (non-governmental, and sometimes even governmental) forum. So what explains the widespread compassion for Najafi, the wife-killer? The answer lies in yet another characteristically Iranian-Islamic institution. Mitra Ostad, the murdered woman, was the ex-mayor’s second wife. Not in the sense that he had divorced his first wife – he hadn’t – but rather in the Jacob, Leah and Rachel sense (polygamy or chand-hamsari is legal in post-revolutionary Iran, and though rare, has been in recent years the subject of a major parliamentary push by the new ultra-conservative lobby known as the delvapasan or “Concerned Ones”).² This fact led to the one question broached without cease on all the major Persian gossip sites: what could possibly have led this pulchritudinous thirty-something from a respected family (her father is a prosperous merchant, her brother a professor of astrophysics) to throw in her lot with a sixty-eight-yearold “has-been” suffering from a dysfunctional prostate – and as second fiddle, to boot? Here, the endemic Iranian propensity for conspiracy theorizing compounded a lifetime of bitter experience with the intelligence-gathering tactics of two repres-

 As reported by Arman-e Melli, 05/24/1398, p. 3. All translations from the Persian and Arabic in this book are the author’s, unless otherwise indicated.  A number of womens’ rights groups have been pushing back, led by both religious and “secular” activists and writers such as Shahla Sherkat, Mehrangiz Kar, recently deceased Azam Taleqani and Shirin Ebadi.

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sive regimes – the Islamic Republic and the Pahlavi dynasty – to suggest a solution.³ Najafi, considered by most of his countrymen as belonging to the “reformist” (eslah talab) camp within Iranian politics, had launched several anti-corruption probes while in office aimed at members of the opposing “principlist” (osulgara) camp. He was thus targeted by regime hardliners for a take-down (so the pervasive rumor went), and the method chosen was a familiar one: the parastu or “swallow,” a fetching female commissioned by the security services to infiltrate the life and home of a public figure in order to report on his activities, document his indiscretions, and/or influence his decision-making. Under the Pahlavi monarchy such “swallows” were regularly employed by the SAVAK, the king’s ruthless General Security Service, to compromise opposition leaders, not excluding high-ranking clerics. Two of these last, Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi-ye Falsafi and Ayatollah Jaʿfar Javad-e Shajuni – both of whom had played key roles in the Fifteenth of Khordad Uprising and would soon do the same for the Islamic Revolution – were caught on film in the mid-1970s be-sporting themselves with half-naked femmes fatales, images that were promptly distributed far and wide by the monarchy-controlled media. Shajuni justified the scandalous photographs by claiming that he had been engaged in a “temporary marriage” (mutʿa, sigheh), an institution sanctioned by Shiʿite (but not Sunni) Islamic law⁴ which involves proposing to a woman, espousing her, cohabiting with her, “divorcing” her and remitting her “dowry,” sometimes in the space of several days or even hours.⁵

 In general, it may be said that the multifaceted movement that led to the Islamic Revolution – although it was a movement emphatically against Pahlavism – learned a great deal from the regime against which it rose up, and implemented not a little of what it learned in the post-revolutionary polity.  Sunnism provides for an arrangement known as nikāḥ al-misyār or “traveler’s marriage,” similar in some respects but not in others to mutʿa. In recent times mutʿa, always a bone of contention between the majority and minority sects of Islam, has come under fire from Westerners and Shiʿite thinkers themselves. Many consider it pure prostitution. Modern Shiʿi apologia on behalf of this institution is – to this author’s taste – abjectly unconvincing and even half-hearted (see, for example, Allamah Tabatabaʾi and Seyyed Hosayn Nasr on the subject in Nasr et al [eds.], Shiʿism, pp. 214– 216).  According to most legal rulings, there is actually no need for official divorce – it is automatic. For a brief summary of the differing legal positions regarding mutʿa marriage, see Judith E. Tucker, Women, Family and Gender in Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 57– 58. For some of the antecedents and parallels to the Shiʿite institution of temporary marriage, see Goldziher, Introduction, pp. 207– 209. The subject of temporary marriage is a highly controversial one both inside Iran itself, and between Shi’ite Iran and the Sunni world, to say nothing of the West. This is true for a variety of “liberties” Shi’ite law permits men to take with women and even pre-pubescent girls (a major scandal that refused to die down for many years after the 1979

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Ayatollah Falsafi was even more creative in wriggling out of the opprobrium into which he had been lured by his purported parastu: he adduced a medieval Muslim legal loophole facilitating the circumvention of an explicit Qurʿanic precept. The precept stipulates that a husband who divorces his wife may not remarry her until she has slept with another man (the mirror image of the biblical statute).⁶ The loophole involves hiring a muḥallil or “permitter” – usually a local beggar, preferably of unattractive mien – to spend the night behind closed doors with the divorcée, and then asking no questions in the morning and allowing the lady to return to her first husband.⁷ Falsafi asserted that he had been caught on camera performing just such a pious service for the sake of a parishioner in need. Ex-mayor Najafi, the argument had it, discovered that his pretty young wife was a parastu well before she could complete her mission of obtaining the requisite dirt, or exerting the requisite influence, on him and (what was left of ) his political career. He slaughtered his beloved Mitra in a fit of rage over her imposture and betrayal: so the public believed, and that would explain its inclination toward clemency in this case (it may also explain the absolution itself: according to his dismissed attorney, Najafi traded silence regarding his dead wife’s deceptive mission for the family’s reprieve).⁸

revolution involved the ostensible testimony by an ostensible eye-witness to the effect that during his exile in Iraq Khomeini was offered an infant girl by her father – who was hosting the ayatollah for dinner – for purposes of tafkhidh al-radiya or “pleasuring oneself against the thighs of a nursing toddler,” a practice condoned by Khomeini and other Shi’ite luminaries in their legal writings. Whether this anecdote is true or not, the attempts to exonerate the Father of the Revolution of such a deed constitute what many would regard as the real scandal. Such attempts include a study focused entirely on this affair, written (and granted a national book award) in 2018, which advanced, among other rebuttals, the argument that had Khomeini desired to gratify himself on that occasion, there were a goodly number of post-pubescent girls present in the house who would not have been refused the septuagenarian. The book additionally points out, by way of justification, that Sunni texts also permit this practice (the book’s website has since been taken down. See, however, http://www.eslam.nu/2017/12/14/khmini-tjvz/, last accessed 10/05/2021).  The Qurʾanic edict – which most Muslim exegetes explain as designed to prevent flippant dissolution of marriage – is contained in verse 230 of the holy book’s second chapter: “Should he divorce her, she is no longer lawful to him until she marries a husband other than him…” The Biblical regulation is found in Deuteronomy 24: 1– 4: “If he writes her a bill of divorcement…then she leaves his household and becomes the wife of another man…then the first husband who divorced her shall not take her to wife again…” In both cases, it should be noted, the derivative jurisprudence and ultimate positive law is much more complex than the bare scriptural proscription. For a good summary of the intricacies of divorce law in Islam, see Tucker, Women, chap. 3.  This institution was famously satirized by Sadeq-e Hedayat’s play of the same name.  Arman-e Melli, 13/02/2019.

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At his interrogation Najafi claimed that after a “fierce disagreement” he had confronted his co-wife in the shower toting an (unlicensed) revolver, and that as he waved the weapon back and forth “in order to frighten her” he inadvertently fired it… five times. What gave the lie to this already implausible assertion was another characteristically Iranian, or at least old-world, phenomenon: genuine down pillows, to this day the only kind of head-cushion available for purchase in the Land of the Lion and the Sun. The goose feathers strewn all over the floor, walls and ceiling of the bathroom attested to the passage of the bullets through the well-known, common substitute for a silencer, and quickly led the court to threw out the plea of accidental homicide. Najafi was convicted, instead, of the equivalent of second degree murder, a crime that carries with it, as we have seen, the penalty of death – but only after seventy-four floggings. This clause, originating in Islamic law and enshrined since the revolution in the Iranian penal code, is applicable not only to certain capital offenses but also to a host of lesser infractions, which is why the scourging of white collar criminals, sometimes in the central squares of major cities, is not an infrequent phenomenon in the Islamic Republic. Mitra Ostad’s family saved the ex-mayor from this humiliating and excruciating fate, as well. Why was Najafi the ex-mayor – a mere seven months after taking office? The answer to this question may be sought in yet another post-revolutionary Iranian phenomenon. His Excellency made the mistake of attending the graduation ceremony of a local elementary school… for girls. Unfortunately, the evening’s program included a dance intermezzo, and even more unfortunately, a malevolent parent captured the mayor on video avidly regarding the pre-pubescent ballerinas and applauding enthusiastically when they were through. The video was posted for all to see, the footage went immediately viral, and Najafi’s jig was up: the conservative “principlist” faction forced him to resign (though he tried to blame his prostate for his forfeiture of office). One would be hard put to find another public servant anywhere in the world who has stepped down for a similar transgression. Ironically, then, the “swallows” who ultimately brought Najafi to his knees were nine-yearolds in tights.⁹ Even the date of the court decision cited in the brief passage we have been parsing points up the sui generis nature of the Iranian-Islamic milieu: we altered it in translation. Persians almost never use the Gregorian calendar. For them Najafi’s fate was sealed (pending appeal) not on July 30th, 2019, but either on the 9th of

 President Mahmud-e Ahmadinejad came in for fierce criticism himself for attending the opening of the Asian Games in Qatar in 2006, during which female dance troupes performed (Tzimt, Iran, n. 115).

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Mordad, 1398, or, for those professing a particularly high degree of Muslim piety, on the 29th of Dhu l-Qaʿda, 1440. The latter is the hejri-ye qamari or “lunar flight” date, based on the hasty departure (the “flight” or hijra) of the Prophet Muḥammad and his hundred or so followers from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE, since which event one-thousand four-hundred-and-forty-one “defective” years (of twelve lunar months or 354 days each) have elapsed. While the Arabs of the pre-Islamic period, like many other ancient peoples, generally “intercalated” their calendar, adding an extra month every few years in order to prevent “seasonal slippage,” the Qurʿan – for reasons not entirely clear even to its own exegetes – prohibited this practice, and Muslims have consequently become accustomed (for instance) to observing the month-long fast of Ramadan at different times during winter, spring, summer or fall. As this unadulterated hejri-ye qamari or “lunar flight” system proved unwieldy for many purposes, a practical compromise was adopted already a millennium ago by Muslim rulers of Iran which, while maintaining the starting point of Muḥammad’s fateful journey and largely avoiding the practice of intercalation, nevertheless based itself upon the shifting “orbit” of the sun and contained 365 days. This became known as the hejri-ye shamsi or “solar flight” calendar, used by most Iranians today, including no less a paragon of Muslim piety than the Supreme Leader himself.¹⁰ The popularity and official adoption of the hejri-ye shamsi calendar is one proof among many that doctrinaire notions of religious orthodoxy and cultural authenticity have always co-existed in Iran, and still co-exist today in the postrevolutionary Islamic Republic, with more than a modicum of flexibility and a guarded openness to the ways of foreigners – even infidel foreigners. In 2018 the Iranian soccer team was set to play their South Korean counterpart in the pre-finals of the World Cup tournament. The excitement was high among sports fans in the Islamic Republic. When it became clear, however, that the game was to be held on the ninth day of the Muslim month of Muḥarram, known as Tāsūʿāʾ – the occasion for the martyrdom of the Imam Ḥusayn’s brother ʿAbbās, and the second most solemn occasion on the Shiʿite calendar – many ulama objected, most prominent among them the late Ayatollah Muhammad-e Yazdi (d. 2020), a former head of the judicial system who was quite close with Supreme Leader Khameneʾi. Among those who objected to his objection was the son of Ayatollah Motahhari – the Islamic Revolution’s premier theoretician – “reformist” Member of Parliament Ali-ye Motahhari, who lambasted Yazdi for his rigid thinking which, he argued, is liable to turn young people off to Islam. The polemic raged

 On the official adoption of this calendar, and its previous version known as “Yazdegerdi,” see Ansari, Politics of Nationalism, p. 58 – 9 and accompanying notes.

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for several days, and in the end the game was played on the problematic date despite the protests. The joke went around on Persian social media that if the Iranian team scored a goal, Shiʿite spectators should – instead of cheering – beat themselves in the traditional manner. While the immense popularity of soccer teams leads even the Supreme Leader to style himself a fan, elements among the Iranian ulama take exception to the entire culture surrounding professional sporting events. Conservative bugbear Hassan-e Abbasi recently caused an uproar when he scolded Iranian footballers whose wives wore the veil – as opposed to the scarf – and thereby affected piety, asserting that “religious people do not play soccer” and that professional athletes are a source of corruption in society. He was countered by clerics from Qom who cited traditions showing the Prophet Muḥammad himself lifting his daughter onto his shoulders to watch a group of Ethiopians play an unidentified game.¹¹ In another recent example of such complexity, paradoxality and vulnerability to the influence of Western ideas, a scandal broke out on September 3, 2019, when images of a wedding from the county of Kohgiluyeh-Boyrahmad (in the Western Iranian province of Luristan) involving an eleven-year-old child-bride and a groom in his twenties, swarmed the Persian Internet. Though such nuptials, which are in reality more akin to a betrothal, are entirely licit according to Islamic (and current Iranian) law, nevertheless the vice-president in charge of women’s affairs, Maʿsume-ye Ebtekar (a.k.a. “Bloody Mary” of Iran Hostage Crisis notoriety), teamed up with several senior clerics and a battery of government legal experts and social workers, and had the marriage quashed.¹² Another recent incident similarly showcased the persistent dilemma involved in upholding a polity that is both “Islamic” and a “Republic,” but this time with an antithetical upshot. In the early summer of 2020, a thirteen year-old Shiʿite girl from the Caspian littoral named Romina entered into a romantic relationship with a twenty-eight year old Sunni man from a neighboring village. Fearing her parents’ opposition, she ran away with her paramour to his sister’s house. The would-be groom’s father sent a message to his intended in-law inviting him to come and set the terms of engagement. The latter agreed, showed up at the arranged time, and brought with him half of the local police force, who proceeded to arrest the hosts for kidnapping. Hauled into court together with her “abductors,” the adolescent Romina pleaded with the judge not to return her to her father’s house. The judge listened, sympathized, and sent her straight back home. That evening her boyfriend, who in the end was not charged with any crime, called her fa-

 Arman-e Melli, 16 Tir, 1401.  Arman-e Melli, 13/06/1398.

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ther and “revealed” to him that while he and Romina had been away together they had had sexual relations. This story may well have been concocted by the despairing suitor, either in order to engender in the father the feeling that it was “too late” and he might as well agree to the union, or in order to get revenge by disgracing him. Either way, the father evidently believed the boyfriend, because several hours later he drugged his son and daughter so that they fell asleep, locked his wife in the bathroom and cut Romina’s head off with a scythe.¹³ The country was in an uproar. Not just the public on social media sites, but the government-controlled newspapers and television stations conveyed the shock and disgust that took hold of the authorities as much as the populace, from mayor to governor to president to the “Guardian Jurist” himself. Then head of the judiciary, “principlist” Ayatollah Ebrahim-e Raʾisi (now Iran’s president) vowed in a veritable fury that “an example will be made of this vile murderer that will never be forgotten.” There was only one problem. In such cases in the Islamic Republic, as we have seen above, it is the saheb-e khun or vali-ye dam – the “blood avenger” – who is responsible for carrying out the qiṣāṣ or lex talionis and obtaining justice for the poor girl. Unfortunately, the blood avenger in Romina’s case is…her father. It gets worse. The blood avenger is entitled, as we have seen, to negotiate an agreement with the perpetrator of the murder for the alleviation and even outright abrogation of the punishment. Under the circumstances, prospects for a solution amenable to both parties appeared encouraging. University professors, well-known authors, famous filmmakers, clerics, politicians, clerics who are politicians – thousands of personages from across the country and the ideological spectrum weighed in and expressed their outrage at this state of affairs. Some cursed the system outright, but most turned anxiously but respectfully to the marājiʿ – the Sources of Emulation, the Grand Ayatollahs – in a plea to make use of the elasticity afforded by the uniquely Shiʿite methodology of ijtihād in order to find a way out of this horrific absurdity.¹⁴ As of this writing,

 This was a qatl-e namusi, an “honor killing,” of the kind often heard about in Muslim societies. It owes less to Islamic law – where it is, essentially, prohibited – than it does to cultural norms.  As we noted briefly above, the notion that ijtihād (the bringing to bear of a scholar-jurist’s independent reasoning on the sources of the law) belongs today to Shiʿite ulama alone cannot be accepted without a probing discussion of the subject. Indeed, historically speaking, one could argue (and important Akhbārīs did argue) that the utilization of uṣūl al-fiqh (principles of jurisprudence) to derive law – or in a word, the practice of ijtihād – was a methodology taken over by Shiʿite scholar-jurists specifically from the Sunnis (i. e., Ḥanafite), beginning in the ninth century CE and gathering steam with ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī in the thirteenth century. It is even the case that Sunni scholars since the medieval period have accused Shiʿites in general, and Ismāʿīlī Shiʿites in particular, of practicing taqlīd or “imitation” – the opposite of ijtihād – due to their unquestioning reliance on the guidance of their imams. Moreover, the nature of ijtihād and the scope of its application

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none has been found, and Ayatollah Raʾisi’s declaration about “making an example of this vile murderer that will never be forgotten” looks like it may be commuted to a maximum of six or seven years behind bars.¹⁵ F. Scott Fitzgerald famously remarked that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” One of the most intriguing and, indeed, compelling aspects of the Islamic Republican project consists in the many ways in which this regime’s political, religious and intellectual leaders strive, against inordinate odds, to balance what they see as indigenous, authentic Islamism, on the one hand, and Western-inspired, “progressive” democracy, on the other, within one and the same polity. But the tensions and contradictions do not stop there, because the entity that we have placed under the microscope in this volume is not just “The Islamic Republic,” but “The Islamic Republic of Iran” (jomhuriye Eslamiyye Iran). A third idea, as we have discussed at length, tugs at the leadership and society of this country: that of Persian nationalism. As the second decade of the new Christian millennium came to a close, slogans like “Darius take heed, listen, Anushirvan: Turbanwearers have taken over Iran!” and “Neither mosque nor Qurʿan – Cyrus, Shahnameh, Iran!” were increasingly heard during protests.¹⁶ Former President Mahmude Ahmadinejad was lambasted during his second term in office by several senior clerics for his “deviant” (enherafi) ideology of “Iran First.” The grandson of Ayatollah al-Ozma Borujerdi, a senior lecturer in the Qom seminary system that his grandfather did so much to preserve and expand, recently declared himself “an admirer of the Cyrus cylinder”: Some aver that Islam rose and invalidated all that came before it.¹⁷ But this is a “saqīfī-an” outlook, a way of thinking that, after the death of the Messenger of God, was hatched at the saqīfat Banī Sāʿida (the covered structure in the city of Medina where the Muslims gathered to choose Muḥammad’s successor – Z. M.). There it was said for the first time that “the Book of God suffices for us! (ḥasbunā kitābu llāh). Whatever is not the Qurʿan must be discarded!” That is why, when the Muslims later invaded Iran, they burned books. Who carried out

have been, and continue to be, a matter of debate between Shiʿite mujtahidūn themselves. The increasing influence on activist Sunni currents in modern times of Ibn Taymiyya-type anti-rationalism has contributed to the notion that Shiʿism has, in contra, preserved the ember of ijtihād (together with that of kalām).  Coverage of the case has been extensive. For a summary of the developments to date, see Arman-e Melli, 01/06/2020, p. 11.  Cyrus, Darius and Anushirvan were pre-Islamic kings of Iran. The Shahnameh or Book of Kings – the country’s preeminent national epic – is concerned solely with the pre-Islamic period.  Eslam amade va qabl az khodesh ra az bayn bordeh ast. This is actually a well-known hadith or prophetic tradition: inna l-islāma yahdimu mā kāna qablahu.

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such atrocities? Those who said, “We want nothing but the Qurʿan!” But this was not the way of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib. In the Pinnacle of Eloquence we read that when the Commander of the Faithful (ʿAlī) dispatched Mālik [al-Ashtar] to Egypt, he explained to him that “Before you there were pharaohs in that country, there were great men there, many of whose customs were good: preserve these!” In Islam itself we find holdovers from the [pre-Islamic] Time of Arabian Barbarity…Iran before Islam was the cradle of many prophets such as Zoroaster. In the pre-Islamic period Iran was a superpower, and a vast portion of the globe was under its sovereignty. So yes, I am an admirer of the Cyrus Cylinder. The United Nations has recognized it as the earliest declaration of human rights. Whoever took into account the needs of minorities in those bygone days should be remembered and respected. We should be proud of our past!¹⁸

Grandfather would not be happy. Ayatollah Borujerdi has here not only validated and aggrandized major aspects of what Islam has always viewed as the period of ignorance and savagery (jāhiliyya), he has praised three paragons of illegitimacy in Muslim eyes: Pharaoh, the premier villain of the Qurʿan and symbol of godlessness and arrogance (estekbar); Zoroaster the Magus (majūsī), condemned by Islamic tradition (hadith) for his theological dualism and other crimes;¹⁹ and Cyrus, who is albeit perceived in a more benign manner by Iranian Islamists – partially because Islam never knew him in order to disparage him – but is still a symbol of heresy, monarchy and (because he was introduced to them by European scholars) “cultural imperialism” (tahajom-e farhangi). Moreover, where Borujerdi Senior was a pioneer of Muslim inter-sectarian dialogue and détente, his grandson has in these remarks – for the sake of vindicating the ancient Iranian literary tradition – taken

 Arman-e Melli, 15/09/2019.  Just to add to the complexity and confusion, neither Zoroaster nor Zoroastrianism has been consistently condemned by Islamic tradition. Possessors of a sacred scripture, Zoroastrians were often subsumed under the rubric of a protected “People of the Book.” Even in recent times, none other than Ayatollah Tabatabaʾi – Borujerdi Senior’s celebrated student and one of the twentieth century’s preeminent exponents of Shiʿism – was used to speak approvingly about Zoroastrians in the same breath with Jews, Christians and Muslims (see, e. g., Allamah Sayyid Muhammad Husan Tabatabaʾi, Shiʿite Islam [trans. Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Albany: SUNY Press, 1975], p. 32). Tabatabaʾi’s student and colleague Ayatollah Motahhari also had many positive things to say about Zoroastrianism. Occasionally Iranian television will devote a short documentary to one or another small pocket of Zoroastrians living in various parts of Iran, and show the religion and its rituals in a benign light (most recently on Oct. 29, 2020, IRIB Mostanad, where an interview with a “mobed” or Mazdean priest was devoted to dispelling the notion that Zoroastrians are dualists). Hojjatoleslam va l-Moslemin Ali-ye Yunesi – former Minister of Intelligence and special advisor to President Rouhani – “attributed Iran’s endorsement of Islam, and of Shiʿism in particular, to the fact that the ʻIranian nation’ had never worshipped fire or idols, but had been believers in one god (yektaparast) and inclined to spirituality” (Meir Litvak, “God’s Favored Nation: The New Religious Nationalism in Iran,” Religions, 11 [Oct. 2020], p. 4).

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quite the swipe at Sunnism, saddling the second caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb with responsibility for (what he claims were) the anti-intellectual, book-burning proclivities of the Arab-Muslim conquerors of Iran. (He is also playing a bit fast and loose with the sources, since ʿUmar did not reportedly utter these words at the saqīfa but rather at Muḥammad’s death bed, and the referent was something else entirely).²⁰ This is, in other words, Iraniyyat at the expense of pan-Islam. Ayatollah Borujerdi Junior is far from alone: Alireza Sami-Azar, well-known Iranian art historian and director of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art under President Mohammad-e Khatami, declared Persepolis “one of the three essential symbols of my homeland.”²¹ Ayatollah Khameneʾi himself became, from the 1990s onward, a staunch defender of Persian, which he called “the language of true…and revolutionary Islam.”²² Bernard Hourcade reminds us that “Ruhollah Khomeini was the first [modern] Iranian leader of Persian origin (the Pahlavis were from Mazandaran and the Qajars were Turks)” and that Shiʿism has often functioned as a tool of Iranian nationalism, even under the Islamic Republic.²³ In the early fall of 2019 a group of seminary students from the holy city of Qom penned a query to several senior ayatollahs regarding a film, financed and slated to be televised by the state-run broadcasting service, detailing the life and times of the world-renowned thirteenth century Iranian mystic-poet, Jalal al-Din Rumi. The ayatollahs’ collective responsum fiercely condemned the film and its subject, declaring Rumi a “nefarious practitioner and promoter of homosexuality and Sufism” (Muslim esotericism), the latter constituting “a deviant and heretical school of thought implanted in Islam by Jews in order to undermine God’s religion from within.” Upon being told of this decree, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei react-

 When Muḥammad was dying he asked for writing materials – “ink and a shoulder bone” – to “write for the Muslims a writing which will prevent them from ever going astray” (aktubu lakum kitāban lan taḍillu baʿdahu abadan). ʿUmar is supposed to have opposed this request, arguing that “the prophet is delirious with pain (inna l-nabiyya qad ghalaba ʿalayhi l-wajaʿ) and at any rate you have the Qurʾan: the Book of God suffices for us.” Shiʿites assert that what the Prophet wanted to indite – or dictate to another (since tradition claims that he was illiterate) – was the official appointment of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib as his successor. Ayatollah Borujerdi Jr. has deftly recontextualized this statement of ʿUmar’s, turning it into a more general rejection of all non-Qurʾanic literature. This recontextualization is in line with what ʿUmar is often quoted (by hostile and probably unreliable sources) as having commanded regarding the library of Alexandria: “If these books of the Greeks are in accord with the Qurʾan they are useless and need not be preserved; if they are not, they are pernicious and must be destroyed.”  Mirsepassi, Iran’s Quiet Revolution, p. 134.  Litvak, Constructing Nationalism, p. 18.  Bernard Hourcade, “Nationalism and the Islamic Republic of Iran” in Litvak, Constructing Nationalism, p. 224.

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ed by quoting at length and with especial reverence several passages from the masnavi – Rumi’s masterpiece. Notwithstanding the fatwa of the senior clerics, the film was shown on every relevant network, and the Persian Sufi poets, including (among many others) Hafez, Saʿdi, Khayyam and Rumi himself, are lauded in the Iranian media unabashedly – as they have always been, both before and after the Islamic revolution – as mafakher-e melli (“Sources of National Glory,” now the name of an IRIB television series celebrating those same controversial figures). Persian pride had trumped Shiʿite principles. Like St. Jerome and many other Church Fathers, who denounced paganism but could not forego their beloved Greek and Latin classics, Ayatollah Khomeini reputedly read Hafez in the evenings. His successor, Ayatollah Khameneʾi, eulogized his own mother first as a “Hafez-shenas” – a woman well versed in that same poet’s verse – and only afterward as “Qurʿanically knowledgeable.”²⁴ The triangle of “Islamic,” “Republic” and “Iran” – of religion, democracy and nationalism – serves as the arena in which one of the modern world’s most hard fought and fateful kulturkampfs is currently raging. This makes the ethos of present-day Iran complex, conflicted, and indeed – despite the monochrome chadors (lit. “tents”) worn by many of the country’s more devout women – quite colorful. The laconic press release about murder and municipality with which we opened this conclusion, then, becomes far less generic and far more uniquely Iranian and Islamic when we pick it apart or read between the lines, and elucidate even just a few of the assumptions, allusions and associations embedded in the words making it up. Iranians are, albeit, very much like the rest of us: they play in the park with their children in the afternoon; wrestle with run-away inflation and impossible government bureaucracy; work out in state-of-the-art fitness centers and undergo plastic (and gender reassignment) surgery; spend inordinate amounts of time on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (clerics too); throw lavish parties (where the alcohol often flows freely); buy fancy cars (when they can afford them); and of late, battle the scourge of Covid-19 in much the same way as every other country on earth.²⁵ They are like us; and yet, in many respects, they are not like us. States, societies, cultures and religions remain – despite decades of “globalization” and the

 Gozaresh-e kutah as zendegi-ye adabi-ye Khameneʾi, https://web.archive.org/web/20130129052905/ http://farsi.khamenei.ir/others-page?id=9369; see also sheʿri keh az madar beh yadegar mand, https:// farsi.khamenei.ir/memory-content?id=3593. Last accessed 12/10/2022.  It was hard to miss the irony when the inordinate amount of gloating in the West about the devastation wreaked on Iran by the Corona crisis at the outset of the plague’s spread, was rapidly overtaken by the soaring statistics in Italy, France, Spain, Britain and of course, the United States. No one is gloating anymore.

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wishful thinking of many a post-modernist homogenizer – profoundly different the world over, and today’s Islamic Republic, in many ways the only genuine theocracy in modern times, is, one might say, more different than most. The attempt to understand, analyze and theorize the Iranian domestic experience, as well as Iran’s role on the international stage, based on one-size-fits-all premises purportedly applicable to all denizens of the globe or all political entities in equal measure, is, as we have argued, a spurious categorical imperative doomed to failure. This is all the more true when it comes to the beliefs and activities of the Shiʿite clerical class. To come to grips with the Iranian-Islamist polity that has metamorphosed into what is arguably one of the most salient actors and factors in present-day geo-politics – as well as one of the epicenters of the world-wide culture war – it is essential to go beyond the superficial, the platitudinous, the theoretical and the supposedly all-encompassing, and seek to penetrate the particular viscera of this singular and extraordinary commonwealth. Such a project requires a willingness, indeed an eagerness, to depart our comfort zone of familiar terms, concepts and outlooks and enter – and strive to be open to – a wholly other universe of discourse. The future of the Islamic Republic is uncertain. As the locus of the most acute struggle between two of the most powerful forces humanity has ever known – religion and modernity – Iran today is a powder keg that will explode and ignite with it many other polities and regions, whether in the direction of greater dedication to tradition or greater freedom from tradition, or both at the same time. So far from being a rogue pariah existing beyond the pale, the Islamic Republic is, in this sense, a microcosm of the rest of human society. It behooves us to watch closely the developments unfolding in the Khomeinist polity, not just because they represent “the other,” but because they represent ourselves.

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660

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Heern, Zachary, The Emergence of Modern Shi’ism: Islamic Reform in Iraq and Iran (Oneworld, 2015) Hovsepian-Bearce, Yvette, Out of the Mouth of the Leader: The Political Ideology of Ayatollah Khameneʾi (Routledge, 2017). Jahanbegloo, Ramin (ed.), Iran between Tradition and Modernity (Lexingtom Books, 2004) Katouzian, Homa, Iranian History and Politics, the Dialectic of State and Society (Routledge, 2003) Kamrava, Mehran, Iran’s Intellectual Revolution (Cambridge, 2008) Keddie, Nikki, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2006) Keshavarz, Fatemeh, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (The University of North Carolina Press, 2007) Kramer, Martin (ed.), Shiʿism, Resistance and Revolution (Westview Press, 1987) Litvak, Meir, Shi’i Scholars of 19 th Century Iraq: The Ulama of Najaf and Karbala (Cambridge, 2002) Litvak, Meir (ed.), Constructing Nationalism in Iran: From the Qajars to the Islamic Republic (Routledge, 2017) Majd, Hooman, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Revolutionary Iran (Anchor Press, 2009) Majd, Hooman, The Ayatollah’s Democracy: An Iranian Challenge (W. W. Norton, 2011) Majd, Hooman, The Ministry of Guidance Invites you to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (Anchor, 2014) Menashri, David, Iran After Khomeini: Revolution at a Crossroads (Washington Enterprise Institute, 1997) Merkhavi, Menachem, National Symbols in Modern Iran: Identity, Ethnicity and Collective Memory (Syracuse University Press, 2019) Milani, Abbas, The Shah (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2012) Milani, Abbas, The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Image Publishers, 2009) Mirsepassi, Ali, Political Islam, Iran and the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2011) Modarressi, Hossein, Crisis and Consolidation in the Formative Period of Shiʿite Islam (Darwin Press, 1993) Mottahedeh, Roy, The Mantle of the Prophet (Oneworld, 2008) Moin, Baqer, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah (I. B. Tauris, 2009) Nabavi, Negin (ed.), Iran: From Theocracy to the Green Movement (Palgrave, 2012), Rajaee, Farhang, Islamism and Modernism: The Changing Discourse in Iran (University of Texas Press, 2007) Richard, Yann, Iran: A Social and Political History since the Qajars (Cambridge, 2021) Rieffer-Flanagan, Barbara Ann, Evolving Iran: An Introduction to Politics and Problems in the Islamic Republic (Georgetown, 2013) Saikal, Amin, Iran Rising: The Survival and Future of the Islamic Republic (Princeton University Press, 2019) Schirazi, Asghar, The Constitution of Iran: Politics and State in the Islamic Republic (I. B. Tauris, 1998) Sciolino, Emily, Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (Free Press, 2005) Secor, Laura, Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran (Riverhead Books, 2016) Straw, Jack, The English Job: Understanding Iran and Why it Distrusts Britain (Biteback Publishing, 2019) Takeyh, Ray, Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic (Holt, 2007) Takeyh, Ray, Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs (Oxford, 2011) Vahdat, Farzin, God and Juggernaut: Iran’s Intellectual Encounter with Modernity (Syracuse University Press, 2002)

Index of Persons Amjad, Mahmud 196, 202, 252 f. Ansari, Morteza 10, 16, 38, 42, 163, 277, 299, 307 f., 310 f., 348, 480, 499, 503, 528, 544, 546, 573, 576, 593, 651 Araki, Mohammad Ali 5, 82 Azeri-ye Qomi, Ahmad 599

Hasani, Gholamreza 128 Hosayniian, Ruhollah 236

Badla, Hosayn 312 Baha al-Dini, Reza 202 Behbehani, Vahed 10, 132, 304, 312, 368, 499, 502 f., 508, 520, 529 f., 543, 634 Beheshti, Mohammad 4 f., 11, 42, 86, 178, 192, 352, 524, 535, 602 Bojnurdi, Musavi 127 Borqe’i, Abu’l Fazl 529 Borujerdi, Alavi 4, 36, 111, 231, 236 f., 500, 506, 513 f., 518 – 520, 527 – 539, 547 – 551, 554 f., 565, 654 – 656 Borujerdi, Hosayn Ali 4, 36, 111, 231, 236 f., 500, 506, 513 f., 518 – 520, 527 – 539, 547 – 551, 554 f., 565, 654 – 656

Karroubi, Mehdi 54, 125 f., 129, 174, 178, 182, 195, 202, 249, 609 Kashani, Abol-Qasem 487, 509, 518 – 520, 527, 530, 622, 629 Khalkhali, Sadeq 58, 128, 195, 235, 330, 549 Khamene’i, Ali Hosayni 254 Khamushi, Mehdi 459 Khaqani, Mohammad Taher-Shubayr 82 Khatami, Mohammad 3, 125 f., 128 f., 137, 173, 175, 179, 182, 184 f., 191, 203, 250, 253, 358, 389, 642, 656 Khomeini, Ruhollah 1, 4, 10 – 12, 14, 18 f., 21, 44 f., 47, 50, 54, 56, 58, 69 f., 72, 75, 77 – 79, 81, 84 – 86, 92, 94 – 98, 101 – 105, 116, 120, 123, 125 – 127, 129, 142, 149 f., 153, 157, 160, 175 – 178, 180, 182 – 185, 188 – 195, 202 – 204, 206 f., 214 f., 217, 229, 237, 243, 251 – 253, 255, 257, 295, 302, 313, 315, 317 – 319, 327 – 330, 332 f., 335 – 339, 343 f., 349 – 352, 354, 358, 365, 368 f., 375, 379, 397, 450, 460, 480, 484 – 486, 488, 493 f., 504 f., 507 f., 518 – 522, 524 – 528, 531 – 534, 537 f., 549 – 560, 563 f., 568 – 570, 574 – 577, 579 – 585, 590, 593 – 614, 618, 622 – 624, 626, 637, 640 – 644, 649, 656 f. Khorasani, 82, 456, 507 f., 513, 518

Daneshi, Gholam Hosayn 594 Daneshmand, Mehdi 513 Darvaze’i, Mehdi-ye Amini-Moharrer Dastgheib, Abd al-Hosayn 154

515, 532

Eslami, Reza 46, 153, 186, 207, 303, 311, 354, 493, 510, 602, 621, 624, 628, 638, 643 Eslami-ye Qra’ati, Ali 153 Falsafi, Mohammad Taqi 5, 314 f., 524, 533, 553, 648 f. Fazlollah-e Nuri, Shaykh 5, 73, 507, 514, 571 Ferdowsi-Pur, Esma’il 631 Ghiffari, Hadi 58, 128, 196, 516 Golpayegani, Mohammad Reza 5, 82, 535, 548 f., 552, 554, 633 Ha’eri-ye Yazdi, Shaykh Abdolkarim Hakim, Mohsen 51, 534, 554 Hamidzadeh, Akbar 154 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111026183-020

537

Jannati, Ahmad 5, 133, 159, 209, 241, 250, 627 f., 639 Javadi-ye Amoli, Abdollah 5, 460, 538

Lankerani, Javad Fazel

5, 82, 384, 599, 630, 688

Makarem-e Shirazi, Naser 5, 57, 257, 626 Mesbah-e Yazdi, Mohammad Taqi 3, 12, 54, 102 f., 120, 123, 191, 215 f., 220, 334, 338, 391, 460, 524, 612, 632, 643 Modarres, Hasan 517 Mohaqqeq-e Damad, Mostafa 54, 179

662

Index of Persons

Montazeri, Hosayn Ali 5, 79, 82, 127 f., 181 f., 194 f., 197, 204, 317 f., 331, 352, 522, 524 f., 527, 537, 584 f., 595, 601 – 609, 622 f., 640 Motahhari, Morteza 4 f., 11 f., 36, 43 – 46, 53, 72 f., 86, 93, 102, 150 – 153, 157, 190 – 192, 194 f., 235 f., 238, 243, 245, 250 f., 281, 293, 326, 332, 337, 339 – 343, 352, 354, 406 f., 465, 478, 487, 499, 524, 532, 535, 538, 542, 548, 583, 601, 651, 655 Mousavi, Hosayn 126, 184, 200, 204, 253, 355, 451, 605, 609 – 611 Mousavi-ye Ardebili, Abd al-Karim 305 Movahhedi-ye Kermani, Mohammad Ali 151, 153

Rastgu, Hasan 460 Rasuli-ye Mahallati, Sayyed Hashem 148, 373 Ruhani, Mohammad Sadeq 82, 358

Najafabadi, Ne’matollah Salehi 522 Najafi, Hasan 9 f., 82, 244, 312, 360, 495, 500, 528, 624, 646 – 650 Najafi-ye Ruhani, Ja’far 43 Nateq-e Nouri, Ali Akbar 184, 237, 253, 311, 533

Taj-Abadi, Reza 449 Taleqani, Mahmud 5, 11 f., 86, 307, 330, 344, 352, 524, 529, 549, 623, 633, 647 Taskhiri, Mohammad Ali 5 Tavakkol-e Kermani, Mohammad-e Hasan 597 Tavassoli, Mohammad Reza 175 f.

Panahian, Ali Reza

Safi al-Din, Hashem 216, 481 Sedighi, Kazem 163 – 165, 167, 169 f. Shahidi-Pur, Mohammad Reza 203 Shahrudi, Hashemi 179 f., 406 Shamsabadi, Abu’l Hasan 194, 522 Shirazi, Mirz Hasan 82, 111, 303, 352, 487, 489, 495 f., 506, 514, 528, 546 f., 549, 567, 634, 645 Sobhani, Ja’far 5, 82, 258, 459, 548 Soltani-ye Tabataba’i, Hosayn Ali 530

462

Rafsanjani, Akbar Hashemi 5, 126, 138, 176 – 178, 180 f., 183, 188, 198 f., 202 f., 206, 241, 253, 257, 300, 358, 609, 631, 633, 635

Yazdi, Shaykh Mohammad 4, 36, 69, 75, 100, 120, 133, 149, 210, 313, 451, 511, 513, 518, 525, 527, 530, 537, 551, 599, 612, 651 Yunesi, Ali 343, 655