Ruhollah Khomeini - Extremism in Islam

Ruhollah Khomeini was an interesting character - his opposition towards the Shah and support for the people suggests that he would be a democratic leader. However, he was quick to condemn the political left after rising in power, including the Soviet Union and especially the United States. He understood the people - Khomeini himself rose from poverty and perhaps a much more difficult situation than any Iranian. After investigating into his past, I realized that it is because of this poverty, combined with the dictatorship of the Shah and extreme situations around him, that exposed his mind to the extremism of Islam.

Islam is a religion worshipped by around 1.8 billion people around the world. The religion itself is the same as any other religion and should not be associated with religion. However, in comparison with Christianity which had already caused many conflicts in Europe, the influence of Islam in government and politics persisted through the modern era. Starting from the Islamization of Iran in 654 C.E. following the Muslim conquest of Persia, Islam had been the national religion and the basis of its laws. While religion also served as an integral part of the American constitution, there was a visible decline in its influence in politics over time. The intertwinement of politics and religion, two aspects of society that can be easily polarized, created the Sharia - or Islamic Law - which gave birth to the Muslim extremists we see today. The sharia is God's immutable divine law which came from four sources: the Quran, sunnah (authentic hadith), qiyas (analogical reasoning), and ijma (juridical consensus). Muslim legal schools have developed different ways of deriving sharia rulings from scriptural sources using a process called ijitihad. The divergence of the rulings of these schools generated serious religious and political conflicts in the Middle East. Although the creation of the sharia could be compared with the Western religious development of individualism and humanism, the Western world had long begun the secularization of their society before the sharia could reach that revolutionary phase. This incompatibility between the sharia and secular forms of government, human rights, freedom of thought, women's rights, and economy inevitability led to the alienation of American democracy, Western civilization, and political secularism in Iran.

How did the sharia influence Ruhollah Khomeini's political views? Khomeini's ancestry had long been influenced by the fiqh, or human scholarly interpretations of the sharia. Towards the end of the 18th century, Khomeini's ancestors migrated from Nishapu, Khorasan Province, in the northeastern part of Iran, to the kingdom of Awadh, then ruled by the Persian Twelver Shia Muslims who endorsed Persian scholars, poets, jurists, architects, and painters. The constant influence of Muslim intellectuals and artists allowed the family to cultivate a deep understanding of the fiqh. Under this family, Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini was born on September 24, 1902, in Khomeyn, Markazi Province. In spite of his father's murder soon after his birth, he began diligently studying the Aur'an and elementary Persian at an early age of six. His local school was also heavily influenced by religion. His relatives, who had developed a deep understanding of religion from a scholarly and political context, assisted him through his religious education. He continued his religious path and studied under the Ayatollah Abdul Karim Haeri Yazdi in 1920. Khomeini's studies included the sharia and the fiqh and took up interests in poetry and philosophy (irfan). Khomeini pursued his interest with great teachers, including Mirza Ali Akbar Yazdi,, Javad Aqa Maleki Tabrizi, Rafi'i Qazvini, Mulla Sadra, Ibn Arabi, and perhaps the most influential of them all, Mirza Muhammad 'Ali Shahabadi, whose studies gave birth to gave birth to key scriptures, institutions, and religious people of Iran. Khomeini's diverse interests in literature, poetry, and philosophy and his diligent studies allowed him to become a leading scholar of Shia Islam. He taught political philosophy, Islamic history and ethics, inspiring his students, including Morteza Motahhari, to later become leading Islamic philosophers.

Ruhollah Khomeini's expansive studies allowed him to explore the nuances of Iran's sociopolitical environment. His seminary teaching often focused on the importance of religion to practical social and political issues of the time. As expected from his study of the sharia, he opposed secularism strongly and condemned many modern innovations such as international time zones. As a result, his ideas often conflicted with the Shah's pursuit of Westernization. At the age of 61, Khomeini took the opportunity given by the deaths of religious and political leaders Sayyed Husayn Borujerdi (1961) and Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani (1962) to be more involved in Iranian politics. His opposition against the Shah became apparent to the public after the Shah's announcement of the "White Revolution", a six-point programme of economic and land reform, in January 1963. He issued a powerful declaration denouncing the Shah and his plans on January 22, 1963, and continued his denunciation of the Shah's programmes by issuing a manifesto boring the signatures of eight other senior Iranian Shia religious scholars. Following a series of oppositions toward the Shah, he was detained in Qom and transferred to Tehran. He was again arrested in November 1964 and held for half a year when he denounced both the Shah and the United States regarding the presence of Ameican military personnel in Iran. When he refused to apologize after his imprisonment, he was exiled to Turkey.

Khomeini's exile only elevated his status in Iran. Many saw him as a national hero who sacrificed himself for justice in Iran. By the late 1960s, Khomeini was recognized as a marja-e-taqlid (model for imitation) for "hundreds of thousands" of Shia. When he was allowed to move to Najaf, Iraq in October 1965, he gave lectures there on Islamic government, later published as a book titled Islamic Government or Islamic Government: Governance of the Jurist. His ideas on governance, coupled with his religious appeal, greatly attracted and influenced Iranian revolutionaries during his exile. Cassette copies of his lectures fiercely denouncing the Shah became common items in the markets of Iran. Khomeini himself reached out to Islamic reformists and secular enemies of the Shah to undermine the Shah's authority over the people in spite of his ideological incompatibility with them. Thousands of kilometers away from Iran in Paris on his exile, Khomeini was able to rise up to be the head of opposition to the Shah after the 1977 death of Ali Shariati, an Islamic reformist and political revolutionary at that time.

We have already gone over in class the influence of Khomeini as he returned from his 14-year-long exile on Thursday, February 1, 1979. Up to five million people welcomed his return, and his movement reached a climax. The Bakhtiar regime collapsed on February 11, ten days after his arrival in Iran. The Islamic Republic replaced the monarchy on March 30 and 31 with 98% voting in favor of it. From the perspective of an Iranian or perhaps even the reader of this article, Khomeini was a hero who rose in power through diligence and discipline. He ruled with an iron fist, following his beliefs justified by decades of research in philosophy, literature, religion, and politics. If "Extremism in defense of Liberty is no vice", extremism in defense of Islam, to Khomeini, is definitely no vile act.

On the flight to Tehran, Khomeini was asked by a reporter how he felt returning to his home country after a long exile. Khomeini replied "Nothing". His intelligence and experience built up his authority, but one can argue that it was the years spent on searching for the ideal sociopolitical landscape for Islam in Iran which deprived him of sympathy for his own people.