Khomeini

<html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Khomeini</title> <script id="nyt-capsule-data" type="text/json"> { "lastTransform": "2018-04-08T05:58:10.302Z" } </script> <script src="https://archive.nytimes.com/_capsule/nyt-capsule.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="https://archive.nytimes.com/_capsule/nyt-capsule.css"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" vlink="#444464" link="#000066" background="https://static01.nyt.com/images/back.c.gif"> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td align="left" width="600" valign="top"> <img src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/pixel.gif" border="0" width="600" height="1"> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td align="left" valign="top" width="60"> </td> <td align="left" valign="top" width="480"> <img src="https://static01.nyt.com/books/images_br/1banbookreview.gif" border="0" width="468" height="40" alt="alt=banner"> <map name="maintoolbar2"> <area shape="rect" coords="0,0,75,16" href="https://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/" onmouseover="window.status='Click to go to the Home Page';return true"> <area shape="rect" coords="76,0,154,16" href="https://www.nytimes.com/info/contents/siteindex.html" onmouseover="window.status='Click to see site contents';return true"> <area shape="rect" coords="155,0,233,16" href="https://www.nytimes.com/search/daily/" onmouseover="window.status='Click to search the current site';return true"> <area shape="rect" coords="234,0,312,16" href="https://www.nytimes.com/comment/" onmouseover="window.status='Click for discussion in the Forums';return true"> <area shape="rect" coords="313,0,391,16" href="https://www.nytimes.com/archives/" onmouseover="window.status='Click to search the archives';return true"> <area shape="rect" coords="392,0,468,16" href="https://www.nytimes.com/marketplace/" onmouseover="window.status='Click to visit the Marketplace';return true"> </map> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/images/maintoolbar2.map"> <img src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/maintoolbar2.gif" border="0" alt="toolbar" ismap usemap="#maintoolbar2" width="468" height="16"></a> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <blockquote> <blockquote> <a href="http://barnesandnoble.bfast.com/booklink/click?sourceid=56130&ISBN=0312264909"> <img src="https://static01.nyt.com/books/images_br/bnbuy.gif" width="168" height="56" border="0" align="right"></a> <img src="http://barnesandnoble.bfast.com/booklink/serve?sourceid=56130&ISBN=0312264909" border="0" width="1" height="1"> CHAPTER ONE Khomeini Life of the Ayatollah By BAQER MOIN St. Martin's Press <img src="https://static01.nyt.com/books/images_br/firstdot.gif" height="5" width="5"> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/08/27/reviews/000827.27sciolit.html">Read the Review</a> <hr> The Orphan Childhood in Khomein Khomein lies deep in the vast semi-arid areas of central Iran some 200 kilometres to the north-west of Isfahan, the magnificent capital of the Safavid Shahs, and 40 kilometres south of the city of Sultanabad-Arak. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was the administrative centre of Kamareh, a district of Golpayegan province. Yet in today's terms it was no more than a large village with a population of around 2,000 divided into 800 households. Built on the west bank of a tributary of the Qom river, it consisted of a main street fed by numerous alleys, a small shrine covered with blue and white tiles, three caravanserais, three bath houses and a great cluster of mud-brick houses plastered with a mixture of clay and straw to protect them from the eroding effects of the occasional downpour of rain and the ever-blowing wind. The little town was constantly threatened by marauding tribesmen. For this was the country of the Lurs, notorious for their unruly ways until the 1920s when they were pacified under Reza Shah. Khomein was all the same a rather prosperous place. A constant traffic of carts, donkeys and camels made its way through the market place carrying goods along one of the main trade routes between the Persian Gulf ports in the south and the capital, Tehran, to the north. It was surrounded by rich fields of grain, abundant orchards and good pasturelands all watered by the carefully channelled melting snows of the nearby Zagros mountains. A little further afield were some of the finest vineyards in the region from which a dozen or so Jewish families in the nearby village of Lilian produced a very fine araq (spirits).     Ruhollah Khomeini was born on 24 September 1902 in a house that stood in a large garden on the eastern edge of the village. A spacious two-storied structure built around three courtyards in a style common to the homes of the prosperous throughout provincial Iran, it had cool balconies and two tall watchtowers — one overlooking the river to the fields beyond and the other the surrounding streets and gardens. Throughout Khomeini's childhood this large fortified compound was alive with activity. His widowed mother Hajieh Khanum rented the andaruni, the old family and women's quarters, to the provincial governor's deputy in Kamareh who used the first floor as his offices and the second as a billet for his guards. Hajieh Khanum herself lived with her five children, her sister-in-law, her co-wife and their guards and servants in what was known as the biruni, the outer courtyard of the house normally used for guests and as the men's quarter.     Outside the house, on almost any warm evening, noisy groups of boys would play in the street. A favourite game among them was `the thief and the vizier' (dozd-o-vazir) in which a thief is captured by guards and brought to the court of a king who commands his vizier to have the wretched man punished. Ruhollah Khomeini loved dozd-o-vazir. He was a particularly striking boy of above average build, and he had a decorum that betrayed his membership in one of the more prominent families of the area. Even his friends seem to have noticed the difference between themselves and this charismatic child, for whenever he joined the game he was at least the vizier, if not the Shah himself. `Even as a youngster, my father always wanted to be the Shah in the games he played,' says Khomeini's son Ahmad.     Khomeini's family are Musavi seyyeds; that is they claim descent from the Prophet through his daughter's line and the line of the seventh Imam of the Shi`a, Musa al-Kazem. They are believed to have come originally from Neishabur, a town near to Mashhad in north-eastern Iran. In the early eighteenth century the family migrated to India where they settled in the small town of Kintur near Lucknow in the Kingdom of Oudh whose rulers were Twelver Shi`a — the branch of Islam which became the official state religion in Iran under the Safavids and to which the majority of Iranians adhere today. Ruhollah's grandfather, Seyyed Ahmad Musavi Hindi, was born in Kintur and was a contemporary and relative of the famous scholar Mir Hamed Hossein Hindi Neishaburi whose voluminous history of the religion, the Abaqat al-Anwar, is sometimes described as the pride of Indian Shi`ism.     Seyyed Ahmad left India in about 1830 to make a pilgrimage to the shrine city of Najaf in present-day Iraq, and possibly to study at one of its famous seminaries. He never returned. In Najaf he struck up a friendship with Yusef Khan Kamareh'i, a landowner who lived in the village of Farahan not far from Khomein who persuaded Ahmad to return to Iran with him. It is thought that the two men made the journey around 1834. Five years or so later, in 1839, Ahmad purchased the large house and garden in Khomein which was to remain in his family for well over a century and a half. Whether he had brought money with him from India or made it in Iran, he was clearly at this time a man of substance as the 4,000-square-metre property cost him the very large sum of 100 tomans. He had already married two wives from the district, Shirin Khanum and Bibi Khanum, and in 1841 he took a third, his friend Yusef Khans sister Sakineh. Ahmad had only one child from his first two marriages, but Sakineh gave him three daughters and a son Mostafa, who was born in 1856. The family continued to prosper as, over the next decade, Ahmad bought land in the small villages of the region, and in Khomein itself an orchard and a caravanserai. He died in 1869 and, as he had instructed in his will, the family took his body by mule to the holy city of Karbala for burial.     Still a young boy at the time of his father's death, Khomeini's father Mostafa, as was customary in those days, trained for the family's religious profession. He studied first in a seminary in nearby Isfahan and then in Najaf and Samarra. He seems to have arrived in Najaf in 1891 with his first wife, Hajieh Agha Khanum, the daughter of Mirza Ahmad Mojtahed-e Khonsari, a high-ranking cleric well-known in central Iran. For a young member of a clerical family this was an exhilarating time to be in the holy city. Just a few months earlier, the Qajar king of Iran, Nasser al-Din Shah, had granted a monopoly over the country's large tobacco business to the British Imperial Tobacco Company in return for an annual payment of £15,000. The measure had enraged all kinds of people — the landlords and peasants who grew tobacco crops, the large merchants who exported them, the more humble tradesmen who sold tobacco in the country's bazaars and the many Iranian men and women who habitually enjoyed the water pipe with their friends and family. Responding to the anger, in December 1891 Mirza Hassan Shirazi, the leading divine of the Shi`a who lived in Najaf, issued a fatwa banning the use of tobacco by the faithful. Throughout Iran, even in the royal harem, people obeyed his call, forcing the Shah to climb down and cancel the concession. Whether Mirza Hassan himself had issued the fatwa, or whether, as one historian persuasively argues, it was dreamt up by the country's threatened tobacco merchants, the effect was to vastly increase the prestige of the clergy in Iran's great trading cities and to mark the beginning of their active involvement in contemporary politics.     Mostafa studied in the Atabat or `sacred threshholds', the collective name given to the Shi`i shrine cities of Iraq, until 1894 when, at about the age of thirty-nine, he received what is known as `permission to exercise ejtehad' (ejazeh-ye ejtehad), a qualification that allowed him to issue his own interpretations of religious law and principle and put him in the senior rank of the Shi`i clerical hierarchy. His first child, a girl, was born in Najaf soon after he and his wife arrived there. Five more children followed his return to Khomein, three sons and two daughters. The eldest son, Morteza, was born in 1896 and lived to be 101; the second, Nureddin, became a lawyer in Tehran; Ruhollah was the third. The family was still wealthy and when Mostafa died he left them an annual income of 100-200 tomans from his properties, a very considerable sum in days when it was calculated that an individual required just one toman a month for his or her upkeep.     In a memoir written in his old age Morteza, Mostafa's eldest son, remarks that his father took no part in the `religious affairs' (omur-e shari`) of Khomein. Although he does not elaborate, it is probable that by this he means that Mostafa did not carry out, or live by, any of the many specific functions that the clergy carried out in traditional Iranian society. Mollahs supervised not only people's personal religious affairs but also social, educational and judicial matters. Often, especially in larger towns, these functions were separated. Private tutors who worked with children educated beyond the level of the traditional primary schools were nearly always mollahs who would teach a range of subjects — language, calligraphy, mathematics, literature as well as the religious sciences. Or a mollah might have specialised in legal matters acting as a notary public or, if he was properly qualified (had gained his `permission' in other words), as a judge at one of the country's many religious courts which in those days enjoyed wide, often vaguely defined jurisdiction over both criminal and civil matters. Or he may have concentrated on one or another of the purely spiritual functions of the clergy and worked as a prayer leader, a preacher or a chanter of religious stories (rowzehkhan).     A good mollah in a smaller place often combined many of these functions. A sort of country vicar extraordinary, he was at the same time spiritual guide, judge, notary, teacher, preacher and entertainer. He would be asked to speak the word of God in a child's ear after it was born, Islam's form of baptism. He often taught children and young people the principles of Islam. He officiated at their marriages and legalised their divorces, acted as notary to sign and seal their land, household and water transactions. He preached to them, eulogising the martyrdom of the saints and the Imams. Above all he guided them in their daily religious practices from the cradle to the grave. For the ordinary believer, whatever his or her social class, the mollah was an essential companion in the most intimate moments of life: birth, prayer, marriage and death. And he was especially needed to ensure their entry to paradise.     This wide-ranging remit meant that the Iranian clergy as a body enjoyed a special prestige among a highly religious and deeply superstitious people; and individual clerics were particularly valued if, like Khomeini's family, they could claim descent from the prophet. Yet a rather low social status was attached to some of the specific functions they carried out, and the whiff of corruption that sometimes surrounded even the more prestigious occupations, such as that of the shari`a judge, meant that members of landed clerical families would usually stand aloof from such work. They nevertheless maintained the tradition of religious learning which gave them the social influence and the country-wide social connections that were so vital to maintaining a family's position in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Iran.     Mostafa seems to have belonged firmly to this category and to have lived the life of a landed provincial notable whose clerical background, wide-ranging connections in the region, and strong personality enabled him to become something of a community leader. Inevitably, hagiographical accounts of Mostafa's character have, given the almost god-like status achieved by his youngest son and the lack of contemporary records, proliferated since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. These tend to portray him as a man who came to be a popular and influential figure because he was `close to the ordinary people' and, unlike many clerics and chiefs `stood by the small farmers and peasants in their problems with the landlords and government officials.' There may well be an element of truth in such claims. But the noble qualities they attribute to a man of this period were of a different kind than those implied by the vocabulary of modern populist politics. The role a man like Mostafa played in his community should be seen against the background of the lawlessness and insecurity that prevailed in many areas of provincial Iran in his day and the idealised function, in such circumstances, of the good `notable'.     Rural society in nineteenth-century Luristan was made up of a complicated, chaotic web of settled and migrating tribes and sub-tribes, large and small landowners and the peasantry who worked the land. Disputes over rights to land and water and, where landowners behaved unfairly with their peasants, over the division of crops, were rife and the settled population lived in constant fear of raids by armed and highly mobile tribesmen. Although it had its officials in the area, central government was not strong enough to have much of a presence. Tax collection and the business of maintaining order were usually farmed out to powerful local landowners who kept private armies, and all too often exploited their position to enrich themselves at the expense both of ordinary people and the government. `The khans and the princes were very powerful at the time,' Mostafa's eldest son Morteza recalls: `They had guns. They were oppressive ... princes and khans oppressed the governor and the governor oppressed the people.' In this context, people needed the protection that a well-connected wealthy man like Mostafa could provide. `Our father,' says Morteza, `was well-supplied with rifles and riflemen which he used not only to protect his land but to help others.'     But such a position carried its own dangers. On a cold day in March 1903, less than six months after the birth of his third son Ruhollah, Mostafa was shot and mortally wounded on the road from Khomein to Arak. He was only forty-seven-years-old. A number of imaginative stories have circulated since the 1979 revolution about this incident. One of these suggests that Mostafa had ordered the execution of a man for publicly violating the Ramadan fast and that he was murdered by the man's relatives in revenge. Khomeini's son Ahmad tells another, very different tale tinged with both illicit romance and a strong hint of populist political motive. The Shah was at the time on a visit to Arak and had summoned Mostafa to his presence. On hearing of the invitation Mostafa's sister Sahebeh became anxious about her brother's safety and insisted that he take armed men with him. Mostafa refused, left Khomein on his own and was murdered on the way to Arak. The distraught Sahebeh immediately organised a party to track down the murderer. However, it soon became apparent that her daughter was in love with one of the assassins, and tried on several occasions to warn him of his imminent arrest. The men were eventually discovered by reluctant local officials who took them to prison in Tehran. Sahebeh and her daughter were also taken to the capital as witnesses at the interrogation. On the journey the desperate girl pleaded with her mother to show mercy and to stop the execution, but Sahebeh adamantly refused. When they returned to Khomein her daughter dressed for months in mourning black, ostensibly for her Uncle Mostafa; but it was an open secret that the man for whom she was mourning was in fact her lover and her uncle's assassin.     An account that is undoubtedly closer to the truth and just as intriguing is that given by Morteza, who was only eight-years-old at the time of his father's death, but, as his eldest male heir, was deeply involved in the events that followed it. It is worth paraphrasing in some detail for the vivid picture it provides of the society into which Khomeini was born.     In the second and third years of the twentieth century, life for the people of Khomein was, Morteza relates, made particularly miserable by three local khans — Bahram, Mirza Qoli Soltan and Ja`far Qoli — whose predatory ways oppressed the population. The worst of them, Bahram Khan, was arrested and jailed by Heshmat al-Dowleh, a powerful Qajar prince who owned huge tracts of land in the region. Bahrain Khan was later killed or died in prison, but his two companions continued to harass the people. As the situation got worse, Mostafa decided that something must be done and that he would go to Arak to ask the provincial governor, the Shah's son Azod al-Soltan, for help.     When they heard about Mostafa's plans, Mirza Qoli Soltan and Ja`far Qoli Khan approached him pretending they wanted to seek a position from the governor, presumably on the grounds that if they had a stable source of income they could afford to stop living by pillage and extortion. They asked Mostafa to allow them to travel with him. `My father replied,' says Morteza: `There is no need for you to come. I'll get a job for you from the governor.' Meanwhile, the wife of one of the khans, who was a daughter of Sadr al-Ulema, a local religious dignitary and a relative of the family, warned Mostafa that `they bear you ill will'. But Mostafa ignored her. `They won't dare to do a damn thing,' he said. He left for Arak, which was about two-day's journey from Khomein, with ten to fifteen horsemen and armed guards. The next day, as he was riding ahead of the party flanked by only two of his guards, Ja`far Khan and Mirza Qoli Soltan appeared on the roadside. They were unarmed. `You were supposed to stay in Khomein,' said Mostafa. `Well we didn't obey you,' they replied. `They offered our father sweets and then suddenly seized a rifle [from one of the guards] and ... aimed at his heart. The bullet went clean through the Qor'an my father had put in his shirt pocket and pierced his heart. He fell from his horse and died instantly.' The assassins escaped before the rest of the party could catch up.     News of the murder was taken without delay to Arak and a large group of clerics set out to collect Mostafa's body and accompany it back to the city. `Life in Arak came to a complete standstill that day' and elsewhere. In Tehran, Isfahan and Golpayegan, the news of Mostafa's murder was heard with dismay and services were held to mourn him. `In Khomein itself,' Morteza recalls, `there were displays of public grief and groups of mourners came to our home to offer their condolences ... the killer's house was burned down though I do not know whether this was the work of the government or the people. I was only eight and no one told me. But I saw the flames from the top of our watch tower. Their houses were burnt and their property confiscated.' They were, however, he adds in a footnote, `later returned to their heirs at the request of our family.'     The murderers had meanwhile escaped to the nearby villages of the Aligudarz area. Finding that no one was prepared to give them shelter they moved on to Khonsar, a small town many miles away, thinking that they could find sanctuary with Haj Mirza Mohammad Mehdi Khonsari `an important cleric who also had numerous difficulties with the government and so was always armed and had a great many riflemen.' But he, too, refused them. Finally, they returned to the environs of Khomein to hide with their families in an abandoned fortress in the village of Yujan. The prime minister, Amin al-Soltan, who had been informed of the incident by Seyyed Mohammad Kamareh'i, Mostafa's son-in-law who resided in Tehran, had by this time ordered their arrest. Meanwhile, Mostafa's family had gone to the governor's court in Arak to demand qesas or retribution — the customary procedure under Islamic law in such cases. But the wheels of justice proved to be painfully slow.     Despite Amin al-Soltan's orders, Ja`far Qoli and Mirza Qoli remained undisturbed in their hideout for the next six months, perhaps longer, until a new prime minister, the notorious Qajar strong man Ayn al-Dowleh, came to power. By this time Mostafa's heirs had obtained the support of Tehran's most powerful clerics — Seyyed Abolqassem the young Imam Jom`eh of Tehran, Seyyed Mohammad and Zahir al-Islam. The three men were brothers and the senior members of a family from whose ranks the Friday Imam (imam jom`eh), the leader of Friday prayers in the capital — the most important religious position in the country and the only position in the Shi`i hierarchy that was a government appointment — had been selected ever since the Safavid era. Zahir al-Islam was also, through his mother, the grandson of Nasser al-Din Shah.     On the brothers' request, Ayn al-Dowleh ordered Nasrollah Khan Sardar Heshmat, the son of Heshmat al-Dowleh, to arrest Mostafa's assassins. `Sardar Heshmat, who kept an armed troop in his village Heshmatieh, set out with his men for Yujan....' The soldiers surrounded the fort but Ja`far Khan and Mirza Qoli refused to surrender. Eventually, when all [other] efforts failed, the governor [sic] ordered his men to dig a tunnel under the fortress. The murderers resisted until their last bullet was spent ... and were finally arrested with members of their family and were taken to Tehran.' According to a report in the newspaper Adab the battle had lasted for three days.     Mirza Qoli Khan died in prison. But nothing was immediately done about Ja`far Qoli who, for reasons Morteza does not explain, had found a patron in Mozaffar al-Din Shah's court minister, Amir Bahador-e Jang. Amir Bahador had insisted that `... the past is the past ... we should not execute Ja`far Khan,' and had even instructed groups of ritual mourners commemorating the heroic death of Imam Hossein in the holy month of Moharram (1322) — March 1904 — to attack the prison and free him. But the plot was foiled when the prime minister ordered Ja`far Khan to be moved to a different prison just before the attack was scheduled to take place.     At this point Seyyed Abolqassem, Seyyed Mohammad and Zahir al-Islam, together with leading ulema in Sultanabad, intervened once more by issuing a decree condemning Ja`far Qoli to death. But their judgment was not immediately pursued, presumably because Amir Bahador was still protecting the man.     So back in Khomein Mostafa's family decided that if justice was to be done they would have to travel to Tehran to seek the intervention of the Shah. Before they left, the young Morteza and his seven-year-old brother Nureddin were invited to the home of Heshmat al-Dowleh with their male relatives. As a mark of the nobleman's respect and sympathy they were presented with the customary gift of new clothes, a turban and abba, the long woollen cloak worn by mollahs. Little Morteza was deeply impressed. The gift of a clerical outfit made of the finest material — as was usual with such ceremonial gifts, known as khalat — marked a coming of age. `We became turbaned,' he recalls, using a slang expression for the clergy. We set out for Tehran in April 1905 in the company of Nureddin, my elder sister, my aunt Sahebeh Khanum, our mother Hajieh Agha Khanum, our father's [second] wife Shahzdeh Agha, our mother's uncle Sheikh Fazlollah Raja'i and our servant Abbasqoli Abarqu'i. Imam [young Ruhollah], who was 4 months and 22 days old when our father was killed, and our two sisters, stayed behind with our servants. The journey took us ten days ... When we arrived in Tehran we rented a house in Abbasabad in the south of the city.     Once they had settled in, the whole family headed for the palace of Ayn al-Dowleh. They were taken to the prime minister's audience chamber where, as usual, a large crowd was gathered. The now ten-year-old Morteza, as Mostafa's eldest male heir, had been thoroughly schooled in the way to make a formal plea for retribution. When we moved forward to meet the prime minister he ordered some ten people to move back. He wore a long robe and had a huge moustache. I moved forward and took hold of [the hem] of his robe. I had been taught my lines with care and said to him in a sarcastic tone: `if you are just, we are not. Give us the killer and we will execute him ourselves.' Ayn al-Dowleh replied `No. I will execute the murderer. But Mozaffar al-Din Shah himself decreed that his own father's assassin should not be executed in the [holy] months of Moharram or Safar. We won't kill anyone in Moharram or Safar. If we don't kill him after that you can complain.' I replied `We will take sanctuary and remain in this building until you kill him.' He said `Fine. You stay here. My feet are aching and you have kept me standing too long. I'm tired.' Then they brought Zahir al-Islam to speak to us ... [and] he persuaded us to go home and wait.     Shortly after this audience Ayn al-Dowleh left Tehran to accompany Mozaffar al-Din Shah on a trip to Europe. The acting prime minister was Moshir al-Saltaneh who Morteza describes as `a Sufi learned in theology.' The family pursued their case with him. `We saw him in his garden and he took me in his arms and sat me on his knee. He treated us with great respect and said "the death warrant has been issued for the murderer. I will kill him".'     Later, probably as a means of demonstrating the court's sympathy for their case, the two young orphans were taken to the Golestan palace to visit the crown prince Mohammad Ali Mirza. `He had ordered that Nureddin and I should go alone ... I was ten and Nureddin was eight. We both wore our turbans. [The Crown Prince] stood next to a big pond in a court yard surrounded by trees. When he saw us he said "go back now".' The boys were conducted to an adjacent building and on the way they spotted Ja`far Qoli Khan with his neck in a chain held by a guard. `He was brought in and he sat down. He was an old man and he had become very fat. He swore that "I am not the murderer. They are lying. Please let me go'"     But the children showed no mercy and soon afterwards, on 9 May 1905, Ja`far Qoli was taken to the Baharestan, and area of Tehran where public executions were held, to meet his fate. `My brother and myself were not allowed to watch and were told to go home ... but others went to watch. The condemned man, the executioner and the Shah [sic] all wore red, as was the custom in those days. Ja`far Qoli was beheaded. The executioner took his head to the bazaar where he showed it to the merchants and shopkeepers who offered him tips.' Justice done, the family left Tehran immediately — just a few months before the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-6, the most momentous event in the history of early twentieth-century Iran, began to gather steam. In fact one of the first incidents of the build-up to the revolution had occurred just as they arrived in Tehran, although Morteza does not mention it. The capital's merchants, who were deeply upset by new customs tariffs drawn up by Monsieur Naus, the Belgian head of the customs administration, in an effort to find extra sources of income for the government, had closed their shops and taken sanctuary (bast, a traditional form of protest in Iran) at the shrine of Shah Abdolazim. At the same time, a photograph of Naus dressed in mollah's robes for a fancy-dress ball had been circulated among the clergy arousing huge indignation and guaranteeing their firm support for the merchants' cause. The merchant-clergy alliance which, a decade earlier, had succeeded in forcing the Shah to withdraw the Imperial Tobacco Company's concession, was once more on the move against an increasingly impecunious government.     This time, however, there was more at stake than just forcing a climb down over the customs tariffs. For one thing a sharp economic recession was producing generalised discontent in the urban areas of the country. But even more important, from the mid-1890s demands for political reform and for an end to British and Russian intervention in the affairs of the country, advanced at first by a small elite of intellectuals, bureaucrats and merchants who were deeply aware of the backwardness of Iranian society, had, with the advent of newspapers, begun to find a wider audience.     The demand for reform surfaced for the first time on the streets in December 1905 when the undercurrent of unrest which had simmered all summer burst out into the open when the prime minister ordered a group of prominent Tehran merchants to be bastinadoed in public for putting up the price of sugar. Their colleagues took sanctuary (bast) at the Shah mosque and crowds of people led by a coalition of religious figures and secular intellectuals, many of them reforming bureaucrats, began to fill the streets. The crowd demanded not just the dismissal of the prime minister Ayn al-Dowleh, but also an end to despotic rule and the establishment of a `house of justice', a sort of judicial council whose functions would be to abolish favouritism and to make all subjects equal before the law and which would be made up of representatives of the clergy, merchants, craft guilds and landowners and to be presided over by the Shah.     A month later Mozaffar al-Din Shah promised action, but he did nothing until he was forced by a more serious crisis which blew up in the summer of 1906. This time the trouble began with the death of a talabeh (a seminary student) who had been demonstrating in a crowd that was fired upon by the Shah's Cossack guard. Subsequently 14,000 people, many of them clergymen, took bast in the grounds of the British Embassy in Tehran and stayed there for around a month — a demonstration perhaps comparable in scale, given the very much smaller population of the capital in those days, to the huge demonstrations that ushered in the Iranian Revolution seven decades later. By that time the demand of the crowd had developed into one for a full-blown Western-style constitution and a representative assembly. In October the first National Consultative Assembly — the Majles-e Showra-ye Melli, known for short as the Majles, was opened, and in December 1906 the Shah signed the Constitutional Law on his deathbed. Although it heralded a major political change and caused much excitement and gossip throughout the country, the Constitutional Revolution did not immediately affect the daily life of people in places like Khomein, and certainly did not help to increase security. In fact the revolution severely weakened the central government's already fragile authority in the provinces and Morteza recalls that this was a time of widespread thievery and, for Khomein, frequent raids by the Lurs. He describes one such raid that took place on a cold March day just after the Iranian New Year, which falls on the Spring solstice. He and the rest of the family were paying the customary new year visit to friends in a different part of the town when the warning cry went up. `We got up and returned to our homes. When we got home we found that the gendarmerie had taken over our house and were shooting from the watch tower. I went up the tower and saw the tribesmen on their horses 100 to 200 zar` from Khomein, but the attack was repulsed.' All the same, korsis, charcoal burners covered by low tables and cotton-stuffed eiderdowns, were set up around the family's home so that the people of Khomein could take refuge there and sleep peacefully guarded by constables and by Morteza and Nureddin who gave them an enthusiastic helping hand.     The young Ruhollah was brought up in this bleak, somewhat hair-raising environment by his mother, his wet nurse Naneh Khavar and his Aunt Sahebeh, who had no children of her own and had moved back into the family home to help with her brother's orphaned brood. (There is no record of how this affected Sahebeh's relationship with her second husband, a wealthy landowner and merchant; her first, a certain Shokrollah Khan whose brother had become an outlaw, was killed in a skirmish.) Sahebeh seems to have been a major influence on the family and legends of her strength and courage abound. Ahmad, Khomeini's son, says that in the absence of a shari`a judge in Khomein, Sahebeh had once carried out his duties for a few days until a replacement could be appointed. If this story is true it is most unusual since in Islam women are not allowed to become judges. Ahmad also relates that: `Two rival groups of the people of Khomein were involved in a shooting incident. Sahebeh interfered and placed herself between the feuding factions, ordering them to stop shooting. Her power and charisma were such that they immediately obeyed her.'     Whether as a result of his genes, or of influences such as Sahebeh, Ruhollah was clearly a spirited child. The family recalls that he was very energetic, playing all day in the streets and coming home in the evening with his clothes dirty and torn, often bearing the wounds of scraps with his friends. He was also physically strong and his abilities meant that as he grew older he became something of a champion at sports. He could beat other boys in wrestling, but his favourite game was leapfrog and in this he was considered the local champion.     Like most other boys in Khomein — and throughout Iran at the time — when he was seven Ruhollah was sent to a local maktab run by a certain Akhund Mollah Abolqassem. In Arabic maktab means `place of writing', but in effect it was a `place of reading'. The teacher was usually, like Abolqassem, an old mollah or woman who taught the alphabet, the Qor'an and popular religious stories. Each child would take his food and a piece of cloth or an animal skin rug to sit on. Learning was by rote and the children would repeat in chorus the lines spoken by their teacher. In lessons of this kind their chanting gained its own musical momentum and on a quiet day could be heard from several hundred metres away.     Regulations in the maktabs were very harsh and punishment for mispronouncing a Qor'anic word was by today's standards torture. The suffering of the children who attended them was legendary. One of the nursery rhymes of those days was: `Wednesday I think. Thursday I enjoy. Friday I play. Oh unhappy Saturday: my legs are bleeding from the strokes of cherry-tree branches.' Schoolchildren dreaded Saturday, the first day of the Islamic week, and when the days lessons were over they felt as if they had been freed from prison.     At the maktab and at home Ruhollah would have first been taught to memorise by heart the last few chapters of the Qor'an, as well as a few phrases and words in Arabic about the Prophet and the Imams. In the absence of his father, the elders of the family — his brother, his aunt or his mother — would have taught him to recite the principles and precepts of Islam. Children are made to repeat these principles without any idea of the meaning of the words. For them the regular cadences of Persian made the task seem just like reciting a nursery rhyme: first, the oneness of God; second, the prophethood [of Mohammad]; third, justice; fourth, the imamate (the leadership of Mohammad's twelve successors) and fifth, the resurrection on the day of judgement.     Another channel through which Ruhollah would have been socialised into the culture of Shi`ism, this time in its popular form, would have been through the many religious festivals in the Shi`i calendar which, in the days before cinema and television, provided the main form of entertainment in a place like Khomein and were eagerly looked forward to. Most such festivals mark the birthdays of the Imams and the anniversaries of their martyrdom. For young and old alike their high point comes in the month of Moharram when children join in colourful processions, passion plays and the recitation of elegies and eulogies of the Imams and other martyrs.     Moharram is the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar, but for the Shi`a it is the month of mourning for the third Imam, Hossein, and his companions who were killed in the battle of Karbala on 10 October 680, the tenth day of the lunar month, known as Ashura. The events of that day are commemorated throughout the Shi`i world with great intensity. For the Shi`a, the martyrdom of Hossein is a historic moment rich in religious symbolism. It is represented in scholarly works, poetry and architecture, passion plays and other popular rites and evoked everywhere by orators, clerics, monarchs, politicians, revolutionaries, reactionaries and men of literature. This one moment acts as a focus for the sentiments of all Shi`i believers and was used later in his life by Khomeini as a point of departure for the mass movement he staged against the Shah.     The tragedy of Hossein was the culmination of a long dispute over the succession to the Prophet and the nature of religious and political leadership in early Islam. It is also the great issue which divides the Shi`a from the Sunnis. The Shi`a believe that, before his death, Mohammad designated his cousin and son-in-law Ali as his successor — as a divine act, not a personal choice. But Ali did not become the temporal leader or caliph of the community. Abu Bakr, the closest of the Prophet's `Companions' was elected by a congregation of the elders of Medina, Mohammad's capital, while Ali and his wife Fatemeh, the Prophet's only surviving child, were occupied with the funeral arrangements.     Abu Bakr survived for only two years and on his deathbed he appointed another leading Companion, Omar, as the new caliph. Omar, in his turn, appointed a council of six men, including Ali, to designate his successor and Osman ibn Affan was declared the third caliph. Osman was the longest serving of the early successors to Mohammad; but he became very unpopular and was accused of nepotism and corruption. He was eventually assassinated in 656, and Ali, who had by this time acquired a considerable following, was finally acclaimed the fourth caliph. Ali had not involved himself in the wars of conquest that had begun within two years of the Prophet's death and which had, by this time, brought large swathes of territory in the Middle East under Muslim control. He also, unlike many other members of the Meccan aristocracy, lived a simple ascetic life devoting himself to preaching and writing.     Nevertheless, Ali faced enormous difficulties, because the provincial governors of the Islamic Empire had been appointed by Osman, mostly from his own family, the Umayyads. The most powerful of these, Mo`awiya, the governor of Syria, refused to acknowledge Ali as caliph. In this he was supported by one of the Prophet's wives, Ayesha, who led an army against her son-in-law near Basra. Ali won the battle, but his efforts to guide the community and set it back on the correct Islamic path brought him more and more enemies. Two years later Mo`awiya marched an army against him at Siffin in Iraq. Ali's forces were on the point of victory when Mo`awiya's general ordered his soldiers to fasten Qor'ans to their spears, a signal that only God could decide the issue. Arbitration followed, largely to Ali's disadvantage. Not long afterwards Ali was mortally wounded in Kufa by an assassin, probably by one of a group of rebels known as Kharijites who believed that he should never have submitted to arbitration at Siffin. The caliphate passed to Mo`awiya; but for Ali's followers he was succeeded by his son Hassan, the second Shi`i Imam.     For the Shi`a, Mo`awiya's takeover signalled even greater decline in the purity of the Muslim community. When he was succeeded by his son Yazid it must have seemed that Islam as a religious movement was in grave danger. Yazid was well-known for his love of wine and the pleasures of court life and he showed little respect for the moral and legal changes that Islam had inaugurated. The growing discontent was led by Hossein, Ali's second son who had become the Imam upon the death of his brother Hassan. He first moved from Medina to Mecca to escape swearing allegiance to Yazid and, while there, he received messages from Kufa urging him to set up a rival government with the support of the townspeople. Hossein set out with a small armed detachment and several women and children, including his family. But Yazid had, meanwhile, frightened or bought off the Kufans. As a result, when Hossein reached the plain of Karbala he was met by some 4,000 of Yazid's troops.     Hossein seems to have been aware that a battle was impending, for he had several times urged his followers to leave him. His armed men are said to have numbered a mere seventy-two. A massacre ensued; all the fighting men were killed, and Hossein was the last to fall. His infant son Ali Asghar was struck by an arrow and the women and children were taken prisoner, first to Kufa and then to Yazid in Damascus. Hossein's surviving son Ali — better known as Zein al-Abedin — now became the fourth Shi`i Imam and he and the family were eventually allowed to return to Medina.     The passion plays staged in Iran during Moharram, known as ta`zieh, are a ritual re-enactment of this story. There are many different versions, each emphasising a different aspect in order to convey a particular religious truth. For example, on the day of Ashura the focus is usually on the battle of Karbala itself depicting the bravery of Hossein and the cruelty and corruption of his enemies. On other occasions the focus may be on Hossein's sister Zeinab, her journey in captivity with the rest of his family, and her brave and dignified conduct in the court of Yazid.     These same stories are also related throughout the year in another ritual of popular Shi`ism, the rowzehkhani. Rowzehkanis are held in people's houses or in neighbourhood mosques. Most of the preachers who conduct these ceremonies have a repetoire of a dozen or so stories about the different personalities of the Battle of Karbala which they will be asked to relate as the occasion demands. For example, if a family loses a child they may ask for the story of little Ali Asghar through which they can mourn their own loss. These are always highly charged, emotional occasions and, even if the rowzeh is organised to mark a happy occasion, a skilled preacher will construct the plot of his story in a way that will, without losing the flow, relate it to the martyrdom of Hossein and bring his audience to tears.     Through these popular ritual observations children are indoctrinated with the Shi`i version of history. The constant themes of sadness and morbidity in them reflect the ever-present sense among the Shi`a that they are an oppressed community who have been wronged historically. The Prophet and all Imams and saints were wronged by their enemies, and it is the duty of the faithful to seek revenge. This struggle between truth and falsehood, haq and batel, and the resulting tendency to see things in black and white is imprinted on children's minds and can remain with them for the rest of their lives. There are no grey areas and it is only through revenge that things can be put right.     But Shi`ism was not the only element of the cultural environment in which the children of literate families, even very strict religious families, grew up. The great classics of Persian literature were also read to them from a very early age and they would be encouraged to learn poetry by heart. On long winter nights families would sit together around the korsi to read and recite passages from the Shahnameh (Ferdowsi's Book of Kings), tales from A Thousand and One Nights or the poetry of Hafez and Sa`di. These and other great works of literature inject a more complex picture of life which has an altogether more questioning feel about it. The culture of literature and the culture of religion often blatantly contradict one another; and yet they have coexisted for centuries in the Iranian psyche.     There is much to suggest that Khomeini's family was no exception to this pattern. His brother relates that, by the time he reached his teens, Ruhollah had memorised hundreds of verses by different poets, both religious and classical. There is indeed hardly a major poet whom he has not quoted in his later writings. He also, from his teens, knew how to versify and would often, later in life, write his own poetry as a pastime. This was a skill learnt by boys in clerical and other literate households through the mosha`ereh, or verse contest, a game in which two or more would exchange lines of poetry. The rules of mosha`ereh are varied, but the most common form is to begin a line of verse with the same letter used at the end of the competing side's line.     Ruhollah remained in the maktab until he was about seven and then attended a school built in Khomein by the constitutional government as part of its effort to modernise Iran's educational system. In addition to Persian language and literature, at this school he would have had an elementary training in subjects such as arithmetic, history, geography and some very basic science. He also had private tutors: Sheikh Ja`far his mother's cousin, Mirza Mahmud Eftekhar al-Ulama who had been his brother's tutor and whom Morteza describes as `not very literate' (and certainly a much inferior teacher to Mirza Mahmud's mother who would stand in for him when he took his annual trip to Isfahan) and Sheikh Hamza Mahallati who taught him calligraphy. When he was fifteen he started learning Arabic grammar in a serious fashion with Morteza, who had studied Arabic and theology in Isfahan. Morteza, who had a good hand, also worked with his younger brother on his calligraphy and relates how their handwriting became so alike that he would write half a letter, give it to Ruhollah to complete, and then wait to see whether anyone could tell the difference. The brothers' conspiracy was never discovered!     Khomeini's childhood drew to a close towards the end of the First World War when his mother and aunt both died in the terrible cholera epidemic that raged through Iran in 1918. He was sixteen and about to enter the seminary. But political events in far off Tehran during his childhood and adolescence meant that the country he was to live in as a young man was very different from the society in which he had been born and brought up. The Constitutional Revolution had gone through many ups and downs since the victorious months of late 1906. Aided by the Russians, Mozaffar al-Din Shah's successor, the reactionary Mohammad Ali Shah, had in 1907 moved against the constitutional government and had eventually succeeded in abolishing the Majles and arresting the constitutionalist leaders. Riots had flared up all over the country and armed revolutionaries took the northern city of Tabriz declaring the Shah deposed. By this time, however, the constitutional cause was a truly nationwide affair and in the summer of 1909 tribesmen from the great Bakhtiari confederation marched on the capital from the south while, simultaneously, a hastily assembled army of constitutionalists approached from Rasht in the north. Mohammad Ali Shah was deposed and succeeded by his eleven-year-old son, Sultan Ahmad.     The Shah's counter-revolution had been supported by a group of clergymen led by Sheikh Fazlollah Nuri, Tehran's most learned cleric and one of Khomeini's heroes in his later life. Like many of the clergy, Sheikh Fazlollah had at first sympathised with the constitutional movement's opposition to tyranny and the demand to apply the law. However, after he had attended a few sessions of the first Majles, he realised that its function was to make laws. For Sheikh Fazlollah, Man could not make law and the role of a parliament should only be to ratify and enforce shari`a-based laws. Some of the clergy still argued in favour of the Majles — generally on the grounds that the Qor'an enjoined consultation and in the modern world the Muslim community was in need of legislation not provided for in the shari`a, as long as the new laws were not incompatible with Islam. Many other pro-constitutional clerics shared Sheikh Fazlollah's doubts but, rather than actually oppose the Majles, opted out of active involvement in politics. Only Sheikh Fazlollah and his followers took their argument to its logical extreme, concluding that in the absence of the Hidden Imam, an absolutist government which applies Islamic law is the best government. The despotism of the Shah was, in other words, for Sheikh Fazlollah the lesser of two evils and he had campaigned vigorously, from the pulpit and through pamphlets, for this point of view.     Sheikh Fazlollah was a man of conviction and considerable courage. When the constitutionalist forces entered Tehran, instead of fleeing to a place of sanctuary, he encouraged the local roughs, armed by the Shah, to defend the Sangelaj district of Tehran where he lived. Their resistance was, however, quickly broken and Sheikh Fazlollah was arrested. He was put on trial on 31 July 1909 before a special tribunal consisting of`ten members drawn from the occupying forces, the former assembly, the press and others, mostly of a radical persuasion chaired by a reformist mojtahed, Sheikh Ebrahim Zanjani', and condemned to death. The execution took place in public immediately after the trial.     Soon afterwards the second Majles was convened. By then the secular reformists, for whom the image of law was derived primarily from the tradition of the French Enlightenment, had won the day and the Iranian state began to develop decisively in the direction of a modern state — though not in the end the democracy the constitutionalists had envisaged. In the course of this evolution, many clerics cast aside their turbans and were absorbed into the new order, often as teachers, intellectuals or lawyers. But for the clergy as a body the end result was marginalisation, the loss of many of their functions and of their authority in society. As we shall see, many of them became increasingly bitter about the events of this period. (C) 1999 Baqer Moin All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-312-26490-9 </blockquote> </blockquote> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td align="left" valign="top" width="60"> </td> <td align="center" valign="top" width="468"> <hr size="1"> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/">Home</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/info/contents/siteindex.html">Site Index</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/search/daily/">Site Search</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/comment/">Forums</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/archives/">Archives</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/marketplace/">Marketplace</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/late/">Quick News</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/front/">Page One Plus</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/world/">International</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/national/">National/N.Y.</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/business/">Business</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/tech/">Technology</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/science/">Science</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/sports/">Sports</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/weather/">Weather</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/editorial/">Editorial</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/oped/">Op-Ed</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/artleisure/">Arts</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/auto/">Automobiles</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/yr/mo/day/home/">Books</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/diversions/">Diversions</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/jobmarket/">Job Market</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/realestate/">Real Estate</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/travel/">Travel</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/subscribe/help/">Help/Feedback</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/classified/">Classifieds</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/info/contents/services.html">Services</a> | <a href="http://www.nytoday.com/">New York Today</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/subscribe/help/copyright.html">Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company</a> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </td> <td align="left" width="14" valign="top"> <img src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/pixel.gif" border="0" width="14" height="1"></td> <td align="center" width="140" valign="top"> <img src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/pixel.gif" border="0" width="140" height="2"> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </body> </html>

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