A Fanatic's Other Sides

...The extent to which Khomeini saw politics as the main point of Islam was driven home by his remarkable 1988 decree that the Islamic government of Iran, being the continuation of the Prophet Muhammad's rule, can overrule any religious commandment if necessary to advance the interests of the state...

...The officer's wife, Melahat Cetiner, provided the biographer with the most personal glimpses of Khomeini...

...Khomeini was indeed the dour ascetic antimodern fanatic portrayed in the US...

...To keep Khomeini isolated, the Shah sent him into exile...

...Nonetheless, Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah is the most penetrating glimpse so far into what were the principal passions motivating revolutionary Iran's Supreme Religious Leader...

...Despite his not being a fan of the Shah, Moin describes the imperial government's efforts to defuse the tension and concludes, "The government tried every possible nonviolent means of stopping [Khomeini], to no avail...

...We are given little insight into why he agreed to a cease-fire in 1988...

...MOIN IS almost certainly correct that, "Had it not been for the social and political upheaval, and had the traditional clergy been as powerful as in other periods, [Khomeini] himself might have become the victim of the orthodox faction" that had mystically minded clerics put to death...

...Predictably, he was arrested...

...yet he succeeded in using modern revolutionary methods to elicit fervent support for his ideas...

...Moin quotes Khomeini declaring that it was "more bitter than poison for me, but I drink this chalice of poison for the Almighty and for His satisfaction...

...On Ashura, the holiest Shi'ite day (June 3, 1963), he whipped a crowd into a riot, crying: "If the religion of Mohammad cannot be restored except with my blood, may the swords take me...

...He includes the key edict, where Khomeini stated: "I would like to inform all intrepid Muslims in the world that the author of the book Satanic Verses, which has been compiled, printed and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and those publishers who were aware of its contents, are sentenced to death...

...During his years as Iran's Supreme Religious Leader he often seemed like a man from the distant past, an exponent of the most obscurantist traditions...

...Reviewed by Patrick Clawson Director of Research, Washington Institute for Near East Policy AYATOLLAH Ruhollah Khomeini, who died in 1989—at age 86 according to Baqer Moin—was a sinister and mysterious figure to Westerners...

...Making sense of Khomeini is not easy, and the paucity of reliable information about him—as distinct from hagiography and hate literature—complicates the task...

...Still, the sparse account of his role in the war with Iraq is disappointing...

...In fact, after the publication of some of his poetry late in life, senior ayatollahs publicly warned him to avoid heresy, even though he was by then the revered Supreme Religious Leader...

...press, but he also had other sides...

...Khomeini's fascination with mysticism is of a piece with his politics: Both reflect the conviction that ultimate power and truth are too dangerous to be shared with the masses...

...For him, politics was an extension of religion, not of popular will...

...Notwithstanding the Iranian government's propaganda about the massive popular support Khomeini's political vision received, Moin demonstrates that it was not at all democratic...

...Unfortunately, Moin scants the period beginning with the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 and Khomeini's assumption of power...

...She recounted how he would cook Azerbaijani food for himself, and how this man who had never "looked a woman in the face" began to open up...

...Equally poor is Moin's account of another defining aspect of Khomeini's regime, the Salman Rushdie affair...

...On the contrary, the man who emerges from Moin's pages was a revolutionary, determined to use politics to transform society...

...But he doesn't illuminate the circumstances surrounding the edict, offering only the bare details...

...But her guest soon moved on to the holy cities of Iraq, where he established a following among those unhappy about the modernization Iran was undergoing...

...He fails, though, to give much sense of what led to such a stunning reversal by a man who had sent hundreds of thousands of Iranians to their deaths in a futile six-year attempt to overrun Iraq...

...Surprisingly, he was an avid poet and active mystic...

...As a youth, at considerable risk to his reputation, he took up the study of an Islamic mystical tradition with some similarities to Sufism, called erfan...

...his main motivation was to confront the Shah, not to ensure that the government followed the practices mandated by Islam...

...On that point, Iran's contemporary hardliners are accurately carrying out Khomeini's legacy, for he would not have been impressed by the massive election victories of Iranian reformers...

...All his life, he wrote gentle contemplative poetry in this vein, though he was careful not to publish much of it until his very last years, for erfan was—and is—regarded with deep suspicion by the clerical establishment...

...I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, where they find them...

...All have been much misreported—notably in The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution, the generally unreliable yet widely used 1986 biography by Amir Taheri, a prominent journalist under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi...

...In particular, he has interviewed many who knew Khomeini as a young man, nailing down the facts regarding his origins, youth and early political activities...

...Already in an anonymously published 1942 book called Kashf al-Asrar (The Discovery of Secrets), Khomeini attacked the clergy for not being sufficiently political...

...The issue he finally fastened upon in 1963 was objection to women's suffrage...

...In fairness, this may be attributable to the fact that several excellent accounts of the revolution and the Islamic Republic have covered Khomeini's actions and analyzed his motivations...

...the 'renegade' clergymen who in Khomeini's eyes had 'actively collaborated with him.'" Moin's detailed account of the future Ayatullah's activities in the early 1960s, which led to his exile, shows him searching for a way to foment opposition...

...It is precisely that vision the Iranian people have so decisively rejected since electing moderate reformer Mohammad Khatami as their president in 1997...

...Iraq started the war by invading Iran, but in late spring 1982, it pulled back and declared its willingness to end the fighting...

...Unlike the other senior clerics, Khomeini had no interest in resolving conflicts with the government...

...As Moin points out, although Khomeini hated "that illiterate soldier" Reza Shah (and his son Mohammad Reza Shah, who took the throne in 1941), "the real target of Kashj al-Asrar was...

...As the years passed, politics gained increasing importance over piety in his concept of religion...

...Khomeini was not, however, the kind of mystic who withdraws from the hurlyburly of daily life...

...He also opposed land reform, close relations with the United States, and the failure to persecute minorities vigorously...

...Khomeini refused and insisted on "war until victory...

...Moin has approached his subject with the studied neutrality that is in the best tradition of the BBC, where he is Director of the Persian Service, and the result is the most authoritative biography to date of the Ayatollah...

...At first he lived in Ankara, where a Turkish military officer was assigned the task of housing him...

...In his mid-20s, Moin explains, "Because he had taught [mystical] philosophy, he was branded as unfit to be a senior theologian and was isolated" in the city of Qom...