• U.S.

Man Of The Year: Portrait of an Ascetic Despot

11 minute read
TIME

An earthy sense of justice, an all-embracing code of behavior

There is no room for play in Islam. It is deadly serious about everything.

Khomeini in speech at Qum

All Western governments are just thieves. Nothing but evil comes from them.

Khomeini counseling supporters

The nation voted for the Islamic Republic, and everyone should obey. If you do not obey, you will be annihilated.

Khomeini denouncing opponents

Arogant and pious. Stubborn and vengeful. Humorless and inflexible. Ascetic and power hungry. These are some of the adjectives that experts on Iran use to describe the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Much as his principles differ from those of the Shah, some analysts believe, Khomeini has many things in common with the deposed ruler—most notably, a sense of having been divinely ordained to guide and govern Iran. Marvin Zonis, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, notes that the Ayatullah “has more titles now than the Shah ever had: Savior of the Generations, Defeater of the Oppressors, Imam of the Age.” Zonis believes , that the Ayatullah and the Shah “are a lot alike as leaders. Neither is particularly intelligent, but each is shrewd and cunning. Each is determined to impose his views on the Iranian people. Khomeini is ending up the same kind of ruler that the Shah was—namely grandiose, arrogant, despotic.”

Khomeini is not a man given to self-doubt. Through 64 years of philosophical

study and teaching, inclduing almost 15 years of exile, and now a year of adulation and power in his homeland, the Ayatullah has been wholly consistent—and totally unbending. Why not? In his own mind he speaks not for himself but for God, whose precepts never change. Says Richard Cottam of the University of Pittsburgh, one of the few American scholars who have held long conversations with Khomeini: “The trouble in talking to him is that you always run up against a wall called God.”

Khomeini and the world outside Iran have spent most of 1979 glaring past each other in mutual incomprehension. The barriers to understanding go well beyond the Ayatullah’s lack of interest in explaining himself to foreigners. He spent most of his life in obscurity; he was an enigma even to many of the theological students who presumably knew him best. Some of the most basic facts about his life are matters of conjecture, largely because Khomeini regards such personal details as unimportant. It is not known whether his birth date is actually May 17, 1900, as Tehran newspapers assert, or whether his wife of 50 years—Quesiran, or Khadijah, as different spellings have it—is his first or second spouse. Almost all Western translations of his basic prerevolutionary teachings are of doubtful authenticity or accuracy. In particular, a howlingly funny French translation of some of his remarks—dealing with, among other things, the proper attitude of Muslims toward the meat of a camel that has been sodomized—is composed of random pronouncements from a thick book, deliberately excerpted out of context to make the Ayatullah look ridiculous.

But from discussions with former students, talks with Western scholars who have visited Khomeini, profiles prepared by Western intelligence analysts, and the speeches and interviews he has given during his year on the world stage, it is possible to gain some insight into the Ayatullah’s thinking. First and foremost, all sources agree, he is an Islamic mystic who believes that God tells him directly how to apply the principles of the Koran and the Shari’a (Islamic law) to life and politics.

For Khomeini, the essence of the mystic attitude is detachment—serenity in accepting and preaching God’s will. He does feel emotion; intimates insist that with students and his family, he weeps, laughs and even cracks jokes. In public, however, Khomeini will not permit himself to display joy, sorrow, rage or any other emotion. His angriest words are delivered in a soft, uninflected voice that seldom rises above a murmur.

And what is it that Khomeini’s God commands? An all-embracing code of behavior. Says Chicago’s Zonis, who is preparing an English translation of one of the Ayatullah’s major works: “It is a rigorous, minute, specific codification of the way to behave in every conceivable circumstance, from defecation to urination to sexual intercourse to eating to cleaning the teeth. Khomeini does give attention to human frailties; he says, in essence, ‘If you don’t do it this way, well, if you feel bad, that’s okay.’ But the scheme is appallingly oppressive to us Westerners, in that there is a right way and a wrong way to do everything.”

As in personal routines, so in politics: to Khomeini the only just state is one ruled by Islamic theologians, who alone can be trusted to interpret God’s commands correctly. There is no separation of church and state, or division between sacred and secular, in Islamic teaching. The Ayatullah, however, carries his theocratic vision much farther than most other Muslim scholars by insisting on the clergy’s duty, not just to pass moral judgment on the acts of government, but to rule the state directly—a concept enshrined in the constitution that Iran adopted last month. The ideal Islamic government, Khomeini has declared many times, was the five-year reign over the Arabian peninsula of Muhammad’s son-in-law Ah’, who died in A.D. 661.

Khomeini’s zeal for theocracy has led to the charge that he is seeking to drag Iran back to the Middle Ages. One scholar argues instead that the Ayatullah is something of an innovator in his application of the Shari’a to contemporary situations. Certainly his justification of the students’ seizure of the hostages has no precedent in Muslim jurisprudence. Although he can be mysteriously vague about programmatic approaches to specific political and economic issues, Khomeini has a social philosophy that Hamid Enayat of Oxford sums up in this manner: “The country should be content with a simple way of life. His ascetic example should be the standard for all Iran.” Says an American scholar: “He has an earthy sense of justice. He is for private property, cheap’meat and electricity and plenty of water. That makes him an Iranian populist. He has a George Wallace sense of how people think.”

Khomeini is not opposed to Western technology. Indeed, he has used it shrewdly—first in distributing cassette tapes of his anti-Shah sermons throughout Iran before the revolution, more recently by exploiting television to maintain his popularity with the people. He has read deeply in early Greek philosophy and can discuss Aristotle with animated admiration; Iran’s new constitution is an Islamic version of Plato’s Republic, with Khomeini as philosopher-king. His peers, however, generally believe that on matters of Islamic scholarship he is less profound than some of his fellow ayatullahs—notably Seyed Kazem Sharietmadari. Numerous Western scholars who have spoken to him have been shocked by his ignorance of modern life. He knows little of the non-Muslim world, and regards it with morbid suspicion.

Ignorance and mystic certitude can be a dismaying combination. Some of Khomeini’s preachments sound bizarre and even irrational to Western ears. He has justified polygamy, for example, on the ground that there are more women than men in the world, and that women without the protection of multiple marriages would be driven into prostitution. He asserts that the Shah’s soldiers, who fired into crowds during the Iranian revolution, were imported Israelis dressed up in

Iranian army uniforms; they must have been, he says because Muslims do not kill fellow Muslims.

His vivid denunciations of assorted opponents as “devils” and “agents of Satan” have persuaded some American politicians that Khomeini is—in the words of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat —”a lunatic.” Not so, conclude most Iranian scholars. “I don’t think he’s crazy,” says Columbia University Historian Richard Bulliet. “Most of his decisions have been taken quite logically as a consequence of his perception of the popular will.” Richard Falk, professor of international relations and foreign policy at Princeton, concurs: “When he seems the most crazy to us, he appears most exemplary to the Iranian people. That suggests you would have to say all of Iran is crazy.”

Mehdi Haeri, a onetime student of Khomeini’s who now teaches at Georgetown University, feels that Khomeini has changed over the years: “He’s more militant now. He’s more stubborn, less flexible, less subtle.” As they try to analyze Khomeini from a distance, some Western intelligence sources conclude that he is an authoritarian personality who thinks almost totally in black-and-white terms, has only a limited tactical flexibility and is unlikely to tolerate any challenge to his power. He has strong narcissistic traits and reacts to threats by demagogy. But Khomeini is capable of backing away, albeit reluctantly, when his goals cannot be accomplished immediately. During the Tehran government’s military campaign against the Kurds last spring, he denounced the separatist leaders as corrupt men deserving of punishment. Later he sanctioned negotiations to allow for some form of Kurdish autonomy. After mass protests he modified his rule that women must wear the chador to one requiring merely “modest dress”—even though he fumed to Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci about “the coquettes who put on makeup and go into the street showing off their necks, their hair, their shapes.”

In the hostage crisis, some Western analysts believe, Khomeini is torn two ways. He seized on the Shah’s admittance to the U.S. for medical treatment as a heaven-sent opportunity to focus all popular discontent and criticism on two hated scapegoats, the deposed monarch and the Americans, and incited a wave of fury that culminated in the seizure of the U.S. embassy. (Some intelligence sources think that the Ayatullah genuinely feared the Shah might die of cancer before Khomeini could exact his revenge.) But Khomeini did not think through the consequences, and—implausible though it now seems—may actually be looking for a way out. According to this analysis, Khomeini recognizes that the wave of anarchy unloosed in Iran by the violent emotions of the confrontation with the U.S. is a threat to his dream of an Islamic republic, the establishment of which is his overriding goal. At the same time, he will not accept any settlement that would appear to be a defeat. If he feels totally boxed in, he just might seek an outlet in national martyrdom, by provoking the U.S. to military action.

In Qum, Khomeini lives as an unassuming man of God. In his sparsely furnished house, he is surrounded by the cheerful noise and confusion of a typical Middle Eastern home. He evidently enjoys the company of his 14 grandchildren. He is said to have a weak heart, has suffered from a form of undulant fever and can work for only a few hours a day. Still he performs the devout Muslim’s daily ritual of prayer without visible effort. He subsists on a sparse diet of rice, bean curd, yogurt and raw onions, supplemented now and then by a slice of melon or a bit of mutton. There are some signs that power has begun to intoxicate him. He has admitted enjoying the adulation of the crowds, and he took personal command of the government, though he had originally said he would not, apparently because he decided no one else could be trusted to carry out God’s will. Another Iranian ayatullah has observed that Khomeini, because of his long career in opposition to the Shah, is “a good wrecker but a bad builder.”

Indeed, Khomeini’s Islamic state is planned and governed in conditions of primitive chaos. Ambassadors and government ministers as well as peasant petitioners wait for their audiences in an antechamber lit by a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. Two mullahs stand guard over the residence’s only link to the outside world: four single-line telephones.

The mullahs or Khomeini’s son Seyyed Ahmed, about 35, handle all the calls; the Ayatullah does not deign to use this modern invention. That disdain could well stand as a symbol of the Ayatullah’s whole rule, which aims at creating, to ward the end of the 20th century, a modern version of his ideal 7th century state. In one sense he has succeeded: Iran is undoubtedly the only major nation that is ruled by a mystic philosopher-king sitting cross-legged on the floor of a bare room in a dusty provincial town. –

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com