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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."