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How was it possible for an obscure religious fanatic to lead one of the great revolutionary upheavals of this century? To begin with, the time was ripe. The Shah had pushed his feudal and devout country into the modern, secular world too far and too fast, using torture and execution to suppress dissent. In addition, Khomeini's place in the world of Shi'ite theology gave him a platform. Unlike Sunni Muslims, members of Islam's other, much larger branch, Shi'ites believe in an intermediary between God and man. In Shi'ism's first centuries, this role of mediator was played by the Twelve Imams, who were thought to be the rightful successors to the Prophet Muhammad and who combined religious and secular authority. Most Shi'ites continue to believe that the Twelfth Imam, who disappeared in A.D. 940, will one day emerge from hiding to establish a purified Islamic state. Some Iranians hailed Khomeini as an Imam qualified to be the deputy for the Shi'ite messiah.
Khomeini was educated as a scholar in Qum, the holy city where he worked as a teacher, married and reared a family of six children. An excellent instructor, he was fascinated by the Greek philosophers, especially Plato, whose Republic provided the Ayatullah with a model for his own concept of the ideal state, in which the philosopher-king was replaced by the Islamic theologian.
Khomeini's long rise to power began with a series of confrontations with the regime of the Shah. In 1962 he led a general strike of the clergy to protest reforms allowing witnesses in court to swear by any "divine book," instead of the Koran alone. By the spring of 1963 he was under house arrest for telling huge crowds at Qum that just a "flick of the finger" could sweep away the Shah. Soon after his release a few months later, Khomeini was arrested again, this time for fomenting riots against a modernization program that included land reform. He was imprisoned for half a year, then exiled to Turkey. He soon moved to the Iraqi city of An Najaf, one of Shi'ism's holiest shrines. There for 14 years he taught, meditated and taped messages of hate against the Shah that were distributed on cassettes to mosques back in Iran.
Then the Shah's government made the crucial mistake of asking Iraq to expel Khomeini. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein complied, thereby earning Khomeini's abiding hostility. In October 1978 the Ayatullah went to France and settled in Neauphle-le-Chateau, a Paris suburb, where for the first time he enjoyed the full glare of Western press attention. Shortly after his arrival, the continuing massive street demonstrations and battles between the Iranian soldiers and protesters turned the tide against the regime and led, within three months, to the Shah's exile. In February 1979 Khomeini made his triumphant return to Iran, where ecstatic million-strong crowds greeted him.