"You Are Weak, Mister"

Khomeini raps his Prime Minister and riles his country's women

Only a month ago Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini had lavishly praised Mehdi Bazargan, his choice as the first Prime Minister of postrevolutionary Iran, for his "confidence in the holy writ of Islam" and his "past record in the national and Islamic struggle." By last week, the 78-year-old Shi'ite leader's view had changed sharply. Speaking to theological students at his headquarters in the holy city of Qum, he rapped his slightly younger (71) appointee. "You are weak, mister," he thundered. He also lambasted Bazargan's 17-member Cabinet as "weak characters" who believe that "everything should be copied from the West." Under Bazargan, Khomeini scoffed, "the nation lives in caves and nothing has changed." To make the revolution a reality, "carpets, furniture, Western trappings" must all be removed from the government.

Among the more vulnerable items was clearly Bazargan, the gentle, democratic-minded engineer-politician who had been the chief adviser on oil matters to Iran's last revolutionary leader, Mohammed Mossadegh. Stung by Khomeini's diatribe, Bazargan went to Qum with an offer to resign. After some deliberation, Khomeini refused the resignation and pledged greater support for the government. But if that promise was not kept and Bazargan were to quit, authority in Iran would apparently rest solely with the Komiteh, the mullahs and other fervent Shi'ites whose grab for power has literally pulled the Persian rug out from under Bazargan's regime.

Last week Islamic Revolutionary Courts, controlled by the Komiteh, tightened their grip on Iran's legal system, for the first time executing persons charged with nonpolitical offenses. In public trials that are expected to replace the widely protested late-night secret tribunals, the courts punished rapists, thieves and adulterers, as well as more of the SAVAK agents, police and army officers who have been their chief targets. In Tehran, four men convicted of raping an 18-year-old male university student were executed; unaccountably, the victim was given 13 lashes. In Jamshid Abad, near the Caspian coast, a married woman and her lover were whipped in the square for adultery (he got 80 lashes, she 40).

No sector of Iran's society is untouched by the Ayatullah's dictates. Mohammed Ali Mohlavi, governor of the central bank, announced that he would look into setting up an Islamic banking structure in which no interest would be charged on loans. Most hotels and restaurants began to conform with a prohibition on alcoholic beverages. X-rated films disappeared from cinemas, and television programs like The Six Million Dol lar Man will no longer be broadcast. A mutton shortage loomed as a result of the Ayatullah's ban on meat imported from Australia and New Zealand. Because the importers could not prove that the sheep had been slaughtered according to Muslim standards, he declared the meat to be "unclean and forbidden."

With the March 30 referendum on the creation of an Islamic republic drawing near, the Ayatullah has rejected the proposed constitution written by a group of lawyers at Bazargan's request. He prefers the strongly Islamic draft constitution put together by a group of his aides. The task of reconciling the two documents has fallen to Interior Minister Haj-Sayed-Javadi. .His biggest problem areas: the role of the Iranian parliament and the status of women. While the lawyers proposed that the parliament have full legislative powers, Khomeini at first favored merely an advisory role; he now appears to be reconsidering, however, and the lawyers may well get their way.

The women's issue is even tougher.

Many Iranian women are furious over the Ayatullah's attempt to impose a subservient role on females. Last week, after Khomeini was quoted as proclaiming that "women must not come naked into ministries," thousands of women, many dressed defiantly in tight jeans and skirts, paraded in Tehran in protest. Orthodox Islamic men attacked the demonstrators, and though guerrillas protecting the women fired warning shots, the zealots stabbed one woman and injured others.

The slogans the women shouted were telling: "Down with Khomeini," "We shall fight the veil," "In the dawn of freedom, there is an absence of freedom." "We fought for freedom with the men," one woman explained. "None of us knew freedom would come with chains." Political fashions were changing fast: many of the women now denouncing the veil as a mark of repression gladly wore the all-covering chador as an anti-Shah symbol during the revolution.

On the twelfth anniversary of the death of Mossadegh, the nationalist Prime Minister who forced the Shah to briefly flee Iran before being toppled by a CIA-assisted coup in 1953, a crowd including many Khomeini critics gathered in Ahmadabad (pop. 800), 60 miles northwest of Tehran. At a rally outside the brown brick house where Mossadegh is buried, his grandson-in-law, Dr. Hedayatollah Matine-Daftary, called for the creation of a National Democratic Front. Its program: a referendum to abolish the monarchy followed by an extended debate on the new constitution. Matine-Daftary also favors home rule for ethnic minorities like the Kurds, the abolition of censorship and worker control of factories. Says he: "In front of us is nothing but light. If a nation can express its thoughts freely, then we shall progress."

But the Komiteh has no intention of relaxing its grip on Iran. In an interview with TIME Tehran Bureau Chief Bruce van Voorst, Mohammed Reza Mahdavi Kani, a Khomeini aide who calls himself "the Ayatullah's man for Komiteh activities," outlined a plan that would make the group and some of its 1.500 or so replicas across the country permanent features of Iran's government. In Tabriz, Abadan, and other places, local komitehs have already begun rendering decisions on everything from whether brothels can reopen (answer: no) to the prices grocery shops can charge. Kani, who operates out of a makeshift office in Tehran's parliament building, says that the authority of this parallel administration will now be consolidated by "drastically cutting" the number of local groups and by bringing the rest under the direct control of the central Komiteh in Tehran. The Komiteh will also foster "understanding of the Islamic revolutionary objectives" by propagandizing through television and radio programs, recorded cassettes and a newspaper.

The Komiteh's militia, the so-called Islamic Guard, will be melded into a secular national guard commanded by a council headed by Deputy Prime Minister Ibrahim Yazdi, Khomeini's most ardent backer in the Bazargan government.

But the Komiteh's main concerns, as Kani sees it, will remain "security and the arrest of holdovers from the former regime." Such seizures have been authorized by a Khomeini-appointed revolutionary prosecutor. The ultimate power, however, lies with the shadowy Islamic Revolutionary Council, whose membership has never been divulged; Kani refers to it as "the acting parliament in the absence of a parliament."

Though Kani maintains that the Komiteh will eventually turn over most of its authority to an elected government and assume an "oversight" role, he made clear that any new regime would have to kowtow to the Komiteh's commands. If not, he said, "we will do what we did before." Did that mean that the Komiteh would go on ruling Iran in the Council's name? Kani's reply: "Of course."

The religious leaders' hardening determination to reign--and the spreading uneasiness about this among their erstwhile allies against the Shah--promises trouble. One respected Iranian political analyst, Fariborz Atapour, has forecast that a civil war will begin within two weeks. Writing in the daily Tehran Journal, he complained, "We know that a new constitution is about to be imposed on us, but since we do not know what it contains we cannot contest it. We can merely protest against the undemocratic way that the entire revolutionary aftermath is being handled." Given the theocratic rule now taking shape in Iran, Atapour may have taken a big risk by publishing that lament. Events in Iran last week made it clear that his prediction could turn out to be right.

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