Iran Sword of a Relentless Revolution

He came to symbolize everything the West found incomprehensible and baffling about the East: his intense, ascetic spirituality and air of otherworldly detachment; his medieval, theocratic mind-set, which drew its parallels and precedents from the Islamic world of the 7th century; the mystical certitude that he spoke in the name of God, his country and Muslims everywhere.

Yet when Tehran Radio announced early this week that the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's revolutionary zealot, was dead at 89, millions of his countrymen mourned the loss. They did so even though the movement he led plunged them into a devastating war with Iraq and left a legacy of turbulence at home and terrorism abroad. To his people, the patriarch with the baleful dark eyes and white beard had been the heart and sword of their revolution, the icon of implacable opposition -- first to the dictatorship of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and then to the U.S., which the Ayatullah relentlessly denounced as the Great Satan.

He translated his hatred of America into acts of terrorism and defiance that helped undermine one U.S. presidency and led a second into scandal. His followers held 52 Americans captive in the U.S. embassy in Tehran from November 1979 to January 1981, thus dealing a severe blow to the re-election chances of Jimmy Carter. Then, in what began as an effort to secure the release of American hostages held in Lebanon, the Reagan Administration became enmeshed in the Iran-contra affair, its gravest foreign policy blunder.

Khomeini vowed to pursue the conflict with Iraq to the "frontiers of martyrdom," and sent an estimated 900,000 Iranians, many of them not yet teenagers, beyond that frontier. But in August 1988, the loss of key positions forced Tehran to accept a United Nations-sponsored cease-fire in the eight- year war. It was, said the Ayatullah, a decision "more deadly than drinking poison."

Tehran's utter isolation in the world of nations had become apparent just two weeks before the cease-fire decision, when a U.S. frigate mistakenly shot down an Iranian jetliner with 290 people aboard: international response was notably muted. In the following months, leading Iranian politicians such as Parliamentary Speaker Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 54, attempted to soften their country's radical image. But Khomeini would have none of it. Last February he prompted a worldwide outcry when he demanded the death of Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born, British author of The Satanic Verses, a book many regard as blasphemous to Islam. "It is incumbent on every Muslim to do everything possible to send him to hell," declared the Imam. An angry Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Iran, and many Western ambassadors were temporarily recalled from Tehran.

Khomeini's reassertion of radical Islamic rejectionism soon claimed his appointed successor, Ayatullah Ali Montazeri, 65, as a victim. Montazeri had harshly criticized the war with Iraq and did not endorse the killing of Rushdie. In late March he was forced to resign.

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.

Khomeini's ascent to power worked a remarkable change in a man who had once seemed a gentle, if extraordinarily zealous, cleric. During the upheaval that toppled the Shah, Khomeini urged his followers to remain nonviolent. In part, this was a shrewd wish to avoid harsh military reprisals, but his caution also reflected Khomeini's temperament at that time. Abolhassan Banisadr, whom Khomeini ousted as President in 1981, notes that in the final weeks of Khomeini's exile the Ayatullah "would not even kill a fly." Yet after Khomeini became Iran's ruler, he exhorted his countrymen to kill, burn and destroy.

Khomeini and his followers attempted to stifle every vestige of opposition to the imposition of a Muslim theocracy. In so doing they set standards for brutality and injustice that at least equaled -- and probably surpassed -- the worst excesses of the Shah's regime. A clergy-dominated security system soon rivaled SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, in terror and bloodthirstiness.

As the military underwent repeated purges and came under the influence of the clerics, its force was swiftly applied to suppress ethnic minorities that had supported the revolution in hopes of gaining greater cultural and political autonomy. The excesses led to nearly 10,000 executions -- some put the actual figure as high as 20,000 -- and tens of thousands of arrests. This provoked a campaign of assassination by dissident Islamic guerrillas that eliminated hundreds of top members of the Ayatullah's regime.

While he was consolidating his revolution at home, Khomeini was seeking to extend it to other nations. Iraq attacked Iran across the Shatt al-Arab in September 1980 after Khomeini called for an uprising of Iraqi Shi'ites and fomented skirmishes along the border. Iranian forces blunted the Iraqi offensive, and two months after the war began, the conflict was largely stalemated. After years of fighting, Tehran lost all hope of victory when Iraq stopped an Iranian drive for the port city of Basra in early 1987; a year later, Iraq began the offensive that eventually brought Iran to the peace table. The fighting reportedly cost both countries an estimated $500 billion. More than 900,000 Iranian lives were lost; 300,000 Iraqis died during the war.

Khomeini's ability to hold together the squabbling factions that produced Iran's revolution was one of his major achievements. After first setting the direction of the nation through proclamations and statements, Khomeini left it to his followers to forge specific policies. Still, he remained the pivotal figure of Iranian politics, even toward the end, when his various illnesses made it impossible for him to follow events closely. The dismissal of Montazeri, in the opinion of many experts, put increased power in the hands of the pragmatic Rafsanjani, who is also Commander in Chief of the Iranian armed forces. In the final months of Khomeini's life, the spotlight also turned on his son, Ahmed Khomeini, 43, who has lately been increasingly visible in public life. In his zeal and rigid ideology, Ahmed appears to be very much his father's son.

For whoever succeeds the Ayatullah, many fruits of the revolution will remain bitter. Unbending militance has turned Iran into an international pariah, and most Muslims have resisted Khomeini's call for the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. It is possible, though, to compare his role with that of the 20th century's other great revolutionaries. Like the Soviet Union's Vladimir Lenin, he fomented a revolution from distant exile, then returned to try to bend it to his will. Like India's Mohandas Gandhi, he mobilized spiritual forces for political ends. Like China's Mao Zedong, he attempted to push beyond nationalism to ideological and cultural revolution, believing that by destroying the old order, he could create the conditions for the emergence of a utopia. As it turned out, however, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini could destroy but he could not build, and his legacy is a country in chaos.