The Enigmatic Mullah

His voice is soft, almost diffident, but it is powerful enough to have spurred the collapse of a 53-year-old dynasty. In his home country, nearly everybody utters his name with reverence; his photograph, hawked on virtually every Iranian street corner, is now as ubiquitous as the Shah's portrait once was. Yet little is known of the private life and thought of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the enigmatic patriarch of 32 million Shi'ite Muslims who regard him as their guiding light.

Day after day, streams of reporters journey to the drab stucco bungalow in Neauphle-le-Chateau, outside Paris, where the 78-year-old mullah has lived in exile since last October. There the journalists submit written questions, are bidden to sit cross-legged on the floor in a barren room, and then listen as Khomeini, dressed in his black turban and robe, delivers his answers in Farsi monotone. Khomeini's replies are usually short, banal and often repetitive. He can rarely be drawn out on crucial political issues: Who should rule the Islamic republic he espouses for Iran? What kind of nation would it be? How does he propose to bring down the fledgling government of Shahpour Bakhtiar? What role would the Ayatullah himself play on his anticipated return to Tehran? Even when he gives direct answers ("Every form of domination--political, military, cultural and economic--will be brought to an end"), they almost invariably are the kind of vaporous generalities that only a nongoverning opposition leader can afford to make.

The Ayatullah (an honorific title meaning sign of God) was born in central Iran, the son of a mullah who was shot to death--according to Khomeini followers, by Iranian government agents--while on a pilgrimage to Iraq. Educated largely at the holy city of Qum, Iran's orthodox Shi'ite center of learning, Khomeini became what has been described as a "fine medieval scholar." That did not mean he was an expert on the Iranian Middle Ages, but rather that his Islamic philosophical and legal expertise belong to an intellectual tradition unstudied in the West since the 16th century Spanish expulsion of the Moors.

Khomeini first drew attention in Iran more than 30 years ago, when samples of his philosophical writing drew critical acclaim for his "moral dimension" as well as his ascetic personal life and intense spirituality. That intensity seems to have been channeled in more or less the same direction ever since: his first book, Discovery of the Secrets, decried "the plots and plans which the father of the present Shah made with other leaders of neighboring countries," adding that "the orders of the dictatorial state of Reza Khan [the Shah's father] have no value. All the laws approved by Parliament should be burned."

Khomeini turned into a more blatant political activist in the early '60s, when he openly challenged the Shah's ambitious program of social and economic reforms. The Shah's defenders charge that Khomeini and other mullahs opposed the so-called White Revolution because it demanded confiscation of their landholdings and equal rights for women. Khomeini denies any self-interested motive, charging instead that the reform simply favored absentee landlords who were supporters of the Pahlavis. As a group, the mullahs continued to argue, in Khomeini's words, that "Islam has never opposed [women's] liberty. It is the Shah who is dragging women toward corruption and wishes to bring them up as mere dolls." Khomeini has added, however, that "we will not permit behavior that is contrary to the national interest or the public morality." He did not say what that might mean.

Banished by the Shah in 1964, Khomeini settled in An Najaf, a major Shi'ite holy city in Iraq that contains the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law Ali. There the Ayatullah lectured students, calling for direct political action to root out corruption in Iran, eliminate Western cultural and moral influence, and replace the Iranian monarchy with a nonparliamentary constitutional theocracy governed by the precepts of the Koran. His goal, Khomeini said, was to produce a "generation of believers to destroy the thrones of tyrants." His tape-recorded lectures were circulated widely inside Iran. Cautious listeners played the bootlegged tapes in secret, since even the mention of Khomeini's name became an offense punishable by a prison term. Iraq tolerated Khomeini's religious politicking until last October, when the Baathist government threw him out at the Shah's request, and Khomeini migrated to France.

Throughout Khomeini's exile, the Shah's government has striven mightily to blacken the mullah's reputation. It reported that Khomeini had connived with anti-Iranian forces in India. In 1977, when Khomeini's son Seyyed Mustafa, 49, died suddenly in An Najaf, the mullah hinted that SAVAK agents might have been responsible. In reply, the government planted a clumsy character assassination in the Tehran newspaper Ettela'at, linking Khomeini to the illicit Communist Tudeh Party (Khomeini is, in fact, a vitriolic anti-Communist). But the newspaper article was the first mention of Khomeini's name in the Iranian press in years, and the patently false charge helped to make him a public hero to the Shah's populist opposition. Demonstrators took to the streets in protest, helping to start the long cycle of unrest that led to the Shah's "vacation."

Khomeini's defenders argue that his campaign to oust the Shah is in keeping with Shi'ite tradition. In contrast to religious leaders in such countries as Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, Iranian mullahs have traditionally adopted a critical stance toward the ruling establishment, operating, in effect, as a theological opposition. Shi'ite mullahs were engaged in power struggles with emperors in the 17th and 19th centuries. In 1892, for example, religious leaders directed a massive sit-in protest against the reigning monarch's allocation to the British of the Iranian tobacco monopoly. They also weighed heavily in the drawing up of Iran's 1906 constitution, which was based in its secular details on that of Belgium, and which the Shah and his autocratic father repeatedly violated by suppressing political rights.

There are occasional signs that Khomeini himself might not be averse to doing the same thing, given the chance. In one of his Paris press conferences, the Ayatullah declared that "after the Shah leaves, the press will be free." Then he added: "Except for those articles that would be harmful to the nation." But unless and until Khomeini's theocracy comes to pass, nobody can know what the mysterious mullah really thinks, on this and many other issues.

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