The mind and heart of Khomeini Part three of Mohamed Heikal's insider's account of the Iranian Revolution focuses on its extraordinar leader, his th iking and hisl ifestyle .~ ~ ~ ~~xr .d d. hi hiki. hls . .. Mohamed Heikal met the .Ayatollah Khomeini twice: first in December 1978, when Khomeini was in exile in Paris, and the second . time- after the Iranian religious leader's triumphal return to Iran. Heikal's The Return, of The Ayatollah will be. published by Andre Deutsch in November. Khomeini's wife, Khadi- jah, is a woman of great strength of character, energy and charm. When he was deported from-Qom in 1963 and dumped on the Turkish frontier, Khomeini told her not to try to follow him, but she ignored his instructions and made her way to Najaf. She accompanied him from Najaf to France, and though he went direct to' his sub- urban house of exile in Neauphle-le-Chateau, and never set foot in Paris, she made several visits to the capital, saw all the sights : and was interested in every- thing she saw. It is still Khadijah who cooks the Ayatollah's food for him. His routine is regular and his menu simple. He wakes at about 5 am for the dawn prayer, then goes back to sleep again. His breakfast, consisting of bread and a- saucer of honey, is placed by Khadi- jah for him beside his doshak. At 11 am he has a little fruit juice, usually orange juice, and at noon a little rice and boiled meat, which he eats with a spoon - the only utensil he ever uses. He is particularly fond of the, yellow Persian water- melons. After his midday meal he has a nap, then wakes for the afternoon prayer and continues dealing with busi- ness and meeting people until after midnight. Kho- meini does not smoke, and never uses the telephone, though while he was in France he once made' an exception to this rule when he heard that his brother, Basandidah, was very ill and he wished to hear his voice. The elder brother now occupies the small house in a side street which used to be the Ayatollah?s home until he attained power. Khomeini himself has moved to a new residence, one of a group of four houses, all single-storey, grouped on either side of a street. One pair contains the offices of his secretary and personal mullah, his secur- ity guards, a-nd so on. Across the street one house contains a section of revol- utionary guards and the other is the Ayatollah's own. home. Inside there is a reception room, about 16 feet by 24, with an undistin- guished blue carpet on the floor and spotlights clutter- ing the ceiling. It looks like a makeshift television studio. This leads into three tiny private rooms and a minute kitchen. One of these rooms is for Khomeini's wife, one for any member of the family who wishes to make use of it, and the final-one is Khomeini's own bedroom. From what I could see, all his worldly possessions there consisted of his doshak and a trunk contain- ing his clothes. As a faqih, a canon lawyer who has made his own contribution to jurispru- dence (fiqh). Khomeini is the author of several books, the most important of which are Liberating the Means and Islamic Government. He has a good brain, but his ideas are simple. He sees Islam as a whole, as a unity, and often speaks of it as an international force. He denounces any governnent in the Moslem world which deviates from the rules of the Koran as shirk (hereti- cal) and its ruder as taghuti (a tyrant). Ihe revolutionary leader relaxes with his surviving son and grandchldren before his return from exile in France. The Ayatollah and his family Khomeini was born Ruhallah Musawi in 1902, on 20th Jumad, which is also the birthday of Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Mahamnued who\became the wife of Ali and the mother of Hassan and Hussein - a most auspicious date. He was born in Khomein, a vilage about eighty miles south-west of Qom, where his father, Mustafa Musawi, was a mullah. (Ayatollahs always take the name of the town or village from which they come). Only a few months after Ruhallah's birth his father was shot in the head and kiUed by the agents of some rich landowners, as a consequence of having championed,the cause of some of their tenant farmers. It has sometimes. been alleged that Reza Shah, who was then a. private soldier in the Cossack Brigade, had something to do with the murder of Mustafa Musawi. This would make a neat pattern - the father killing Khomeini's father and the son killing his son (Savak was responsible. for the death of Mustafa Khomeini in 19773. I asked Khomeini about this, but he said there was no truth in it. The young Musawi's mother died in 1918, so he went to live with his elder brother, Basendidah Musawi, who was already a muilah, and who is still alive today. Ruhallah enrolled in the hawza of a well-known mullah in the town of Arak, about thirty miles north of Khomein, the Ayatollah Abden Karim el- Ha'iri. In 1922 el-Har'iri decided to move his hawza to Qom, and all his pupils, including young Ruhallah Musawi, went with him. This was the future Ayatollah's first sight of the city to which his fortunes were to be so closely linked. There being nowhere for the young and impecunious student to live, he lodged in the mosque where the sessions of the hawza were held. spreading his doshake (blanket) on the floor. In due course he completed the first stage of his studies, taking the degree known as Mahzallet es-sutuh eZ-aliyah ("the high roofs"), and began to assist his master, specializing in Islamic philosophy and logic. He also started a course on ethics (alaq), but Reza Shah's police put a stop to this on the- ground that political matters were getting mixed up in it.. Ruhallah Musawi had a friend in the Ha'iri hawza called Mohammed el-Thaqaaf, a Shi'i from Taif in the Hejaz. He was an older man, with a daughter called Khadijah, the name of the Prophet's first wife. WVhen she was fourteen and Ruhallah was twenty-five he asked his friend for his daughter's hand in marriage. They had never met, but she had caught a glimpse of Ruhallah one day when he came to visit their home. She protested. She had no wish to mahry a mullah, her ambition being to marry a government official and go to live in Tehran.- But, as she tells the story, the night after she had rejected the proposal she had a dream, in which she saw with great clearness the figures of the Prophet Mohammed, Ali, and Fatima. There was an elderly wornan there also, who pointed to the other three and said "None of these likes you." She asked why, :and was told '9Because you have refused their son, Ruhallah." The next morning she told her father that she agreed to the marriage. So they were married. Their first three children, a boy called Ali, and tvo girls called Latifa and Khamira, al died. Then they had two more sons and three daughters - one son, Mlustafa, was murdered by Savak in 1977; the other, Seyyid Ahned Khomeini, is his father's chief assistant. Mustafa left a son,. Hussein, a great favourite of his grandfather and one of his aides, and a daughter, Miriam. Khomeini's three daughters , all married mullahs, who have usually sersved in some capacity on Khomeini's sta-ff Farida is married to Ayatollah Aradi; Sadiqa to Hojat al-Islam Ishraki, who was with the Khomeini in France, and Fatima to Ayatollah Bargroudi, -son of the former Ayatollah al-Uzma whom the Shah wished to replace by one of the religious leaders in Najaf. Khomeini now has thirteen giandchildrg eight boys and five girls. Khomeini sees Islam as being one-eighth a matter of prayers and ceremonies and seven-eights a matter of principles and organization, these latter being designed to bring men to an under- standing of justice.. He believes that the necessary return to Islam involves two stages: first takhliya, which means getting rid of obsol- ete ideas and practices, and secondly tahliya, which is a sweetening process, the adding of new things. Among the ideas which had to be swept away by takhliya was tuqi'a (the practice of disguise or deception which had been a necessary system of protec- tion for Shi'is in the days of persecution under the Umayyads but which, Khomeini insists, had devel- oped into a bad habit for which the excuse no longer exists). Khomeini tells his disciples that the second stage, tahliya, wiU be harder than the first, takhliya, because it involves change and innovation. But the new things, the answers to new situations, will have to be reached by ijtihad, the formation of opinion by the fuqaha. Khomeini believes that the imams are created from the light of God and have a rank which cannot be attained by : Tomorrow: Nation-making on -Islamic princiles ., . .. i ! o,,". = The teaching that says every man lives, i-n four prisons The great strength of Islam is that it provides a law, a rule for life which appeals to the heart as much as to' the intelligerice. '.It ' governs ' a man's relationship with his fellow man, with his wife and family, and with the -whole universe. .--It does not require a sophisticated . understanding, since 'it, is a belief which has been handed down over .generations and whose language and forms are as natural to the Moslem of the Arab world as the air he breathes. Even liberal thinkers, have, often ended by returning to the -religion of their childhood. Thus Taha Hussein, the distinguished writer . and edu- cationist, whose early book on pre- Islamic poetry had provoked a storm of protest from the orthodox, turned to wsriting about the Prophet and the early days of Islam. - .. - . Other Egyptian Iiterary figures such as Mohammed Hussein -Heikal and Abbas el-Akkad, who had. been greatly influence by western 'writers ke Bergson, Shaw and Wells, became increasingly concerned with ' Islamic 'themes. Even connunist novelists started to .'taclde sympathetically Islamic subjects. For Iranians much the most import- ant influence (apart from Khomeini himself) was the man who became the philosopher of the Revolution, Dr Ali ShariatiL When I was having my discussion with the.i students inside the Anierican Embassy in. Tehran I found that any one of them would, in the space of a few minutes, quote Khomeini at me five'times and' Dr Shariati at least three times. Shariati was a proific writer, with more than a hundred books to his credit. Part'of his teaching,' which had a profound effect on:Iranian-youth, was that every man . is in four prisons. First he is in the prison imposed on him by history and geography; from this he can liberate himself through. science and technology. Next he is in the prison of historical necessity, and from this he can free himself by an understanding ' of ..how . historical forces-operate. The third prison is the -social and class 'structure; only a revolutionary ideology can provide the way'of escape from.that. The fourth prison is the self. Each-, .individual is compounded of divine and satanic elements, of good and evil; each individual must choose between them. Shariati admitted that his ideas were an amalgam of Islam and Marxism, of Sartre's existential- ism and the Sufism of the tenth-cen- tury thinker el Hallaj, with a dash of Pascalian humamsm. All this shbild not-be the occasion for surprise. While - the western achievements appeared to Arabs aid Iranians to be represented by weapons of mass destruction and instruments of. torture, -Islam offered a positive good. The West supplied the machin- ery of suppression; Islam by contrast put the emphasis on the individual, on the dignity of man. For Islam is the religion of the individual human being; the social content is built into the message of Islam. *It is', significant that when a Moslem achieves independent manhood he aims to provide himself with two things - a home and a grave. The home is the refuge of his body while he is alive; the grave the recipient of his body after death. temporal monarchs or even by angels. Thejfuqaha (plural of faqih) are the representa- tives of the imams, and since they know more of the law than anybody else they alone are capable of acting for the imam in his absence. They can act both as the interpreter and executor of the law: "The ink of the pens of the fuqaha is as sacred as the blood of the martyrs." In these days, when the problems confronting- a ruler seem to 'have devel- oped so far beyond anything which-faced rulers thirteen hundred or a thousand years ago, leaving everything to the fuqaha may sound a little naive. When I saw Khomeini in Paris I asked how a faqik would deal with, say, the problems of econ- omics or of space. His answer was q'uite shrewd. "What does King Khaled know about 'space?" he said. "What do 'these military men who %have seized power in the Arab world know about econ- omics? A faqih at least, understands the laws of God, but these people do not understand the laws of man or the laws of God." Khomeini dismisses cri- tics who say that religious men should keep out of politics. Did the Prophet l Mohammed keep out- of politics, he asks. If he had been no more than the messenger of God he would have delivered God's book, the Koran, to men and then disappeared. But he;was.told by God to fight an# to,plan. He organized society and acted as judge in the community. He commanded armies in battle, dispatched ambassadors, signed treat- jes. To say that religion can be separated from the busi- ness of government is non- sense. This, says - Khomeini, is what the imperialists want. They want to persuade us that religion is just a matter of theology. He claims that when the British entered Iraq during the First World War they banned all demonstrations. Then one day someone reported to the General Officer Commanding that people were shouting from the minaret of one the mosques. "If that is all they are doing," the General said, "they can go on shouting till the end of the -world. Let them stay in their mosques and shout from the minarets." Khomeini also claims, as he told me in one of our discussions, that after his arrest in 1963, while he was in, prison in Tehran, some- one came to him from the Palace, and asked him why he bothered with politics: "Politics is all a matter of treachery, lies and hypoc- risy," said the envoy. "You had better leave it to us." Khomeini says his answer was that that might be a true description of their sort of politics but it did not describe Isfamic politics. He said that after this interview the man from the Palace sent a statement to the newspapers to the effect that Khomeini agreed that religion and politics should be kept separate, with poli- tics being left to the poli- ticians. When he got to Najaf he denounced this statement as a lie: "It is the man who published this lie who ought to have been sent into exile, not me.' Khomeini's speeches and writings are bound to have a strange sound in foreign ears because part. of his genius lies in the use he makes of phrases from the Koran. These have an immediate relevance to Moslems but need a good deal of explanation for non- Moslems. I have already mentioned his use of the words taghuti (tyrants) and mustazafin (the humiliated). He used other Koranic words to contrast the mus- - taqbirin, the vain and arro- gant, with the mahrumin,the de'prived. When officials of the Shah's regime went on trial, and were accused of being "soldiers of Satan", some western newspapers found the expression slightly ridiculous, but again it had a familiar sound to Moslems. In many respects Khomei- ni's ideas are extremely- progressive. In his book Islamic Government, he dis- cusses subjects like imperi- alism, exploitation, and the influence of America in very modern terms, while he introduces the book with an appropriate verse from the Koran: "If kings enter a village, they will despoil it, loot it, and turn its honour- able inhabitants into slaves." In this book, as else- where, he emphasizes his main themes - hostility to the United States, which he regards as Iran's arch- enemy, and hatred, from Zionism and Israel. One of his fetu'as was that it was right that some of the money due to the imam should go to the Palestin- ians; this of course pleased the Arabs. It was characteristic of Khomeini, and one of the reasons for the growth of his reputation, that his interests extended far be- yond the confines of Iran; he was never parochial. He tried to address people not just as a Shia ayatollah, not just as a Persian, but as a Moslem leader who could speak with authority to all Moslems. Islam, he said, made a man free in all that he does - in his person, in his reputation, in his work- in where he lives and what he eats, provided that he does mothing that is con- trary to Islamic law, to the Sharia. - These were the principal ideas which Khomeini took with him to Najaf when he was driven out of Qom. Although he had been ob- liged to abandon his hau'za he stil regarded himself as a part of it, and from Najaf he used to send every week to his pupils a lesson he had recorded on cassette. These pupils would congregate to listen to his voice, and gradually others from out- side the hau'za came to listen too. Soon the message on the cassettes moved away from theology and became increa- singly political. The cas- settes were transcribed, the message on them copied and circulated outside Qom, in Tebran and all over the country. These taped mess- ages became known as i'ilamiyahs, communiques, or literally, "l-am-inform- ing-youse'. As someone said, what was happening was a revol- ution for democracy, against autocracy, led by theocracy, made possible by xerocracy. Or, as one. foreign ambassador ob- ..served, the right man had appeared at the right histori- cal moment, saying the right things. My own first meeting with Khomeini took place in the small house at Neauphle-le- Chateau, twenty miles west of Paris, whic in October 1977 became his head- quarters until his final return to Iran. On the day I arrived, in December, I found people there who had come from all over the world - students from the Sorbonne, graduates from Harvard, Yale, Berkeley and other American universities, many from leadi'ng families in Iranian society and public life. I was met by Ayatollah Hussein Miuntazari, the second most important Ira- nian divine and the man who would have had to take over from Khomeini if anything had happened to hime' iHe took me to Khbmeini wh,&r- after we had been tallcing for some time, asked me if I. would care to attend the- evening prayers and ser- mon. When I said that I would, he instructed his grandson Hussein to take me across to the marquee outside. - Soon Khomeini enteied and began to address his followers. He started in a low key, but I have never heard a voice which was so quiet and yet so moving. It seemed to caress the ears of his hearers in gentle waves, producing in them a state almost of intoxication. At first Hussein trans- lated his message into Ara- bic for me, but some of those near us begged us to be quiet, and in any case I preferred to iwatch the. effect of his words on the, audience rather t-han be toid their exact mearing. -It was a most extraordi- nary scene. HIere was the Imam, with his long grey beard and the black mourn- ing turban of the Shi'is, a figure who might have stepped straight out of the seventh century. Yet -all these people, representa- tives from theI intellectual and social elite of Iran, were listening to hini in absolute silence, -hanging in rapt attention on every word that fell from his lips. What most impressed me, when the chance came to talk alone to Khomeini, was his ability to grasp t-he essential of a situation. Wnhen I saw him, he had already been clear in his own mind for the best part of a year that the stage in Iran was set for a revol- ution, but he knew that there were no political forces and no individuals inside the country capable of leading it. The rermnants of the old political parties, and the new groupings like Mujalid- din Khalk and Fedayin Khalk, had been living too long in a- state of siege to see the position clearlyj and some of them had compro- mised with the regime. So had some of the religious leaders, but Khomeini. was absolutely certain that the motive force of the revol- ution was going "to be religion, and that this-meant he was the man whli was destined to lead it. ? 1981 Mohamed Heikal K homeini sees Islam as one eilhth prayers and ceremonies, seven eighths principles and organization. c o, seve : - 0-- The; mind f and heart :oif Khomeini