340 DESTINY DISRUPTED
outfit called SAVAK to consolidate his grip on the country, and as if just
to salt his countrymen's wounds, he signed a treaty with the United States
giving American citizens in Iran complete immunity from Iranian laws-
an astounding giveaway of sovereignty.
The shah's tyranny energized a resistance movement that harkened back
to the spirit of Sayyid Jamaluddin. Its leading theoretician, Dr. Ali Shariati
was a Sorbonne-educated Muslim socialist intellectual. He crafted a vision
of Islamic modernism that rejected what he called "Westoxification" and
sought a basis for progressive socialism in Islamic tradition. Shariati said,
for example, that Islam's insistence on the unity of God expressed the need
for human unity on Earth. In the modern era, the "polytheism" forbidden
by Islam was embodied in the division of society into classes by wealth and
race. According to Shariati, the three idols that Muslims pelted with stones
during the Hajj pilgrimage represented capitalism, despotism, and reli-
gious hypocrisy. He tapped Islamic stories and traditions as fuel for revo-
lutionary fervor, pointing for example, to Hussein's uprising against
Mu'awiya as a symbol of the human struggle for liberation, justice, and sal-
vation: if Hussein could inspire a group of seventy-plus against a massive
state, then a small underground revolutionary group of just a few hundred
members had no reason to hold back from declaring war on the shah of
Iran and the superpower that supported him.^3
The Islamic socialist resistance incarnated as an underground group
called the Mujahideen-e-Khalq. From the midfifties until the Iranian rev-
olution of 1978, this small group led the struggle against the Shah and
fought a secret war against SAVAK. These Mujahideen-e-Khalq {some-
times called Islamic Marxists) bore the brunt of the executions, imprison-
ment and torture by which the shah hoped to crush resistance, and the
cruelties these men and women endured beggar description.
At the same time, however, a very different sort of religious resistance
movement was gathering steam in Iran, one that came out of the ortho-
dox religious establishment as embodied by the grim cleric Ayatollah
Khomeini.
Like the Wahhabis of Sunnism, Khomeini claimed that Muslims had
fallen away from "true" Islam as understood from a literal reading of the
Qur'an and the traditions of the prophet and {because these were Shi'is)
the imams who succeeded him. Khomeini attacked the Shah not for his