192 No god but God
of Muslim clerics in the modern world was to preserve the spiritual
character of the Islamic state, not to run it directly. But what made
Khomeini so alluring was his ability to couch his theology in the pop-
ulist rhetoric of the time. He thus reached out to Iran’s influential
communist and Marxist factions by reformulating traditional Shi‘ite
ideology into a call for an uprising of the oppressed masses. He wooed
the secular nationalists by lacing his speeches with allusions to Iran’s
mythic past, while purposely obscuring the details of his political phi-
losophy. “We do not say that government must be in the hands of the
Faqih,” he claimed. “Rather we say that government must be run in
accordance with God’s laws for the welfare of the country.” What he
often failed to mention publicly was that such a state would not be
feasible except, as he wrote, “with the supervision of the religious
leaders.”
Khomeini balked when his fellow ayatollahs objected that the
Valayat-e Faqih merely replaced one form of tyranny with another.
After all, Khomeini argued, the Faqih is no mere secular leader; he is
the heir to the “Hidden Imam.” As such, he does not administer
divine justice, he is divine justice. Indeed, according to Khomeini, the
Faqih is “not ‘just’ in the limited sense of social justice, but in the
more rigorous and comprehensive sense that his quality of being just
would be annulled if he were to utter a single lie.”
Once his colleagues had been intimidated into silence and Iran’s
Shi‘ite majority stirred into action, Khomeini was free to seize control
of the transitional government. Before most Iranians knew what they
had accepted, he had used his popular mandate to inject his theologi-
cal beliefs into the political realm, transforming Iran into the Islamic
Republic, and proclaiming himself the country’s first Faqih: the
supreme temporal and religious authority in Iran.
The Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989. Although he was a frail and
sickly eighty-seven-year-old man, his death took much of the country
by surprise. During the funeral his corpse was mobbed in the streets;
the shroud in which he had been wrapped was torn to pieces and the
fragments taken by mourners as relics. There even were those in Iran
who refused to believe “the Imam” could have died. Some claimed he
was not dead, but had only gone into hiding; he would return again.