Waiting for God

Debunking the myths that sustained Ayatollah Khomeini's republic

Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic. By Michael Axworthy.

“SLEEP easily, Cyrus, for we are awake,” assured Iran's last shah, Muhammad-Reza Pahlavi, speaking at the tomb of his imperial ancestor in 1971. This staged event helped forge the myth that the Pahlavis were an adored monarchy stretching back millennia to the Achaemenid empire, a claim to which the shah clung dearly. Yet in less than a decade his embittered people had delivered his throne into the hands of an obscure Shia cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. James Buchan's elegant “Days of God”, which came out last November, focused on how all this came to pass. Now Michael Axworthy, a former diplomat and director of the Centre for Persian and Iranian Studies at Exeter University, goes over much of the same ground and explains how the Islamic republic has survived.

A hodgepodge of Marxists and other leftists allied themselves at first to the religious fundamentalists in common cause against the shah, inspiring Iranian students, in particular, to rise up against his rule. Within a few years, though, the left had lost out to Shia Islamic political groups that were, Mr Axworthy writes, “more flexible, more charismatic, more in tune with Iranian realities and less hidebound”. Like Mr Buchan, Mr Axworthy has mined newly opened archives to good effect. He lays bare the failure of Western governments to keep abreast of fast-changing events. One British dispatch saw “no threat to basic stability” in late 1977; another asked whether Iranians were still “the epitome of idleness”. The Iranian hostage-takers were astounded to find that, of the four CIA officers in the American embassy in Tehran, none could speak Persian.

Balancing scholarly precision with narrative flair, Mr Axworthy depicts an Islamic movement that exploited and distorted traditional Shia beliefs in order to seize and hold on to power. Cycles of protest and mourning, 40 days long and timed to coincide with Shia holy days—Mr Buchan's “days of God”—were like “a great revolutionary lung”, inhaling indignation, exhaling more demonstrations. Khomeini's theory of divine rule, velayat-e faqih, still unknown to most in 1979, represented a complete innovation in Shia religious thinking. The Shia Muslim tradition believes the Mahdi, its messiah, will return, but its adherents had not previously considered putting themselves in power.

Revolutionary jargon justified purges and trials (the regime executed 2,946 people in 1981 alone, according to Amnesty International). Those who survived bombs set off by the radical left and other secularists were glorified as shaheed-e zendeh, or living martyrs. Fundamentalist rhetoric also fed popular fervour for an eight-year war against Iraq, framing the struggle as a continuation of the ancient fight between the evil caliph Yazid and the martyred Hussein, who was killed at the battle of Karbala in 680. Military offensives were named after that sacred Shia site; the last big assault, Karbala-5, fought around Fish Lake, a huge artificial basin on Iraqi defence lines, was also the most wretchedly wasteful. Around 20,000 Iranians are believed to have died.

Mr Axworthy does the best job so far of describing the Iran-Iraq war. He draws on first-hand accounts of pilots, lieutenants and militia, and challenges the accepted notion that the Iranian air force was inept. The attacks were carried out according to intricate plans drafted under the shah, whose highly trained pilots were released from prison. He also breaks from Mr Buchan's thesis that Khomeini was bent on exporting Islamic government to Iraq, arguing instead that he saw the conflict as a just war to fend off a real threat. Drawing on Persian eyewitness accounts, he conjures up the chaos: the scramble for masks in nerve-gas attacks; paper-thin lungs blistered by mustard gas; fish, rotting and floating belly-up in an Iraqi lake brimming with barbed wire, electrodes and mines, “adding a new stench to the battlefield”.

Yet the repressive Islamic republic of today was not at all inevitable. Reformist Iranian presidents succeeded one another, from Mehdi Bazargan and Abolhassan Bani-Sadr in 1980 to Muhammad Khatami in 1997. Evidence shows that Khomeini genuinely wanted to work with progressive governments—not least because he needed their credibility to rule. Mr Axworthy paints a nuanced picture of the ayatollah, who let army generals lead the war and his assembly of experts end it, although the ceasefire was “more deadly to than poison”.

Mr Axworthy's analytical approach helps him demystify a revolutionary regime that has needed to feed off myths. He revisits, and convincingly reinterprets, defining moments of the Islamic republic. One is Khomeini's infamous response to a journalist as he returned to Tehran in February 1979, to cheering crowds. He felt “nothing”, he said—not because of a cold indifference to the Iranian people, but because he believed himself to be only a vehicle for the mind of God on Earth. The strength of Mr Buchan's rendering of Iran's story lies in its detail and its delicious storytelling; Mr Axworthy's, in his scholarly rigour and first-class analysis. Anyone interested in this most complex of revolutions would do well to read both.