The Ayatollah Khomeini descended from an Air France jet in Tehran 30 years ago this past February to claim the mantle of his Islamic revolution. Before alighting, he was asked by a journalist how he felt upon returning to Iran after 15 years in exile. Khomeini’s curt, one-word reply — “nothing” — swiftly became notorious. Millions of Iranians, not to mention the scores of politicians and scholars intent on understanding Iran’s upheaval, have spent the intervening three decades trying to decipher its meaning. Did the ayatollah’s calculating, pan-Islamist heart hold no affection for Iran? Was he asserting his existential distance from the West?
KHOMEINI’S GHOST
The Iranian Revolution and the Rise of Militant Islam
By Con Coughlin
Illustrated. 370 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99
Such questions typically preoccupy accounts of Khomeini, for even today the ayatollah remains a perplexing subject — a puritan who loved poetry, a fundamentalist capable of flexibility, a Persian-Shia chauvinist longing to inspire the Sunni Arab world. In Tehran, politicians regularly quote him to trounce rivals, but the ayatollah has left such a rich legacy of contradictory opinion that both sides of a debate can usually deploy his words to strategic effect.
The nuances of the ayatollah’s character do not much interest Con Coughlin, an editor at The Daily Telegraph, in his new book “Khomeini’s Ghost.” He portrays Khomeini as an incorrigible, Taliban-style fanatic bent on acquiringnuclear weapons for the sake of his doomed Islamist project. “The quest for the atom bomb was a central part of Khomeini’s legacy,” he writes.
In the book’s second section, Coughlin sets out to catalog revolutionary Iran’s dirty business from 1979 down to the present, drawing a neat line from Khomeini’s revolution to “so many of the challenges the world faces today.” He rightly points out that Khomeini’s early attempts to market his revolutionary politics abroad antagonized the Sunni regimes of the Persian Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia, initiating an effective contest for the title of “most fundamentalist” that recast the dynamics of the Middle East for years to come.
But in measuring the success of Khomeini’s supranational project, Coughlin overreaches. He describes in sweeping terms how Khomeini’s vision for an Islamic state “became the manifesto for Islamic fundamentalist regimes throughout the world.” That can hardly be the case, since the ayatollah’s concept of rule by the clergy (“velayat-e faqih”) is enshrined in a Shia reading of jurisprudence, and can hold no such direct, universal relevance for the majority of the Islamic world, which is Sunni. Coughlin argues that the legacy of the revolution is “as powerful today” as it was when Khomeini came to power in 1979. Such endorsements would brighten any Tehran bureaucrat’s day, but in reality Iran’s ability to extend its ideological influence around the region has never matched its ambitions.
Coughlin tends to define Iran in black-and-white terms, writing that Khomeini “accomplished his lifelong ambition of creating an Islamic state based on the strict interpretation of Shariah law.” He ignores the fact that, despite Khomeini’s best intentions to vest absolute power in the state’s religious leader, the Constitution provides for an elected legislature and declares that the country must be run “on the basis of public opinion.” Though elections have never been free, they remain fiercely contested, and myriad institutions force an opaque but real rule by consensus.
This unworkable, dual sovereignty of the divinely appointed and the popularly elected lies at the heart of Iran’s problems and is the cause of its debilitating factional strife. Coughlin has little feel for the role Iran’s warring factions play in its foreign policy, and often relates only half the story. He paints a picture of Iran as a state in cahoots with Al Qaeda, writing that Tehran masterminded the escape of operatives fleeing from Afghanistan, includingOsama bin Laden’s son Saad, and provided them safe haven. He states that “the presence of such prominent Al Qaeda militants in Iran . . . was yet another issue that would undermine Khatami’s attempts to improve relations with the West.”
This is a misleading presentation of the facts. It is true that Iranian hardliners played a cat-and-mouse game with the moderate government of Mohammad Khatami, concealing Qaeda fugitives who had fled to Iran. But the Khatami government dispatched agents to hunt down at least 200 fugitives, and put them on planes back to their home countries.
Iranian officials complained at that time that they could not repatriate all of the fugitives. In the case of Saad bin Laden, for example, Iran faced a quandary — Saudi Arabia refused to accept him, and there was no framework in place to hand him over to a third country or party. Tehran sought America’s help in handling these awkward cases, but was rebuffed by the Bush administration.
Coughlin stretches and contorts history with unproven allegations to tie Iran to nearly all major terrorist attacks against American interests over the past two decades. His Iran trained the Qaeda cells that bombed the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and he writes that “similar suspicions surfaced” when Al Qaeda bombed the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. He declares that Iran led a campaign of destabilization in Jordan. Even after the 9/11 attacks, he writes, Iran trained Qaeda terrorists at camps in Tehran. It is presumably at this point that the reader is meant to panic, and begin wondering why the United States decided to invade Iraq in 2003 rather than Iran.
But the reader should be aware that in marshaling his argument, Coughlin is careless with names, associations and even basic facts. He mistakenly states that Iran uses the Muslim calendar, rather than the Iranian; that the human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi won theNobel Prize in Literature, rather than the Nobel Peace Prize; and that women in Iran are required to wear the black chador (they are required to cover their hair and wear coats, but official codes permit some sartorial freedom).
At times, Coughlin takes out of context documents that are available in the public realm. Khomeini “unequivocally declared his support for an Iranian atom bomb,” he says, paraphrasing quotations from a letter written by Khomeini, leaked to the public in 2006. But the letter refers only indirectly to Iran’s need to pursue nuclear weapons. Khomeini was responding to a letter by a military commander outlining what the depleted Iranian forces would require to win the war against Iraq. It does not explicitly call for Iran to develop nuclear weapons and hardly qualifies as the smoking gun Coughlin brandishes throughout his final chapters. With such an abundant record of actual Iranian transgressions with regard to its nuclear program, such leaps are unnecessary.
At a time when Washington is dispensing with its failed policy of belittling and ignoring Iran, it is disappointing that Coughlin’s book cannot offer the nuanced analysis policy makers need. Iran is not only the most powerful nation in the Persian Gulf, but arguably the only country in the region where people are weary of political Islam and inclined to view the United States favorably. These rare qualities make Iran a nation of unique potential to the Obama administration, as it turns to rehabilitating America’s image in the Middle East.
Coughlin offers no thoughts on how the West ought to proceed. He concludes limply that as long as Khomeini’s heirs are in power, Iran will remain defiant. Given the current attitudes in Washington about Iran, it seems Coughlin’s book has arrived one administration too late.
Azadeh Moaveni is the author of “Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran.”
www.nytimes.com
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