The World

Although he appointed a moderate Islamicist as premier, he had tricked the leftists, the moderates and the Americans: Khomeini delegated power to a Council of the Islamic Revolution, where many of his pupils, men who had been in and out of prison for years, joined the inner circle: one of them, a forty-year-old Najad clergyman called Ali Khamenei, trusted by Khomeini, organized a new army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. These two – first Khomeini, then Ali Khamenei – would rule Iran as imams into the 2020s.

Khomeini’s real nature was revealed at once as his supporters won shootouts with the Imperial Guard and arrested all the generals and ministers. These they brought to the Refah school, where the chief revolutionary judge, Sadeq Khalkhali, a plump, murderous giggler, a Khomeini disciple since 1955 and long-time leader of the Fadayan-e Islam, shot them on the roof. When he received a phone call asking him to delay the execution of the shah’s long-time premier, he asked them to wait and then personally shot him before returning – ‘Sorry, the sentence’s already been carried out.’ Later he boasted, ‘I killed over 500 criminals close to the royal family … I feel no regret,’ except that the shah had escaped. In October, the shah arrived for medical treatment in America, inspiring a ‘Death to America’ campaign: 400 students stormed America’s Teheran embassy. They took sixty-six Americans hostage, backed by Khomeini, who used the episode to remove the moderates and impose his unique theocracy: the Supreme Leader – by the Law of the Guardian – was an absolute sacred monarch, superior to an elected president and assembly.

Humiliated, Carter dispatched commandos in Operation Eagle Claw to rescue the hostages, but the choppers crashed in a sandstorm, killing eight soldiers, whose wizened bodies became props in a macabre Iranian show. ‘Who crushed Mr Carter’s helicopters?’ asked Khomeini. ‘We did? The sands did! These sands are agents of God. Let them try again.’ They did not. American commanders-in-chief require the laurels of victory: Carter was tainted with defeat and misfortune, but he did nurture the first Arab–Israeli peace treaty.

On 19 November 1977, Sadat, confident after his early successes against Israel, had courageously flown to Jerusalem.

JJ OF GHANA AND SADAT IN JERUSALEM

Sadat told the Knesset: ‘Let’s put an end to war.’ His Israeli host, Menachem Begin, a dour Polish-born nationalist who had used terrorism to undermine the British Mandate, had overturned thirty years of Labour government, winning the votes of the neglected Mizrahi Jews from Arab countries. Begin returned Sinai to Egypt in return for a peace that outraged the rest of the Islamic world. In March 1979, when the deal was signed in Washington, Assad of Syria and Qaddafi of Libya denounced Sadat’s betrayal along with Imam Khomeini.

Khomeini’s first foreign visitor was Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, who had trained many Iranian radicals in his Soviet-funded Lebanese camps. Faith is contagious and fungible: the revolution of 1979 changed the world as much as those of 1789 and 1917. Secular westerners saw Khomeini as a spectre from the obscurantist, intolerant past. Actually, he was the future. Khomeini’s ambitions were pan-Islamic, unbounded by Shiism or Iranian history, embracing the secular Palestinians (‘Today Iran, tomorrow Palestine’) as well as Sunnis. Khomeini had been inspired by the Egyptian Sunni, Qutb, hanged by Nasser; now Qutb’s followers were inspired by him. President Sadat had granted asylum to his friend the dying deposed shah, who moved from America to Panama, pursued by Khomeini’s agents demanding his murder or extradition. When he died in Cairo, Sadat buried him in al-Rifai Mosque beside Ismail the Magnificent and Farouk. Sadat’s peace with Israel and loyalty to the shah aroused Islamicist hatred.

In Pakistan, on 4 April 1979, the elected former prime minister Bhutto was hanged on the orders of the Islamicist general who had deposed him. The chief of staff, General Muhammad Zia, had in July 1977 deposed Bhutto, whose high-handed autocracy and manoeuvres between socialism, Islam and the feudal lords, not to speak of the murder of his opponents, had alienated all sides. Bhutto himself had appointed Zia and encouraged the brisk, moustachioed British-trained officer to promote Islam in the army, but the general loathed him, later trying him for murder. Now the Shiite Iranian revolution encouraged the Sunni Zia to Islamicize Pakistan and impose sharia law.

Khomeini’s influence was powerful, but he faced a present threat: he despised Saddam Hussein and called for the destruction of the ‘godless Baathists’. Saddam despised him back.