Lisa Daftari: Exalting Khomeini’s Legacy
[Lisa Daftari is an award-winning journalist with expertise in the Middle East and counter-terrorism. Her stories have appeared on CBS, NBC, PBS, the Washington Post and Voice of America. She was invited to show her documentary film on an Iranian political youth movement to a subcommittee of Congress.]
...Khomeini, best known to the rest of the world as the founder of modern Islam, the supporter of the Hostage Crisis and the man who issued a fatwa (death decree) on the head of author Salman Rushdie, represented for the Iranian people a central chapter of their modern history that is both complicated and tragic. In the roughly ten years that he reigned, over 100,000 Iranians were executed. The Iran-Iraq war futilely dragged on for almost a decade, and persecuted Iranians across a multicolored Iranian population wondered what the Revolution had achieved.
Looking back at [Khomeini] makes it difficult to understand how Islamic Republic leaders are now bringing back a cultish reverence for the Khomeini era. Since the post-election protests, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and likewise, reformist Presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi have made serious efforts to revive a faux nostalgia for the late Ayatollah among the opposition....
Besides bearing such resemblances in surnames, Khomeini and Khamenei share similarities beyond the superficial. Both support mass executions, terrorism, and a fundamentalist Islamic ideology. Khomeini was famous for the words, “We do not worship Iran. We worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.” To spread Islam and its influence was his agenda, not much different from the current regime. So inherent is Khomeini’s role in the Islamic Republic landscape that to eradicate his influence from the movement is to study the establishment of the American government system without George Washington, or better yet, to assess Nazism absent Adolph Hitler.
The cleansing of Khomeini’s image became en vogue under former President Mohammad Khatami, who sought to salvage the late Ayatollah’s bloody reputation and in effect absolve the regime, beginning at its very roots. It is said that Khatami began his campaign to change the then dull and disillusioned mood during his presidency and to purify Iran’s modern history. It also might have to do with the fact that Khatami and Khomeini were related. Khatami’s brother, Mohammad Reza, is married to Khomeini’s granddaughter, Zahra Eshraghi....
Under every IRI leader since Khatami, there has been a push to glorify the name and legacy of Khomeini, a move the leaders believe will sustain the Islamic Republic. For the current government it relies on erasing a very recent history, and for the reformists, it means tying themselves to a retrospectively more ‘benevolent’ supreme leader, in order to say that not everything about the Islamic Republic is corrupt; it had its glory days too.
Making such a claim relies entirely on pandering to a population of Iranians under the age of 30, who do not clearly remember Khomeini’s track record. Or maybe they do remember it and choose not to. It is clearly more pleasant to remember a peaceful history rather than one dotted with executions, stonings and lack of human rights. The leaders may take advantage of the people’s yearning for a united Iran, albeit one that chooses to forget its own history and thus remains under the grips of an Islamic Republic.
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...Khomeini, best known to the rest of the world as the founder of modern Islam, the supporter of the Hostage Crisis and the man who issued a fatwa (death decree) on the head of author Salman Rushdie, represented for the Iranian people a central chapter of their modern history that is both complicated and tragic. In the roughly ten years that he reigned, over 100,000 Iranians were executed. The Iran-Iraq war futilely dragged on for almost a decade, and persecuted Iranians across a multicolored Iranian population wondered what the Revolution had achieved.
Looking back at [Khomeini] makes it difficult to understand how Islamic Republic leaders are now bringing back a cultish reverence for the Khomeini era. Since the post-election protests, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and likewise, reformist Presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi have made serious efforts to revive a faux nostalgia for the late Ayatollah among the opposition....
Besides bearing such resemblances in surnames, Khomeini and Khamenei share similarities beyond the superficial. Both support mass executions, terrorism, and a fundamentalist Islamic ideology. Khomeini was famous for the words, “We do not worship Iran. We worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.” To spread Islam and its influence was his agenda, not much different from the current regime. So inherent is Khomeini’s role in the Islamic Republic landscape that to eradicate his influence from the movement is to study the establishment of the American government system without George Washington, or better yet, to assess Nazism absent Adolph Hitler.
The cleansing of Khomeini’s image became en vogue under former President Mohammad Khatami, who sought to salvage the late Ayatollah’s bloody reputation and in effect absolve the regime, beginning at its very roots. It is said that Khatami began his campaign to change the then dull and disillusioned mood during his presidency and to purify Iran’s modern history. It also might have to do with the fact that Khatami and Khomeini were related. Khatami’s brother, Mohammad Reza, is married to Khomeini’s granddaughter, Zahra Eshraghi....
Under every IRI leader since Khatami, there has been a push to glorify the name and legacy of Khomeini, a move the leaders believe will sustain the Islamic Republic. For the current government it relies on erasing a very recent history, and for the reformists, it means tying themselves to a retrospectively more ‘benevolent’ supreme leader, in order to say that not everything about the Islamic Republic is corrupt; it had its glory days too.
Making such a claim relies entirely on pandering to a population of Iranians under the age of 30, who do not clearly remember Khomeini’s track record. Or maybe they do remember it and choose not to. It is clearly more pleasant to remember a peaceful history rather than one dotted with executions, stonings and lack of human rights. The leaders may take advantage of the people’s yearning for a united Iran, albeit one that chooses to forget its own history and thus remains under the grips of an Islamic Republic.