The Ayatollah Sayyid Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi was an important figure in recent Iranian history. Widely recognized as the Ayatollah Khomeini’s heir apparent, Shahroudi was an Iranian-Iraqi dual citizen whose job was to unify Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon under a Shi’a alliance based on anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism whose ultimate goal was the elimination of Israel in collaboration with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Shahroudi was also involved in Iran’s Ostpolitik—or perhaps Nordpolitik would be a better term—which began on January 3, 1989 when the Supreme Leader, as one of his last acts, sent a delegation which included Abdollha Javadi-Amoli, Mohammed Javad Larijani, and Marzieh Hadidchi to Moscow bearing a letter in which Khomeini warned Mikhail Gorbachev of the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. Marxism, in Khomeini’s opinion, could not deal with the world situation because its materialistic ideology could not resolve a spiritual crisis brought on by lack of belief in spirituality, which he considered “the prime affliction of human society in the East and the West alike.”1

Gorbachev was taken aback by Khomeini’s daring move and reacted to what he saw as an invitation to convert to Islam by telling the Iranians that the Russians had their own traditions. Offended by what he felt was interference in the internal affairs of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev nonetheless approved a law granting religious freedom, claiming that “despite having different ideologies, we can have a peaceful relationship.”

The reaction of the Shi’ite clerics in Qom to Khomeini’s overture was, if anything, more hostile than the reaction of the Communists in Moscow. The mullahs were appalled that Khomeini had recommended reading Muslim philosophers of the Mutazilite school which they considered “deviant” and “heretical.” Khomeini would die before the year was out, but at the end of his life he found himself in the middle of a philosophical battle which had raged a millennium before he wrote his letter and was, as of that writing, still unresolved. As some indication of the complexity of his character, Khomeini taught philosophy in Qom during the 1940s, but by the 1960s he had turned to Egypt’s fanatical Muslim Brotherhood for the political solution to the problem which the creation of the state of Israel posed for the Muslim world.

The letter urging Gorbachev to study Greek philosophy was written by the same Ayatollah Khomeini who had Sayyed Qutb’s Salafist revolutionary manifesto translated into Farsi so that he could mobilize Iran’s Muslim population to rise up against the Great Satan in the successful revolution of 1979. Amanat claims that the influence of Qutb on the worldview of Sayyed ‘Ali Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader, “cannot be denied.”2

I was in the Ayatollah Shahroudi’s modest apartment as part of a whirlwind tour of Golestan which included a long conversation with the head of Radio Golestan about ancient Persian culture, which he studied at the university, and its perdurance into the present in unexpected ways. According to the standard western interpretation of ancient history, Greece was the antithesis of Persia. Aristotle said that no one who had to work for a living could be a citizen of Athens, because citizenship was a full-time job which entailed endless meetings, during which the Athenians would debate matters of state, like whether to go to war with the Persians. Unlike their Greek counterparts, who brought the idea of democracy into being, the Persian emperors based their decisions on the advice of a few counselors, like the Grand Vizier when it came to economic matters, and senior clergy like the Magi. Sometimes, as in the case of Darius, the Persian sovereign followed his dreams with disastrous consequences.

The head of Radio Golestan was firm in his denigration of ancient Persian culture. There was, he told me, no Persian Herodotus. If Iranians wanted to know their history, they had to read the Greeks. If Persians wrote anything down, he continued, it was not for hoi polloi; it was only for adepts in the Persian religion and usually inscribed in stone at out of the way places like mountain tops. My interlocutor was in this regard a product of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 which denigrated Persia’s non-Islamic past every bit as much at the Pahlavis praised it during the early 20th century as part of their attempt to establish a secular regime, something which makes Khomeini’s simultaneous endorsement of both Sayyed Qutb and Greek philosophy all the more astounding.

The main problem with ancient Persian culture may have more to do with historical circumstance than political philosophy. One of the constants of Persian history is the fact that every invader, including Alexander the Great, the Arabs, who imposed Islam on them, and the Mongols, to name just three marauding armies, burned to the ground every Persian library they could find, destroying centuries of accumulated literature. The main reason the Cyrus Cylinder, which documented the political philosophy of Persia’s multiethnic empire in the 6th century BC, survived is that it was made of clay and, therefore, fireproof.3

So how did Gorbachev react? Well, I never found out from the Ayatollah Shahroudi because he had more pressing issues on his mind. He wanted to talk about the Saudis and how distressed he was at their distortion of Islam and general lack of culture. Iran was involved in the Islamic version of a civil war with their co-religionists on the other side of the Persian Gulf. The main battlefield in that war at the time was Yemen, but the war was ideological too and had been for well over a millennium. A bit taken aback by the vehemence of his attack on fellow Muslims, I asked, “Why is there a sword on the Saudi flag?” To which he responded, “Because they spread their religion by conquest.”

In his recent history of Iran, Abbas Amanat describes that revolution that Shahroudi rode into power as unambiguously Islamic, ignoring the fact that the Ayatollah Khomeini taught philosophy at Qom during the Pahlavi era and, more importantly, that he got the idea of the rule of the guardians, or velayat i-faqih, from a reading of Plato’s Laws, as refracted through Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1907, which relied on the Shiite clergy in making sure that the laws it passed were not contradictory to Islam. Khomeini expanded the anti-British, anti-Russian attitudes of the Constitutional period to include anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism.

Mohsen Kadivar tracks the evolution of Khomeini’s political theory over the four cities associated with its development. Beginning in Qom, Khomeini wrote Uncovering of the Secrets (Kahsf a-Asrar) in 1942 advocating the viewpoints of Shi’ite authorities in the Constitutional Movement like Hosein Gharavi Na’ini, who “argued for the legitimacy of a democratically elected government and parliament with the permission and under the legal supervision of the Faqihs”4 or guardians as organized by the wilayat-i faqih, or the rule of the guardians, a concept he adopted from Plato’s Laws. In Najaf, Khomeini wrote Islamic Governance in which he claimed that the wilayat al-faqih led theocracy was “the only valid Islamic state.”5

In June 1979, Mehdi Barzargan came up with a new constitution modeled on the 1958 constitution of the French Fifth Republic, which got rejected in favor of a more Islamicist doctrine, but the dialectic pendulum continued to swing back and forth between these two alternatives without finding the golden mean. Because it could not resolve the conflict between a parliament directly elected by the citizens and a supreme council selected by the highest shi’ite authorities, the Iranian constitution’s “dichotomous foundations” ensured “contradictory essence of the Islamic Republic.”6

Kadivar lists five theories that form the foundations of Ayatollah Khomeini’s theory of the “absolute guardianship of the jurist”:

First, Khomeini adopted and altered Plato’s theory of the Philosopher-King by replacing the philosopher with the jurist. Second, as one of Ibn al-Arabi’s admirers, Khomeini took his idea of the mystic as the “Perfect Human Being,” and replaced the mystic with the jurist. Third, he expanded the theory of Shiite leadership or Imamat, which equated the Imam to the Prophet that are both appointed by God. He equated the jurist with the infallible Imam who is the absolute guardian of the people. Fourth, he assigned the characteristics of the charismatic, mythical Iranian king (farrahmand) to the jurist. Fifth, he added the bases of public interest and the efficiency of the modern state, which he replaced with the expediency of the regime, to ultimately serve Islam. The first four theories belong to the pre-modern state. Only the last one is borrowed from theories of the modern state.

According to this schema, Iran is to be ruled by jurists who are a conflation of the infallible imam, as its religious prototype, and “the charismatic, mythical Iranian king, on the other hand, as its secular counterpart. Neither paradigm fits in well with the administration of the modern state, which Kadivar sees as “essentially a secular job” based on the public interest.7

Khomeini’s political project was doomed to failure because Shari’a, as understood by Khomeini and Sunni fundamentalists like Mawdudi or Sayyid Qutb, “is not a system of law. Shari’a is a set of Islamic ethical virtues and moral norms. Hence, theocracy or the religious state is implausible, at least in the modern age.”8

Amanat contests the idea that “the 1979 revolution was destined to acquire an ‘Islamic’ face,”9 proposing instead the idea that the Islamic republic which rules Iran today came into being as the result of circumstances which no one could have foreseen in advance. Those circumstances were exploited by the republic’s “clerical elite” who “quickly developed weapons of intimidation and violence” which eliminated other voices by firing squad or driving them into exile. This was true, but the ad hoc nature of the revolution’s outcome was based on fault lines that went all the way back to the consequences of the Arabic invasion which still bothered the Ayatollah Shahroud, who brought them up in our conversation.

Convinced that institutions like the universities had been corrupted under the Pahlevis, Khomeini unleashed the Persian version of Mao’s cultural revolution to purify them. Amanat claims that “the Iranian version was far tamer, less bloody, and largely concerned with control of the educational levers at all levels. It was nevertheless deeply damaging to the fabric of Iranian education, professional fields, technological skills, and most of all, branches of the humanities.”10 The Iranian cultural revolution began with the closure of all of the country’s universities on June 4, 1980, followed by Khomeini’s ratification of that act and the need “to systematically cull undesirable elements,”11 by which the mullahs meant supporters of the Pahlevi policy of Westernization. Within a year, the cultural revolution was in full swing, as “mobs in Tehran and other provinces randomly attacked university campuses, beating up and injuring students, driving out the left from their offices and paramilitary bases, and in turn occupying campuses.”12 The Iranian cultural revolution may have been “far tamer” and “less bloody” than its Chinese counterpart, but it had catastrophic consequences for literature and philosophy, which the Iranian clergy had always viewed with suspicion. Now at the moment when they were needed the most, they were deliberately banned from the discussion, leading to the excesses of revolutionary figures like Sadeq Khalkhali, the hanging judge in charge of the revolutionary tribunals who set out to purge the nascent Islamic republic of anyone found guilty of “corrupting the earth and combating God.”13 This category, unsurprisingly, encompassed a large group of people including nationalists of the secular and ethnic variety as well as leftists of all shades and nonpolitical groups like the Baha’is (a sect to which Amanat belongs). Before long, it became clear that Khalkhali was invoking Islam as a way of declaring war on Iranian history:

In his vast catalog of corrupters of the earth, he reserved a place for rulers of Iran’s pre-Islamic past. He wrote an essay condemning Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire of the fifth century BCE, accusing him not only of being a despot and liar but also of being a sexual pervert. In the early days of the revolution, Khalkhali intended to bulldoze Persepolis and other ancient Iranian monuments of the pre-Islamic era. His campaign was stopped, miraculously, because of local resistance. Reportedly, even Ferdowsi’s tomb made it onto Khalkhali’s demolition wish list.14

Like Shi’a Islam, Persian poetry became an acceptable way to protest the Arabic suppression of Logos in Persia. One of the main protagonists in that battle was Abul-Qasem Ferdowsi Tusi, or simply Ferdowsi, author of the Shahnameh, a work universally recognized as the national epic of Persia. Like Shi’a Islam, which was based on the tragic death of Husain, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh found its culmination in the death of Rostam, the Persian hero who died defending his country against the Arabic invasion:

Completed in the early 11th Century, the Shahnameh (Book of Kings) is not only a literary masterpiece, but also a book that has for centuries helped define Iranian identity, as well as safeguarding the existence of the Persian language. Consisting of more than 50,000 rhyming couplets, it is the longest poem ever written by a single author. It is not an epic about a single defining event, a fantastical voyage, or a particular pair or star-crossed lovers or arch-rivals, as is the case with many national epics. Although certainly brimming with the aforementioned, the Shahnameh is an epic centred around the very essence and soul of Iran; and, while ancient Iran is its chief object, the book’s messages are timeless, and in many cases may well have been written for humanity as a whole.15

Over a millennium after Rostam, the hero of the Shahnameh, died on the battlefield fighting the Arabs, the Ayatollah Shahroud was still mourning his death by attacking the Saudis, years after Sadeq Khalkhali, a member of the same revolution, had done his best to efface Ferdowsi’s memory. Anyone who is unaware of this contradiction will find it impossible to understand the current situation in Iran.

After close to 1,500 years, the Arabian conquest of Persia has created a conflict between Persian culture and Arabic religion which continues to act as a fault line dividing Iranian culture. Iran was one of the few countries conquered by Islam which refused to substitute Arabic for its native language. Like the Berbers of North Africa, Iran “did not succumb to the predominance of the Arabic language. Nor did it ever entirely abandon its pre-Islamic cultural memories. It preserved not only its endogenous solar calendar along with the Islamic lunar calendar but also its pre-Islamic rites such as the Persian New Year festival of Nowruz at the vernal equinox.”16

Amanat establishes the importance of language as the vehicle and repository of Persian culture early in his history. The Persian language, in all of its historical forms, was:

an enduring and yet adaptable means of communication, source of literary efflorescence, and repositor of collective memories and shared symbols. Belonging to the Indo-Iranian linguistic family (a branch of Indo-European languages), over the course of three millennia Persian evolved from the ancient tongue of Achaemenid times, known as the Old Persian, to the Middle Persian (Pahlavi) of late antiquity, and eventually to “Modern” Persian (Farsi) of today’s Iran (and with minor variances, Dari of Afghanistan and Tajik of Central Asia). Presumably rooted in the court parlance (dari) of the Sasanian period, Modern Persian first developed as a literary medium in the early ninth century CE, only to become, in the following centuries, the lingua franca of the Persianate world, including Iran proper and in use from India to Central Asia.17

Farsi was the main bulwark against Arabic cultural hegemony, and it preserved Iranian cultural identity largely through the poetry written in that tongue “despite Islamic disapproval, and even prohibition, and in the face of outcries from the religious establishment.”18 The history of Iran, as Amanat portrays it in his book, has been an ongoing conflict between the Persian id, celebrating wine, women, and song in its poetry, and the Islamic superego, which:

emphatically prohibited playing or listening to music for leisure and reproducing any images of humans and living things in any form; it denounced any preservation and celebration of “pagan” myths and festivals of the pre-Islamic past; and even more intrusively, it banned, at least in theory, social practices such as wine drinking, singing, mixing of the sexes, same-sex affection, recitation of lyrical poetry, and most, if not all, forms of social leisure. Despite political defeat and the relatively swift conversion to Islam, it can be argued that Iran never was fully won over by the predominant culture of normative Islam, perhaps less even than Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean, and Mesopotamia. It converted to Islam at its own pace and on its own terms, and with paradigms and practices it improvised along the way.19

If what Amanat says about the Persian/Islamic fault line in Iranian culture is true, then the Iran we have known for the past 43 years is an aberration based on a category mistake which deliberately mistook the part for the whole. The Islamic Republic which came into being in 1979 was part of a dialectic which began with the Arabic conquest. More specifically, the Islamic Republic came into being as the reverse engineering of the CIA inspired coup d’etat which brought the Shah to power in 1953. No matter how we view the two competing paradigms which dominate the last century of Iranian history, both the Pahlavi desire to westernize Iran and the Islamic desire to reverse that westernization derived from contesting strains that went all the way back to the Arabic conquest of Persia in the seventh century.

What both 20th century coups have in common is an intense desire to maintain Persian identity against foreign invaders. The arid plateau which constitutes the main area of the Iranian nation has provided a natural fortress against foreign influence, even though the northeastern end of the country lay wide open to the Asiatic hordes who entered Iran through the Silk Road, which was also the main vehicle for commerce. But geography was not the main safeguard for Iranian culture. Because Iran was one of the few countries which retained its own language after the Muslim conquests of the seventh century, the Iranian language provided the main bulwark against foreign influence even after the culture had been subdued by the Arabian conquest.

Iran was a logocentric culture whose language preserved the identity of its people in spite of centuries of foreign invasions. In spite of their different languages and political systems, Persians were every bit as Logocentric as the Greeks. If by Logos we mean language, the Persian language was central to Iranian identity. If by Logos we mean St. John’s appropriation of the Greek term Logos as the description of God (Kai Logos een Theos) in the metaphysical prologue to his gospel, then the Persian Magi were the first non-Hebrews to encounter the Logos Incarnate. If by Logos we mean the central tenets of Greek philosophy, Iran made formal contact with Logos at least one century before the Arab conquest. After the emperor Justinian ended its funding in 529 AD, the Platonic Academy moved from Athens to Ctesiphon, where it found patronage under the Sassanid King Khosrau I.20 Arabic philosophy was not Islamic in inspiration. The Arabic conquest of Persia, which took place from 640 to 642 AD, meant the imposition of Arabic as Persia’s liturgical language, but from the eighth or ninth century until about the fifteenth century “the greatest Mohammaden theologians, historians, philosophers, grammarians, lexicographers, and philologists who wrote in Arabic were of Persian origin.”21 Amanat’s history is predicated on a philosophical event which took place roughly 900 years before the events described at the beginning of his book, an event that has been characterized as the “closing of the Muslim mind.”22

[…] This is just an excerpt from the May 2022 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

(Endnotes Available by Request)