Horrors, Realities of Khomeini’s Rule Recalled : Iranian Journalist Pens a Biography of Iran’s Fearsome, Iron-Fisted Ayatollah

WASHINGTON —  In Iran today they have a machine for cutting off the arms of convicted thieves, one of the many “reforms” imposed by the regime of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

“Technological progress,” said Iranian journalist Amir Taheri, a wry smile barely dancing across his face.

“It caused a big debate,” he continued in a dispassionate tone. “There are mullahs who are against the machine because they say it makes the operation painless, and therefore detracts from the original weight of the punishment.

“The humanists favor the machine precisely because it is painless. So it has been adopted in some cities and banned in others.”

Of course, he cautions, the arm isn’t chopped off for a first offense; for that the criminal is merely beaten. With further convictions the beatings increase and he begins to lose pieces of his arm: first a finger, then two, then three.

Fled in 1979

Taheri lives in Paris now, where he works for a French magazine. He stayed in his homeland for six months after the ayatollah came to power in February, 1979, but fled later that year, leaving behind most of his possessions, a few days before he would have been purged from his job editing the largest daily newspaper in Tehran.

His book, “The Spirit of Allah,” a biography of Khomeini, has recently been published in the United States, after its debut in England, France and West Germany, where it has been a best seller. (It has had mixed reviews here, with some writers complaining about its rather dense prose.)

Writing the book was one way to make some use of the knowledge he earned during 11 years as a journalist in Iran, and to try to make some sense of the whole bizarre experience.

“I thought that Khomeini deserved to be properly introduced,” he said. “The tendency has been to put him aside and deny that it was his revolution. . . . This is not true. He deserves credit.”

Confusion and Horror

Americans watched with confusion and horror as Iran, once a little-known land somewhere in the Middle East, came into focus with terrifying clarity as the place where 52 Americans were held hostage from November, 1979, until January, 1981.

In the history of Iran, that incident will be recorded as a short chapter in what proved to be a major revolution--one that in the eyes of Westerners turned the country into a medieval outpost ruled with surrealistic flair by religious despots.

It is this revolution that Taheri chronicles. The story of Khomeini traces the tensions and currents that turned into a full-scale rejection of everything perceived as Western, from music and poetry to equality for women.

The ayatollah, Taheri writes, is now virtually a prisoner, so afraid of assassination that for six years he has not left the fortified village in the foothills of northeast Tehran in which he lives.

‘Note of Remorse’

“He’s like a figure in Greek tragedy,” Taheri said. “He’s brought it all on his own head. I detect a very faint note of remorse in his recent speeches. . . . I can read his semiology. I get his signals. I am a Khomeiniologist.”

He began collecting information for the book as soon as he left the country. He returned for a few months in 1980, but has not been back since. His reading ranged from the Koran, the holy book of Islam, to everything Khomeini ever wrote. “That I wouldn’t recommend to my worst enemies,” he said.

One person he interviewed was murdered between sessions; not because of the book, he hastens to add, though it’s hard to know for sure in a country where a “crime against Allah” can be drinking whiskey, writing poetry or, for a woman, failing to wear a veil. And some crimes against Allah are punishable by death.

“It could be anything,” he said. “A 9-year-old girl was shot because she poured pepper into the eyes of a revolutionary guard during a demonstration. She was warring on Allah.” He writes of homosexuals being hanged from trees in one city, and an 18-year-old pregnant woman being executed by a firing squad after being accused of fornication.

No Art Allowed

Khomeini disapproves of all art, Taheri said, because it brings pleasure and that is a seduction to weakness.

“There are people who say Khomeinism is not really Islam. I say it really is Islam, but Islam is not only Khomeinism, just as the Inquisition is quintessentially Christianity, but Christianity is not only the Inquisition.”

Taheri first encountered Ayatollah Khomeini when, as a young journalist, he was assigned by the editor of the English-language paper he worked for to discover the possible successors to the recently deceased grand ayatollah of the time.

“I thought it would be like a U.S. presidential race,” he said. “I didn’t have the faintest idea how these people operate. I interviewed all the likely successors and, of course, one of the names mentioned was Khomeini, but I couldn’t interview him because he was in exile. You were not even allowed to print his name.

Wrote About Khomeini

“But I wrote an article and included several paragraphs about him, and the editor quite courageously published it. And this was the first time his name had been published in Iran for five years.”

His editor, he said, had developed a system of printing controversial articles on Thursday, the eve of the Muslim weekend.

“The advantage was that we were writing in English, and by the time the whole thing was translated it was cold stuff. Other felonies would have been committed in the meantime to attract attention.”

Taheri, the son of a professor of English literature at the University of Tehran, left the country at 15 to finish his education in Great Britain, then the fashionable country for middle- and upper-class Iranians.

He found work on the English-language newspaper after a short stint as a teacher of economics and failing to get into the foreign service because he had a non-Iranian wife (she is French).

Revolution Unlikely

He sees little hope of another revolution deposing Khomeini.

“Many people are tired, wounded, hungry, cold, miserable. People must have a relative degree of comfort before they make a revolution.”

The country is ruled by the mullahs, he said, but run by thousands of people who were educated in the United States and Europe. They are the ones who make the trains run and keep the system, such as it is, rolling, Taheri said. It is in this group that he sees some hope of things changing for the better.

“They have their beards and they chant ‘Death to America’ in front of the TV cameras, but I can’t believe they are that dumb,” he said.