Ruhollah Khomeini

• 1. Introduction

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  Ruhollah Khomeini died on the 3rd of June 1989, and the streets of Tehran became something the world had never quite seen before. Up to ten million people poured out to mourn him, one fifth of Iran's entire population, producing what is considered the second-largest funeral in recorded history. The body fell out of the coffin. Soldiers fired warning shots into the air. The helicopter carrying Khomeini's remains was swarmed by grieving crowds who dragged it back to earth as it tried to take off. A second funeral had to be held five hours later, this time with a steel casket.

  Who was the man who inspired that kind of devotion, and that kind of disorder? He was born Ruhollah Mostafavi Musavi Khomeini on the 17th of May 1900 in the small city of Khomeyn. His father was murdered before he turned three. He would grow into an ayatollah, a poet, a philosopher, a political theorist, and finally the supreme leader of a revolution that remade an entire nation. He described the United States as the "Great Satan", issued a fatwa calling for the death of a British novelist, and presided over a war that lasted nearly eight years and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. He was Time magazine's Man of the Year in 1979. And in Iran today, insulting him is punishable by imprisonment.

  This is the story of how a cleric from a provincial town became the face of an era.

• 2. Roots and Formation

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  Khomeini's family tree stretches back to Nishapur in northeastern Iran, and before that to the Kingdom of Awadh, a region in what is now the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. His ancestors migrated there toward the end of the 18th century, drawn by Shi'a rulers of Persian origin who welcomed a steady stream of scholars, poets, jurists, architects, and painters. His paternal grandfather, Ahmad Hindi, was born in the small town of Kintoor, near Lucknow. He left on a pilgrimage to Najaf in 1830 and never came back, reportedly to escape the spread of British power in India. The family's Indian chapter was so formative that Ruhollah Khomeini used Hindi as a pen name in some of his ghazals.

  The family's clerical tradition ran deep. Khomeini's grandfather Mirza Ahmad Mojtahed-e Khonsari was the cleric who issued a fatwa forbidding tobacco during the Tobacco Protest, a significant act of religious defiance in Iranian history. Ruhollah's father, Mustafa Musawi, was murdered in 1903, leaving the two-year-old to be raised by his mother, Agha Khanum, and his aunt, Sahebeth.

  By the age of six he was studying the Quran and elementary Persian. The following year he enrolled in a local school learning religion, noheh khani, and traditional subjects. His elder half-brother Morteza Pasandideh, a cleric and poet, helped guide his education. These early years instilled in him the combination of religious rigor and literary sensibility that would mark his entire life.

• 3. The Scholar and the Mystic

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  After World War I, arrangements were made for Khomeini to study at the Islamic seminary in Isfahan, but he chose the seminary in Arak instead, placing himself under Ayatollah Abdolkarim Haeri Yazdi. In 1920, he began his studies there. The following year, Haeri Yazdi moved to Qom and invited his students along. Khomeini accepted, taking up residence at the Dar al-Shafa school in the holy city southwest of Tehran.

  At Qom, Khomeini's interests ranged well beyond what seminaries typically taught. He pursued Islamic law and jurisprudence, but also philosophy and mysticism, subjects that were often regarded with suspicion by other clerics. He sought out Mirza Ali Akbar Yazdi, a scholar of philosophy and mysticism, and after Yazdi's death in 1924, he continued with two other teachers, Javad Aqa Maleki Tabrizi and Rafi'i Qazvini. His deepest influences included Mohammad Ali Shah Abadi, and the Sufi mystics Mulla Sadra and Ibn Arabi. He studied ancient Greek philosophy and regarded Aristotle as the founder of logic, while holding Plato's views in the field of divinity to be "grave and solid".

  He was also, quietly, a poet. Beginning in his adolescent years he composed mystic, political and social verse. His collections, published posthumously under the titles The Confidant, The Decanter of Love and Turning Point, and Divan, reveal a sensibility the world rarely associated with him. The modern poet Nader Naderpour, who lived from 1929 to 2000, remembered spending "many hours exchanging poems with Khomeini in the early 1960s": "For four hours we recited poetry. Every single line I recited from any poet, he recited the next."

  He inaugurated his teaching career at 27 by giving private lessons on irfan and Mulla Sadra. In 1928 he published his first book, Sharh Du'a al-Sahar, a detailed Arabic commentary on a prayer recited before dawn during Ramadan. He would eventually author more than 40 books, becoming one of the leading scholars of Twelver Shi'ism.

• 4. The Path to Confrontation

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  In January 1963, the Shah announced the White Revolution, a multi-point programme that included land reform, the nationalization of forests, profit-sharing in industry, and the enfranchisement of women and non-Muslims to hold office. To the Shia Ulama, some of these changes posed a direct economic threat: the clergy administered and drew revenue from vast tracts of land held as charitable trusts. Khomeini called the reforms "an attack on Islam".

  On the 22nd of January 1963, Khomeini issued a strongly worded declaration denouncing the Shah. Two days later, the Shah took an armored column to Qom and delivered a speech attacking the Ulama as a class. Khomeini responded with a manifesto signed by eight other senior Shia scholars, accusing the Shah of violating the constitution, spreading moral corruption, and submitting to the United States and Israel. He also canceled the Nowruz celebrations for the Iranian year 1342, which fell on the 21st of March 1963, as a sign of protest.

  On the afternoon of Ashura, the 3rd of June 1963, Khomeini delivered a speech at the Feyziyeh madrasa comparing the Shah to the Caliph Yazid, whom Shias regard as a tyrant. He warned the Shah that the day would come when people would offer thanks for his departure. On the 5th of June at 3:00 am, Khomeini was detained and transferred to Tehran. The resulting three days of riots left some 400 people dead. That event is now marked in Iran as the Movement of 15 Khordad.

  Another confrontation came on the 26th of October 1964, when Khomeini denounced a Status of Forces Agreement granting American military personnel diplomatic immunity in Iran. He was arrested in November 1964 and held for half a year. Upon his release, Prime Minister Hassan Ali Mansur demanded an apology. Khomeini refused. Mansur slapped him in the face in a fit of rage. Two months later, Mansur was assassinated on his way to parliament. Four members of the Fadayan-e Islam were later executed for the murder.

• 5. Exile and the Theory of Rule

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  Khomeini spent more than 14 years in exile, the bulk of it in the holy Iraqi city of Najaf. He was first sent to Turkey on the 4th of November 1964, staying in Bursa at the home of Colonel Ali Cetiner of Turkish Military Intelligence. In October 1965 he was permitted to move to Najaf, where he would remain until 1978, when Saddam Hussein, then Iraq's Vice President, expelled him. He then traveled to Neauphle-le-Chateau, a suburb of Paris, arriving on a tourist visa on the 6th of October 1978.

  In early 1970, while still in Najaf, Khomeini delivered a series of lectures that became his most consequential theoretical work. Published as Islamic Government or Islamic Government: Governance of the Jurist, the book laid out his concept of Velayat-e Faqih. The argument was systematic: all laws in society should derive from God's law, the Sharia; those in government must have deep knowledge of Sharia; therefore the ruler should be the Islamic jurist most knowledgeable in law and justice, a marja. Elected parliaments had been declared "wrong" by Islam. Clerical rule was not merely permissible but necessary to prevent corruption, oppression of the poor, and foreign interference.

  Khomeini was careful to keep this vision away from the secular middle class he needed in his coalition. In his public interviews, speeches, and fatwas during the pre-revolution period, scholars have found "not a single reference to velayat-e faqih". Publicly he spoke of the mustazafin, a Quranic term for the oppressed, which in his framing came to mean virtually everyone in Iran except the Shah and the imperial court.

  By the late 1960s he was a marja-e taqlid, a model for imitation, for hundreds of thousands of Shia. Cassette copies of his lectures circulated in Iranian markets, each one fiercely denouncing the Shah. His network reached mosques and over 20,000 properties across the country. A rumour swept Iran in late 1978 that his face could be seen in the full moon. Millions were said to have seen it.

• 6. Revolution and Power

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  On the 16th of January 1979, the Shah left Iran for medical treatment and never returned. On Thursday, the 1st of February 1979, Khomeini landed in Tehran on a chartered Air France flight accompanied by 120 journalists, including three women. A crowd reported to number up to five million welcomed him. On the plane, journalist Peter Jennings asked how he felt about returning. Khomeini replied through his aide Sadegh Ghotbzadeh with a single word: "Hichi." Nothing.

  Within days, Khomeini had dismissed the provisional government of Shapour Bakhtiar, promising "I shall kick their teeth in", and appointed his own interim prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, declaring disobedience against either man was a revolt against God. By the 11th of February, the military declared neutrality and the Bakhtiar regime collapsed. On the 30th and the 31st of March 1979, a referendum on replacing the monarchy with an Islamic Republic passed with 98% in favor.

  In Paris, Khomeini had promised a democratic political system. In power, he built a theocracy. The consolidation moved quickly: Islamic Revolutionary courts were established; the military and police were replaced; a new constitution was drafted around Velayat-e Faqih; opposition newspapers were closed; groups outside his religious network, including the National Democratic Front and the Muslim People's Republican Party, were attacked and banned. Senior clerics whose ideas conflicted with his, including Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari, Hassan Tabatabaei Qomi, and Hossein Ali Montazeri, were neutralized.

  On the 4th of November 1979, Iranian college students calling themselves the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line seized the American Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 staff hostage for 444 days. Khomeini backed the seizure under the slogan "America can't do a damn thing against us". He reportedly told his president that the crisis "united our people" and allowed the constitution to be put to a vote without difficulty. The new constitution was passed by referendum a month after the hostage crisis began. In November 1979, Khomeini became the officially instituted Supreme Leader of Iran.

• 7. War, Repression, and Fatwas

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  In September 1980, Iraq launched a full-scale invasion of Iran, beginning a war that would last until August 1988. Despite Saddam Hussein's internationally condemned use of poison gas, Iran had by early 1982 regained almost all the territory it had lost. After that reversal, Khomeini refused an Iraqi offer of a truce, demanding reparations and Saddam's removal from power. The war ground on for six more years. Khomeini deployed human wave attacks, including child soldiers, promising those who died in battle a place in paradise. In July 1988, he accepted a UN-mediated ceasefire, describing it as drinking "the cup of poison". The total cost was 450,000 to 950,000 Iranian casualties and an estimated US$300 billion. In a Letter to Clergy, he wrote: "we do not repent, nor are we sorry for even a single moment for our performance during the war."

  The internal repression was relentless. Between 1981 and 1985, reports put the number of people executed at between 8,000 and 10,000. The 1988 executions of political prisoners, ordered after the People's Mujahedin's Operation Mersad, saw estimates ranging from 1,000 to 30,000 killed. Because of the scale, prisoners were loaded into forklift trucks in groups of six and hanged from cranes in half-hour intervals. In 2024, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran categorized these purges, including the 1981-1982 massacres and the 1988 executions, as a genocide of Iran's political and religious minorities.

  In early 1989, Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie, an India-born British author, for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. The fatwa required not only Rushdie's death but that of "all those involved in the publication" of the book. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator, was stabbed to death in 1991. Rushdie himself survived a murder attempt as recently as August 2022. The Rushdie fatwa was condemned across the Western world as a violation of free speech and freedom of religion, and critics noted it violated classical fiqh by denying the accused any opportunity to defend himself.

• 8. Legacy and Succession

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  Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri, a former student of Khomeini and major figure of the revolution, had been chosen by Khomeini himself as successor and approved by the Assembly of Experts in November 1985. But following the mass executions of political prisoners, Montazeri told Khomeini directly: "Your prisons are far worse than those of the Shah and his SAVAK." After a letter containing his complaints was leaked to Europe and broadcast by the BBC, Khomeini ousted Montazeri in March 1989. The constitution still required the Supreme Leader to be a marja. To solve the problem Montazeri's removal created, Khomeini convened an assembly to revise the constitution, stripping out that requirement. This allowed Ali Khamenei, who had strong revolutionary credentials but lacked the scholarly ones, to be designated successor. Khamenei was elected Supreme Leader by the Assembly of Experts on the 4th of June 1989, one day after Khomeini's death.

  Khomeini's gold-domed tomb in Tehran's Behesht-e Zahra cemetery has become a shrine. The anniversary of his death is a public holiday in Iran. Under Iranian law he is officially "inviolable"; insulting him carries a prison sentence. One scholar has written that politics in the Islamic Republic "are largely defined by attempts to claim Khomeini's legacy" and that faithfulness to his ideology has been the test for all political activity in the country.

  His legacy beyond Iran's borders remains contested. Former South African President Nelson Mandela stated on several occasions that Khomeini served as an inspiration for the anti-apartheid movement. At the same time, critics cite anti-democratic actions, human rights violations on a mass scale, and the use of child soldiers. His concept of velayat-e faqih, the principle he outlined in lectures in Najaf in early 1970, remains the governing logic of the Iranian state more than three decades after his death.