Authors: Henry Kissinger
In Khamenei’s analysis, this reawakening of Islamic consciousness was opening the door to a global religious revolution that would finally vanquish the overbearing influence of the United States and its allies and bring an end to three centuries of Western primacy:
Islamic Awakening, which speakers in the arrogant and reactionary camp do not even dare to mention in words, is a truth whose signs can be witnessed in almost all parts of the world of Islam. The most obvious sign of it is the enthusiasm of public opinion, especially among young people, to revive the glory and greatness of Islam, to become aware of the nature of the international order of domination and to remove the mask from the shameless, oppressive and arrogant face of the governments and centers that have been pressuring the Islamic and non-Islamic East.
Following “the failure of communism and liberalism” and with the power and confidence of the West crumbling, the Islamic Awakening would reverberate across the world, Khamenei pledged, unifying the global Muslim
ummah
(the transnational community of believers) and restoring it to world centrality:
This final goal cannot be anything
less than creating a brilliant Islamic civilization. All parts of the Islamic Ummah—in the form of different nations and countries—should achieve the civilizational position that has been specified in the Holy Quran … Through religious faith, knowledge, ethics and constant struggle, Islamic civilization can gift
advanced thought and noble codes of behavior to the Islamic Ummah and to the entire humanity, and it can be the point of liberation from materialistic and oppressive outlooks and corrupt codes of behavior that form the pillars of current Western civilization.
Khamenei had expatiated upon this topic previously. As he remarked to an audience of Iranian paramilitary forces in 2011, popular protests in the West spoke to a global hunger for spirituality and legitimacy as exemplified by Iran’s theocracy. A world revolution awaited:
The developments in the U.S.
and Europe suggest a massive change that the world will witness in the future … Today the slogans of Egyptians and the Tunisians are being repeated in New York and California … The Islamic Republic is currently the focal point of the awakening movement of nations and this reality is what has upset the enemies.
In any other region, such declarations would have been treated as a major revolutionary challenge: a theocratic figure wielding supreme spiritual and temporal power was, in a significant country, publicly embracing a project of constructing an alternative world order in opposition to the one being practiced by the world community. The Supreme Leader of contemporary Iran was declaring that universal religious principles, not national interests or liberal internationalism, would dominate the new world he prophesied. Had such sentiments been voiced by an Asian or a European leader, they would have been interpreted as a shocking global challenge. Yet thirty-five years of repetition had all but inured the world to the radicalism of these sentiments and the actions backing them. On its part, Iran combined its
challenge to modernity with a millennial tradition of a statecraft of exceptional subtlety.
The first implementation of radical Islamist principles as a doctrine of state power occurred in 1979, in a capital where it was least expected—in a country unlike the majority of Middle Eastern states, with a long and distinguished national history and a long-established reverence for its pre-Islamic past. So when Iran, an accepted state in the Westphalian system, turned itself into an advocate for radical Islam after the Ayatollah Khomeini revolution, the Middle East regional order was turned upside down.
Of all the countries of the region, Iran has perhaps the most coherent sense of nationhood and the most elaborated tradition of national-interest-based statecraft. At the same time, Iran’s leaders have traditionally reached far beyond the modern borders of Iran and have rarely had occasion to adhere to Westphalian concepts of statehood and sovereign equality. Iran’s founding tradition was that of the Persian Empire, which, in a series of incarnations from the seventh century
B.C.
to the seventh century
A.D.
, established its rule across much of the contemporary Middle East and portions of Central Asia, Southwest Asia, and North Africa. With resplendent art and culture, a sophisticated bureaucracy experienced in administering far-flung provinces, and a vast multiethnic military steeled by successful campaigns in every direction, Persia saw itself as far more than one society among many.
The Persian ideal of monarchy
elevated its sovereign to quasi-divine status as a magnanimous overlord of peoples—the “King of Kings” dispensing justice and decreeing tolerance in exchange for peaceful political submission.
The Persian imperial project, like classical China’s, represented a
form of world ordering in which cultural and political achievements and psychological assurance played as great a role as traditional military conquests. The fifth-century
B.C.
Greek historian Herodotus described the self-confidence of a people that had absorbed the finest of all foreign customs—Median dress, Egyptian armor—and now regarded itself as the center of human achievement:
Most of all they hold in honor
themselves, then those who dwell next to themselves, and then those next to
them,
and so on, so that there is a progression in honor in relation to the distance. They hold least in honor those whose habitation is furthest from their own. This is because they think themselves to be the best of mankind in everything and that others have a hold on virtue in proportion to their nearness; those that live furthest away are the most base.
Roughly twenty-five hundred years later this sense of serene self-confidence had endured, as manifested in the text of an 1850 trade agreement between the United States and the Safavid Dynasty—which governed a curtailed but still expansive version of the Persian Empire consisting of Iran and significant portions of present-day Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Turkmenistan. Even after the recent loss of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, and eastern Georgia in two wars with the expanding Russian Empire, the Shah projected the assurance of the heir of Xerxes and Cyrus:
The President of the United States
of North America, and his Majesty as exalted as the Planet Saturn; the Sovereign to whom the Sun serves as a standard; whose splendor and magnificence are equal to that of the Skies; the Sublime Sovereign, the Monarch whose armies are as numerous as the Stars; whose greatness calls to mind that of Jeinshid; whose
magnificence equals that of Darius; the Heir of the Crown and Throne of the Kayanians, the Sublime Emperor of all Persia, being both equally and sincerely desirous of establishing relations of Friendship between the two Governments, which they wish to strengthen by a Treaty of Friendship and Commerce, reciprocally advantageous and useful to the Citizens and subjects of the two High contracting parties, have for this purpose named for their Plenipotentiaries …
At the intersection of East and West and administering provinces and dependencies stretching at their widest extent from modern-day Libya to Kyrgyzstan and India, Persia was either the starting point or the eventual target of nearly every major conqueror on the Eurasian landmass from antiquity to the Cold War. Through all these upheavals, Persia—like China under roughly comparable circumstances—retained its distinct sense of identity. Expanding across vastly diverse cultures and regions, the Persian Empire adopted and synthesized their achievements into its own distinct concept of order. Submerged in waves of conquest by Alexander the Great, the early Islamic armies, and later the Mongols—shocks that all but erased the historical memory and political autonomy of other peoples—Persia retained its confidence in its cultural superiority. It bowed to its conquerors as a temporary concession but retained its independence through its worldview, charting “
great interior spaces
” in poetry and mysticism and revering its connection with the heroic ancient rulers recounted in its epic
Book of Kings
. Meanwhile, Persia distilled its experience managing all manner of territories and political challenges into a sophisticated canon of diplomacy placing a premium on endurance, shrewd analysis of geopolitical realities, and the psychological manipulation of adversaries.
This sense of distinctness and adroit maneuver endured in the Islamic era, when Persia adopted the religion of its Arab conquerors
but, alone among the first wave of conquered peoples, insisted on retaining its language and infusing the new order with the cultural legacies of the empire that Islam had just overthrown. Eventually, Persia became the demographic and cultural center of Shiism—first as a dissenting tradition under Arab rule, later as the state religion starting in the sixteenth century (adopted partly as a way to distinguish itself from and defy the growing Ottoman Empire at its borders, which was Sunni). In contrast to the majority Sunni interpretation, this branch of Islam stressed the mystical and ineffable qualities of religious truth and authorized “
prudential dissimulation
” in the service of the interests of the faithful. In its culture, religion, and geopolitical outlook, Iran (as it called itself officially after 1935) had preserved the distinctiveness of its tradition and the special character of its regional role.
The revolution against Iran’s twentieth-century Shah Reza Pahlavi had begun (or at least had been portrayed to the West) as an antimonarchical movement demanding democracy and economic redistribution. Many of its grievances were real, caused by the dislocations imposed by the Shah’s modernization programs and the heavy-handed and arbitrary tactics with which the government attempted to control dissent. But when, in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in Paris and Iraq to claim the role of the revolution’s “Supreme Leader,” he did so not on behalf of social programs or of democratic governance but in the name of an assault against the entire regional order and indeed the institutional arrangements of modernity.
The doctrine that took root in Iran under Khomeini was unlike anything that had been practiced in the West since the religious wars of the pre-Westphalian era. It conceived of the state not as a legitimate entity in its own right but as a weapon of convenience in a broader religious struggle. The twentieth-century map of the Middle East,
Khomeini announced, was a false and un-Islamic creation of “
imperialists
” and “tyrannical self-seeking rulers” who had “separated the various segments of the Islamic
umma
[community] from each other and artificially created separate nations.” All contemporary political institutions in the Middle East and beyond were “illegitimate” because they “do not base themselves on divine law.” Modern international relations based on procedural Westphalian principles rested on a false foundation because “
the relations between nations
should be based on spiritual grounds” and not on principles of national interest.
In Khomeini’s view—paralleling that of Qutb—an ideologically expansionist reading of the Quran pointed the way from these blasphemies and toward the creation of a genuinely legitimate world order. The first step would be the overthrow of all the governments in the Muslim world and their replacement by “
an Islamic government
.” Traditional national loyalties would be overridden because “it is the duty of all of us to overthrow the
taghut;
i.e., the illegitimate political powers that now rule the entire Islamic world.” The founding of a truly Islamic political system in Iran would mark, as Khomeini declared upon the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran on April 1, 1979, “the First Day of God’s Government.”
This entity would not be comparable to any other modern state. As Mehdi Bazargan, Khomeini’s first appointee for the post of Prime Minister, told the
New York Times,
“
What was wanted
… was a government of the type seen during the 10 years of the rule of the Prophet Mohammed and the five years under his son-in-law, Ali, the first Shiite Imam.” When government is conceived of as divine, dissent will be treated as blasphemy, not political opposition. Under Khomeini, the Islamic Republic carried out those principles, beginning with a wave of trials and executions and a systematic repression of minority faiths far exceeding what had occurred under the Shah’s authoritarian regime.
Amidst these upheavals a new paradox
took shape, in the form of
a dualistic challenge to international order. With Iran’s revolution, an Islamist movement dedicated to overthrowing the Westphalian system gained control over a modern state and asserted its “Westphalian” rights and privileges—taking up its seat at the United Nations, conducting its trade, and operating its diplomatic apparatus. Iran’s clerical regime thus placed itself at the intersection of two world orders, arrogating the formal protections of the Westphalian system even while repeatedly proclaiming that it did not believe in it, would not be bound by it, and intended ultimately to replace it.
This duality has been ingrained in Iran’s governing doctrine. Iran styles itself as “the Islamic Republic,” implying an entity whose authority transcends territorial demarcations, and the Ayatollah heading the Iranian power structure (first Khomeini, then his successor, Ali Khamenei) is conceived of not simply as an Iranian political figure but as a global authority—“the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution” and “the Leader of the Islamic Ummah and Oppressed People.”