2
Perceptions of Private Property, Society, and the State

Wealth is a gift from God.
Ayatollah Khomeini, Ettela^c at, 29 December 1980

Introduction

Khomeini was no more a political philosopher than Molière's bourgeois gentilhomme was a literary deconstructionist. He was, first and foremost, a clerical leader who found himself immersed in politics, and therefore felt compelled to express views on human nature, social justice, class structure, legal authority, and state power — in short, on political theory. Since his views were often prompted by immediate and changing circumstances, it is not surprising that they contain contradictions and inconsistencies — so much so, that some scholars have described him as an archcon-servative, others as a fundamentalist reactionary, and others as a "revolutionary radical," even as a "socialistic egalitarian."^[1] The intention of this chapter is neither to turn Khomeini into a political philosopher nor to deny his conceptual inconsistencies. Rather, the intention is to understand his political concepts by analyzing his perceptions of private property, society, and the state.

Private Property

In his forty-six years of political activity, Khomeini shifted ground on many issues, but he remained remarkably steadfast on the

crucial issue of private property. In his first major work, Kashf al-Asrar, he argued that Islam "protects private property" and by definition opposes dictators, who by their very nature threaten personal possessions.^[2] Nevertheless, he argued, governments are necessary because human beings are naturally evil — greedy, egoistic, dangerous, and rapacious. Without government, there would be no law and order; without law and order, there would be no security for life and property. He also argued that God had endowed man with private property, and consequently, no one had the right to deprive another of this divine gift. He underlined this theme by reminding his readers that the sacred law categorically safeguarded private property, and since the sacred law was divinely inspired, it followed that no earthly power had the right to interfere with private property.

Kashf al-Asrar favored not only private property but also the propertied middle class. It urged the government to set up a special fund to help bankrupt businessmen.^[3] It further urged the government to stop levying import-export duties on Iranian merchants on the grounds that such taxes were burdensome, unlawful, and against the interests of free trade.^[4] It should be noted that Khomeini wrote Kashf al-Asrar at the request of a group of wealthy bazaaris who had opposed Reza Shah's policy of building a centralized secular state.^[5]

In Towzih al-Masa'el, Khomeini continued the long Shii tradition of protecting private property in doctrinal issues. While discussing in what circumstances Muslims could be exhumed, he argued — as his predecessors had — that such a drastic act would be justified if the body was buried with someone else's belongings or in someone else's land without their permission.^[6] In short, respect for property was more important than respect for the dead. In discussing the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), he advised — again like his predecessors — that the expensive venture should be undertaken only by those who had enough "land, business, and real estate" to afford the trip.^[7]

In Velayat-e Faqih, Khomeini again stressed that the sacred law protected private property. He emphasized that the security of one's home was inviolable; that Islamic government, unlike

dictatorships, could not confiscate personal belongings; and that the highest religious authorities could not take from the faithful one cent more than permitted by the sacred law. Not even Prophet Mohammad and Imam Ali had had the authority to trample over people's lives and property.^[8] The Velayat-e Faqih was first presented as a series of lectures in the main bazaar mosque in Najaf. It should also be noted that Khomeini's main financial supporter in these years in Najaf was a wealthy Iranian merchant.^[9]

Similar ideas can be found throughout his public statements. In 1963, in commemorating a student massacre in Qom, he argued that since Islam gives full protection to people's property and homes, Muslims had the right to take up arms and, if necessary, to kill to defend their homes.^[10] In 1964, in his famous anti-Capitulations proclamation that prompted his deportation, he accused the shah of handing the country's bazaars over to America and Israel.^[11] In 1967, in his Moharram message, he argued that the so-called White Revolution was bankrupting the bazaars and the reputable merchants.^[12] In 1971, during the celebrations for 2,500 years of monarchy, he protested that the shah was extracting huge sums from respectable bazaaris to pay for his extravaganzas.^[13]

In 1978, while in Paris living in the house of a wealthy businessman, he told European journalists that the shah wanted to destroy the merchants because Iranians as a whole had high regard for their bazaars.^[14] In 1979, during the collapse of the old order, he reminded the country, especially the Revolutionary Guards, that they could not violate the sanctity of citizens' homes and land.^[15] He also argued on a number of occasions that Islam, unlike communism, recognized private property; that his followers had no intention of confiscating factories and farms;^[16] that the Islamic Revolution, unlike others, would not endanger people's possessions;^[17] and that the new order, in sharp contrast to the old one, would fully respect the privacy of people's homes.^[18]

In 1980, in the midst of the revolutionary turmoil, Khomeini again stressed that "wealth is a gift from God."^[19] He emphasized that the new republic, unlike the Qajar and Pahlavi monarchies,

would not treat the country as a "feudal fiefdom";^[20] and that no one, not even the clergy, had the right to violate people's farms, houses, and orchards.^[21] In 1981, he frequently reminded the public that the shah had been determined to destroy small businessmen^[22] and that without national independence there would be no real protection of private property.^[23] In the same year, he issued with much publicity his famous Eight-Point Declaration, which ordered the revolutionary authorities to fully respect people's "movable and immovable possessions," including their homes, stores, workshops, farms, and factories.^[24] They were even told not to tap the telephones of or otherwise spy on private homes.

Of course, it is true that revolutionary tribunals in this period often expropriated wealth, especially agribusinesses, large factories, and luxury homes belonging to the former elite. But it is also true that in expropriating this wealth, the tribunals carefully avoided challenging the concept of private property. Instead they accused their victims of political misdeeds, especially conspiring against the revolution. They were attacking not wealth per se, but wealthy individuals suspected of "counterrevolutionary crimes." In this regard, the Islamic Revolution behaved in much the same way as the English, French, and American revolutions. Few would describe these Western revolutions as threats against the bourgeois concept of private property.

Khomeini reiterated his commitment to private property in the last years of his life. He warned that judges who did not respect Muslim lives, property, and honor would be punished in this as well as the next world;^[25] if the Iraqis won the war, they would plunder people's possessions;^[26] if the Eight-Point Declaration was ignored, citizens' homes and privacy would be endangered;^[27] and if the new regime violated "private property" as the previous one had done, it would meet the same fate.^[28] Finally in his Vasiyatnameh-e Elahi va Siyasi, he reminded the government that Islam "recognizes private property," free enterprise would turn the "wheels of the economy," and this, in turn, would produce "social justice" for all, especially the poor. "Islam," he proclaimed, "differs sharply from communism. Whereas the former respects private property, the latter advocates the sharing of all things — including wives and homosexuals."^[29]

Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, the chief architect of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, reflected Khomeini's views in many ways. In a series of articles entitled "Islam and Private Property," Beheshti argued that the Koran and the Shii traditions protect legitimate wealth (as opposed to illegitimate wealth, obtained by robbery, extortion, and prostitution) for the simple reason that human labor was the source of all such property.^[30] This labor, he explained, was physical work, mental work, such as accountancy, or public service (khedmat), especially trade and commerce. Some citizens became wealthier than others as a result of their hard work, their talent, or inheritance. Economic inequalities, especially in wages and salaries, could also be increased by legitimate market forces. Individuals, not society, owned property. The state, however, as the guardian of the community, was entitled to supervise "common property," namely, irrigation water, natural resources, and wastelands. The state could also intervene in the marketplace if the forces of supply and demand created "extreme" inequality in wages and salaries.

Similar arguments can be found in the works of Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari, a leading member of the Islamic Revolution, who, upon his assassination in 1979, was praised by Khomeini as "my son," "the product of my life," and "the outstanding thinker, philosopher, and senior jurist of Islamology."^[31] According to Motahhari, God created private property, and therefore, the state has the divine duty to scrupulously respect it.^[32] The state, of course, could collect legitimate taxes, dispose of wastelands, expropriate stolen goods, administer communal property, mine natural resources under the soil, regulate the sacred law's directives on inheritance, and, under exceptional circumstances, intervene in the marketplace to help the needy. Khomeinists hailed this as Islamic economics; skeptics could well describe it as conventional bourgeois economics tempered with a dose of welfare paternalism. This heavy emphasis placed on property rights undermines the claim made both by some Khomeinists and by Orientalists that Islam inherently advocates socioeconomic egalitarianism.

Although the Khomeinists resemble the Western bourgeoisie in their respect for private property, the two differ in their premises.

The latter, especially the Enlightenment philosophes, base their arguments on the theory of natural law, insisting that man is born with the inalienable right to liberty and property. The former, while sanctifying wealth as a "divine gift," tend to dismiss natural law as an alien and secular notion. The latter view mankind as naturally rational, even good, and, therefore, capable of respecting the rights of others. The former see the average human being as basically sinful — corrupt, greedy, irrational, and, in Khomeini's own words, "even more dangerous than the wildest jungle animals."^[33] In this respect, Khomeini resembled Saint Augustine, Edmund Burke, and Joseph de Maistre, an early proponent of fascism, more than he did the Enlightenment philosophes.

These premises help explain why so many members of the Iranian bourgeoisie leaned toward authoritarian conclusions — conclusions that did not become self-evident until well after the Islamic Revolution.^[34] The concept of natural law had liberated the Western bourgeoisie from the shackles of royal absolutism. The rejection of natural law meant that the Iranian bourgeoisie had no choice but to protect their possessions by appealing to the divine law and, thereby, linking property rights to the existence of a clerical state. The problem was compounded further by the fact that those who rejected natural law could not resort to the dominant traditional institutions to defend property rights — as Burke and others in Europe had done. After all, the monarchical institutions in Iran were reputed to have been gross violators of private property.

Thus, if property was a divine gift, as Khomeini argued, then the government, as long as it was God's government, had the ultimate right to defend and oversee private property. If mankind was inherently evil, irrational, and violent, then individual liberty was an open invitation to social chaos. Democracy paved the way to anarchy. Unbridled pluralism invited internal disorder. If individuals were instinctively rapacious, then strong authority was needed to preserve private property.^[35] Without authority, social groups, as well as individuals, would violate the rights of others. Without guidance, the average person would be led astray by bestial passions; the average person, like orphans,

widows, and the mentally incompetent, needed constant supervision.

Without the ever-present fear of the state, especially of the executioner, citizens would be tempted to violate their neighbors' rights and possessions. In light of this jaundiced view of human nature, one can view the imposition of public whippings and amputations not so much as the reintroduction of the medieval "discourse" on crime and punishment (in the Foucaultian sense) as the introduction of a modern, but fascistic, concept of political power: the essence of the state is the public executioner.^[36] It should be noted, however, that some mavericks, such as Najafabadi, the controversial author of Shahid-e Javid and Hokumat-e Salihan, have tried to reconcile Shiism with the concepts of natural law, reason, and social contract.^[37] Time will tell how far this line of argument can go.

Society

Although Khomeini's respect for private property remained unswerving, his notion of the optimal social structure passed through three distinct stages. In the first, which lasted from the 1940s until the late 1960s, his ideas were remarkably conventional and conservative. In the second, which continued through the revolutionary 1970s into the early 1980s, he adopted militant rhetoric, developing in the process his new version of Shii populism. In the last stage, from the consolidation of the new regime until his death, he gradually discarded the more radical rhetoric and articulated a less militant version of Shii populism.

The First Stage (1943-70): A Multilayered Hierarchy

At first Khomeini saw society as a multilayered hierarchy formed of many occupational groups (qeshrha): clerics and seminary students, landlords and tribal chiefs, civil servants and office employees, intellectuals and professionals, bazaar merchants and tradesmen, laborers, and peasants and tribesmen. Each stratum was dependent on others for survival, each had its own functions to

perform, and each needed to respect the rights of the others. Khomeini's scheme was, to borrow Stanislaw Ossowski's terminology, that of "harmonious gradation."^[38]

The government's main tasks were to protect Islam and maintain the proper balance between the strata. The clergy — whom Khomeini often defined as the "highest stratum" (qeshr-e bala) — had the responsibility of speaking out if the government did not carry out its main tasks. In fact, Khomeini in this period often used the Aristotelian metaphor of the "human body" to describe society. The various strata were each part of an organic whole and were by definition unequal. They were divinely ordained to respect and not to challenge their superiors — revolution was synonymous with anarchy, banditry, and bloodshed.^[39] It is significant that in this period Khomeini implicitly accepted sharecropping and even slavery as legitimate and explicitly described certain low-status occupations, such as selling shrouds, as "loathsome."^[40]

Even more "loathsome" were non-Muslims, including the traditionally tolerated "People of the Book" — the Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians. Being non-Muslims, they were considered to be kafer (infidels) and thus, according to Shii Iranian tradition, were najes (unclean). Being unclean, they could not marry Muslims, touch the Koran, bury their dead in Muslim cemeteries, or use public places such as barbershops, town baths, and the streets during rainstorms, because their washed-away sweat could come in contact with Muslims. In fact, this Iranian use of the term najes has more in common with the Hindu notion of "untouchables" than with the Sunni concept of "contamination." The Sunnis, as well as the Shiis outside Iran, rule that believers have to be physically "uncontaminated" only when performing religious duties.

"The following eleven," in Khomeini's own words, "are najes. First, urine; second, stool; third, semen; fourth, dead bodies; fifth, blood; sixth and seventh, dogs and pigs; eighth, non-Muslims; ninth, wine; tenth, beer; eleventh, the sweat of a camel that eats unclean things."^[41] Khomeini's main hagiographer boasts that the imam would not eat or drink in restaurants unless he knew for sure that the waiter was a Muslim.^[42] It should be noted that however "unclean" the non-Muslims were, their property was to

be respected as long as they paid their special taxes, gave allegiance to the Muslim state, and functioned as separate, but unequal, communities. In this, as well as in his general attitude toward religious minorities, Khomeini followed conventional Shii Iranian traditions.

The Second Stage (1970-82): The Oppressors and the Oppressed

In this period Khomeini freely borrowed concepts, language, and imagery from full-fledged radicals, especially the Mojahedin and Ali Shariati. He now depicted society as formed of two antagonistic classes (tabaqat): the oppressed (mostazafin) and the oppressors (mostakberin). In the past, Khomeini had rarely used the term mostazafin, and when he had, it had been in the Koranic sense of "the meek," "the humble," and "the weak." He now used it to mean the angry "oppressed masses," a meaning it had acquired in the early 1960s when Shariati and his disciples translated Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth as Mostazafin-e Zamin.

By the eve of the revolution, Khomeini was portraying society as divided into two warring classes, each with economic attributes.^[43] On one side was the upper class (tabaqeh-e bala), which he identified, in his own terminology, as formed of the oppressors, the rich, the exploiters, the powerful, the feudalists, the capitalists, the palace dwellers, the corrupt, the high and mighty, the opulent, the enjoyers of luxury, the gluttonous, the lazy timeservers, and the wealthy elite. On the other side was the lower class (tabaqeh-e payin): the oppressed, the exploited, the powerless, the slum dwellers, the barefooted, the street folk, the hardworking poor, the hungry, the unemployed, the disinherited masses, and those deprived of education, work, housing, and medical facilities.

The oppressors, Khomeini argued, had always favored unjust, satanic, and tyrannical government. They had opposed the Prophet Mohammad, subverted his message, and now supported the Pahlavi monarchy and the imperialist Americans. The op-

pressed, on the other hand, had always struggled for a just and Islamic government. They had rallied behind the Prophet, remained true to his creed, and now were willing to die for the Islamic Revolution. Khomeini added that the clergy would lead the oppressed masses to their liberation.^[44] He also implied that the lower class respected private property, whereas the upper class had no regard for other people's belongings.^[45] In Ossowski's terminology, Khomeini's picture of society was now one of "antagonistic dichotomy."^[46]

In this stage, Khomeini and his disciples often placed the religious minorities, especially the Jews and the Bahais, on the side of the oppressors. They referred to them as "traitors," "Zionists," "economic plunderers," and the "enemies of Islam, the clergy, and Muslim intellectuals."^[47] However, they made no attempt to transform their concept of najes into actual discriminatory laws. Their distrust was expressed more in political than in religious-theological terms.

In formulating a dichotomous scheme of society, Khomeini frequently resorted to history. He asserted that Mohammad and Moses had been poor shepherds; Imam Ali had been a water carrier willing to give up his extra shirt to a needy believer; and Imam Ali, as caliph, had not used candles at night to help the public treasury. He argued that the Prophet's war with pagan Mecca had been a "class struggle" against the exploiters and that Imam Hosayn had died at Karbala trying to liberate the "oppressed from the clutches of the satanic despots." He also asserted that Islam had always found its true strength among the dispossessed masses; the martyrs of righteous protests, like the 1963 June Uprising, had all come from the lower class; and the senior clergy lived frugal lives and originated from the humble masses. Muslim leaders, he insisted, avoided family favoritism and treated relatives as they did other members of the community.

During the revolutionary 1970s Khomeini not only depicted society as class struggle but also promised to redistribute among the deprived masses the ill-gotten wealth of the foreign companies, the Pahlavi family, and the rich courtiers.^[48] He also prom-

ised to establish on earth an Islamic utopia free of injustice, inequality, poverty, social conflict, unemployment, landlessness, foreign dependence, imperial exploitation, political oppression, social alienation, prostitution, alcoholism, drug addiction, crime, nepotism, government corruption, and bureaucratic red tape. "The Islamic Revolution," he declared, "will do more than liberate us from oppression and imperialism. It will create a new type of human being."^[49] To hasten the arrival of this utopia he urged his followers to "unite the oppressed of the world, both Muslim and non-Muslim, against their class oppressors and foreign exploiters."^[50]

Khomeini's disciples portrayed him as the ideal "man of the people." For example, a group of former students compiled a six-volume book of reminiscences dwelling mostly on his concern for others and disregard for his own material comforts.^[51] They described him as living a humble life, "like an ordinary seminary student," eating simple food — bread, cheese, watermelons, and abgusht (the perennial poor man's stew) — wearing the same plain but clean clothes for years on end, and owning only two turbans, one for summer, the other for winter. They claimed that he took early morning walks in the street without bodyguards, even in France. When they searched for a house in Neauphle-le-Château outside Paris, he instructed them to find a "peasant" home. When they looked for a Tehran residence at the time of his triumphant return, he told them to avoid the northern, wealthy suburbs and search instead in the southern, "mostazafin" districts. In actual fact, they moved him temporarily to the Refah School, a private school funded by bazaari philanthropists and located in the lower-middle-class district of central Tehran.^[52]

These disciples describe him as doing his own chores, not bothering his wife and servants, and even helping out in the kitchen when too many guests appeared. One writes that he made a special point of giving audiences to humble folk. Another writes that he was so determined to keep in touch with popular culture that he read from cover to cover a thousand-page bestseller entitled Showhar-e Ahu Khanum (The husband of Ahu Khanum). Written by a former Tudeh army officer who had been sentenced

to life imprisonment, this popular novel focused on the problems of polygamy in a bazaari family.

He was praised for traits which others would recognize from the "Protestant ethic": frugality, modesty, punctuality, and impartiality. He refused to accept from bazaari admirers such luxuries as fancy carpets, air conditioners, private cars, and a summer vacation away from the Najaf heat. When friends tried to replace his broken-down furniture, he retorted, "This is not the home of a government minister." When they tried to repaint his house, he replied that peeling walls did not bother him.

He scolded others for leaving lights on, throwing away drinking water, and wasting money on taxis. At Neauphle-le-Château, he ordered his household to return the many oranges they had purchased on sale with the argument they did not need so many and such a large transaction would drive up the prices and thus would be unfair to the local population. He denied himself personal long-distance phone calls, even when his son Mostafa died. He disliked favoritism, treating his sons as he did the rest of his many students. He kept meticulous financial records and scrupulously separated personal expenses from his office budget. He would not tolerate idle talk, especially backbiting gossip. He canceled classes for three days when he overheard a student making rude remarks about another marja^c-e taqlid. He was so punctual and his schedule was so routine that members of his household claimed they could set their watches by his daily activities.

When Borujerdi died Khomeini went into seclusion so that his students would not publicly acclaim him as a new marja^c-e taqlid. They had to plead with him to get him to publish his Towzih al-Masa'el so that he would be recognized by others as a grand ayatollah. They quoted him as saying that he preferred to remain a "humble teacher and scholar." They claim that when Ayatollah Hakim, another senior cleric, died in 1968, Khomeini again ordered his followers not to campaign on his behalf for the title of supreme marja ^c-e taqlid. For his disciples, this modesty proved not only that Khomeini was a man of the people but also that he possessed the prerequisite quality needed to lead the Islamic community.

Figure 5.
Stamp (1982) honoring Jesus. The inscription
is in Armenian and Arabic as well as in Persian.

The Third Stage (1982-89): Recognition of the Middle Class

Khomeini's populist rhetoric proved to be highly explosive in postrevolutionary Iran, arousing anger not just against the royalist elite and the multinational corporations but also against the propertied middle class, particularly the religious minorities. Khomeini, therefore, began to tone down his language. He thanked the minorities, including the Jews, for producing "martyrs" in the struggle against the shah.^[53] He distinguished Judaism, an "honorable religion that had arisen among the common folk," from Zionism, a "political `ism' that opposed religion and supported the exploiters."^[54] He argued that Imam Ali had treated all as equal and had not distinguished between Muslim and Jew.^[55] As a gesture of goodwill toward the Christians, the Islamic Republic issued a postage stamp bearing Jesus' silhouette and a Koranic verse in Armenian — the first time Armenian had appeared on a stamp since the fall of the Armenian Republic in 1921. Khomeini also watered down his class rhetoric. He now argued that Islam wanted harmonious relationships between factory owners and workers, between landlords and peasants. "If these class antagonisms are not alleviated," he warned, "their inevitable explosion would destroy the whole Islamic Republic."^[56]

In softening his rhetoric, Khomeini replaced his dichotomous

image of society with a trichotomous one. He now increasingly delineated three main classes: an upper class (tabaqeh-e bala) formed of the remnants of the old wealthy families; a middle class (tabaqeh-e motavasset) composed of clerics, intellectuals, civil servants, merchants, shopkeepers, and tradesmen; and a lower class (tabaqeh-e payin) comprising laborers, peasants, and slum dwellers. In Ossowski's terminology, Khomeini, the prerevolutionary, used a scheme of harmonious gradation; Khomeini, the revolutionary, one of antagonistic dichotomy; and Khomeini, the postrevolutionary, one of semiharmonious trichotomy.

In the new picture, the word mostazafin ceased to be an economic category depicting the deprived masses. Instead it became — like the term sans culottes in the French Revolution — a political label for the new regime's supporters and included wealthy bazaar merchants. "The bazaars," Khomeini stated, "are a crucial part of the deprived masses. Those martyred in the revolution came from the bazaars and the middle class as well as from the shantytowns."^[57] In one speech, Khomeini declared that in the years after the revolution the deprived classes, namely, "the intellectuals, the clergy, the peasants, the workers, and the bazaaris," had carried much of the country's burdens.^[58] In another, he argued that the revolution had been accomplished by the masses, including the "bazaaris and the middling sort of people [mardom-e motavasset ]."^[59] In a speech commemorating the June Uprising, he stated that the martyrs of 1963, as well as those of 1978-79, had all come from the lower classes — from "the peasants and workers, from Muslim tradesmen and merchants."^[60] Similarly in the 1984 parliamentary elections, he declared that the revolution would be undone if the republic lost the support of the bazaaris, who, he stressed, had played such a critical role in overthrowing the shah.^[61]

Khomeini's disciples echoed his new use of the term mostazafin. For example, Rafsanjani, in a Friday sermon devoted to the term, began by assuring his audience that Islam was the "motor of history" that drove mankind toward its final destination, where the mostazafin would "inherit the world."^[62] He then criticized fellow revolutionaries for grossly misusing the term in order to

heap exaggerated praises on the weak, the poor, and the economically deprived. This, he argued, was a mistake because the Koran used the term mostazafin as a subjective (fekri) category to describe those fighting oppression. The Koran had not used it objectively to define the poor, many of whom often accepted and even collaborated with their oppressors. The Islamic Revolution, he concluded, proved that fighters against oppression could come from all walks of life and from diverse social strata.^[63]

The new picture of society emerged most clearly in a major speech given by Khomeini to the Parliament on the third anniversary of the revolution. He warned that parliamentary deputies must come predominantly from the "middle class," they should not strive to become "upper class," and they should always help the "lower class." "The revolution will remain secure," Khomeini concluded, "so long as the Parliament and the government are manned by members of the middle class."^[64]

Khomeini now placed heavy emphasis on the importance of harmony between the middle and lower classes.^[65] The country as a whole was constantly referred to as a mostazafin nation (mellat-e mostazafin) . Clerics, intellectuals, bazaaris, workers, and peasants were described as having common interests against imperialism and the old upper class. The clergy was viewed as historically and socially close to the bazaaris. The new government leaders, in contrast to the former "ruling class," were seen as coming from the ranks of the bazaaris, the traders, and the seminary students.^[66]

Khomeini underlined his support for the bazaars in a long address to the merchants of Tehran. He praised the bazaars for building mosques and seminaries, for serving throughout history as the staunch pillar of Islam, and for having lent their support to the clergy in such crucial crises as the 1891 Tobacco Crisis and the 1905 Constitutional Revolution.^[67] "Previous rulers," he continued, "did not dare to set foot in the bazaars. But things are very different now for the government and the bazaar. The president and the bazaaris are all brothers born among the common people." Hojjat al-Islam Ali Khamenei, his immediate successor, continued this line of reasoning. In a lecture to university students,

Khamenei argued that Islam respected the bazaar, the Koran had favorable things to say about trade and commerce, and socialists, not Muslims, associated business with theft, corruption, and exploitation. "The bazaars," he declared, "helped the Islamic Revolution and continue to be staunch supporters of the Islamic Republic."^[68]

The State

The class forces unleashed by the revolution prompted Khomeini not only to redraw his picture of society but also to pay greater attention to the role of the state — an entity that had hardly figured in his early works. The contemporary state, he had liked to argue, should be no more complex than the early caliphate, in which Imam Ali had been able to administer a vast region from the corner of a simple mosque. God's will could be carried out without a vast army of tax collectors, bureaucrats, and military officers. The state's main functions were simple: to implement the sacred law, provide law and order, allow local judges to make swift and final decisions, keep a healthy balance between the social strata, spend no more than it collected in the khoms taxes, and, most significant of all, restrain people's evil instincts, especially their instinct to steal.^[69]

In these early works, the state had been mentioned in terms not of how limited or extensive it should be but rather who should supervise it. In Kashf al-Asrar, Khomeini had accepted monarchies on condition they sought the advice and consent of the senior clerics. In Velayat-e Faqih, he had argued that monarchies were incompatible with Islam and that the clerical jurists had the divine right to rule. But in both works he had pictured the true Islamic state as a very limited one, which probably helped increase Khomeini's popularity among the middle class.

The political realities of revolutionary Iran pressed Khomeini to pay greater attention to the state. To run the country's vast array of social services, the Islamic Republic had no choice but to extend the large ministries and their regional departments. To con-

solidate power, it found it necessary to put in place a system of local committees (komitehs) and Revolutionary Guards (Sepah-e Pasdaran). To fight the war with Iraq, it retained the existing armed forces, drastically expanded the Revolutionary Guards, and also created the Reconstruction Crusade (Jahad-e Sazandegi) and the volunteer force known as the Mobilization Army (Sepah-e Basij). To curb the arbitrary behavior of local judges, it kept the conventional and cumbersome appeals system, which Khomeini had denounced for forty years as un-Islamic and against the sacred law. To alleviate public discontent, it introduced food rationing and price controls and periodically launched campaigns against speculators, hoarders, and price-gougers. To administer the recently nationalized enterprises, mostly confiscated from multinational corporations, the royal family, and their close associates, the new regime had to dramatically expand the bureaucratic machinery. Prophet Mohammad and Imam Ali may have been able to run the community from a mosque corner; Khomeini had to preside over a state bureaucracy three times larger than that of Mohammad Reza Shah.

It was not only the increasing bureaucracy that forced Khomeini to pay greater attention to the state. The inherent contradiction between his populistic rhetoric and his respect for private property led eventually to a major constitutional impasse. Attacks on wealth resounded in the halls of Parliament, especially among the majority bloc, who referred to themselves as "progressives" (motaraqi) and to their opponents as "procapitalists" (sarmayehdari). Respect for property, however, found a receptive audience in the Guardian Council, the body with the constitutional authority to ensure that all parliamentary bills conformed to the sacred law. Not surprisingly, from 1981 to 1987 the Guardian Council vetoed some one hundred reform bills as violations against the sanctity of private property. These bills included land reform, labor legislation, progressive income tax, control over urban real-estate transactions, nationalization of foreign trade, and confiscation of the property of émigrés who had not been found guilty of having obtained their wealth through unlawful means.

The impasse was compounded by Khomeini's reluctance to alienate supporters among either the bazaars or the laboring classes. On some days, he would praise the "slum dwellers" for their frugality and denounce the "palace dwellers" for their conspicuous consumption.^[70] On other days, he would lecture the ministers on the virtues of limited government and the dangers of an "overbloated state." He advised the ministers to supervise rather than control the economy and to encourage entrepreneurs to do what they did best, such as importing goods and managing small factories.^[71] He warned that bureaucrats could not possibly administer a nation of forty million, the people had the right to participate in economic activities, and the bazaaris should be treated as honorable partners rather than as untrustworthy outsiders.^[72] He also warned that the government should do its utmost to keep the support of the bazaaris, for they had been Islam's main pillar of strength throughout Iranian history. "Their alienation," he argued, "had undermined the [1905] Constitutional Revolution"^[73] and the cooling of their support now could very well lead to the collapse of the Islamic Republic.^[74] "This is not a communist country," he exclaimed, "where the state can violate private property, taking away people's farms and factories. No, this is an Islamic country, where we recognize private property and keep government within bounds."^[75]

Khomeini's conflicting signals hardened the deadlock between Parliament and the Guardian Council. To loosen the deadlock, Khomeini in late 1987 and early 1988 tried to nudge the council into accepting some of the milder reform bills, such as income tax and a watered-down labor law. In doing so, he issued what turned out to be a highly controversial decree on the authority of the state.^[76] He criticized the diehard traditionalists for misunderstanding the role of government, especially in the regulation of prices and social services. Because the Prophet had had absolute (motlaq) authority, because this authority had been passed on to his political successors, and because the Islamic Republic was now his true successor, it followed that the present state in Iran should have absolute authority.

He also brought into his ruling the Sunni concept of public interest (maslahah), a doctrine that permitted the state to violate citizens' rights for the common good and for Islam's long-term interests. In the past, the Shii clergy had been wary of this concept for obvious reasons. "The government in Islam," Khomeini elaborated, "is a primary rule having precedence over secondary rulings such as praying, fasting, and performing the hajj. The government can destroy a private house to build a public highway as long as it pays compensation. It can destroy a mosque if that building endangers the community. It can cancel religious contracts if these contracts undermine the common good." In short, the state, so long as it was a truly Islamic state, could overrule the highest-ranking clerics and their interpretation of the sacred law.

Liberal Muslims were shocked. They interpreted Khomeini's decree to be not only a direct attack on private property but also a license for establishing a Hobbesian Leviathan — perhaps even a totalitarian behemoth. This new ruling, argued Bazargan's Liberation Movement, contradicted not only Khomeini's previous promises but also the norms of the sacred law, the Koran, and the sacred traditions; in short, it violated Islam.^[77] The bad caliphs had undermined the Muslim community by ruling despotically, stealing people's possessions, and thus instigating "incredible class wars." The Liberation Movement concluded that the new decree could do the same, especially because the bazaaris had enthusiastically supported the revolution on the understanding that the new order would respect the sacred law and private property.

These fears, however, turned out to be overly alarmist. Khomeini's purpose was not to undermine private property but to strengthen the Islamic Republic, which, in his eyes, was the guardian of Islam and thus in the long run the true defender of private property. In Khomeini's view, Islam was synonymous with the sacred law, and this law, by definition, sanctified private property. Even the Prophet and the imams, with their absolute power, had not had the right to tamper with private property.^[78] It followed that the Islamic Republic, as the embodiment of Islam,

the sacred law, and the imams' traditions, would protect the fundamental rights of private property. Furthermore, the original Sunni concept of public interest, as expounded by al-Ghazzali and other classical theorists, had given the state unrestricted powers only insofar as the rulers behaved within the "essential norms" of the sacred law — that is, respected religion, life, intellect, lineage, and private property.^[79]

In his last years, Khomeini continued to appoint conservative jurists to the Guardian Council — often with the advice and consent of Grand Ayatollahs Golpayegani and Marashi-Najafi, the two highly traditional maraje^c-e taqlid who had joined the revolutionary bandwagon late in the day. He advised Parliament not to draft bills that would antagonize the Guardian Council and set up an arbitration committee to iron out differences between them, but he gave more than half of its seats to the conservative jurists. The committee was named the Council for Determining the Public Interest of the Islamic Order (Majma'-e Tashkhis-e Maslahat-e Nezam-e Islami). Khomeini also continued to criticize the traditional clergy on a host of issues, including their opposition to music, chess, and television. But, significantly, he never once criticized them on the vital issue of private property. On the contrary, he publicly praised archconservative ministers who had opposed a labor law on the grounds that the eight-hour day did not appear in the Koran and that Muslim factory owners did not need legislation to tell them how to treat their workers. Finally in his Vasiyatnameh-e Elahi va Siyasi, Khomeini advised all three branches of government to nourish a mixed economy, respect private property, and encourage businessmen to invest money in productive ventures and give alms to the poor to ensure their own welfare "in this as well as in the next world."^[80]

Thus Khomeini's intentions were not so much to undermine the middle class as to strengthen the Islamic Republic, which, in his eyes, was the main defender of the long-term interests of Islam, the sacred law, and thereby private property. Although Khomeini has often been hailed as the champion of the deprived masses, his own words show him to be much more the spokesman of the propertied middle class. For this reason alone the Islamic

Revolution can be considered a bourgeois revolution. If this sounds strange to Western ears it is only because the traditional middle class in Iran protected property rights by appealing not to the language of natural rights and the Enlightenment but to that of Shii Islam — of the Koran, the sacred law, and the Twelve Imams.