A Portrait of the Place of Islam in the Discourses of Ruhollah Khomeini and the Mojahedin-e-Khalq

Few people could have foreseen the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The Pahlavi Monarchy, though unpopular, was nevertheless a decades-old institution that enjoyed the support of Britain and the United States, profited from billions of dollars in revenue from oil exports,^c1 and (in the SAVAK) had a robust and infamously brutal security apparatus enforcing its hegemony. On January 7, 1978, the Shah closed the seminary and the bazaar of Qom, eliciting a protest on which the Shah’s security forces opened fire.^c2 By February 11, 1979 — after 37 years of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s rule and millenia of virtually interrupted monarchy — a 37-day old provisional government conceded to a new revolutionary authority. When such an unexpected event happens, a natural response is to make sense of it through explanation. In scholarship, this can lead to a certain type of knowledge production in which, as Charles Kurzman puts it, scholars “take unexpected events and try to make them less expected after the fact… a successful explanation leaves little to chance and free will; a less successful explanation leaves more.”^c3 This lends itself to a reading of history that prioritizes structural explanations. While understanding the structural tendencies that animate a society is important, in times of great deinstitutionalization, it is hard to make the case that people’s behavior and its outcome can be understood in terms of existing structures:^c4 Understanding such moments in particular requires a prioritization of people’s agency in how they create and navigate this breach in normalcy.

One of the main ways people do this is in how they articulate their political and philosophical platform. This is an especially important form of agency in a revolutionary period. When the limited frame of what was once normal political discourse gets scrapped, people have the opportunity to invent and mobilize new discourses to their ends. Here, discourse is not just the exchange of linguistic information, but rather a system of thought grounded in communication that informs one’s reading of the world.^c5 It is a logic in itself. Taking agency by creating a new discourse, then, is taking agency by inventing a new logic.

Here, I will home in on two of these logics: Ruhollah Khomeini’s and the Mojahedin-e-Khalq’s.ⁿ¹ Ruhollah Khomeini was a leading scholar of Shi’a Islam for decades before his political involvement, eventually becoming politicized under the secularizing reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi.^c6 In the decades leading up to the fall of the monarchy in Iran, he was a prolific writer, articulating a politics that read Islam as a progressive force and the correct source of the law. He was just as much a member of the ‘ulama as a political figure: by 1963, he was a marja’, the highest title available in the Shi’a clergy. He rose to prominence on ‘Ashura in 1963, when he gave a vicious speech against the Shah from the seminary in Qom. His subsequent arrest elicited mass protests across the country. He spent the next decade and a half in exile, first to Turkey, then Iraq until his exile by Saddam Hussein, and then finally to France. Returning to Iran in 1979 after the fall of the Shah, his movement established the Islamic Republic and he became Supreme Leader of Iran. The Mojahedin, on the other hand, were the first Iranian organization to develop a “systematically modern revolutionary interpretation of Islam.”^c7 The group was founded in the early 1960s by Mosaddeq supporters who were worried that the secular politics of his National Front had alienated the religious masses.^c8 The student activists who founded the group had a different outlook than the generation above them. The previous generation had come into political consciousness in the 1940s and 1950s. Quoting the resistance movements of their time, they tended to be non-violent, focusing more on mass demonstrations and trade unions as their methods of resistance. The new generation, having experienced more violence in their lives and having come into consciousness in a world full of armed liberation struggles, organized themselves as such.^c9 The Mojahedin were the most prominent of such groups, founded on the principles of their reading of Islam as a revolutionary ideology. Juxtaposing Khomeini and the Mojahedin brings out the fact they did not just construct their politics in response to Shah’s status quo, but in contention with each other; It situates their choices in the plural political space that they experienced. As the revolution’s eventual leader, Khomeini is the perfect subject for a portrait of discursive agency in Iran in 1979. The Mojahedin, on the other hand, are his pre-eminent countervailing force. While Khomeini was in exile in France (nevertheless able to impart his discourse upon the Iranian people through cassette tapes), the majority of political martyrs of the ‘70s were from the Mojahedin. After the establishment of the Islamic Republic, the Mojahedin grew to the point that it could “muster over half a million into the streets of Tehran…[and] its newspaper outsold that of the ruling clerical party by sixteen to one,” eventually becoming the victim of almost two-thirds of political executions in Iran since February 1979.^c10 Following Kurzman, I do not seek to extract an explanation of Khomeini’s eventual leading role from the discourses of the two parties,ⁿ² nor even an account of each of how their systems of thought were received by the public. I simply look to portray the nature of one key aspect of these discourses and its relationship with their efforts to legitimize themselves: the place of Islam.

I will begin by contextualizing the key elements of the Pahlavi monarchy’s discourse under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, particularly insofar as it demoted Islam in favor of the glorification of a pre-Islamic Iranian past. He combined that discourse with one of revolution and modernization, terms which he defined with European societies as a model. Then, grounding myself in readings of Khomeini’s oral production, I will examine his system of thought in dialogue with the Shah’s. I will look at how his claims to revolutionary and rational legitimacy were grounded in Islam, and how he mobilized readings of history in defending them. Similarly, I will look at the discursive production of the Mojahedin themselves, along with two writings by Ali Shariati that they chose to circulate to spread their ideology, with a focus on their competing claims to revolutionary and rational legitimacy. I contend that the Mojahedin and Khomeini reclaim the discourse of revolution from the Shah through a historical reading of Islam in which Islam is a progressive and revolutionary force, each using this to legitimize themselves over the other. On the other hand, they fundamentally differ in their claims to rationality. Khomeini’s Islamic Governance is meant to follow syllogistically from the self-sufficient philosophy of Islam; The Mojahedin’s claim to rationality follows from a reading of history — echoing Marx — as a rational, dialectical process set into motion by God that tends towards a just society. This shapes much of their discursive production, and implies a fundamental difference in their attitude towards their system of thought as a whole: whereas Khomeini’s is predicated on its own self-evidence, the Mojahedin’s is predicated on its situatedness in its material context.

The Pahlavi Discourse

Of course, both of these discourses began in opposition to the Shah. Their common desire to frame themselves with Islam as the face of their system of thought has to be understood in dialogue with the system of thought they both sought to bring down. A good introduction to this logic lies in the surname that his father, Reza Shah, invented for them: Pahlavi, after the language spoken by the pre-Islamic Sasanian Empire. The Pahlavi name represents the monarchy’s general effort to legitimize the rule of the new dynasty by appealing to an image of a pre-Islamic ancient Iranian past. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi reproduced this logic in his discourse. Conceiving of discourse not just as textual but embodied in the performance of political spectacle, the Shah’s lavish coronation on the (supposed) 2,500 anniversary of the coronation of Cyrus the Great expressed a vision of the Shah as a custodian of a history that pre-dated Islam by millenia.^c11 At the same time, the Shah appropriated the language of revolution from the popular Left and National Front in an effort to legitimize himself,^c12 making himself out to be a champion of the people: “ours is a country of farmers, laborers, merchants, and office workers, and the laws that are being enacted are designed for the majority.”^c13 The synthesis of these two seemingly contradictory sources of legitimization — one ancient, the other progressive and modernizing — was at the heart of the Shah’s system of thought. Key in bringing the two together was the idea of the “Great Civilization:” it was a formulation that “successfully amalgamate[d] monarchical tradition with ‘modernity.’”^c14 The vocabulary associated with a romantic image of a glorious, imperial Persian past was mobilized to the end of a utopic modernizing vision. This modernization was to be a “White Revolution:” white because it was bloodless, but revolutionary insofar as it liberated peasants from the supposed “feudal”^c15 conditions that subjugated them, bringing them out of the “Middle Ages.”^c16 This, in large part, manifested itself in land reform efforts that took land out of the hands of the Shi’a ‘ulama. The Shah’s modernization, though described as rationalizing and universalizing,^c17 in reality took non-universal, historically contingent vocabulary from Europe as an objective barometer. It measured progress against those terms. This Europeanized vision for modernization was carried out in the state regulation of dress: women were to remove their veils and men were to wear more Western garb. European influence in the Shah’s system of thought was — by law — manifested in the presentation of Iranian people’s (particularly Iranian women’s) bodies. This did not start or end with clothing. For instance, working against the existing education system that was entwined with the institutionalized Shi’a clergy, the education system the Shah established was a Europeanized one.

The Shah demoted Islam in both layers of his synthesized system of thought: in his reading of history and construction of Iranian identity, he focused on a pre-Islamic heritage; In his vision of modernization, he not only weakened the material position of the institutions of Islam in Iran, but enforced a model of the Iranian citizen’s appearance that many Muslims found scandalous.

Khomeini's Discourse

Ruhollah Khomeini rose to prominence on the day of ‘Ashura, 1963, when he gave a pithy speech denouncing the Shah from the Fayziya Madrasa in Qom, a Safavid-era seminary and center for ‘ulama activity in Iran. In a move characteristic of the modernizing and revolutionary aspect of the Shah’s system of thought, he arranged what many took to be a farce of a referendum to legitimize the White Revolution. This passed by a suspiciously unanimous count of 5,598,711 for to 4,115 against. Emboldened by this, the Shah ordered a physical attack of the Fayziya Madrasa in the weeks prior to the speech. This was a school in the capital of Iran’s historic religious center; an architectural monument of the Islamic dynasty that territorialized and institutionalized Twelver Shi’ism in Iran. Situated there, Khomeini responded to the Shah’s recent actions. In the speech, he personally attacks the Shah, positioning him as a non-believer and an agent of Israeli interests. Using the second person, he reproaches the Shah:

Don’t you know that if one day, some uproar occurs and the tables are turned, none of those people around you will be your friends? They are friends of the dollar; they have no religion, no loyalty. They are hanging responsibility for everything around your miserable neck!^c18

A large part of Khomeini’s style — his hyperbole and his blatant ad-hominem attacks on the Shah — seems to be an effort to dismantle any semblance of formality, let alone reverence for the Shah. In response to the Shah’s efforts to legitimize his actions through a claim to popular legitimacy in his modernizing revolutionary discourse, Khomeini’s bluntness served to prove the fiction of this system of thought by eliciting a response that pushed him to the methods of force that the monarchy was truly substantiated on: violence. It worked. Khomeini’s resulting arrest elicited mass protests, who were met with tanks and paratroopers, killing or wounding 380 people.^c19 Notably, the first and most repeated of Khomeini’s ad-hominem attacks made to this end was a comparison of the Shah to Yazid ibn Mu’awiya. This was made particularly potent by the fact that the speech was delivered on the day of ‘Ashura. Much of the rest of the speech can be construed as an act of performance intended to bait the Shah into a repressive response that would reveal his system of thought for the fiction it was. But Khomeini mobilizes Islam — in the form of the yearly mourning of the martyrdom of Imam Hosayn and the sentiments of injustice underlying it — to unify people against the Shah. Shi’a Islam — given the primacy of its notion of injustice and its demotion in the Shah’s system of thought — was the perfect rhetorical tool to mobilize people against him. This was particularly true in parallel with Khomeini’s simultaneous unmasking of the Shah’s claim to revolutionary-popular legitimacy.

For Khomeini, though, Islam was not a rhetorical means to an end: “Islam is an autonomous, rich school of thought that has no need of borrowings from any other school.”^c20 As opposed to conceiving of Islam as primarily pertaining to an individual’s relationship with God, Khomeini points out that:

The ratio of Qur'anic verses concerned with the affairs of society to those concerned with ritual worship is greater than a hundred to one. Of the approximately fifty sections of the corpus of hadith containing all the ordinances of Islam, not more than three or four sections relate to matters of ritual worship and the duties of man toward his Creator and Sustainer. A few more are concerned with questions of ethics, and all the rest are concerned with social, economic, legal, and political questions—in short, the gestation of society.^c21

It is the exportation of European propaganda,ⁿ³ in Khomeini’s system of thought, that limits the scope of Islam to the individualized realm of one’s relationship with God, emptying it of its judicial processes and political laws and replacing it with European importations that allow for the exploitation of the Islamic world.^c22 This articulation of the primary role of Islam is particularly damning of the Shah’s system of thought. Shah’s vision of a modernized Iran was construed of in imported European terms; Khomeini’s system of thought paints this as not just an artificial imposition, but an exploitative one that conspires against a matter of philosophical necessity:

Any person who claims that the formation of an Islamic government is not necessary implicitly denies the necessity for the implementation of Islamic law, the universality and comprehensiveness of that law, and the eternal validity of the faith itself.^c23

Khomeini’s reading of Islamic history is essential in the way he constructs the formation of this government. Inflected by the anti-monarchical concerns of his day, he positions Islam as categorically rejecting hereditary monarchy, going as far as to claim that upon its appearance in Iran, Egypt, Yemen, and Byzantium, the institution of monarchy was abolished. He positions Imam Hosayn as a martyr against the hereditary succession of Yazid from Mu’awiya.^c24

In dialogue with the Shah’s discourse of rationalizing and universal modernization, Khomeini articulates a discourse of rational Islam that deconstructs the universality of the Shah’s system of thought. In dialogue with the Shah’s discourse of ancient monarchical glory, Khomeini derives from this rational Islam a categorical rejection of monarchy which he articulates in the form of a (false) reading of Islamic history. Khomeini’s reading of the history goes on to claim that Mohammad was not just a conveyer of the revelation of the teachings of God, but that:

he undertook the implementation of the law and the establishment of the ordinances of Islam, thereby bringing into being the Islamic state…When the Prophet appointed a successor, it was not for the purpose of expounding articles of faith and law; it was for the implementation of law and execution of God’s ordinances.^c25

It is for this reason, Khomeini posits, that vilayat-i faqih — the governance of experts in Islamic jurisprudence — is necessary and self-evident. In Khomeini’s system of thought, the principles of Islam are taken to be rational, self-sufficient, and concerned with societal matters, and if societies are taken to require an executor of those social principles, the logical conclusion must be that an executor qualified to interpret the principles of Islam ought to govern society. Khomeini’s syllogistic claim to rationality, though, is made interspersed with the aforementioned claims in dialogue with (and against) the Shah’s system of thought. This point doesn’t just serve as a claim to rationality, but also as a call to action: it positions Mohammad as an essentially political figure, encouraging followers of Islam to engage in politics, too.

Whereas some of Khomeini’s discourse — like his historical reading of Islamic opposition to monarchy — categorically rejects elements of the Shah’s system of thought, others compete with the Shah’s system of thought for the same sources of legitimacy. So far, I have demonstrated how Khomeini challenges and takes for himself the Shah’s claims to: popular legitimacy (in his ‘Ashura speech), universality (by positioning his system of thought as an exploitative Western import that empties Islam of its full scope), and rationality (through the above syllogism). Khomeini seeks to claim the tokens of revolutionary legitimacy for himself, too. For him, “Islamic law is a progressive, evolving, and comprehensive system of law,”^c26 derived from “the religion of militant individuals who are committed to truth and justice. It is the religion of those who desire freedom and independence. It is the school of those who struggle against imperialism.”^c27 Khomeini appeals to the revolutionary and the progressive as tokens of legitimacy in his system of thought: he ports the language of contemporary anti-colonial struggle into the ancient past to this end.

In his address on Nowruz in Tehran in 1980 — the first since the establishment of the Islamic Republic — Khomeini’s main concern seems to be the solidification of the new status quo. He does this with an appeal to three main concepts: the people, order or discipline, and Islam. The first priority in his thirteen-point list is the maintenance of discipline in the army, which he justifies with an appeal to the people: disorder is punished by denouncement to the people as counterrevolutionary.^c28 The people are a legitimating force insofar as they behold what is illegitimate, i.e. counterrevolutionary. Within Khomeini’s system of thought, then, to be revolutionary is to be legitimate. This same reasoning is repeated to discourage any sort of disobedience that Khomeini admonishes in almost all the items in this list. The discourse of discipline operates in parallel with the discourse of the people: whereas everyone must obey governmental authorities, governmental authorities must at the same time be exposed as counterrevolutionaries to the people when necessary.^c29 Government officials are only empowered to enforce obedience; the people are only empowered to disgrace those who don’t. It is these reciprocally limiting forces through which Khomeini creates a stable form of power out of a distinctly new circumstance while still, through his discourse of the people, maintaining some claim to popular legitimacy.

Whereas these two discourses loop together to stabilize his power, it is Islam that serves as the theoretical underpinning of the whole system. The above dynamic, as Khomeini presents it, is placed side by side with a call to students of Islam to stop “following and imitating either the West or the East, and adhere instead to the straight path of Islam and the nation,”^c30 because Islam serves as a complete philosophical framework in itself. I will return to this point in dialogue with the Mojahedin’s discourse.

The Mojahedin-e-Khalq's Discourse

In many ways, the place and nature of Islam in the Mojahedin’s system of thought was remarkably similar to the same in Khomeini’s. Both re-interpreted ‘Ashura as not just an occasion to mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hosayn, but to assert one’s commitment to struggle against oppression; Both re-interpreted the Quran and hadiths as essentially dynamic and progressive texts with revolutionary potential;^c31 Both asserted claims to the language of revolution and rationality to legitimize themselves. Their key difference lies in how they construct their claim to rationality, a difference that permeates the language of their discourse at every turn. Khomeini’s claim to rationality emphasizes Islam as a rational system in itself that logically implies a system of governance by which an executor interprets these principles. On the other hand, the Mojahedin’s claim is grounded in a distinct reading of history. For them, God had set into motion the rational process of historical evolution, which had sowed class divisions in early egalitarian communities. These class divisions brought about oppression; they brought about states and ideologies that enforced that oppression; they brought about irreconcilable contradictions between classes that led to conflicts that created new relations of production. The historical dynamism brought about by class conflict, according to their historical model, would eventually bring an end to all outdated social systems and class antagonisms. This would bring about — as the Quran states — an essentially just society in which the mostazafin (lit. the disinherited) will inherit the earth.^c32 This is, to a tee, Marx’s dialectical materialist reading of history: a reading in which history is legible as an essentially rational process driven forward by class struggle that tends towards perfection — not to mention, a reading that uses exactly the same terminology.ⁿ⁴

The Mojahedin reread Islamic concepts in relation to this rational dynamism towards perfection. God sends prophets to further the dialectic: Prophet Mohammad did not just preach mazhab-e tawhidi (the oneness of God) but nezam e-tawhidi (a classless society).^c33

In their works, the meaning of ummat changed from community of believers to a dynamic society in dialectical motion towards perfection; tawhid from monotheism to egalitarianism; jehad from crusade to liberation struggle; shahid from religious martyr to revolutionary hero; mojahed from holy warrior to freedom fighter; tafsir from scholastic study of the holy texts to the process of revealing the revolutionary content of the same texts… and, most noticeable of all, mostazafin from the meek to the oppressed masses.^c34

While both Khomeini and the Mojahedin re-articulate Islam and the act of ijtihad as a revolutionary force, the Mojahedin’s re-articulation in terms of rational dialectical materialism gives certain terms a slightly different significance, which they mobilize to different to ends:

The practice of ijithad, deducting rules from religious sources, hinges on the ability to grasp the concept of social change and Koranic dynamism. The true essence of ijtihad is to accept the fact that mankind, led by its aware vanguard, is constantly transforming society. Unfortunately, ijtihad has not been practised properly since the martyrdom of the Imams. In theory, the Shii ulama, unlike the Sunnis, have kept open the gates of ijithad. But in practice, the Shii ulama, just like the Sunnis, have failed to grasp the real essence of Koranic dynamism.^c35

While Khomeini also conceives of the practice of ijtihad in terms of its revolutionary potential, he positions this potential not against, but with the ‘ulama. As demonstrated by his ‘Ashura speech, the central conflict is between, on the one hand, the revolutionary force of Islam as interpreted by ‘ulama, and on the other hand, the Shah and foreign influence. The Mojahedin, in dialogue with these claims, position the ‘ulama as against the “aware vanguard” that is “constantly transforming society.”^c36 It denies them access to the language of revolutionary legitimacy by positioning a revolutionary against them. Most importantly, this revolutionary group is understood through re-signified Islamic terminology, terminology that Khomeini re-signifies in largely the same way. Whereas the Mojahedin’s claim to rationality comes from a reading of history completely alien to Khomeini’s system of thought, there is a common place of revolutionary Islam in their systems of thought. This leads to discursive production in which the Mojahedin seek to deny Khomeini’s claim to revolutionary legitimacy:

We have developed a scientific-realistic approach that enables us to grasp the real essence of these texts…For us these texts are not static and dogmatic commands, but rather guides and inspirations for dynamic change and revolutionary action. Unfortunately, the traditionalists [the ‘ulama and Khomeini] have treated these texts as dry dogmas, public tranquillizers, and even hidden truths about science and technology. Consequently, they have managed to repel progressive and scientific minded intellectuals. These traditionalists have transformed Islam into a conservative ideology with which they have stupefied the public… In fact, these traditionalists have done to Islam exactly what Lenin in State and Revolution accused the revisionists of doing to Marx: of turning his radical ideas into harmless banalities; placing a halo over his head; and emasculating the real essence of his revolutionary message.^c37

Here, they mobilize their version of their claim to rationality (in the form of their historical reading, here articulated as a “scientific realist approach”) to legitimize their reading as genuinely revolutionary in contrast with that of Khomeini’s.

While Ali Shariati was not a member of the Mojahedin, the Mojahedin’s leaders of the early 1970s propagated their ideology less through their own writings, which were all banned, and more through Shariati’s.^{c38, n5} Shariati’s reading of Islamic history provided the Mojahedin with a means to articulate their claim to revolutionary legitimacy over both Khomeini and the Shah. For Shariati,

Like a revolutionary party, Shi'ism had a well-organized, informed, deep and well-defined ideology, with clear cut and definite slogans and a disciplined and well groomed organization. It led the deprived and oppressed masses in their movements for freedom and for the seeking of justice.^c39

Shariati’s reading of history positions — generated out of a contemporary imagination of what a revolutionary vanguard looks like — positions the revolutionary Shi’ites as:

turn[ing] their backs on the opulent mosques and magnificent palaces of the caliphs of Islam and turn to the lonely, mud house of Fatima. Shi'ites, who represent the oppressed, justice-seeking class in the caliphate system, find, in this house, whatever and whoever they have been seeking.^c40

Two of the groups that Shariati positions on the side of the opulent mosques and magnificent caliphs of Islam in the text are invading foreign dynasties and the Safavids. For Shariati, the Safavids converted Shi’ism from a revolutionary religion of martyrdom to a mere religion of mourning. To an Iranian reader, it would have been clear that the Shah, with his Europeanized vision of modernization and his Western support, was the successor to the foreign dynasty; It would have been clear that Khomeini, a member of an institutionalized ‘ulama that came into being during the Safavid era who studied at (and give his famous ‘Ashura speech in 1963 from) the visibly opulent, Safavid-built Fayziya Madrasa, was the successor to the Safavids. The Mojahedin, on the other hand, imply that they are successors to Fatima’s mud house: a potent image in the Shi’a cultural consciousness recast to symbolize a revolutionary pursuit of justice.

Pivoting from claims to revolutionary legitimacy back to claims to rationality, the differences in the place of rationality in the Mojahedin and Khomeini’s systems of thought brings out an essential difference in the way they construe the place of Islam. Because Khomeini construes Islam as a fully “autonomous”^c41 school of thought from which all societal affairs logically follow, the authority of Islam must be absolute — yet for Shariati, as he puts it in “Where Shall We Begin?,”

An enlightened person, however, is not allowed to consider religion, either scientifically or subjectively, as an absolute phenomenon. Every enlightened person must find out for himself what the social role of his religion is. ^c42

“Where Shall We Begin?” is a unique text in what it demonstrates about the Mojahedin’s system of thought, as its core mission is to address the question of how a system of thought should be constructed and from where it should be derived. At the start of the text, Shariati positions his goal as strategic as opposed to ideological: not about the nature of a doctrine of religion or a scientific theory, but rather about practical matters. For him, the central concern for Iranian political movements is the gulf between the masses — uneducated and “deprived of wisdom,” and the educated class — whose flourishing in an ivory tower is supported by the masses, and who have little knowledge of their own society. While the masses are “captives of ancient traditions and social molds,” the intelligentsia are “captive of abstract concepts.” Shariati turns to the prototype of the Prophet as a model of the enlightened person to break Iranian society out of the stagnation this captivity enforces:

Prophets are not in the same category as philosophers, scientists, technicians or artists. The prophets often emerged from among the masses and were able to communicate with the masses to introduce new mottoes, project new vision, start new movements, and beget new energies in the conscience of the peoples of their time and places. The great revolutionary, uprooting and yet constructive movements of the prophets caused frozen, static and stagnant societies to change their directions, life-styles, outlooks, cultures and destinies.

Similarly to in other discursive production by both Khomeini and the Mojahedin, the Prophet is re-interpreted as revolutionary. Here, though, the prophet’s importance lies partially in his ability to communicate: Shariati and the Mojahedin’s prophet is not just political, but practical in his politics. For Shariati, this comes from elm’: a form of knowledge in the Quran that is not philosophical, nor scientific, but a form of social conscience unique to man. Elm’ is so powerful precisely because of its non-universality: unlike the universality of science, which is based on fixed principles (or Khomeini’s claim to the universality of Islam, or of the Shah’s claim to universality in the vision of Iran as a model society) the enlightened person who possesses elm’ is situated in their geography. This is why, for Shariati, the enlightened Iranian must know Islam. Whereas Shariati goes on to espouse the inherent merits of Islam as a complete school of thought, he begins with a conception of any system of thought as existing only insofar as it is useful to move people. For Khomeini, a system of thought is categorically true, and nothing but.

This difference in meta-attitude towards one’s own system of thought between Khomeini and the Mojahedin became apparent when Massoud Rajavi, the leader of the Mojahedin, was exiled from Iran following the revolution. During this time, now situated in a new geography and addressing the West, he did not articulate his claims to legitimacy over Khomeini by positioning his understanding of Islam as the true and revolutionary one.

His interview with Richard Falk is an interesting case study: It was published in the journal Alternatives, which according to its self-description was “established in 1975 by scholars who were concerned with the more obvious dangers of the Cold War but also with the need for less imperious and more sustainable forms of development.” It emphasizes “reshaping relations…between universality and particularity, in ways that challenge prevailing assumptions about political life within and between states” with both “empirical precision and a culturally sensitive imagination.”^c43 It was produced for an academic readership sensitive to the dangers of the Cold War. Situated in a long history of western intellectual approaches that prioritize (if not prescribe) a universalist stance, this journal publishes works that (as the name suggests) provide alternative scholarly methods that are critical of this, and draw from the particulars of other contexts. There, Rajavi reproduces Shariati’s approach in his thinking about Islam: Islam gives the Mojahedin a “social base in Iran.”^c44 In Rajavi’s frame of thinking, Khomeini was able to rise to power because of a combination of “objective factors favoring a revolutionary uprising” and the lack of a “subjective factor of leadership.”^c45 The material conditions were there, but the Shah’s execution and imprisonment of all progressive forces meant that the opposition force left in the best position to take a leadership role was the clerical institution. By positioning the Mojahedin on the side of objective forces, he puts his understanding of history as a rational historical process on their side. Addressing a Western audience that might conceive of Islam as a cause of unrest in the region, Rajavi chooses an approach that does not emphasize deriving its philosophical principles from a reading of Islam. In the Iranian context, his reading of history as a rational process was inextricably linked with Islam — “to separate the class struggle from Islam is to betray Islam.”^c46 As presented to a Western audience, though, Islam is the precondition to having the social base that allows a group entry into the rational historical dialectic. This is not to say that Rajavi and the Mojahedin were disingenuous in their discursive production, but rather that — in comparison to Khomeini’s absolute stance — they saw discourse as contextual and practical. Their very idea of not just politics, but of systems of thought as an articulation of a vision for life and society fundamentally differed from Khomeini’s.

Conclusion: Situating my work in its methodological concerns

To summarize my portraits, then, the Mojahedin and Khomeini both looked to reclaim revolutionary legitimacy from the Shah. They did this by creating a vision of the revolutionary through that which the Shah demoted: Islam. Each read Islam as a progressive and revolutionary force; they mobilized historical readings on these grounds against each other in an effort to claim revolutionary legitimacy. On the other hand, they had different relationships with rationality and systems of thought themselves: for Khomeini, the authority of Islam was absolute, and he conceived of his system of thought as rationally following from Islam. The Mojahedin, on the other hand, had a more dynamic understanding of systems of thought as geographically contingent, and derived their claims to rationality from a dialectical account of history.

That being said, my work here is inherently limited. The entirety of my portrait of both Khomeini and the Mojahedin’s systems of thought hinge on their written and oral production. This is rich ground for analysis of how they formulate their internal logic, the place of certain terms within it, and how they mobilize said logic and terms in dialogue with each other. It can bring about a meaningful account of how they compete for legitimacy. Here, though, it hinges entirely on translated works. While I can capture the broad conceptual strokes of each of their systems of thought, a whole world of subtle linguistic contours is unavailable to me: how do their discursive productions differ stylistically in Persian? What do they seek to index with these stylistic differences? Are there places where they use similar turns of phrase or morphosyntactic arrangements that are atypical in other Persian language discourses? What do they seek to index in those places? My analysis also hinges entirely on a linguistic register: systems of thought are not just things that are said and written, but things that define and are in turn defined by action. Interpreting the Khomeini and the Mojahedin’s actions as not just as means to an end, but as symbolic and rhetorical acts could similarly open up a new world of analysis: In what cases do their actions seem to be in tension with their linguistic production? How do they reconcile this in their linguistic production? What does this say about their system of thought as a whole? What symbols of legitimacy do they lay claim to in their actions? How do they do this in dialogue with each other? Do their systems of thought demonstrate different relationships between their linguistic production and action? What does this say about them?

The portrait I offer here looks to be a groundwork for this sort of thinking, and can prompt even broader questions about Khomeini and the Mojahedin’s systems of thought. While here, I mainly construe them in dialogue with each other, there is no doubt that both of their discourses were interpreted, re-interpreted, and claimed by all sorts of people to their own ends. Examining how this process worked for a particular demographic and looking at how Khomeini or the Mojahedin responded to that over time could be another angle from which to situate and portray their systems of thought.

All of this is to situate my work here in its limitedⁿ⁶ place in the endeavor of portrayal. Looping back to my initial methodological exploration, portraits like this could be synthesized with knowledge production that has more explanatory goals. What can the nature of the systems of thought explored here explain about the eventual outcome of the Revolution of 1979? What does it explain about Khomeini’s ascent to power and the nature of the construction of his Islamic Republic?

Beyond its readings of Khomeini and the Mojahedin’s discourse, this paper hopes to provoke thought on the ways in which scholarly historical knowledge is produced, and prompt further inquiry sensitive to these concerns.