When Khomeini Returned to Iran

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On February 1, 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran after fourteen years of exile. Where the Shah had been tearful, Khomeini was studiously stoic. As Khomeini’s plane neared Iran, Peter Jennings of ABC News asked him, “Ayatollah, would you be so kind as to tell us how you feel about being back in Iran?” He replied, “Nothing”—in Persian, hichi. His translator, amazed, responded, “Hichi?” Khomeini was adamant: “Hich ehsasi nadaram”—“I don’t feel a thing.”

More emotional was the massive and adoring throng of several million people that greeted him at the Tehran airport. The crowd was so huge that the roads were absolutely blocked and Khomeini could not proceed by car; he had to be carried from the airport by helicopter.

As The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Iran explains, Khomeini felt nothing, but was ready to assert his power. Of the interim government of Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar, the ayatollah said, “I shall kick their teeth in. I appoint the government, I appoint the government in support of this nation.” On February 4, 1979, he named his own prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, demanding loyalty to him on the theory of clerical rule.

Explaining why Iranians would have to accept his choice for prime minister, Khomeini invoked the deity: “As a man who, through the guardianship [velayat] that I have from the holy lawgiver [the Prophet], I hereby pronounce Bazargan as the Ruler, and since I have appointed him, he must be obeyed. The nation must obey him. This is not an ordinary government. It is a government based on the shari‘a. Opposing this government means opposing the shari‘a of Islam and revolting against the shari‘a, and revolt against the government of the shari‘a has its punishment in our law…it is a heavy punishment in Islamic jurisprudence. Revolt against Allah’s government is a revolt against Allah. Revolt against Allah is blasphemy.”

Bakhtiar resisted, but the military refused to support his government, which collapsed on February 11, 1979. In Iran today, February 11 is still “Islamic Revolution’s Victory Day,” a national holiday marked by chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”

Khomeini held a referendum on March 30 and 31 on whether to establish an Islamic Republic—the announced results were that 98.2 percent of Iranians had voted yes. This was, of course, a wildly inflated number, and many who enthusiastically supported the establishment of an Islamic regime regretted doing so later.

Khomeini established the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and suppressed opposition groups. He pushed through a new constitution solidifying the Islamic character of the state; it, too, was made subject to a referendum. But even before it could be voted upon, Khomeini had made abundantly clear that the Islamic Republic would consider the United States a mortal enemy when he enabled the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. American diplomats would be held hostage for well over a year.

The immediate pretext for the invasion of the Embassy was Jimmy Carter’s reluctant decision to allow the gravely ill Shah to enter the United States on October 23,1979, for medical treatment. Carter presciently asked his advisers, “What are you guys going to advise me to do if they overrun our embassy and take our people hostage?” They did just that on November 4, 1979, when a group calling itself Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line (that is, Khomeini’s line) entered the embassy compound and took the skeleton staff of sixty-six that was still serving there after the fall of the Shah hostage.

Khomeini was delighted, dubbing the hostage-taking “the Second Revolution.” He told a reporter, “I regard the occupation of the American Embassy as a spontaneous and justified retaliation of our people.” He explained that the hostage crisis would assist the Islamic Republic in consolidating power: “This action has many benefits. The Americans do not want to see the Islamic Republic taking root. We keep the hostages, finish our internal work, then release them. This has united our people. Our opponents do not dare act against us. We can put the constitution to the people’s vote without difficulty, and carry out presidential and parliamentary elections. When we have finished all these jobs we can let the hostages go.”

Khomeini wasn’t worried about the Americans interfering with his timetable: “Jimmy Carter is too much of a coward to confront us militarily.” At Thanksgiving 1979, the Iranians freed thirteen black and female hostages, but Khomeini said that the Embassy had been a “den of espionage and those professional spies will remain as they are until Mohammed Reza Pahlavi is returned to be tried and until he has returned all that he has plundered. However, as Islam has a special respect towards women, and the blacks who have spent ages under American pressure and tyranny and may have come to Iran under pressure, therefore, mitigate their cases if it is proved that they have not committed acts of espionage.” One more hostage was freed in the summer of 1980, when he became dangerously ill. The other fifty-two remained in captivity for 444 days, until January 20, 1981, when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president of the United States.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons.