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HOW MUMBO-JUMBO CONQUERED THE WORLD
A Short History of Modern Delusions
Francis Wheen
For Bertie and Archie
Contents
3 It’s the end of the world as we know it
4 The demolition merchants of reality
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …
Francis Wheen’s Guide to the Web
Tehran, Wednesday 24 January 1979
Three army tanks block the entrance to Mehrabad International Airport, following an announcement by the Shi’ite Muslim leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that he intends to return to Iran on 26 January after fourteen years of exile. ‘Khomeini is not coming, not at all,’ a major tells reporters.
It is eight days since Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled abroad, with mass demonstrations and strikes convulsing the country he has ruled for three decades. The tanks in the roadblock – British-made Chieftains – are themselves symptoms of the malaise which laid him low: both Muslims and Marxists were enraged by his dependence on Britain and the United States, his use of military force to crush dissent and his apparent contempt for Persian traditions.
Shahpour Bakhtiar, the prime minister, said after the Shah’s departure that Khomeini was welcome to return home, but has adamantly refused to accept the Ayatollah’s demand that he should yield power to an Islamic theocracy. As the tanks arrive at the airport, Khomeini’s principal envoy in Tehran, Mehdi Bazargan, holds a news conference at which he describes his old friend Bakhtiar as a ‘reasonable, logical and patriotic man’ who must now accept the inevitable and give way to the Ayatollah. To mollify liberals, socialists and other secular opponents of the Shah, who have become increasingly fearful of Khomeini’s ambitions, he adds that the proposed new government will be called an ‘Islamic Democratic Republic’ rather than merely an ‘Islamic Republic’.
What will it mean in practice? In an interview with the newspaper Ettelaiat the Ayatollah denounces dancing and cinema as unIslamic, and limits his promises of free speech to exclude ‘things not in the national interest’. At the Tehran news conference, Bazargan rejects models such as Libya and Saudi Arabia, explaining that he favours a government like that ‘we had for ten years under the Prophet Mohammed and for five years under the Imam Ali’. In short, the intention is to restore a regime that last existed almost 1,300 years ago.
Monday 29 January
In Tehran, troops open fire on demonstrators who have burned two cinemas, two restaurants, a liquor shop, several bordellos and a nightclub. The protesters are seen ‘chortling with delight’ as they throw champagne bottles from the club’s cellar on to a bonfire.
At the American embassy, Iranian soldiers guarding the grounds have to be replaced after one shoves an assault rifle into an American officer’s belly and yells, ‘Yankee go home!’ As the original sixty-man contingent drive away in trucks, they all shout the same refrain.
Outside Tehran University, where at least thirty-five people were killed by army bullets yesterday, Major-General Taghi Latifi is dragged from his Mercedes 220 and badly beaten. A leaflet distributed on the campus says the time has come to establish a ‘people’s army’ and attack the United States and Israel. ‘We have to get guns,’ it adds. Thousands of students take up the chant: ‘Machine guns, machine guns, the answer to everything.’ On sale inside the university are photographs of the Shah holding a glass of wine and Empress Farah wearing a one-piece swimming suit.