A Lecture by Ayatollah[Imam] Khomeini
Once on our way by bus to the Jamaran residence (the hall where [Imam] Khomeini was to speak was connected to his house) there was the buzzing excitation that indicated something powerful was about to happen. For myself I knew that I could trust my intuition enough to determine whether Ayatollah [Imam] Khomeini was essentially good, essentially bad, or an admixture. I also sensed that something dramatic was to happen to me, as if the psyche has a presentiment of that which will radically affect one's perception, one's experiences. I tend to believe that something within Creation knows what is about to happen, or rather that, given the tendencies of a given situation; some form of the reality that is imminent (but unknowable to the individual) begins to participate in the moment of experience even before the important event has happened. In other words there is the absence of time, the present holds the meaning of the future, especially the immediate future that is to profoundly influence one's experience of reality. If something remarkable is to happen to one, the fact of that reality will still be contained in the reality of experience leading up to the experience, which has yet to happen. I knew that whatever would happen in the hall where [Imam] Khomeini would speak, it would be tumultuous and consequential; how could it be otherwise in a situation in which one individual human being embodied and dictated the intention and the reality of a revolution? The ambivalence, the ambiguity that I had experienced in regard to the person of [Imam] Khomeini was about to be resolved: I would know the essence of his motivation, the essence of the claims of his countrymen as to his spiritual greatness. The actual event of his speaking followed inevitably from the sequence of steps that started with the bus ride to North Tehran through the various checkpoints, and finally the entrance into the hall. Since it was guaranteed that we would see the Imam, the bus ride contained the reality of that meeting, and therefore the potency of this reality flowed into the present experience of riding towards our destination. In a sense I felt that all of my speculations, hunches, concepts of the revolution would dissolve in the face-to face encounter with the leader of that revolution. I was not disappointed.
There were at least five or six checkpoints at which we were frisked for any weapons or object that might be used to threaten the life of the beloved (and hated) leader of Iran and the Islamic Revolution. Nothing - no pencils, no cameras, and no object of any kind - was permitted to be taken past the first checkpoint. As we walked briskly through what seemed a labyrinth of alleys there was the sense of the eagerness with which each invited individual was insuring a suitable view of the speaker-in other words, I was aware that many of us were walking quickly to obtain the best seats. And while we walked I couldn't help but notice the brightness, the alertness, the liveliness in the air itself; this was a very different part of Tehran; it had a humming energy, a vitality, a special kind of consciousness. Was this due to the actual reality of this person called Ayatollah [Imam] Khomeini, or was it due to the attitude that characterized the people's estimation of [Imam] Khomeini? I felt at the time it could be both, since again I determined that something was indeed objectively different about the space we were entering. This was the center of the opposite of apathy and lassitude that I had found on the street of Tehran; here in the lanes leading up to the lecture hall in the early morning - it was about eight o'clock - hundreds of Revolutionary Guards, ordinary citizens, and clergymen were all part of the corridor of guardians and staff who orbited around the sun of [Imam] Khomeini. I could see that they relished their work, that this was where (as well as in the midst of battle) the revolution manifested its living force. Indeed I thought that we were approaching the very source of the revolution, so harmonized did the climate of feeling seem in conjunction with the principles, the mythological realities of the revolution.
Now the reader should realize at this point in my story that I was well aware of all those things attributed to the regime, and especially the authority of the Imam: the brutal torture, the thousands of executions, the raping of women prisoners, the resuscitation of SAVAK; the abolishment of music, dance, and any offending aesthetic or recreational activities that are accepted as normal in the modern world; the killing of young children, the shooting of high school girls, censorship of the press, the cruel campaign of murder and desecration of the Baha'i community, the refusal to permit Amnesty International to enter Iran, in short the systematic and violent overthrow of all semblance of democracy, the instituting of a system of rule that compared unfavorably with the Shah even at his worst. I had heard all these things; I had even heard these things from people whose integrity and credibility I could not doubt. Iran was in a state of vicious madness and the source of the evil repression was none other than the person whom I was to see perform and later meet. Before the shifting towards a concerted campaign against all 'opponents' of the regime (which had caused this increased hostility against him), Ayatollah [Imam] Khomeini had been the object of extreme hatred in the United States for being linked intimately with the seizing of the innocent American diplomats. Then there were still many forces in Iran who supported [Imam] Khomeini; now, however, in the wake of the executions and persecution of opponents of the regime the hatred of [Imam] Khomeini has been entrenched even in the hearts of many who had fought against the Shah, Iranians who had even served in the provisional government, who had, in fact, been loyal to [Imam] Khomeini up until the last six months. Now I was to see in the flesh the personage whose will had dominated Iran, whose policies (although attributed to God) had caused so much disruption in Iran and had drawn so much negativity from the West.
I secured a seat at the front of the hall; [Imam] Khomeini's chair, draped with a white sheet, was situated on a stage above us at least fifteen feet from floor level. A white-bearded mullah surveyed us as we entered the hall, and adjusted the microphone, waiting patiently for the sign that the Imam would be coming through the closed door to the right of the stage upon which he would give his lecture. The hall was redolent with whispered expectation, and from time to time certain Muslims would shout a slogan or a passage from the Qur'an and would then be joined by the hundreds of other Muslims and Revolutionary Guards who were in attendance. No smoking was allowed inside the hall and the reverence that was predominant in the attitude of all those waiting for the Imam's entrance made this scene one in which the usual smells and ambience of Iran were significantly altered. Even as I looked up at the stage at the place where [Imam] Khomeini had given hundreds of speeches my eyes registered the physical calm, the physical purity, the physical freshness that hovered, or rather collected in a block of solid, translucent energy that seemed in such contrast to the hotel we had been in, to in fact every other environment I had been in two trips to Iran. Even the mosques did not radiate this quality, this wholeness of energy. Could the Imam after all be an enlightened human being, a true Sufi, or perhaps even more? All signs indicated that something was urged to happen in this hall that transcended anything in Iran that happened outside the hall, the only feeling that seemed at all familiar with this feeling was the war front and then when I had walked through Behesht-e-Zahra Cemetery. I could only account for this by assuming that perhaps martyrdom was real, that the sudden and sanctified splitting of the soul from the body, carrying that soul up into heaven because of the intention of the martyr, has created an energy that was holy, an energy that was blessed by ALLAH [SWT] Himself. Whatever was the case the atmosphere where [Imam] Khomeini's chair sat was radiant and alive, harmony, not hatred, dominated here.
While we waited for the Imam, a parade of Lebanese Palestinian children whose parents had been killed in Israeli bombing attacks (and who had been adopted by the Iranian government at the behest of [Imam] Khomeini) marched into the hall singing in Arabic various songs about the revolution. They stood in front of us just below the stage, looking slightly more bewildered than the hundreds of Iranian students from the Islamic high schools that had marched and shouted for us. They had been invited to listen to the Imam, and in their yachting-like uniforms (blue caps, white dress) they patiently stood, while their teachers organized their chanting and their positioning. Each day, apparently, [Imam] Khomeini met with individuals and groups associated with the running of the revolution. He was especially interested in those children whose parents had been killed in refugee camps by strafing Israeli jets. They constituted the oppressed, the people who suffered innocently at the hands of the aggressors; they were thus specially suited to the categories of moral judgment of Islam and the revolution. Only another manifestation of evil could have created these orphans; the Palestinians were the victims of American imperialism, since it was American weapons that had drawn the blood of the fathers and mothers of these children. Everything was separated into good and evil; each struggle in the world fell into the categorization of the oppressed fighting against the oppressors. These
Lebanese children were symbols of that struggle, were symbols for the moral distinctions necessary to uphold the revolution and maintain its absolutist basis. Without the reality of evil, one cannot posit the existence of its opposite: good. The Iranians themselves might not be qualified to call themselves pure, but their Islamic motivation was pure, and the enemy certainly was evil. How could it be that it was anything but God that would oppose evil; since evil existed, what countered it was good. The Iranians had been taught to think in this way by their leader, nothing, not the distinctions of Ebrahim Yazdi, nor the resistance of the [so-called] Mujahideen [MKO] could deter those supporters of the "Line of the Imam" from sticking to these black and white categories of judgment, for only in this way could the allegory of good versus evil be enacted.
