Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

Shi’ite Islam in Contemporary Iran 9 3diversity of rulings and dialogue with other clerics and the public. The IslamicRepublic is thus in form actually a modern state with modern codesmandating an extreme version of Islamic law, not a return to a premodern“Islamic” form of government in a society of Muslims.One might, then, wonder how it is that this repressive regime has managedto maintain power for more than two decades. One factor that helped Khomeinikeep power was the almost immediate start of the Iran-Iraq Wa r(1980–1988), which helped him rally nationalist support of some who wouldnormally have rebelled. The war devastated families and towns, killing a millionpeople and preventing economic growth, which called for immense sacrificesamong the population. All of this kept the population too unnerved to fight theregime. The government used religious rhetoric to legitimize itself in the try i n gcircumstances, likening the death of Iranian soldiers to Husayn’s martyrdom,thus guaranteeing them Paradise. Khomeini also kept his power by promotinga rhetoric demonizing the West, which first started with the taking of the U.S.embassy hostages soon after the Revolution. Many of his advisers were perplexedand argued against this action because it would alienate a powerf u lc o u n t ry that otherwise might help the new government. Khomeini blamed theUnited States for many of the social, economic, moral, and political problemsfound in Iran. Iranians were still angry at the United States for having had theCIA reinstate the now-defeated shah, so Khomeini’s rhetoric was quite appealingto the masses, who needed a new enemy and needed to stay focused on theR e v o l u t i o n a ry program now that the shah was gone. By calling the UnitedStates the “Great Satan,” Khomeini mixed politics and deeply held religious valuesand so prevented any dissenting moderate voices from arising. Both BaniSadr and Bazargan were ousted from their positions because they did not agreewith such a clergy-run government; they were accused of being sympathetic tothe West and thus “demonic.” Indeed, all Eastern and Western ideologies, eventhose, such as socialism and Marxism, that had helped in overthrowing theshah, were demonized by Khomeini and his regime as enemies of Islam. “Deathto America” has thus been the slogan around which the Islamic Republicregime defines not only its foreign policy but also itself.Reforming the Revolutionary RegimeAs Khomeini’s death approached and the Iran-Iraq War ended, the governmentrealized that without their charismatic leader or the debilitating distractionof battle, people’s support for the state might wane, especially under thepoor economic conditions that plagued the postrevolutionary state. As a way tohold off such discontent, the government shifted its focus from implementationof ideological Islam to enacting pragmatic political, social, and economic