Thirty years ago Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, man of the people and hero of Shia Islam, brought down the cruel and tyrannical regime of the Shah of Iran. This was not how we viewed the Iranian Revolution in the West. That mutual misunderstanding has led to 30 years of animosity, which once again threatens to boil over. To understand the revolution and modern Iran we have to look back hundreds of years to the birth of the Shia faith.
One man who paved the way for Ayatollah Khomeini was Shah Abbas. His contribution to the development of the distinctive tradition of Iranian Shiaism in the early 17th century is to be celebrated in an exhibition at the British Museum. Abbas had a difficult brief. In 1501 the young commander Shah Ismail, who followed a highly unorthodox form of Shia Islam, had conquered Iran and made it a Shia state. Not only were most Iranians Sunni, but Shiaism was a fiercely revolutionary faith that condemned all government as illegitimate and corrupt. How could it possibly become a state religion?
Shiaism is based on a passionate yearning for a divinely decreed justice that is never fully realised but remains a transcendent imperative. Shia Muslims had long believed that the leader (imam) of the Muslim community should be a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and refused to recognise the Caliphs accepted by the Sunni mainstream. In 680 the Prophet's grandson Husain, the third Shia Imam, marched in peaceful protest against the tyranny of the Umayyad Caliphate and on the plain of Kerbala in Iraq he and his small band of followers were slaughtered by the troops of Caliph Yazid. With his infant son in his arms, Husain was the last to die. Each year at Ashura, the anniversary of his martyrdom, Shia Muslims mourn Husain in processions and passion plays, vowing to continue his struggle against oppression.
Shiaism is a tragic religion. The line of imams, who had inherited something of Muhammad's prophetic insight, continued to challenge the Caliphate. Even though they retired from politics, abjured armed conflict and lived devout, contemplative lives, they were exiled, imprisoned and poisoned by the Caliphs, who could not permit this tacit opposition. Somehow Abbas had to tame this piety of protest. The Ashura rituals were sanitised, drained of revolutionary potential, and the people were instructed to pray with humble deference to Husain, as their patron and intercessor. Abbas imported Shia “ulema” - Muslim scholars - from Lebanon, built madrassas for them in his new capital of Isfahan and made them financially independent. But, unlike their Sunni equivalents in the neighbouring Ottoman Empire, who were often despised as government lackeys, they refused to accept official posts and continued to champion the rights of the people.
Abbas was strong enough to control them, but this system could damage a less effective ruler. In 1891 Shah Nasir-ad-Din gave a British company the monopoly on the production and sale of tobacco, thus depriving thousands of Iranians of their major source of income. But one of the leading ulema issued a fatwah prohibiting the sale and use of tobacco in Iran. Everybody - even non-Muslim Iranians and the Shah's wives - stopped smoking, tobacco sales plummeted, and the Shah was forced to rescind the concession.
So in 1963, when Khomeini began his attack on Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, he was a familiar figure. Standing in his pulpit, with the Koran in one hand and the 1906 Constitution in the other, he repeatedly declared that the Shah had violated both by his dismissal of parliament, his wicked suppression of all opposition, his illegal use of torture, his callous neglect of the poor, and his craven subservience to the United States. Khomeini was the only person who had the courage to speak out, and when he was arrested for the second time, thousands of Iranians poured on to the streets in protest. Banished to Iraq, Khomeini urged Iranians to transform the traditional mourning rites of Ashura into a protest against the regime.
Far from being the rabid conservative depicted in the Western press, Khomeini was a revolutionary in Shia terms for suggesting that, in these dark times, a Muslim jurist should be head of state. Accustomed to the crowd-pleasing bonhomie of their own politicians, Westerners found Khomeini's inward-looking, unsmiling demeanour repellent, but Iranians recognised the traditional marks of a “sober” mystic, who had brought all his faculties under control.
The revolution of 1979 was the ultimate passion play. Demonstrators carried placards reading “Everywhere is Kerbala and every day is Ashura!” Elaborate graffiti depicted the Shah as Yazid and the United States as the Great Satan. People courageously donned the white robes of the martyr, defied the curfew and were shot down by the police, not because they were gripped by a fanatical deathwish, but to reveal the brutality of the regime. Iran and the West had a distorted view of each other. If Western people had bothered to learn more about Shiaism, Khomeini and his revolution would have been less of an enigma. Americans did not understand the imagery of the Great Satan: in popular Shiaism, Satan is not a figure of towering evil, as he is in Christianity, but an obtuse creature, mired in materialism and blind to spiritual values. This aptly reflected the average Iranian's view of the glitzy American quarter in Tehran but ignored the fact that the United States is a nation deeply committed to religion.
Like the French and Russian Revolutions, the Iranian revolution was flawed, but so was Western policy in Iran. On both sides, mistakes, prejudice and misunderstanding have continued. Unless we learn to decipher each other's symbolism fairly and impartially, we cannot hope to achieve global peace. Perhaps the Shah Abbas exhibition is a good place for Western people to start seeing Iran with different eyes.
Karen Armstrong, a former nun and the author of Islam: A Short History.