The Iranian regime faces a challenge from new quarters. In an unexpected outburst, Hussein Khomeini, grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, lashed out against the ruling theocracy, Mustafa El-Labbad writes Hussein Khomeini has added fuel to an already fiery domestic situation in Iran, with his vehement attack on the "rule of the clerics", the underlying principle of government in Iran since shortly after that country's Islamic Revolution in 1979. Moreover, Hussein's words should be assessed with regard of the added weight of the lineage factor in a society and polity in which 90 per cent of the populace are Shi'ite Muslims. Lineage is of fundamental importance to the Shi'ite creed which holds that the nephew of the Prophet Mohamed, Ali, and his descendants had been usurped of their right to inherit the command of the faithful. The Shi'ites have elevated the family and descendants of the Prophet to a position of sacred authority, and, today, among the Shi'ite communities in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, the Ashraf (descendants of the family of the Prophet) are still distinguishable by their black turbans, as opposed to the white turbans worn by other members of the Shi'ite clergy. The charismatic leader of the Iranian Revolution Ayatollah Rohallah Khomeini, the Spiritual Guide of the Revolution Ali Khameini and the current President of Iran Mohamed Khatemi all wore black turbans. Hussein Khomeini is the son of Mustafa Khomeini, eldest son of Ayatollah Rohallah Khomeini. In an open letter to Mohamed Khatemi, the Ayatollah's grandson demanded a public referendum allowing the Iranian people to determine the nature of their government. Advocating a secular form of government, he proclaimed that religion must be liberated from the tyranny of the state and warned that the regime had better take heed of the lessons to be learned from the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. Topping this off with another bombshell to the media, he declared that the struggle with Israel was a "fabricated conflict" and of little concern to the Iranian people. Although the opinions aired by Hussein Khomeini have been frequently voiced by various factions of the Iranian opposition, his genealogy lends them a unique substance and, consequently, makes him a force that may ultimately be more dangerous and demoralising for the regime than any military operations carried out by the Mujahidin Khalq. That it was the Ayatollah's grandson that launched this powerful salvo suggests that the legitimacy of the Iranian regime has begun to crumble as political tensions slowly rise. Born in Tehran in 1958, Hussein Khomeini fled Iran, then under the rule of Shah Mohamed Riza Pahlevi, in 1965, accompanying his father and grandfather in their exile, first to Turkey and then to Iraq. In the mid-1970s, SAVAK, the Shah's notorious secret service, assassinated Hussein's father in Najaf, Iraq, after which the dissident voice of his grandfather began to have a growing impact on events in Iran. Hussein, during this time, had followed the government educational curriculum in public primary and preparatory schools, after which he was enrolled in a Shi'ite seminary. Before completing his education, he was forced to leave Iraq with his grandfather who had fled to France. Following the victory of the Islamic Revolution, Hussein returned to Iran with his grandfather. At the age of 22 he served in the Iranian armed forces for eight months during the Iran-Iraq war. The mid-1980s saw the emergence of a new political movement in Iran. The Republican Party, as it was called, acquired increasing sway in Iranian politics and eventually succeeded in moving into key positions in government. The most prominent figures in this movement were Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Khamenei, who continue to dominate the power spectrum in Iran today. One effect of the rise of this movement was to curb Khomeini's influence and curtail the prospects of his descendants in sharing or inheriting power. In addition to Ahmed Khomeini, the Ayatollah's second son who was still alive at the time, the contenders also included Hussein and Ahmed's son Hassan. While Hassan Khomeini would appear in official functions, Hussein had chosen to remain a recluse in the Shi'ite holy city of Qum. Upon the succession of Khamenei, following the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the exclusion of Khomeini's descendants was finalised. Indeed, Ahmed was accorded no honours apart from permission to be buried by his father in the huge mausoleum whose gilded dome can be seen from the rooftops of Tehran, glittering under powerful spotlights at night. Perhaps inspired by the Shi'ites' historically ingrained sense of injustice and by the perceived wrong to the memory of his grandfather, Hassan Khomeini began to harbour a growing opposition to the regime. Although for several years he had been under compulsory detention in his residence in Qum, he has recently fled to Najaf, in Iraq, from where he broke his silence so dramatically this week. Hussein's rebelliousness is not unique in contemporary Shi'ite societies. To his name, we can add those of such figures as Moqtada Al-Sadr in Iraq and Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon. In spite of the vast differences in the outlooks of these three figures, they share, in addition to the black turban, a spirit of defiance against traditional Shi'ite leaderships, a relative youthfulness when compared to most Shi'ite spiritual leaders and generally radical politics and attitudes. They also all lack the necessary theological credentials for Shi'ite religious leadership, qualifications which must be acquired through a stringent centuries-old system of education and training. Moqtada Al-Sadr, heir to the spiritual influence among Iraqi Shi'ites of the Sadr family which traces itself to the Prophet, came into the spotlight following the collapse of the regime of Saddam Hussein. Al- Sadr has capitalised on the frailty of the traditional Shi'ite leadership in Iraq, on the shaken legitimacy of the Iranian Ayatollah Muhsen Al-Hakim who had arrived in Iraq after the fall of Saddam, on Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's call to keep Shi'ite religious institutions out of politics, and on the fact that his father, Mohamed Baqer Al-Sadr, and uncle, Mohamed Sadeq Al-Sadr, both Shi'ite religious leaders, were assassinated by the former Iraqi regime. Drawing on this political capital, Moqtada Al- Sadr has also appealed to the Iraqi Shi'ites' sense of historical oppression and political exclusion, succeeding in mobilising millions of his coreligionists into taking to the streets to demand their long overdue share in power in Iraq, where Shi'ites constitute the majority of the population. The Lebanese Hassan Nasrallah led the Lebanese armed resistance against the Israeli occupation. At a time when many Lebanese political leaders were content with small gains and prepared to negotiate with the occupation forces, Nasrallah and his supporters mounted armed operations of great inventiveness and impact. Unable to sustain increasing losses, Israeli forces pulled out of Lebanon, marking their first forced, unconditional retreat in the Arab-Israeli conflict. On the basis of this victory, which gave him his credentials as a freedom fighter, Nasrallah won the support of the most of the Shi'ite community, which makes up a plurality of the diverse Lebanese population. Nasrallah's power is in spite of the presence of Al-Sayyid Fadlallah, the most highly esteemed Lebanese Shi'ite theologian, respected not only in Lebanon but among scholars and intellectuals throughout the Arab world. In times of severe crisis, radical ideology is prone to gain ascendancy over logic and reason. An ideology operates on three interrelated philosophical levels: a perception of the order of the world, the nature of life and the role of man, or the metaphysical; an evaluation of specific states of affairs, grounding the ideology in the concrete; and an approach or programme for changing that which is imperfect or unacceptable. The Khomeini ideology, since the success of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, appeared capable of realising the hopes not only of the Iranian people but also of the Shi'ites in Lebanon and Iraq, as well as smaller minorities in the Gulf States. With Khomeini, a perception of the world blended with the politics of the marginalised and discontent which in turn converged with religion as both the source of authority and the solution to create the revolutionary ideology par excellence. Marx has said, "Philosophers understand the world differently, but changing this world is what is important," his implication being that veneration for revolutionary goals had to be given primacy over philosophical and moral hairsplitting if the revolutionary movement is have the impetus and dynamism to effect change. It would seem that this applies to the new black-turbaned revolutionaries in the predominantly Shi'ite areas in the Middle East. However, the transformation which this new generation of radicals is steamrolling by the traditional Shi'ite leadership does not appear to be controlled or well-defined. Indeed, it appears totally unchecked by any social constraints and fuelled purely by the ideology of change, regardless of the form and means. Recent developments suggest that Shi'ite communities in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon are headed for a new period of revolutionary ideological ferment, not from the radical left, which elsewhere in the world has generally been associated with the term "revolutionary", but from the centre of Shi'ite society, and targeting the traditional religious institutions and leaderships that once held that society together. The problem the Iranian regime has with Hussein Khomeini is that the ideology the Islamic Revolution had formerly used against its intellectual adversaries has, in the hands of Ayatollah Rohallah's grandson, been turned into a weapon against the "revolutionary state". Suddenly the winds of change have shifted direction; they are not coming from pro-royalists or left-wing Marxists who could always be branded as foreign proxies. Rather, they are coming from the core of one of the major pillars of revolutionary legitimacy: the Khomeini line. The black turban revolution is imbuing the Shi'ite masses in Iran with a new radicalism and mustering this energy against, not the civil, but the religious establishment.
