I saw mention earlier today of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Little Green Book, and which in a spirit of curiosity and fairness I then found online and quickly looked through it. [To mention, for whatever reasons, copying and pasting from the book has been a bit all over the place in terms of font size and so on.]
Khomeini was the first Iranian Supreme Leader after the revolution of 1979, and in this book he provides some of his key thoughts on life. He clearly believed it is the duty of every Muslim in helping to overthrow everything in the world that is not Islam, and that Muslims cannot be at peace until this theocratic world domination is achieved. Islam must be revolutionary in intent and act. For him, an Islamic state cannot be content within its borders. It must aspire to conquer the world beyond. He and his regime are obviously considered to be carrying out the will of Allah, and so any resistance to that divinely inspired rule is clear evidence of being on the very wrong side of reality. You probably won’t do very well under that regime if you are found to be on that wrong side of reality.
First he has this to say on Islam:
The person who governs the Muslim community must always have its interests at heart and not his own. This is why Islam has put so many people to death: to safeguard the interests of the Muslim community.
We have a duty to create an Islamic republic and to that end our first obligation is the creation of a system of propaganda. Ultimately the group and its propaganda becomes a force that can infiltrate a huge system of government or even bring about its downfall.
[From here I will focus more on the social side of things rather than on the obviously political or revolutionary.]
Urinating and defecating are forbidden on the graves of believers, unless one does so as an insult to them.
[Apart from three listed exceptional circumstances] one may either wash one’s anus with water or wipe it with some fabric or a stone.
It is preferable, for urinating or defecating, to squat down in an isolated place; it is also preferable to go into this place with the left foot first, and come out of it with the right foot first; it is recommended that one keep his head covered while evacuating, and have the weight of his body carried by the left foot.
During evacuation, one must not squat facing the sun or the moon, unless one’s genitals are covered. While defecating, one must also avoid squatting exposed to the wind, or in public places, or at the of door one’s house, or under a fruit tree. At the time of the evacuation, one must also avoid eating, dallying, or washing one’s anus with the right hand. Finally, one must avoid talking, unless one is absolutely forced to or is addressing a prayer to Allah.
It is strictly forbidden to eat the meat of an animal if it was sodomized while alive by a man. In that case, the animal must be taken outside the city and sold.
If one commits an act of sodomy with a cow, a ewe, or a camel, their urine and their excrements become impure, and even their milk may no longer be consumed. The animal must then be killed as quickly as possible and burned, and the price of it paid to its owner by him who sodomized it.
There are eleven things which are impure: urine, excrement, sperm, bones, blood, dogs, pigs, non-Muslim men and women, wine, beer, and the sweat of the excrement-eating camel.
The sweat of an excrement-eating animal is impure; the sweat of other animals, which do not eat the same detritus, is not.
If a person crushes a mosquito on his skin and cannot determine whether the blood therefrom is the insect’s or his own, this blood is pure; but if the time between the bite and the death of the mosquito is so short that no such distinction can be made, the blood is impure.
Mr Khomeini now moves onto the subject of marriage, and here he really shines:
The mother, sister, or daughter of a man who has been sodomized by another man may not marry the latter, even if both men or one of them had not yet reached puberty at the time; but if one who was the victim of the act cannot prove it, his mother, sister, or daughter is
allowed to marry the other man.
If a man sodomizes the son, brother, or father of his wife after their marriage, the marriage remains valid
If a father (or paternal grandfather) marries off his daughter (or granddaughter) in her absence without knowing for a certainty that she is alive, the marriage becomes null and void as soon as it is established that she was dead at the time of the marriage.
It is highly recommended that a girl be married off as soon as she reaches the age of puberty. One of the blessings of man is to have his daughter experience her first period not in her father’s house, but in that of her husband. (Once in power Khomeini lowered the legal marriageable age from eighteen to nine).
A woman who has had her ninth birthday must wait for three menstrual periods after her divorce before being allowed to remarry.
If a woman who has not reached her ninth birthday who is temporarily married, she must, at the end of the contract or when the husband has released her from part of it, wait two menstrual periods or forty-five days before marrying again.
So anyway, I think we’ll all agree, a great man, a palatial mind. Oh to live beneath the holy shackles of such wisdom. Perhaps he was, yes, seriously and scarily deranged in some of the trains of his thought - that must be admitted - and perhaps it would have been better if he kept some of those thoughts to himself instead of committing them to writing, but still, for all that, ultimately we can say he seems very likeable. The kind of person and regime all but the spiritually and intellectually discordant would thrive under. He has perhaps some of the most interesting and involved thoughts on defecating one is ever likely to come across, whilst his views on how to deal with sodomised animals many will find helpful. They had perhaps found the subject too much of a taboo to ask about, but now intellectual help is at hand . The Ayatollah’s stance regarding this is perhaps not quite definitive but is at least worth pondering.
The plight of divorced nine year old women is again a subject the West has ignored for far too long, and the Ayatollah’s views deserve consideration if not perhaps necessarily respect. His thoughts on how to proceed after acts of sodomy inflicted on one’s family members by one’s husband are also illuminating and progressive. Sodomy seems incidentally, in all its forms, a subject close to his heart, and he examines it in detail regarding one’s wife or wives also, though it’s maybe a bit too complex in its details to go into here.
So I can see now why the Ayatollah and his successors have so many supporters. These supporters evidently have also read The Little Green Book, and it speaks deeply to them. And why wouldn’t it?
Remember though, this is a just a short book, and in it Khomeini is focusing his gaze on to the most crucial questions of life, rather than life in anything like its full complexity. Hopefully he is more expansive in his treatments elsewhere.
(To add, someone more cynical than I might ponder a scenario where you’re, say, a relatively refined, civilised or simply sane and decent person and you’re under the iron rule of these ruthless, deranged shitkickers, and you might consider that situation a bit unfortunate . . . )
