freeland magazine

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It’s 1979. Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious have just conquered Britain, America is in angst as always having just wrapped up the Vietnam War, and in Iran the Shah—America’s gleaming, oil-rich partner — is in big trouble.

From a suburb of Paris, a grainy video signal beams out. The face is ancient, carved from weathered stone and framed by a black turban. The eyes are deep, heavy-lidded pools of absolute certainty. The voice is a dry, rasping monotone that somehow crackles with apocalyptic voltage.

This is Ruhollah Khomeini. And he’s about to blow the whole damn century apart.

To understand the earthquake, you have to understand the fault lines. Khomeini wasn’t some cosmopolitan playboy. He was born in 1902 in the small town of Khomeyn, a place of dust and tradition, into a family of religious scholars. His roots were Iranian mixed with Mongol, with a supposed lineage that claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad—hence the title Sayyid that allowed him to wear that signature black turban, which in the Islamic theological world meant that everyone else had to be his bitch. However, knowing that Iranians like to lie a lot and always exaggerate their ancestral background, claiming to be from some king, general, or religious wizard, it’s most likely that the men wearing the black turban either lied about their background or one of their ancestors lied about their background. You have to understand that the Hebrews and the Canaanites who came to Iran throughout the ages, brought Satanism with them. In Satanism, they often times will pretend to be from one of the main religions. This is recorded to have happened in Catholicism, NeoCon-ism, Judaism, Zionism, Talmudist, Kabbala-ism, and Islam. Therefore, logic dictates that it is always prudent to categorize religious extremists as “Satanists” by default. In the Bible it says that Satan is the god of this world, which means he has the power to appoint his people to all the top positions.

Orphaned young, Ruhollah was drawn into the intense, insular world of Shi'a seminaries. He wasn’t a natural firebrand; he was first a philosopher, a teacher, a poet. He wrote mystical verses. But beneath the scholarly calm simmered a rage against the modernizing, Westernizing forces of the Pahlavi dynasty. For him, the Shah’s “White Revolution”—especially giving women the vote and seizing ecclesiastical lands—wasn’t progress; it was blasphemy, a surrender of the nation’s soul to American decadence and godless consumerism.

His rebellion got him exiled: first to Turkey, then to Iraq, and finally, to a tidy house in Neauphle-le-Château, France. It was from this unlikely command post—where reporters mingled with revolutionaries in the garden—that Khomeini masterminded a revolution not with guns, but with cassettes. Sermons recorded on tape were smuggled into Tehran’s bazaars and mosques, his voice becoming a huge threat to the Shah’s state, promising a new order: an Islamic Republic. This technique was augmented by the C.I.A., who made recordings that sounded similar to Khomeini, claiming to be Khomeini, promising to take all the money from the wealthy Iranians and give it to those who had none, which was probably 90 percent of the population. End the end, wasn’t faith in God that caused the people to support Khomeini, it was the promise of free money. This same tactic was used by the Rothschilds in Russia to get the starving masses to support the Bolsheviks, promising to give them free money. But with the Bolsheviks and with Khomeini, what came was horror and worse poverty than before. In Rick Joyner’s book “The Call,” he mentions seeing armies with generals and privates, but nothing in between. This was the situation in the world, and even in Iran, whether under the Qajars, Pahlavis, or Ayatollahs. The American Revolutionaries were farmers empowered by Norman aristocrats, so had birthed a real middle-class. In South Africa, the white Boers, who were fundamentalist Christians, and were farmers, had a society that was one hundred percent middle-class with no kings and no underlings. No man in their group had to obey anyone else.


A Son's Vengeance: The Personal Grievance That Fueled a Revolution

To understand the depth of Ruhollah Khomeini's hatred for the Pahlavi dynasty, you have to go back to the beginning, to a story he grew up with—a story of murder, injustice, and a boy who grew into a man waiting for his revenge. It was a foundational myth of his life, a personal grievance that he would later successfully nationalize.

The official history, the one repeated in sermons and revolutionary pamphlets, is stark: Khomeini’s father, Mostafa Hindi, was a respected cleric and scholar in the small town of Khomeyn. In 1903, when Ruhollah was just five months old, Mostafa was journeying to the provincial capital of Arak. He was set upon by armed men on the road. They murdered him in cold blood. The motive, the story goes, was his opposition to the local landowners and his advocacy for the peasants.
So where does Reza Shah fit in? Nowhere, historically. And that’s the crucial twist.

Reza Shah Pahlavi, the father of the last Shah, didn't seize power until a military takeover in 1921 and declared himself Shah in 1925—over two decades after Mostafa’s death. The man actually responsible for law and order in the region at the time was a Qajar governor, part of the decaying dynasty the Pahlavis would eventually replace.

But for Khomeini, the distinction was irrelevant. In his telling, the death of his father wasn't just a random act of violence; it was a political assassination carried out by the forces of oppression—the same kind of oppressive, secular, state-backed thuggery that the Pahlavi dynasty would be accused of (looking into that, it seems as if the oppression was only against terrorists).

Khomeini blurred the lines between the Qajar corruption and the Pahlavi autocracy, painting them with the same broad brush of tyranny.

Reza Shah became the symbol of that entire system. By accusing him, Khomeini wasn't making a factual historical claim; he was making a powerful political and emotional one. He was personalizing the enemy. The Pahlavi state wasn't just a modernizing government he disagreed with; it was the spiritual successor to the very killers who orphaned him. It was a narrative of personal and national victimhood woven together into a single, potent cord. For all who have experienced poverty, of having nothing, and feeling like life is hopeless, while rich people sneer at you, Khomeini’s narrative resonates on a very deep level.
This story was a quiet drumbeat in the background of his ideology. It wasn’t the headline of his revolution, but it was a key part of the bassline. It gave his conflict with the monarchy  visceral, deeply personal stakes that went beyond theology or political theory. It was about a son avenging his father. When he spoke of the Shah’s regime as fundamentally illegitimate, violent, and unjust, he wasn’t just speaking as an ayatollah. He was speaking as a boy from Khomeyn who never got justice.
This personal history provided a powerful, relatable emotional core to his political struggle. It transformed a complex geopolitical and religious revolution into a simpler, more ancient story: a blood feud. And in 1979, the bill finally came due.


Birth of a Theocracy

When the Shah finally fled and Khomeini returned in February 1979, the ecstasy was televised. Millions greeted him as a messiah. But the party ended fast. The revolution, like all revolutions, began to eat its children. And it had a voracious appetite.

First in the crosshairs: the old guard. The generals who had propped up the Shah. In a series of sham trials that lasted minutes, the founding pillars of the Imperial Army were executed by firing squad. General Nematollah Nassiri, the head of SAVAK (the secret police). General Mehdi Rahimi, the military governor of Tehran. They were charged with “corruption on earth” and “waging war against God”—crimes straight out of a medieval theological playbook, now backed by the cold steel Ruhollah’s voracious appetiate for vengeance for the death of his father.

The mania for purification had a chief architect: Sadegh Khalkhali, Khomeini’s “hanging judge.” A jovial, rotund man with a laugh that chilled the blood, Khalkhali was given a blank check to purge the new state of its enemies. He held trials without evidence, signed death warrants by the thousands, and ordered executions of politicians, journalists, communists, and former officials with the casual air of a man ordering lunch. He was a fanatic, a true believer, and the perfect instrument for Khomeini’s will to impose absolute control through absolute terror.


The Private Shadow: The Wife

While Khomeini presented the face of an austere, celibate holy man, he was, in fact, a family man. He married Khadijeh Saqafi in 1929, when he was 27 and she was 15. She was the daughter of a cleric, raised in a traditional household, and would remain his wife for six decades, bearing him seven children.
She was, by all accounts, the absolute opposite of a public figure. She lived behind the black chador and the high walls of their modest homes, first in Qom and later in Tehran. In a revolution that bizarrely politicized every aspect of private life, she was a ghost—never interviewed, rarely photographed, a silent partner in a universe of roaring dogma. Her power was immense but entirely private, shaping the domestic world of the man who shaped a nation. She was the revolution’s First Lady who was never seen, a testament to the very ideals of seclusion she embodied.


The Darkest Accusation: Doctrine and Depravity

No part of Khomeini’s legacy is darker or more hotly contested than the accusations of sanctioned sexual violence against female prisoners. The source is explosive: none other than Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, once Khomeini’s designated successor.

In the mid-1980s, Montazeri received a devastating report detailing the torture and rape of young female virgins in Tehran’s prisons. The theological justification, allegedly endorsed by Khomeini’s circle, was monstrous: Islam forbids the execution of a virgin; therefore, guards were ordered to “marry” them the night before their death—a grotesque euphemism for ritualized rape—to make them “fit” for execution.
When Montazeri presented this to Khomeini, he claims the Ayatollah not only dismissed the concerns but endorsed the practice. Montazeri’s moral outrage over this and the mass executions of 1988 led to his downfall. The regime and its supporters vehemently deny these claims as slander. But the testimony from Montazeri’s memoirs and the accounts of survivors like Marjane Satrapi in Persepolis paint a picture of an ideological machine so brutal, so detached from humanity, that it would sanctify violation in the name of God.


The Final Days: A Prophet Alone

Khomeini’s end was as stark as his life. After a decade of war with Iraq—a conflict he prolonged with a terrifying willingness to sacrifice a generation of young men for principle—his body was failing. He lived in a spartan house near the cemetery where the war’s martyrs were buried. He had outlived his sons; he had expelled his heir.

In his last years, the absolute certainty seemed to curdle into something more complex. He shocked his followers by issuing a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses, internationalizing his revolution in a rude way. Yet, in what some interpret as a final, grim reckoning, he told aides, “I have made a mistake in choosing my path.”

On June 3, 1989, the engine of the revolution finally stopped. Millions poured into the streets for his funeral, a sea of humanity so vast his body was nearly torn from the coffin. The underclass of Iran mourned the man who had given them back their pride, their faith, their identity. The world watched the chaotic scene, relieved and terrified by the vacuum he left behind.

He was a paradox: a man of God who sanctioned unspeakable violence, a scholar who unleashed fury, a leader who freed his people from one tyranny to deliver them into another. He was the ultimate rebel who became the ultimate authority, proving that even the purest revolution eventually builds its own prison.


His Rule Has Not Ended

Ruhollah's powers continue to influence Islamists worldwide. If it continues, it will end with Iran nuked off the face of the planet because the West and China are not going to be conquered by the Islamists or the Talmudists. The push back against Iran and the Israelis is going to be a juggernaut of death. Only after their skin is falling off the bone will they finally say, "Oops. I was wrong. Sorry about that, bro."