The Power Of Ideas Against Terror

IT WAS 58 YEARS ago that Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Iran’s greatest living writer, Ahmad Kasravi. Six months later, Kasravi was dead. Writes Amir Taheri:

At the time of his murder Kasravi was one of Iran’s leading intellectuals. A veritable Renaissance man, he was a senior jurist at the high court, a distinguished historian, a magnetic orator, a master of the Persian prose, and a best-selling author.

So why did Khomeini arrange his murder? Was it because Kasravi was a critic of Shi’ism? Was it because Khomeini’s book had been published to yawns while “publication of any of Kasravi’s book[s] was a national event with reverberations throughout society?”

Thirty years later, Khomeini’s thugs were digging up Kasravi’s grave and burning his books, and Khomeini was executing his enemies by the thousands. But today “Kasravi is re-emerging as one of Iran’s best-loved and most read authors,” while Khomeini’s unreadable work remains unread.

Today, we know, Iran is a nation in a pre-revolutionary situation, its people seething with rage and despair while the world turns its gaze away. And Iranian writers like Amir Taheri burn with a hope that the dreadful night of Iranian darkness will clear away and reveal a new dawn of hope. They hope that: “Terrorism is, in fact, the tool of the intellectually lazy politicians.”

They hope that

A thousand years from now Kasravi will still be remembered as a great Iranian writer and thinker while Khomeini would have become a footnote in history

And we can hope with them.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.