Imam Trump

Sooner than later, the Ayatollah in the red tie will try to degrade India's national honour and prestige

- Harish Khare

ON February 1, 1979, an elderly man, a darkly austere imam, dressed in a black robe, stepped out of a chartered aircraft at Tehran airport to a rapturous reception from a crowd of nearly one million Iranians. The world had no idea that this man, Ayatollah Khomeini, would soon disrupt the lazy rhythm of the global order to which the western world had got so fond of since the end of the Second World War. The Ayatollah, who would soon elevate himself to the status of the Supreme Leader, was untutored in the norms and rules of the civilised world. He was deeply resentful of a global order that had allowed a despotic Shah to write his own rules of oppression and repression. Armed with the adoration of a wrathful following, the Ayatollah would order the seizing of hostages at the American embassy—in violation of the sanctity and inviolability accorded to foreign embassies. America had been chosen as the enemy of the Iranian people and he, as the custodian of the faithful, decided that he was entitled to inflict revenge and humiliation on the Great Satan. And he—cocooned in his own righteousness and his theological dogmas—would arrogate to himself the right to issue a fatwa of a death sentence against a writer, in a distant land, because the novelist had seemingly written something blasphemous. The imam had instigated a debate as to who would decide and define what a world order should look like.