IRAN: Khomeini's Kingdom Qum

Rule 1: If it is Western, "we don't want it

For three days, the 300,000 residents of the holy city of Qum had carefully scrubbed the dusty streets and minareted buildings, making ready for the Ayatullah's return. Now, hundreds of thousands of people, chanting "God is great," lined the narrow highway from Tehran to catch a glimpse of him as his motorcade drove by. When the blue Mercedes bearing the 78-year-old Shi'ite leader neared the city, the throng burst through a cordon of police and armed Islamic guerrillas. It engulfed the car in a sea of humanity so dense that it took nearly an hour for the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini to complete the last mile and a half of his journey. Finally, he mounted the steps of a golden-domed shrine and looked out in triumph over Qum.

It was there that Khomeini, in the courtyard of a theological seminary, had first attacked Iran's monarchy 16 years earlier, leading to his arrest and a long foreign exile. Now, in the same courtyard, the architect of the Iranian revolution delivered a homecoming address that was part sermon, part campaign speech. Before a crowd estimated at nearly a million, he vowed to "devote the remaining one or two years of my life" to reshaping Iran "in the image of Muhammad." This would be done, he said, by the purge of every vestige of Western culture from the land. "We will amend the newspapers. We will amend the radio, the television, the cinemas," he intoned. "All of these should follow the Islamic pattern."

Nor would his proposed Islamic republic be based on Western models. "What the nation wants is an Islamic republic," he proclaimed. "Not just a republic, not a democratic republic, not a democratic Islamic republic. Just an Islamic republic. Do not use the word 'democratic.' That is Western, and we don't want it." When Khomeini concluded, the crowd's cheers filled the air for minutes.

That adoring reception proved, if proof was needed, that Khomeini remains the pivotal figure in a revolution that is still taking shape and is far from under control. In fact, uncertainty about the Ayatullah's intentions had threatened the fledgling government of his hand-picked Prime Minister, Mehdi Bazargan. On the eve of Khomeini's departure from Tehran, Bazargan leveled an emotional attack on the Komiteh, an 80-member group controlled by Khomeini and made up of mullahs and other Iranians with fervent Islamic convictions.

The Komiteh, Bazargan charged, had become a parallel government that not only interfered with his struggling administration, but was tarnishing the revolution. "They persecute us, they arrest people, they issue orders, they oppose our appointments," Bazargan said, speaking with the indignation with which he formerly criticized the Shah. "They have turned my day into night." If the Komiteh is not curbed, he warned, "we would have no alternative but to resign."