Introduction
Imam Seyyed Ali Khamenei was rare in the ranks of great statesmen, which included Lenin (Russia), Mao Zedong (China), Kim Il-sung (North Korea) Fidel Castro (Cuba), and Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam).
The common thread that ran through their contributions to world history was that they helped break the regional spine of imperialism. It is for historians and biographers a major criterion to measure the performance of great statesmen.
The challenge
As all the preceding statesmen were Marxist-Leninist, how could Imam Khamenei have made a similar contribution from an Islamic perspective?
What kind of mind culture the Imam needed to achieve it when there was no Islamic precedent?
Mind culture
Every human being is born with a mind into a culture. The mind is natural; culture is social. They combine into mind culture. The mind that unites humanity is draped in a diversity of colourful cultures.
The way of the mind is to create personal harmony as well as to absorb and to emit social harmony. Harmony is natural and social peace.
The purpose of harmony
The purpose of harmony is to promote mental and physical health, happiness, social progress, and liberation from pain and suffering.
As the Imam operated from within Persian and Islamic cultures, he was uncompromising on the sovereignty of culture and modern nationhood.
He was well aware that imperialism tries to destroy all mind cultures and impose its cultural imperialism. He advanced the culture of political resistance to imperialism. He created a new precedent, namely, a Persian-Islam-centric approach to breaking the regional spine of imperialism in West Asia.
What explains his peerless resolve?
The preparation for such resolve began with innocent childhood ambitions.
Innocent childhood ambitions
Ambition of 7-year-old children
When seven-year-old children, in the first year of primary school are asked, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ One of the answers is, ‘A doctor.’ They are asked why? The answer is, ‘Because I want to help sick people.’ Such a child is stating the intention to give leadership in later years.
Intention of 10-year-olds to fast
This is similar to when 10-year-olds make an intention to fast in the holy month of Ramadan and fulfil it. It is an intention to suspend one’s animal aspect of life for the day.
Ambition of 4-year-old Seyyed Ali Khamenei
Could this have been four-year-old Seyyed Ali Khamenei’s intention to offer leadership after he would have completed the memorisation of The Holy Qur’an? Would it have been a reduction in the natural animal aspect of his life?
Ambition for the future
Such an intention is more living in the future than in the present with a very young memory of the inspiring past rooted in faith. It is living more a public than private life. It is an early ripening of childhood maturity.
Painful and pleasurable consequences of noble intention
‘Writing an autobiography’
Living a noble life is like ‘writing an autobiography’ in public.
The growing events of life become the raw materials of autobiography and history. They are interlocutions and intersections. They are real-time self-conversations. They embed memory and shape storytelling, unafraid of public scrutiny – knowing well that the scrutiny might have a wounding sting.
Self-conversations and storytelling
They are self-examination and self-correction, which make life of service a worthy life, in spite of hardships. It is an experiment in life for which there is no precedent, filled with risks for oneself and benefits for others. Living in the median between pain and pleasure and shedding natural egotism, hedonism, and vanity. Coping with character development, deepening selfless commitments, and intensifying relationships – filled with tense and relaxed moments.
While life is lived chronologically when it is finally reduced to biography the chronology is disturbed to accommodate themes, truths, meaning, purpose, storytelling, and plot.
Childhood and adolescence
Childhood and adolescence can be unstable and uncertain but having trustworthy parents can ease the worries and gain in self-confidence and self-esteem.
Imam Khamenei’s possible early internal life
Living his daily life in its two early phases, with a focus on memorization, would have polished his sense of ethics even before his mentorship by Imam Khomeini at the seminary in Qom.
Memorization is an absorbing, enjoyable, meaningful, and reinforcing way of internal living, which Imam Khomeini emphasised in his seminal text called Jihad e-Akbar or The Greater Struggle.
Self-interpretation
Ethics would have helped him at self-interpreting his own life and pre-empted him from spraying it with psychological gloss.
Living life is an unfinished phenomenon and a work-in-progress – with open questions. It is not a published textbook but an ongoing provisional research and writing process, in which facts are gathered to produce truths.
‘Autobiography-in-the-making’
Conscientious living is a long labour of an autobiography-in-the-making. It is self-understanding and construction of multiple identities with its core rooted in faith. It takes extraordinary courage and integrity to expose one’s private life to public scrutiny – the standard set by Prophet Muhammad.
Identity construction
Identity construction means living not one but multiple story with unexpected plot and sub-plots as twist to one’s storyline – allowing for continuities and discontinuities as well as for coherence and incoherence.
‘Normality’ versus abnormality under Shah fascism
The Imam’s six imprisonments, banning order, and internal exile constituted the continuities and discontinuities as well as the coherence and incoherence of his ‘normal’ daily life. Life under the Shah was abnormal. He had to balance the ‘normal’ and abnormal as a survival tactic – episode-by-episode.
The ‘autobiography’ was being written in real and not retrospective time – without a predetermined vision of self-story. He lived with an equilibrium between extremities of life as a mechanism to cope with uncertainties and incoherence.
Living with compassionate detachment
While established texts provided guidance they were not formulaic to cope with interruptions, dead-ends, detours, and retreats. He lived with compassionate detachment from his pains and pleasures.
He had to read his own life, which would be open to public scrutiny, before the public would read it. There was no predetermined design of the pattern of his life, which can be determined only at its end. The storyline incorporates the unpredictable. While torture in prison was anticipated its exact nature was unpredictable though he would have prepared for it psychologically.
Practical experience of torture
He did say of his torture that only those who experienced it would be able to understand it. Until then he could not have understood it himself. He experienced torture as the most intimate violation of his human-person (human rights). But the torture made him more determined to struggle for the overthrow of the fascist monarchy. Nor did it fill him with personal anger and hatred. If anything, it would have filled him with greater determination to fight against oppression and injustice.
Living an impersonal life
He lived such an intense impersonal life that there could not have been a final biography of his. His vast tome of speeches, sermons, letters, interviews function as informal biography waiting to be formalised. What were his achievements? His failures? His mistakes? What should be extolled? What should be corrected? What are the lessons for posterity? What questions have not been asked? Or if asked, not answered? Are there definitive answers?
Friends and foes will agree that he lived an impersonal life – worthy to friends and unworthy to foes . This is what makes biography a democratic practice.
Conclusion
He treated his persecution by the powerful organs of the monarchical state not as punishment but as the joy of struggling against it. It was a self-liberating experience. It was the conscious resolve of his rational mind and the spontaneous impulse of his heart.
What happened outside of him (environmental processes) and inside of him (cortex-emotion brain processes) were manifest complexity, which he managed with manifest simplicity.
The possibilities of an uncertain life accumulate as self-sacrifice. The way he lived his life provided the legitimate framework for his unintended heroism.
He acquitted himself well at ‘writing his autobiography’ under public scrutiny.
He did succeed in creating a new original precedent for breaking the regional spine of imperialism in West Asia.
He merits being ranked amongst the great statesmen of the world.
Next article: Imam Seyyed Ali Khamenei’s foresight on Strait of Hormuz
The purpose of the series of articles on Imam Khamenei is to explain the development of his character as being immersed in the development of the history of Iran. The aim is simple truth from complex facts. It is the intersection of literary biography and scientific history.
By Haroon Aziz, South Africa
