Among the revolutionary clerics, Ayatollah Khamenei was one of the few who paid special attention to the concept of “ideology” and its multidimensional meaning. For him, ideology meant a link between epistemology and sociology. By studying the nature and history of “ideology” as an independent concept, he came to the relationships in the life of ideologies and extracted them as clear rules. In a speech entitled “a discussion on prophethood,” he describes some of his perceptions and findings of the history of ideologies through the following four steps: “If we consider the logical course of ideology from its development to its fulfillment and external objectivity, we would witness these stages:
1) The stage of the emergence of ideology in the mind and heart of a group of people who are ready to receive it and are always acknowledging the truth, and then in their actions as individuals or groups;
2) The stage of an ideology gaining popularity to introduce their new ideas and goals and attract more and more righteous people;
3) The stage of paving the way for taking the last step in the way of destroying the ignorant society and establishing the ideal one;
4) Finally, the stage of founding a social system upon that ideology.
Comparing “ideology” and “theory,” Ayatollah Khamenei says: “The theory can be experienced and rejected as soon as it is presented, whereas ideology is not like that and is measured in the field of social action.” Contrary to theory, ideology depends on the objective interests of individuals in society and leads to the acceptance or rejection of them. Therefore, contrary to the theory to which there is no social and political objection, those affiliated with the previous structure take a stand against the “ideology” and try to prevent its influence and expansion. In fact, that is why ideologies divide society into those who are “with us” and “against us.” The first group is constituted of those who believe in that ideology and make endeavours for achieving the ideals embedded in the ideology so that they could bring changes, and the second group is made of those who have prejudices regarding the new ideology along with the beneficiaries of the previous system who stand against the ideology. On this basis, Ayatollah Khamenei mentioned six characteristics for ideology:
1) Determining the biased groups,
2) Determining opposing groups,
3) Determining how the Prophet (s) develops a relationship with opposing groups,
4) How to mobilize the supportive forces and using the most of their abilities and power,
5) Explaining the historical rules and traditions that ensure gaining a relative victory over the prejudiced and their views, and 6- how to use these rules and traditions.”
Clearly, Ayatollah Khamenei had a positive and normative view of “ideology.” In addition to not using this word in a negative sense, he also did not consider it a neutral word. Contrary to the view that ideology is pervasive and all political currents have an “ideology,” or even contrary to the original meaning of ideology used in Marxism which taken into account the aspects of its domination by the ruling class and the government, he even has adopted a sacred perspective on ideology. Because he used the concept of ideology primarily to explain the “mission of Prophets.” However, in the following stage, this view was neutralized and he used it for political systems as well all other political tendencies, including the monarchy.
Ayatollah Khamenei believed in the originality of ideology and considered the main goal of the Prophet to be the expansion of and spreading the Islamic ideology. For him, the formation of the government was a tool through which an Islamic society will be established and the rules and regulations of religious ideology will be implemented. Therefore, he stated that those characteristics and dividing society are for the transition period and will be used until the establishment of that society.
In the second stage of Ayatollah Khamenei’s political thought, an important part of his ideology of struggle was focused on “superpowers,” Zionism and the system of domination. In this stage, for preserving the “independence” which the revolution has brought, “making a compromise with the domination of the superpower United States” is declared impossible. Meanwhile, the link between colonialism and Zionism, or the United States and Israel, was also an important issue that changed all developments in the Islamic world. The result of this link was the occupation of Palestine, the suppression of Islamic movements, the presence of colonialism in the region, and the emergence of dependent and reactionary states in the Islamic world.
Ayatollah Khamenei believed that many issues of the Islamic world would not be resolved unless the Palestinian issue and what is related to Israel’s policies in the Islamic world were resolved. With this argument, the Islamic Republic’s support for liberation movements in the region was seen as a kind of struggle against colonialism and Zionism, which had Islamic dimensions and led to the Islamization of various political and social relations in the region. According to this view, the Arab-Israeli peace process, which meant recognizing the legitimacy of Israel, was, in fact, an acceptance of the constant presence of Western colonialism, especially the United States, to fight against the Islamic world. Ayatollah Khamenei described this process as a “direct threat to world peace and legitimizing the aggression.” For Ayatollah Khamenei, despite this fact, after the fall of the Pahlavi regime, the governments who served the interests of the West like Saudi Arabia, have strengthened their ties with the United States to consolidate their position because the emergence of Islamic Revolutions was their main concern.
Ayatollah Khamenei considered the foreign policy of the Islamic government to be founded on the concept of “non-dependence on foreign domination” and interpreted it as “neither the East nor the West.” To achieve this goal, he believed that the active force of the nation should be organized in the political and military arena. In other words, for him, this policy would be implemented only through mobilizing the “masses.” Resistance in the system of domination could not be carried out only by the Islamic government, and it needed the masses to be organized. Therefore, in his view, the issues of “mobilizing the oppressed” and an “army of twenty million” would contribute to the objectification of this fundamental policy. Given that resistance sought to oppose the “domination of the superpowers,” in his religious ideology Ayatollah Khamenei emphasizes the three elements of “accepting the adversity,” “having faith in the path,” and “having hope for the future.”
Ayatollah Khamenei’s emphasis on ideology as one of the most important elements of power in the new era was also highlighted in the second stage of his political thought. For example, he believed that armies affiliated with those in power, although they have advanced technologies, yet their weakness is that they do not have an ideology as powerful as the revolutionary ideologies such as the Islamic Revolution. Accordingly, he believed that this was the reason for the defeat of those armies in the face of the revolutionary military forces. In Ayatollah Khamenei’s ideology, the Iraq-Iran War was not a war between two countries. Rather, Iran and the Islamic world were on the same front, and colonialism and the “great world domination” that incited dependent governments were on the other front. Therefore, Iran’s victory in this war was the victory of the “Islamic world.” This approach to the Islamic world could also promote the view that Iran’s victory in the war would not be a threat to the Arab countries of the region. However, Ayatollah Khamenei attributed some of the causes of the war to the activities of Arab governments in the region. He believed, however, that their behaviour is detrimental to the interests of Islamic and Arab countries as a whole. First, during this war, the resources of the two Islamic countries would be destroyed, and second, it would prepare the ground for Israel to take action against the Arab and Islamic countries.
Explaining the front and boundaries of Islamic ideology, Ayatollah Khamenei places the “Islamic world” on the one side and the arrogant powers and Zionism on the other. Thus, in a letter to the presidents of Islamic countries, he spoke of a “holy jihad against Israel.” He compares the essence of Zionism to fascism, saying, “Even if (this decision) had been made once since the establishment of the Zionist fascist regime, there would never have been such catastrophes.”
Ayatollah Khamenei believed that one of the policies to be pursued in the new era was the ideological training of organizations that remained active since the Pahlavi era; especially the military and law enforcement agencies. He believed that the policy of reforming the army’s ideology had been fruitful in the first few years and had yielded better results. He addressed the presence of the “ideology-based army” in the war against Iraq as one of those results believing that this method should be adopted in other institutions, such as the gendarmerie. Accordingly, what directed these organizations and personnel was “ideology.”
Ayatollah Khamenei divided government institutions into two general categories: the “founded institutions” and the “legalized institutions.” The founded institutions were the ones that were established after the Revolution, such as the IRGC and the committees, while the legalized institutions were institutions that had been established before the Revolution and were preserved in the post-revolutionary period, such as the army.
Although he criticized some of the behaviours and practices of the founded organizations, he found it more difficult to enforce Islamic ideology in legalized ones. He mentioned the “cumbersome relations,” “wrong culture” and “people’s perception of them” as some of the obstacles.
Ayatollah Khamenei advised the Islamic political forces to use the method and ideology of the Islamic Revolution in their societies to establish a religious government like the Islamic Republic, and therefore considered Iran to be “the vanguard of the Islamic Revolutions of the world.” He enumerated the features of the Islamic Revolution as a role model:
1) Recognizing Islam according to its primary sources and not through habits and traditions;
2) Highlighting the roles of mosques as the main base and center of power, and
3) Referring to the Muslim jurists and clergies.
Another impact of Islamic-revolutionary ideology was to believe that art is serving religious ideology. Accordingly, the art after the revolution had to move in the direction of the ideology of the revolution and produce its various works, for example, in the direction of confronting imperialism and the United States. He considered the art to be reflecting the origin of a society and a complement to the existence of man and society, believing that if the ideology of the revolution is not expressed through art, it would not grow. Adopting this attitude, Ayatollah Khamenei considered the Pahlavi era as a period of “acting with demagoguery in the fields of art” and believed that a great tragedy had happened to Iranian art and artists in that period.
For Ayatollah Khamenei, to achieve the goals and ideology of the Revolution, a “strong organization” should be established. In the meantime, he considered the “party” as one of the most important tools in this process. According to him, the atmosphere created at the beginning of the Revolution against creating parties in the country originally belonged to a movement that saw the process of organizing the religious forces to be against its interests, and though it had quasi-party organizations, it propagated against the concept of creating parties. He also referred to a religious movement that “naively” and under the influence of the first current began to oppose the concept of the party.
Ayatollah Khamenei, while emphasizing that creating a party does not oppose religious thought, said that although there may be similarities between some of the party’s characteristics in Islamic and revolutionary society and those in the West, they are fundamentally different. Ayatollah Khamenei saw the party as a factor contributing to the social mobilization which would attract the social forces in order to strengthen religious forces against other currents.
One of the Islamic party’s missions in the view of Ayatollah Khamenei is promoting the “Islamic ideology.” That is, “the true and accurate Islam and the correct and genuine political line, on which the Revolution was based.” For him, other paths except this would lead people astray.
Ayatollah Khamenei emphasized the aspect of removing colonialism from the original identity of the colonized countries. He believed that one of the most important measures of colonialism has been changing the culture and history of those countries. In Ayatollah Khamenei’s view, what could have preserved that genuine identity for Iranians is “Islamic ideology.” It was based on this attitude that in that stage Ayatollah Khamenei speaks of the ideological training of all guilds and classes of pilots, teachers, students, and so on. In order to clarify that the above-mentioned function is limited to Islamic ideology, he discusses the failure of the ideology of nationalism in Iran and how it turned to Western orientation, which eventually led to dependence on colonialism. According to this view, the country’s education system should train students at different stages based on religious and revolutionary ideology, so that by the means of expertise and ideology the country can reach the desired and ideal point.
In the meantime, it was stated that the ideological and cultural gap between the family and the school should be filled, because if there was a conflict between them, the goals would not be achieved. Ayatollah Khamenei believed that if the struggle of Muslims against Zionism is limited to political struggle and other aspects, including the struggle against its political roots, which included Western colonial governments or if it does not lead to economic struggle, it would not be fruitful. The historical mission of the Islamic Revolution was emphatically introduced as a global mission; a Revolution that was formed to help the “oppressed people of the world,” speak on their behalf, break the “imaginary idols” of the new era and fight against “hegemony.” In Ayatollah Khamenei’s political ideology, the most important front that had to be created was the “anti-arrogant front.” In fact, there was an important front called “the arrogant powers,” which now had to be created with the help of the Islamic Revolution. With this explanation, Ayatollah Khamenei, from the very beginning of the new stage, reduced using words such as imperialism, which belonged to the global left movement, in his literature, and also while preventing from using the term “colonialism” he began to use the term “arrogant powers.”
In fact, in this stage, it was the ideological school that became a political strategy and an important dimension of the Islamic Revolution.
The ideology of the revolution was highlighted more than any other aspect. In this regard, for Ayatollah Khamenei, the issues of the Islamic world would go beyond it and become a global issue. This approach could shift foreign policy toward interaction with anti-imperialist countries such as North Korea and Cuba. For example, beyond the issue of Israel in the Middle East and the Islamic world, Ayatollah Khamenei addressed the international aspects of the ideology of Zionism and its imperialist and capitalist system. In doing so, he even sought to engage the organizations such as the Non-Aligned Movement, of which non-Islamic countries were also members, in confronting Israel.
In this way, Ayatollah Khamenei is considering an “anti-arrogant” front in which anti-imperialist countries and independent international organizations play an effective role in global developments. In this front, the issue of Palestine had to be the focus of attention and demands.
In this stage, Ayatollah Khamenei raised some issues in some of the sermons of Friday prayer, which he had previously stated in the “General Plan of Islamic Thought in Quran.” Of course, there were some differences between the two. In 1975, when the Revolution had not yet taken place, he proposed those ideological teachings in an attempt to create a revolution, so that by presenting religious ideology the thoughts and views would receive revolutionary education and take the path of revolutionary behaviour. But the new stage, while emphasizing the previous ideology, also presented those teachings at the international and regional levels that had previously been associated with successful experience. In other words, in his view, that path and ideology were provided for others, which means expanding the ideology of the Revolution and moving towards “exporting the revolution.”
According to this ideology, the “general goal” of the prophets was to free people from the bondage of evildoers and taghut. This spiritual movement, which was also political, was in practice meant to stand up against the rulers who did not have the legitimacy and religious right to rule. He believed that by removing such powers from society and replacing them with divine power, the era of “construction” would begin. According to him, through prophets, God has provided us with three tools to fulfill these steps: The Book (laws), the measure (government) and metal (weapons). According to this view, the era of construction has been started in Iran, but other Muslim countries should first seek to establish a religious government according to this doctrine.
Archive of Ayatollah Khamenei
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