Eqbal Ahmad wrote on 1 February 1979, (excerpts)

Eqbal Ahmad wrote on 1 February 1979, (excerpts)

"After all, during 1978 alone-the year of an unprecedented general strike and other open pro-tests in which at least 10,000 Iranians were gunned down by the Shah's security forces-America's support for the Shah included additional riot-control equipment, advisers and trainers, and at least $2.5 billion in weapons alone.

Even more remarkable than the Administration's response was the treatment that the media has given the largely non-violent movement in Iran. Until the summer of 1978, prestigious organs, like The New York Times, told Americans that the Shah had "a broad base of popular support." To date, the media continues, with minor lapses in recent weeks, to portray the opposition as being led by reactionary Muslim mullahs motivated by their hostility to modernization and reforms, and joined by dis gruntled merchants and leftists. This image of an embattled, modernizing, reformist King confronted by a conservative, fundamentalist, religious opposition must be satisfying to those who, for 25 years, backed American support for the Shah. But, as in the early years of U.S. interventions in Vietnam, truth has been a major casualty."

"The tyranny of the Shah grew in proportion to increases in his oil income, and to the power of his U.S.-supplied armed forces. A horrifying variety of tortures was routine. We may never fully know all the indignities and pain Iranian dissenters experienced in the Shah's prisons, for Persian/Muslim culture inhibits the discussion of humiliations suffered at another's hand. Amnesty International, an organization not given to exaggeration, described the Shah's regime as the world's worst violator of human rights."

"The Western press has not known what to make of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. This 78-year-old man seems to have appeared from nowhere, with, unaccountably, millions. of devoted followers in Iran.

But Khomeini did indeed come from somewhere-the same nationalist coalition that periodically has emerged in resistance to foreign domination of Iran. He was a leader the last time this coalition protested en masse: in 1963, when large demonstrations protested the granting of immunity from Iranian law to U.S. military personnel.

Nothing is more misleading than the media's portrayal of the Iranian religious movement Khomeini leads as if it were indistinguishable from orthodox Islam in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or Egypt. An overwhelming majority of Iranians are Shi'ites. This minority sect of Islam was constantly driven underground by oppressive rulers. Its leaders found special support among the oppressed and the under-privileged. Shi'ite traditions are as different from those of orthodox Islam as are, say, the principles of Quakers from those of Roman Catholics. Resistance to tyranny is one of the basic principles of the Shi'ites: the sect's founders were relatives of the prophet Mohammed and were martyred with their families, when they refused to take the oath of allegiance to a caliph who had taken power without being chosen by his community.

During his reign, the Shah suppressed political activities so severely that Iran's mosques became the only places where people could risk assembling and talking. As is still true in Brazil, Chile, South Africa and Indonesia, politics in Iran was forced to take the cover of religion.

What kind of state might result if Khomeini or his followers take power? As some one who has talked with him at length, I believe that, when Khomeini speaks of an Islamic state for Iran, it is a Shi'ite scholar's way of saying that he wants a good state in Iran. His concept of a good state includes democratic reforms, freedom for political prisoners, an end to the astronomical waste of huge arms purchases, and a constitutionalist government. And he has specifically stated in a recent interview that "by a genuine Islamic socio-political order, we do not [my emphasis) mean a system like that of the Ottoman empire or the existing regime in Saudi Arabia."