Thirty-seven years after the Iranian Revolution, one may be tempted to conclude, in a teleological fashion, that the revolution constituted a seamless transition from Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. However, Khomeini's ascendancy was mired in instability and uncertainty. The fledgling Islamic Republic's consolidation entailed a four to five year power struggle that pitted Khomeini and his circle of revolutionary clerics against myriad internal and external opponents. The most formidable of these domestic foes was the Marxist-Islamist guerilla groups, the Mujahidin-i Khalq and Fidaʾyan-i Khalq.
As its title reveals, Ronen Cohen's new book sheds light on an adversary that received less notoriety, but posed just as serious a threat: the Furqan Group. Shortly after Khomeini's triumphant return to Iran on 2 February 1979, the Furqan targeted and assassinated some of the Islamic Republic's key leaders, architects, and ideologues, including Army Chief of Staff General Muhammad Vali Qarani (23 April 1979), Revolutionary Council Chairman Ayatollah Murtiza Mutahhari (1 May 1979), and University of Tehran Islamic law and theology professor Ayatollah Muhammad Mufattih (18 December 1979). Less than a year later in 1980, the Furqan's leader, Akbar Gudarzi, and many of his seventy to eighty followers were arrested, imprisoned, and executed, marking the end of the group's brief existence. While the Furqan's longevity paled in comparison to that of its Marxist counterparts, the group's assassinations of the Islamic Republic's leaders put it on the map by bringing it attention and credibility. Moreover, the Furqan's assassinations likely inspired and paved the way for similar attacks by the Mujahidin and other opponents during the contentious summer of 1981. That summer, the headquarters of Khomeini's party, the Islamic Republican Party, were bombed and several of its top leaders and officials, including Party Secretary Ayatollah Muhammad Bihishti, Prime Minister Muhammad-Javad Bahunar, and President Muhammad-Ali Rajai, were killed.
Given the secrecy, murkiness, and opaqueness that surrounded the Furqan Group and the Islamic Republic, the book adopts a tone of ambiguity and presents ideas more as conjecture than as assertions. In the process, the book raises thought-provoking, yet unresolved questions about this tumultuous period in the Islamic Republic's history. For instance, did the professionalism and precision of the Furqan's assassinations foster perceptions among the Islamic Republic's leaders that the CIA, Mossad, and/or SAVAK were behind the attacks and supported the group in its endeavor for regime change? Did these perceptions, in turn, serve as an impetus or justification for these leaders to order, encourage, or back the seizure of the American embassy on 4 November 1979? Another compelling question involves the individual and collective motives behind the Furqan's assassinations. Were the latter motivated by the personal grievances of Gudarzi, his ideology, or both? The book reveals that, before the revolution, Gudarzi taught with Mutahhari at Northern Tehran's well-known religious institute, Husayniyyih Irshad. During and after that time, tensions surfaced between the two clerics, who penned and published books and articles criticizing and attacking each other's religious ideas and interpretations. Throughout, Cohen's book contends that the motive behind the assassinations was purely ideological as opposed to political or personal (pp. 51, 56, 79–80). However, at the end, the book acknowledges the possibility that the motive was also personal and that Gudarzi's opposition and resistance to the clergy-led political establishment were rooted in his marginalization and exclusion from the system (p. 139). While at first glance, this outcome seems paradoxical, considering that Gudarzi was himself a cleric, the cognitive dissonance and personal anguish he must have experienced and suffered from having been rejected by his own caste must surely have been salient.
Out of this alienation and animosity, Gudarzi and his followers fashioned and promoted an ideology that rejected the rule of the clerics and labeled their foundational doctrine of the Guardianship of the Jurist (vilāyat-i faqīh) a deceptive, idolatrous, monopolistic, despotic, and tyrannical perversion of and deviation from Shiʿi Islam and the Qurʾan, one of the meanings of the term “Furqan” (p. 3). On the surface, the Furqan appeared to be a heterodox, millenarian, and reformist group that rejected the infallibility of the imams and emphasized the end of history, the day of judgment, divine singularity (tawḥīd), and direct or independent interpretation (ijtihād) of the Qurʾan that bypassed or circumvented the clerics (pp. 47–50). In an attempt to deconstruct and dissect the group's innovative and eclectic ideology, the book relies on some of Gudarzi's works and compares and contrasts his ideas and interpretations to those of the revolution's prominent ideologues, including Mutahhari and ʿAli Shariʿati. Assuming Cohen had access to all the sources he listed, the book could have delved deeper into Gudarzi and the Furqan's ideology by examining their numerous books, articles, manifestos, treatises, pamphlets, and fliers (pp. 73–76). The book could have also strengthened and sharpened the comparisons and contrasts between Gudarzi, Mutahhari, Shariʿati, and others by referencing and engaging seminal works on the Islamic Republic's intellectual history.
In addition to Gudarzi's works, the book relies on texts, interviews, and interrogations by Iranian leaders and authorities without fully considering how these sources’ biases and distortions rendered an accurate depiction or analysis of the Furqan difficult, if not impossible. At the same time, the book offers insight into how these leaders and authorities, including Khomeini and Mutahhari, made painstaking efforts to discredit the group and refute its ideology as the product of Marxists, materialists, deceivers, and hypocrites (munāfiqīn) (pp. 72–74). While the propaganda, disinformation, and polemics of the Islamic Republic and its opponents often took the form of name calling rather than substantive criticism, the book implicitly demonstrates that the Islamic Republic considered the Furqan as much an ideological threat as a coercive one—that, during the consolidation phase, the war of ideas and legitimacy was equally, if not more, important than the battles waged over the monopoly of force.
Beyond domestic opposition, the book discloses the internal divisions that existed within the Islamic Republic during its infancy. In addition to combatting and neutralizing the Furqan and other opponents, Khomeini and his clerical allies tempered, tamed, and contained the radicals inside their circle. These radicals included the son of Ayatollah Husayn-Ali Muntaziri, Muhammad, who founded the People's Revolutionary Organization of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The organization aligned with Libyan President Muʿammar al-Qadhafi and sought to deploy Iranian irregulars to Lebanon and Syria to join the Palestinians in their fight against Israel. Despite Khomeini's rhetoric regarding Muslim unity and belligerence toward Zionism, he suppressed the organization due to tensions with Qadhafi over the disappearance of Musa al-Sadr as well as a pragmatic propensity to restrict foreign adventurism and avoid antagonizing Israel during this tenuous juncture in the Islamic Republic's nascent existence. It was not until after consolidation during the early 1980s that a more confident and secure Khomeini exported the revolution to Lebanon and elsewhere through more institutionalized and controlled means, such as Revolutionary Guardsmen and cultural attachés. The book does not address whether Khomeini's suppression of the organization constituted a precursor or harbinger of the tensions between him and the elder Muntazeri that ultimately prevented him from succeeding Khomeini as supreme leader.
In the final analysis, the provocative questions this book raises could shape and define future research agendas and entice scholars to move from the causes of the Iranian Revolution to its outcomes. To this end, scholars could further examine the domestic opposition and internal divisions that plagued the ruling clerics as well as the material and ideological tactics—beyond repression—that they used to overcome this early adversity, survive, and endure. Such research would shed added light on the Islamic Republic's consolidation and mitigate the fog of revolution.
