Iran's revolution
伊朗革命
Waiting for God
等待真主
Debunking the myths that sustained Ayatollah Khomeini's republic
揭示领袖霍梅尼共和国之谜
Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic. By Michael Axworthy.
《伊朗革命：伊朗共和国的历史》，作者：Michael Axworthy
“SLEEP easily, Cyrus, for we are awake,” assured Iran's last shah, Muhammad-Reza Pahlavi, speaking at the tomb of his imperial ancestor in 1971. This staged event helped forge the myth that the Pahlavis were an adored monarchy stretching back millennia to the Achaemenid empire, a claim to which the shah clung dearly. Yet in less than a decade his embittered people had delivered his throne into the hands of an obscure Shia cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. James Buchan's elegant “Days of God”, which came out last November, focused on how all this came to pass. Now Michael Axworthy, a former diplomat and director of the Centre for Persian and Iranian Studies at Exeter University, goes over much of the same ground and explains how the Islamic republic has survived.
“Cyrus，有我们在，你们安心睡吧！”，1971年伊朗最后一位国王Muhammad-Reza Pahlavi在其先王墓前信心十足。从千年前紧握王权的阿契美尼德王朝直到巴列维王朝，一直深受爱戴，简直是一个谜。尽管近10年来饱受疾苦的人民把其王朝政权交与一位不甚知名的牧师Ruhollah Khomeini之手，去年11月出版的James Buchan的《真主之日》简洁而又着重解释了这一形成原因。前外交官兼埃克塞特大学伊朗研究中心负责人Michael Axworthy在书中探讨了这一地区，同时解释了伊朗政权幸存下来的原因。
The shah's gaudy fete at Persepolis, not far from Cyrus's tomb, held to celebrate the monarchy's 2,500th birthday, epitomised a half-century of montazh: a succession of flashy buildings and self-congratulatory statues which helped to conceal the dislocations of a society on fast-forward. Construction faltered for lack of cement; many of Iran's ports became clogged with shiploads of imports. The minister of the shah's court, driving through Tehran in his Chrysler Imperial in 1969, noticed dingy side streets with “not an ounce of asphalt”. Lashing out at the grandiose party at Persepolis, Ali Shariati, an Iranian leftist writer, denounced 5,000 years of deprivation and social injustice. Khomeini, then in exile in Iraq, thundered for the first time that Islam was fundamentally opposed to monarchy.
离伊朗王赛勒斯坟墓不远处的波斯波利斯曾举行了盛大的宴会庆祝伊朗王朝成立2500周年，通过画面剪辑简单回顾了一下伊朗半个世纪以来的历史：一排排高楼大厦，一座座自我标榜的雕像，这些都掩盖了这个快速发展国家背后的混乱。缺乏混凝土结构的建筑摇摇欲坠，船舶上的进口商品使得港口混乱不堪。1969年伊朗王朝法官乘坐克莱斯勒帝国旗舰名车前往德黑兰（Tehran），就注意到街道两边混乱不堪，没有一条柏油路。伊朗左翼作家Ali Shariati猛烈抨击波斯波利斯的奢华盛会，指责5000年的政权废止和社会的不公。当时被流放伊拉克的霍梅尼大声疾呼伊朗人民是坚决反对皇权的。
A hodgepodge of Marxists and other leftists allied themselves at first to the religious fundamentalists in common cause against the shah, inspiring Iranian students, in particular, to rise up against his rule. Within a few years, though, the left had lost out to Shia Islamic political groups that were, Mr Axworthy writes, “more flexible, more charismatic, more in tune with Iranian realities and less hidebound”. Like Mr Buchan, Mr Axworthy has mined newly opened archives to good effect. He lays bare the failure of Western governments to keep abreast of fast-changing events. One British dispatch saw “no threat to basic stability” in late 1977; another asked whether Iranians were still “the epitome of idleness”. The Iranian hostage-takers were astounded to find that, of the four CIA officers in the American embassy in Tehran, none could speak Persian.
那些信奉传统基督教的马克思主义者和左派人士首次联合起来，尤其还煽动学生共同抵抗伊朗王的统治。Axworthy写到，在近几年里，脱离什叶派团体的左翼人士“更加灵活，有感召力，与时俱进与伊朗现实相结合”。与Mr Buchan一样，他也恰到好处地引用了最近公开的史料，还指出了西方政府在获取重大事件方面的不足，例如1977年底英国报道认为“不会威胁到基本稳定”，另一西方媒体认为伊朗是不是在虚张声势。伊朗人质劫持者惊奇地发现美国驻德黑兰大使馆的4名CIA人员不会说波斯语。
Balancing scholarly precision with narrative flair, Mr Axworthy depicts an Islamic movement that exploited and distorted traditional Shia beliefs in order to seize and hold on to power. Cycles of protest and mourning, 40 days long and timed to coincide with Shia holy days—Mr Buchan's “days of God”—were like “a great revolutionary lung”, inhaling indignation, exhaling more demonstrations. Khomeini's theory of divine rule, velayat-e faqih, still unknown to most in 1979, represented a complete innovation in Shia religious thinking. The Shia Muslim tradition believes the Mahdi, its messiah, will return, but its adherents had not previously considered putting themselves in power.
为了平衡学术的准确性和叙述的技巧，Axworthy曲解了传统的什叶派信仰来描述伊朗运动。在长达40天的什叶圣日期间，伊朗人民的不断抗议和哀悼就像“一个巨大的革命之肺”，吸入怨恨，吐出更多的游行示威。代表什叶派精神全面革新的霍梅尼神权统治—法吉赫的监护在1979年还不为大多数人所知。什叶派穆斯林坚信他们的救世主会降临，但是其拥蹙之前并没有让他们掌权。
Revolutionary jargon justified purges and trials (the regime executed 2,946 people in 1981 alone, according to Amnesty International). Those who survived bombs set off by the radical left and other secularists were glorified as shaheed-e zendeh, or living martyrs. Fundamentalist rhetoric also fed popular fervour for an eight-year war against Iraq, framing the struggle as a continuation of the ancient fight between the evil caliph Yazid and the martyred Hussein, who was killed at the battle of Karbala in 680. Military offensives were named after that sacred Shia site; the last big assault, Karbala-5, fought around Fish Lake, a huge artificial basin on Iraqi defence lines, was also the most wretchedly wasteful. Around 20,000 Iranians are believed to have died.
假借革命之意使得审查肃反合理化。那些幸免于左派引发的战乱和非宗教信仰者被歌颂为shaheed-e zendeh，英雄。正统基督主义舆论也支持长达八年的两伊战争，仿佛古代残暴领袖Yazid和烈士Hussein战斗的续曲。“卡尔巴拉5号”军事行动以什叶圣城—卡尔巴拉命名，在伊拉克防线人工湖—鱼湖附近展开战斗，战争极其残酷，据称有20000伊朗人死亡。
Mr Axworthy does the best job so far of describing the Iran-Iraq war. He draws on first-hand accounts of pilots, lieutenants and militia, and challenges the accepted notion that the Iranian air force was inept. The attacks were carried out according to intricate plans drafted under the shah, whose highly trained pilots were released from prison. He also breaks from Mr Buchan's thesis that Khomeini was bent on exporting Islamic government to Iraq, arguing instead that he saw the conflict as a just war to fend off a real threat. Drawing on Persian eyewitness accounts, he conjures up the chaos: the scramble for masks in nerve-gas attacks; paper-thin lungs blistered by mustard gas; fish, rotting and floating belly-up in an Iraqi lake brimming with barbed wire, electrodes and mines, “adding a new stench to the battlefield”.
Axworthy对两伊战争做了迄今为止最好的描述，他引用了飞行员，军官和民兵组织的第一手描述，对伊朗空军实力孱弱这一根深蒂固的观念提出了质疑，那些从监狱里释放出来在伊朗王精细的指挥下袭击敌人的飞行员，都是训练素质很高的。对Buchan的关于霍梅尼想把伊朗政府转移至伊拉克的论据Axworthy也提出了异议，他认为此次战争只是为了避免真正的威胁。根据伊朗目击者描述，他在书中写到这场混乱：大家争抢防毒面具，肺部受到芥子气的感染而起水泡变薄，伊拉克湖里的腐鱼漫过铁丝电网，矿井，使得“战场上臭气熏天”。
Yet the repressive Islamic republic of today was not at all inevitable. Reformist Iranian presidents succeeded one another, from Mehdi Bazargan and Abolhassan Bani-Sadr in 1980 to Muhammad Khatami in 1997. Evidence shows that Khomeini genuinely wanted to work with progressive governments—not least because he needed their credibility to rule. Mr Axworthy paints a nuanced picture of the ayatollah, who let army generals lead the war and his assembly of experts end it, although the ceasefire was “more deadly to than poison”.
然而今天专制的伊朗共和国并不都是不可避免的，伊朗改革派领导人一个接一个，从1980年的Mehdi Bazargan ，Abolhassan Bani-Sadr到1997年的Muhammad Khatami，这些都表明霍梅尼想与改革政府合作，而不只是因为他需要他们的信任来治理国家。Axworthy 对伊斯兰宗教领袖也做了细致描述，其让军队将领和集结的专家结束了这场战争，尽管此次停火协议“对于他而言比毒药更致命”。
Mr Axworthy's analytical approach helps him demystify a revolutionary regime that has needed to feed off myths. He revisits, and convincingly reinterprets, defining moments of the Islamic republic. One is Khomeini's infamous response to a journalist as he returned to Tehran in February 1979, to cheering crowds. He felt “nothing”, he said—not because of a cold indifference to the Iranian people, but because he believed himself to be only a vehicle for the mind of God on Earth. The strength of Mr Buchan's rendering of Iran's story lies in its detail and its delicious storytelling; Mr Axworthy's, in his scholarly rigour and first-class analysis. Anyone interested in this most complex of revolutions would do well to read both.
Axworthy的分析揭开了革命政党需要依靠宗教的神秘面纱，他重新清楚而又令人信服地解释了伊朗共和国的种种事件，例如1979年2月霍梅尼重返德黑兰鼓舞人民的那次臭名昭著的答记者问，霍梅尼感觉这没有什么，并不是他对伊朗人民冷漠，而是因为他坚信她就是上帝意志的使者。Buchan着重于故事的趣味性和细节，而Axworthy则侧重于学术的严谨和精湛的分析技巧。如果对这段复杂的革命史感兴趣，不妨都拿来读一读。 |