Islamic Fundamentalism: The New Global Threat

By Mohammad Mohaddessin. Seven Locks Press, Washington, DC, 1992, 224 pp., soft-cover. List: $14.95; AET. $11.95 for one, $14.95 for two.

Reviewed by Andrew I. Killgore

"Hence loathed melancholy Of Cerberus and blackest midnight born In Stygian caves forlorn. Mongst horrid shapes and shrieks And sights unholy. "

—From Il Penseroso by John Milton

English poet John Milton left little doubt about his extreme distaste for melancholy. A distaste just as strong is probably shared by most Americans toward the present Islamic-centered regime in Tehran. This is the government that held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days in Tehran from 1979 to 1981 in humiliating and increasingly dangerous conditions. As a leading Tehran editor recently put it, "You Americans will never forget [your bitterness over] the 52 hostages. "

Mohammad Mohaddessin, author of Islamic Fundamentalism and a leading official in the International Relations Department of the Peoples Mojahedin Organization of Iran, a major opposition group, seeks to replace the present Tehran regime with a democratic government. If any American needs convincing that this would be an improvement, this will be provided by the author's copiously footnoted accounts of brutality and corruption inside contemporary Iran, and Iranian government sponsorship of subversion and terrorism abroad.

In addition to its political-diplomatic arm, the Mojahedin organization fields a large anti-Tehran military force deployed on the Iraqi side of the Iran-Iraq border. Mohadessin's 15-chapter book makes an urgent case for the overthrow of what he persuasively describes as Iran's economically, politically and morally bankrupt regime before it can achieve an external success by setting up a spin-off Islamic republic in some other country. He fears that the changed situation in the Gulf following the two wars of 1980 to 1988 and 1990 and 1991, and the collapse of Russian power in the Muslim areas of the former Soviet Union, gives Tehran's ruling mullahs a dangerous new opportunity.

Although he titled his book Islamic Fundamentalism, author Mohaddessin concentrates almost exclusively on Iran and the fundamentalist regime established there in 1979 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and run today by President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Looking back to late 1978, it had become apparent to most observers that Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi would lose his throne and that Iran's Muslim clerics, the mullahs, would be the dominant force in any new regime. Those with Iran's best interests in mind hoped, however, that the mullahs, with no relevant experience, would not try to govern directly.

But the fear that, if they did, the mullahs would prove to be incompetent to govern soon became reality as the mullahs ruled, and ruined, their country. Citing hundreds of documented events, Mohaddessin depicts a real-life house of horrors in contemporary Iran. For example, of Iran's work force of 24 million, only 5 million are employed in its utterly devastated economy. Still, according to Mohaddessin, the regime is spending $50 billion on a five-year military buildup that began in 1989.

Islamic Fundamentalism describes the resulting chemical and nuclear plants, heightening the impression of a regime pursuing military power at all costs. The book cites a Peoples Mojahedin report that Iran has paid the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan for four nuclear warheads, but that they have not yet been delivered.

Not only are the mullahs ruling Iran directly, but they are doing so under the theory of Vali-E-Faqih, an ecclesiastical version of the long-discredited divine right of kings. This vests absolute power, both religious and temporal, in one man with supposedly extraordinary knowledge of Islamic law. Mohaddessin quotes highranking mullahs as saying that the regime's ultimate goal looks beyond Iran to worldwide authority.

Islamic Fundamentalism blames the Tehran regime for many of the Middle East's most heinous acts of terrorism, including the April 1983 bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut, which killed 61 and wounded 120 Lebanese and Americans, and the demolition of the U.S. Marine barracks near Beirut Airport that killed 241 U.S. servicemen. The author also claims that Iranian Revolutionary Guards were "involved" in the 1988 explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in which 270 persons died.

Mohaddessin fears that Tehran's Islamic fundamentalism will prove more attractive to residents of the Muslim areas emerging from the former Soviet Union than pan-Turkism. To date, however, the Turkish language spoken in five of the six Muslim former Soviet Republics (except Tajikistan) combines with the thriving Turkish economy to draw all of the newly independent states away from Iran's economic stagnation.

There also will be debate about the real extent of what the subtitle of Mohaddessin's book calls "The New Global Threat. " Physical and psychological misery in parts of the Islamic world provide an environment from which violence can emerge. But this "new global threat" is miniscule, in the reviewer's opinion, compared to the Cold War's "old global threat" of nuclear annihilation, despite Mohaddessin's effort to equate the two.

No outsider can guess at the chances of the Peoples Mojahedin succeeding to power in Tehran. Nor is it necessary to hazard an opinion on the group's future for purposes of reviewing this book by one of its leaders. Certainly the Mojahedin organization seems to be the best organized Iranian opposition group at this point. And it is easy to believe that one day the mullahs' regime will collapse or be pushed out of power. But when, or by whom, is unforeseeable.

Islamic Fundamentalism does not pretend to be a scholarly tome. Rather, it is a sustained attack by one group of well educated, energetic and dedicated Iranians against what they regard, with good reason, as an unqualified and unworthy ruling group in Tehran. Those rulers, however, seem equally dedicated and genuinely obsessed with the values and ideology of fundamentalist Islam.

Still, whether members of the present regime or its Peoples Mojahadin rival, all are Iranians who share certain basic assumptions. Although its effectiveness is questionable and its tactics are unacceptable, even to other Islamic nations, the Rafsanjani regime is a thrusting, driving force in the world. The government of the late shah also was prepared to apply police state coerciveness to its people at home in order to push Iran's influence outward. The same very likely will be true of whatever government succeeds to power in Tehran.

Iran, as the largest country in a region containing between 60 and 70 percent of the world's proven oil reserves, was, is, and will remain extremely important. Any book written by an insider concerning Iran's current instability is important in itself ' and this one should be read by those who wish to understand Mideast affairs.

Despicable tactics by the present Tehran regime aside, a challenge for readers who know the country will be to sort out what portion of Iran's present assertiveness abroad can be ascribed to its current absorption with religious fundamentalism, and what portion stems from the timeless preoccupation with Iranian "mission" which motivated the shah, and which, after the mullahs recede into history, almost certainly will motivate their successors, whoever they may be.

Andrew I. Killgore, former ambassador to Qatar, is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.