MADRID – On the 36th anniversary of the death of Imam Ruhola Khomeini, a central figure in Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, his ideas continue to influence not only the political trajectory of the Islamic Republic, but also the broader debate on the relationship between Islam and the politics of the Islamic world.
The Islamic Revolution represents not just a change of government, but a deep rupture with the dominant modern political paradigm for many of its supporters. At the heart of this movement was an important idea. Islam should not be reduced to purely spiritual or ritual practices, and can provide alternative models of political, cultural and social organization.
Islam is understood as a political formulation developed by Ayatollah Khomeini, and it presents several distinct characteristics as it must occupy a central place in public places and the composition of power. Among them is the belief that the West has lost normative hegemony. Overcoming nation-states as the only legitimate political framework. And the need for Islamic powers that can express and defend Ummah (a global community of believers) on the international stage.
In this context, the Islamic Republic of Iran is independent of Western directions and has established itself as a political actor with autonomous expressive ability, articulated through its own political grammar.
Imam Khomeini understood that Orientalist gazes remained the dominant prism interpreted by Muslim society outside of the Eurocentric narrative. This outlook is that Western ideology, except for its categories, methods and values, is universal, effective in analyzing and explaining reality, and is heterogeneous from its historical and cultural origins.
However, Islamism challenges this premise. From this perspective, the West is defined as an ideology rather than as a concrete geographical space. It is a thinking system that appears as neutral, actually imposing its own unique cognitive limits when interpreting non-Western. Therefore, Islamist criticism is not only political, but also epistemological. It challenges the legitimacy of the conceptual framework used to understand the Islamic world.
According to Muslims, Western normative views begin with the assumption that Islam cannot function as a valid political tool. From this point of view, presenting Islam as a political identity to replace the Pahlavi regime would be dismissed as a distraction from the true and deep causes of the revolution. In this story, Islam is reduced to mere epiphenomeno. This is a smokescreen that has no power to change the political order.
Imam Khomeini’s ideas emerged against Eurocentrism. The revolution was not only a subversion of the Pallavi dynasty (1925–1979), but also a break with the Orientalist framework that portrayed Muslims as the lack of political institutions. This opposition manifested in a cultural transformation aimed at “westernization” of Iranian society.
Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution has been the subject of many interpretations, ranging from sociological and theological to geopolitical and cultural analysis. However, it is rarely approached as an epistemic event in the greatest sense, not as a change in regime or historical anomalies, but as a rupture that destabilizes the very framework that politics has been devised in modernity.
From this theoretical vantage point, Islamic revolution is not an exception within the secularization process, nor is it an exception, but an epistemic break: a fundamental question of the modern political order based on theology and Christian sovereignty. What is at stake is not just the ideological content of the new state, but also the very composition of political fields composed of Western thinking. In this sense, revolution can be interpreted as an attempt to reconstruct politics from another place outside the Western paradigm that reduced Islam to pre-modern or irrationality.
Muslim historiography sees this revolution as the first to fail to follow Western political grammar, making it unpredictable for scholars and experts. A recurring example is the book Iran: Dictatorship and Development written by Fred Halliday several months before the 1979 revolution. In this work, Khalidee attempts to foresee a possible scenario after the collapse of the Pahlavi dynasty, but this was already clear. However, among his many predictions, he never considered the possibility of an Islamic revolution and instead proposed options such as nationalist governments, socialism, and even a new monarchy.
The lack of Islamic revolution from such predictions allowed Muslims to criticize Western political perspectives. In other words, the possibility of using Islamic language to achieve political liberation remains unimaginable and surviving in Western tales.
Imam Khomeini has built an autonomous identity with Islam as its node. According to this interpretation, the founder rejected the universality of Western epistemology, and also challenged the historical sequences called “from Plato to NATO.”
The revolution was realized as an Islamic identity embedded in an alternative genealogy of anti-colonial resistance. It has its own grammar that cannot be expressed in national liberation or Marxist Western languages.
Therefore, Imam Khomeini answered one of the most pressing questions about Islamism through his political thinking. How can Muslims live politically like Muslims in the modern world?
The importance of Imam Khomeini lies in his political project, which was successful, aiming to drive the West away as a normative discourse. This process was carried out using only the language of Islamic tradition, unlike other Islamic reformers, without mentioning political doctrines considered western.
Imam Khomeini wrote as if Western grammar did not exist. To his followers, this irrelevant was fundamental. This was because it meant the embodied political identity of autonomous Muslims. The fact that Imam Khomeini wrote as if the West had not existed suggests that Islam cannot be reduced to the category of “religion.”
From this perspective, the idea of ”religion” is a product of European enlightenment and is a globally exported model. Accepting the universalization of the category “religion” ignores it as a project that seeks to present local European history as a universal story. Islamism condemns this imposition of the norm of Western perception of Islamic tradition.
Religion as a colonial category
The idea that something universal exists under the name “religion” assumes the essence of trans history, which overlooks the differences between the various projects that evoke the image of God. From the perspective of the Islamic Republic, “religion” means accepting the character as a private belief separate from politics, as understood in the West. Therefore, discourses about religion can be fully understood in relation to the narrative of secularism.
Secularism should not be understood simply as the absence or exclusion of religion from the public sphere, but as a normative project establishing its own boundaries. For the Islamic Republic, secularism is not the culmination of natural or historical processes. Rather, it is a disciplinary discourse, a political mode of exclusion of others by looking at them as their threats, while examining a particular political sensibility.
The use of religious languages is not merely a descriptive exercise, but rather a clear normative intent. The ultimate goal is to regulate Islamic spaces.
Imam Khomeini captures this idea that Islam cannot be reduced to the colonial category of “religion.”
“If Muslims pray, beg God, beg for his name, and evoke his name, then the imperialist and oppressive governments will leave us alone. If we say, let us focus all our energy on the 24-hour prayer call and simply pray.
The point of Imam Khomeini is that Islam cannot be reduced to a ritual or moral issue with no political essence. Preventing that dissolution is precisely the political clarification of Islam.
Islamism in the Islamic Republic
In contrast to other regional Islamization projects, one fundamental difference expressed by Iranian Islamism is its inability to reduce Islam to its limited, fixed characteristics. This idea is reflected in several letters by Imam Khomeini to the then president and current leader. In these works, Imam Khomeini argues that the specific symptoms of Islam can be corrected or even abolished if necessary for the Islamic Republic to ensure survival. Some experts interpret this stance as an expression of Imam Khomeini’s nationalistic thinking, while others view it as an affirmation of Islam, which transcends its historical symptoms and always projects beyond them.
Another feature of Khomeinism is that Imam Khomeini considered himself a Shia Islamist, but his political practices are understood as an attempt to more closely link Sunni and Shia under what experts call the “post-mazhabi” vision, called “Mazhabi or Madhab” of “Mazhabi,” meaning Arabic “justice.” This quest for Islamic unity is key to understanding the self-definition of the Islamic Republic as a political figure of all Muslims, establishing it as a power to defend the entire Islamic community against Western invasion.
The final fundamental pillar of hominism is the doctrine of Wilayat al-Faki, translated as “the government of legal scholars,” which represents this current most important political vision. Imam Khomeini understood that the solution to the Iranian and the Islamic community’s problems was not mere theology, but a political challenge that required a concrete response in the field.
In fact, Imam Khomeini has managed to create an Islamic political identity that can transcend national and sectarian sects. His proposal considers political institutions as the ability for Muslims to strip themselves up and weave society back within the historical Islamic tradition. This decolonization aims to dismantle the global colonial order.
Therefore, to his followers, the importance of Imam Khomeini lies in its ability to break the identification between the “universal” and the “west”. In other words, thanks to Khomeinism, the West is revealed as merely another specialism in the world’s political world.
The experiments of the Islamic Revolution provided a unique opportunity for mobilized Muslim subjectivity to effectively construct the former Nihiro. This revolution marked a deep rupture of modern hegemony, Westernness’ paradigms, and politics based on nation-states and ethnic identity. The idea of the Islamic Republic was based on mobilisation centered around ethnic, linguistic, or national categories, not ethnic, linguistic, or national categories, but on shared Muslim identity. This politicization of Islam was precisely a discourse that Westerness’s strong will for secularization and cultural homogenization tried to suppress and confine private territories.
But Imam Khomeini was not merely a symbol of revolution, but also the most powerful defender of Islam’s political vision, which rejected the role assigned to it by modern machines. His appearance represents a deep and fundamental criticism of the machine. This critique was not limited to literal or occasional rebuttals to Westernness’s assumptions, but embodied a fundamentally different projection of futures.