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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 December 2024
The reactions to the publication of Ayatollah Khomeini's poetry in 1989 led to a wide range of publications. In this chapter I shall outline how Ayatollah Khomeini's poetry was received differently by Iranians at home and abroad, analysing how interpretation and reception depend on time and place. While his supporters put all their effort into placing his poetry in a mystical context, his opponents started to de-mystify it. The poet Hadi Khorsandi's satirical poem in response to the publication of Khomeini's poetry illustrates how he uses poetry as a vehicle to respond to or criticise socio-political events. It demonstrates that poetry plays a pivotal role in the life of Iranians, both within and outside of Iran.
Keywords: satirical poetry, Persian kingship, Islamic governance, Iranian diaspora, mystical poetry
When Ayatollah Khomeini's poems, replete with unorthodox topics such as wine and homoerotic love, were published after his death in 1989, Iranians living inside and outside Iran responded in very diverse ways. Some, including many of his followers, took them as symbolic expressions to be read in the framework of a literary genre and a mystical context. Others denied the authenticity of the poems. Many conservative clerics criticised them for their unorthodox content, while some critics of the conservative clerics also took the poems at face value, and used the references on wine and erotic love as evidence of the hypocrisy of the clerical class.
Most Iranians in the diaspora did not respond positively to Ayatollah Khomeini's poetry or his claim to be a poet. M. Legenhausen, an American scholar who works for the Islamic government in Iran and who has translated a number of Ayatollah Khomeini's poems, says of Ayatollah Khomeini's first published poem:
the mystical nature of the poem caught many, even among Imâm's most ardent devotees, by surprise. In one couplet, Imâm wrote, ‘Open the door of the tavern and let us go there day and night, For I am sick and tired of the mosque and seminary.’ The surprise is generated by the contradiction between the literal and symbolic uses of the images. Imâm Khomeini was a great supporter of the religious institutions of the mosque and seminary, but in the poetic genre of which his poem is an instance, the mosque and the seminary are symbols of insincerity and pretentiousness.
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