A Meeting with Imam Khumayni

... The night of February 8 it was announced that those invited to the conference would be addressed by Imam Khomeini at his residence in North Tehran. As soon as I heard the confirmation of what had been tentatively scheduled for any one day during the several weeks when the conference was in session, I immediately sensed the significance of this event for myself, for finally I would have the chance to measure the worth of this man directly; he would be held up to the scrutiny of my critical spiritual sensibilities, ... for although one cannot judge the inner state of consciousness of an individual, one can at least decide if there are some signs of a personal performance that would lend some credence to the nation of having achieved a state of 'liberation' from the narrow boundaries of the ego. There was just too much vengeance, blood, and doctrinal absolutism for me to finally assent to the idea that Khomeini was an 'enlightened' being, for although most reputed saints have emerged from a tradition-that is, from an organized, highly structured and antiquitous system of worship and purificatory practices-they are, when they have reached the climax of their devotion, detached from 'politics,' from heavy involvement in the surface appearance of life, from the rigid ideological warfare and clashing of opinions that dominate the more worldly individual. Khomeini's embrace-unconditionally-of harsh Islamic justice, for instance the stoning of an adulterer, the severing of the hand of a thief, and his violent denunciations of the United States and the Soviet Union-his attribution of all problems to the conspiracies of imperialism-all this seemed a little too one-sided and belief-ridden to be the representations of a human being who dwelled in the equanimity and putative bliss of the Absolute, the state of permanent freedom from the primacy of egohood. And then there were the portraits on Time magazine, the many depictions of the Imam, especially during the hostage crisis and even after the fall of the Shah: all these suggested a morbid seriousness, a humourless severity, and an apparent absence of gentleness, playfulness, or-and this is most important-compassion. The manifest characteristic of the human personality that had achieved some unity with pure consciousness was the radiant reality of love, the love that was simply the fact of that harmony, the fact of that non-separateness from and absolute cooperation with the laws of the universe that worked for the happiness of each creature. This had been the measure of all the great saints, whether Saint Francis, the Buddha, Lao-Tse, or even the Sufis I had read. Imam Khomeini was a symbol in the West of the most obdurate atavistic pride and implacable hatred. And even some Westerners with whom I had talked who had met Khomeini commented on his charisma, but in the same breath remarked at the total absence of humour or warmth in his demeanour.

Now I had the opportunity to judge for myself.

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