Death of an Ayatullah

Khomeini's "son" is killed

It was 10:30 p.m. in Tehran, and Ayatullah Morteza Motahari, one of Iran's leading Islamic theologians, was leaving a home where he had been conferring with Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan. Behind the holy man, out of the shadows, stepped two gunmen. Motahari never saw them. A single shot rang out, and he fell mortally wounded with a bullet through the back of his head. His killers fled.

It was not the first assassination of an important figure since the Shah's ouster three months ago. Two weeks earlier Major General Mohammed Vali Gharani, who was army chief of staff briefly under the revolutionary government, had been shot down outside his home by three unknown attackers. But Motahari's killing was especially ominous, since he was a member of the Revolutionary Council, a group of clergymen and other figures who report to the revolution's spiritual leader, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the provisional government of Prime Minister Bazargan. The names of the members of the Revolutionary Council have never been revealed for fear of endangering their lives.

Next day an obscure group called Forghan sent a letter to a Tehran newspaper saying it had killed the Ayatullah. Government officials later confirmed that Motahari had been a council member. Although little was known about Forghan, a Persian word that is both a synonym for the Koran and a term for something that separates right from wrong, the group purports to oppose the growing power of the Islamic clergy. Post-assassination leaflets distributed by the group deplored the rise of "akhoundism," a term meaning government by the mullahs.

The government, for its part, said that the assassination was an attack on the very heart of the revolution--and some blamed the Communists. Motahari was the author of several theological textbooks widely used in Iran, and like most Shi'ite leaders he shared Khomeini's views of Islam as a political religion. A day of mourning was proclaimed, and he was honored as a martyr. After a huge funeral procession in the holy city of Qum, where Motahari had taught at the Faizieh School, one of Iran's leading theological colleges, Khomeini mourned him as "my son, who represented the fruit of my whole life."

Iran's Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi, the onetime Houston microbiologist who has emerged as a key figure in the revolutionary government, dismisses the Forghan charge of too much akhoundism in Iran. In an interview with TIME last week (see box), he charged that such accusations are part of the strategy of the government's enemies, which is "to frustrate the revolution through protracted psychological warfare."

Criticism of the regime seems to be rising at both extremes of Iran's political spectrum. Hours before Motahari's murder, 200,000 demonstrators, most of them leftists, joined in a May Day march in Tehran to protest high unemployment and the stagnation of the country's economy. Trying to cool tempers, Islamic leaders called on all Iranians to exercise "revolutionary patience" and cautioned against "professional, foreign-led agitators and antirevolutionaries."

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