There is no Blue Book, it’s The Little Green Book. And it wasn’t written by the Ayatollah at all, as you say, but by a source who was apparently at least three times, and three languages, removed.
“There is no Blue Book”: Thus saith the J-School Professor, and he surely wouldn’t make such a baldly definitive statement if he hadn’t fact-checked himself with the rigor Signora Fallaci and I are so deplorably lacking in.
Okay, I’m going to try to explain things very slowly for Doc Miller and M J Murphy, and with pictures, too. For personal reasons, which I’ll return to in a moment, I happen to know that 30 years ago many Iranians did, indeed, refer to the Ayatollah’s “Blue Book”. Visiting Iran in the wake of the revolution, Oriana Fallaci would certainly have heard the Towzih al-Masael referred to both by Iranians and westerners as what she would call the “Libro Azzurro”. Are you wondering why? Well, here’s a clue:
Hmm. Here’s another clue:
Whoops, I see these are black-and-white pages. Okay, flip over to the inside flap of our back cover, which is in luxurious full color, and take a look. Do they appear to have a blue hue? How can that be? We all know: “There is no Blue Book.” The Lord High Checker of Facts has pronounced. As it happens, Resaleh Towzih al-Masael has been published in Iran in several editions. But the most popular was the paperback edition published by Nashr I Sharia’t of Teheran. It sold for 120 rials. It had some 350 pages, approx 5x7 inches, with a blue cover, featuring a picture of its ever more famous author. A souvenir hardback edition marketed as the perfect New Year gift was subsequently published by Rashidi with a plain blue cover. Since the old boy’s death, the Khomeini Resaleh has got a bit like the Johnny Mathis Christmas album, re-released every year in a different color. But, as you can see on the jacket flap of this very tome, many versions of the “Blue Book” are still out there.
In the relevant passage in her book, Oriana recalls first seeing excerpts from the “Blue Book” in 1979. That’s what it was back then: A blue book. The blue book in revolutionary Iran. It certainly wasn’t a “little green book” as no such thing was published till 1980. So when she and I refer to the Ayatollah’s “Blue Book” we’re referring to that Nashr I Sharia’t edition of the Resaleh. It was translated into English, unabridged, by J Borujerdi and published in 1984 by Westview in London and Boulder, Colorado under the title A Clarification Of Questions.
I was given it a couple of decades ago by the Iranian gal I was then dating. She had a copy of the pocket paperback with the Ayatollah on the cover, and once, when she read out a bit to me, I expressed skepticism that it could really be that wacky. So a few weeks later she presented me with the English edition. As she explained, these were not just some personal musings from the Ayatollah but a kind of moral compass for the Islamic state. So I didn’t need to “accept someone else’s word for it” on having sex with nine-year-old girls, because, like anyone else who’s taken even a cursory interest in the subject, I’ve known for a long time that, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, girls could be legally married at the age of nine. Article 1041 of the Civil Code states:
Marriage before puberty by the permission of the Guardian and on condition of taking into interest the ward’s interest is proper.
“Puberty” is defined as “nine full lunar years”. In practice, girls as young as seven can be married on the say-so of a doctor. The justification for all this is in the highly elaborate rules of Islamic life. They may sound unlikely to M J Murphy or Prof Miller but the Ayatollah’s “clarification of questions” doesn’t strike most devout Iranian Shi’ites that way. Mr Borujerdi, the English translator, was an Iranian émigré living in Cleveland, and he gave an interview about the book to David Remnick (now the editor of The New Yorker) in The Washington Post in 1985. M J Murphy and Prof Miller and the Law R Cool nellies are welcome to go to their local reference library and check it out. It’s the Aug 21 issue, page B1:
“I did the translation because it gives a very close understanding of the Shiite view of the world,” he said. “The Bantam Press published a very slight version five years ago called The Little Green Book — just six per cent of the original – but that was really a joke book, to poke fun at Khomeini and debunk Islam at the beginning of the hostage crisis. In Iran, this book is mandatory for every literate person, a kind of guide to living.”
So this is the real deal, not the sensationalist précis but a serious, scholarly “unabridged translation” designed to provide “a unique picture of the belief structure of Shi’ism”. Mr Borujerdi had no difficulty finding eminent academics to provide an introduction – namely, Professors Mehdi Abedi and Michael Fischer of Rice University in Houston. But he also consulted on the translation and interpretation with many other scholars, among them Professor Wilfred Madelung of the Oriental Institute at Oxford University, Professor Wheeler Thackston of Harvard’s Near Eastern Languages department, Professor William Darrow of Williams College, Professor Vincent McHale of Case Western, Professor Merlin Swartz of Boston University …oh, and Professor Marvin Zonis of the University of Chicago. That would be the same Prof Zonis who was unhappy with The Little Green Book, and thus made M J Murphy unhappy, too. But Prof Zonis is cool with A Clarification Of Questions, so presumably M J Murphy will also be satisfied?
Resaleh Towzih al-Masael/A Clarification Of Questions consists of almost 3,000 “problems” for which Ayatollah Khomeini provides answers, plus a few follow-ups he dealt with in subsequent editions.
Here is a page from Mr Borujerdi’s translation:
#2631. It is loathsome to eat the meat of horse and mule and donkey and if somebody makes coitus with them, that is an intercourse, they become unlawful and they must be taken out of the city and sold elsewhere.
#2632. If they have intercourse with a cow and sheep and camel their urine and dung becomes unclean and drinking their milk will also be unlawful and they must be killed and burned without delay, and the person who had intercourse with them must pay money to the owner. Further, if he had intercourse with any beast its milk becomes unlawful.
I first read this book all those years ago with my Persian gal, and I take it off the shelf every once in a while because, like Oriana, I enjoy a good laugh: If you bonk your mule, you’ve gotta take him out the city and sell him. If you shag your neighbor’s sheep, you’ve gotta write him a check. That’s not me, that’s not Oriana, that’s not some compiler of some discredited anthology, that’s the Ayatollah Khomeini. You can go to imam-khomeini.com and read it in the great man’s original Farsi.
Now, it’s true that La Fallaci’s wording differs a little from Mr Borujerdi’s. But so what? The King James Bible is different from the New International Version, or the Reader’s Digest version. And the Towzi has been published in many different versions by the Ayatollah himself. For his translation, Mr Borujerdi looked at six different Farsi editions, some with supplemental questions, others with no answers to some of the original questions. In this instance, Oriana was translating into what she called “Fallaci’s English” from an Italian version of the Ayatollah’s Farsi that was excerpted in an Italian magazine under the headline “I Dieci Khomeindamenti”, or “The Ten Khomeindments”, which is a pretty funny title.