The charismatic authorization of spiritual geopolitics in revolutionary Iran

Abstract

Ayatollah Khomeini’s charismatic religious leadership of the Islamic revolution accompanied the introduction of spiritual territorial discourses that became geopolitical practices of the revolutionary government. Using a discourse analysis methodology within the geopolitical framework, we examine Ayatollah Khomeini’s words and in-depth semi-structured interviews to analyze the formation of spiritual charismatic discourse around Ayatollah Khomeini and his imaginary spatial division of good and evil. While representing the umbrella of Islam to encompass diverse identities across Iran, he used religious motifs to create a sense of hierarchical exclusion from the global to the domestic orders. Furthermore, this construction involved an imaginary idea of Iran as the sacred center to mobilize followers toward the religiously charged revolution and the succeeding war with Iraq. The spread of geopolitical culture through the rhetoric of “exporting the revolution” attempted to instill a sense of centrality in Islamic Iran, making other Islamic societies peripheral and model-accepting. The empirical example of Khomeini’s geo-spiritual discourse shows how the divine follower-charisma relationship justifies territorial goals and actions to legitimize power and spread geopolitical thoughts through the discursive construction of sacred geography.