Imam Khomeini’s Last Will and Testament

They did their best to ensure that the self-committed pious people would be a small minority, and to ensure that those who take the helm of the country in the future would be the same people who hate all religions, especially Islam, and the people associated with religions, particularly the ulama. At that time they pretended that such people, the ulama were the agents of Britain and advocates of the capitalists, and big landlords and advocates of reactionaryism and later they said the ulama were opposed to progress and civilization.
Alternatively, by their sophisticated hostile propaganda they led the ulama to fear college students and university educators because the propaganda invariably labeled all college student educators as being irreligious abandoned and opposed to Islam and other religions.
The idea was to make sure that the people at the helm were opposed to Islam and other religions and the ulama and religious people, and that anything related to the government, and that deep schism between the government and the masses and university students and educators would pave the way for the indulgence of plunderers so that every aspect of the business of the government would be in the hands of plunderers who could pocket the resources of our country, as they had during the previous regimes and were continuing to do, with obvious implications.
Now that by the will of the Blessed and Supreme Lord and due to the struggles of the nation, including the ulama, college students, and traders and toiling men and farm workers and other sectors of the society the people have broken the shackles of bondage and the hindrance of the superpowers and rid the nation from their hands and from the hands of the agents of those powers.
I exhort the present and future generation against tending to overlook the implications of the situation, and I call on the college students to solidify their bond with the ulama and religious students of theology, and never to neglect the schemes and conspiracies of our treacherous enemies, to guide and admonish any individual whom they should see trying to sow the seeds of discord between them, and in the event their words did not work on him renounce and ostracize him so that the plots against us will not take root, because it is easier to stop the current from the fountainhead.
If they should encounter a professor at their college who tends to mislead the youth, the students should guide him and if they should be unsuccessful they should reject him as a professor. I have addressed myself here mainly to the ulama and theological students, since plots at the universities are very grave and every respectable strata of our society who are the think-tank of our society should watch for plots.
E. Among the gravest plot which, unfortuntely, has left destructive effects on our beloved country has been the plot to alienate colonialized countries and make them look to the West and East as their models. So much so that those nations eventually lost their self al-steem and their trust in their own cultures [and are] looking to the West and East as the two poles of power with a nobler generation and loftier culture and concluded that their countries could not but become dependent on either of the two powers.
This has been a long and saddening story and the blows we suffer from the two powers are pounding and deadly. More saddening, however, is that the two powers have checked the progress of the nations whom they attempt to make consumption-oriented countries, and instil a fear in us of their technological advancements and of their satanic power and destroy our self-confidence to test our own intuition, so that we entrust whatever we have to their hands and sit quiet and blindfolded and leave the administration of the state to those powers.
This sense of self-nothingness and this feeling of dullness as inculcated in us by the big powers served to make us distrust our own knowledge and expertise and capacity in all areas and led us to simply try to imitate the West and East blind foldedly, our own West-struck and East-struck uncultured men of letters and public speakers disparaging our own culture and literature and technology and intuition. As little or as much as we had, belittling our own inherent capacities and alternatively publicizing the exotic culture of foreigners, even though they might be totally absurd and ridiculous and forcing those cultures upon the nations by admiring even in our own time.
To cite an example, if a book or an article or a lecture should also include several non-native words, that book or article or lecture is likely to be commended and its writer or the speaker very likely to be commended as a learned and intellectual person. For the nomenclature of our native things, too, names from the Western or Eastern languages seem to suggest status and civilization and are likely to be received by the public with applause. Be they the name for anything ranging from ‘cradle’ or ‘grave’, whereas native names would be outmoded and a sign of reactionism.
The craze for Western culture persists in all areas: if our children happen to have Western names they feel proud and if they have native names they feel embarrassed and backward. The names of our city streets, shops, companies, drug-stores, bookshops, as well as the writings on materials and other commodities would sound a lot better if they were foreign words, even though those commodities are domestically produced, which will ensure better reception by the people.
European-styled mannerisms in every behavior, in social contacts, and in every aspect of our daily living is a source of pride and a sign of being civilized and progressive, and in contrast manifestations of native culture are signs of backwardness and of being old-fashioned. To remedy your illness, however trivial and curable it may be at home, you should go abroad, and thereby belittle and reject your native but capable doctors.
[As the propaganda for western and eastern cultures suggests]. To go to England, France, the United States and Moscow is a source of pride for the Iranian traveler, and to go to Mecca and to other holy shrines for pilgrimage is a sign of backwardness. A lack of concern about religion and its related topics and spirituality is evidence of intellectuality and, in contrast, a commitment to such things is a sign of backwardness and reactionism.
I do not claim that we ourselves have everything we need. Obviously, during recent history and especially during the past few centuries they [the foreign powers] blocked our progress in every area, and the treacherous people at the helm, and especially those during the Pahlavi Dynasty, and the destructive propaganda against our native capacities as well as the infusion of the feeling of self-unworthiness, served to block our every effort for technological advancement.
The importation of foreign-made products of whatever category, the induced preoccupation of women and men, especially the youth, with a wide variety of imported goods, including cosmetics, luxury items and childish toys, the pitting of people and families against each other in a race for consumption-it is a sad story- and the pulling of our youth -potentially the most active members of the society- to prostitution and to places for that purpose and for sensual pleasures, as well as tens of other devices, are schemes for keeping the countries backward.