Birds of Ill Omen

“The name of the ayatollah means: native of Khomein, a small rural town in the province of Esfahan which did not attract mullahs, who are generally interested in more lush and materially profitable places. The local landowner could not find a religious man who would help him keep his farmers in check. While on pilgrimage in Najaf (holy Shiite city in Iraq) he met Ruhollah’s grandfather, a rather indigent cleric whose ancestors had migrated to India from Neyshapour (a northeastern Iranian town). The landowner, impressed by the mullah’s title of seyed (descendant of the Prophet), lured him with the offer of a house and some land. The family left India and settled in Khomein, where Ruhollah was born, around 1901.

In those days Iran was in a state of great chaos and turbulence. Russian influence extended to the North and British influence to the south of the country. Tribal chieftains and feudal khans (landowners) swayed power in their domains. Brigands infested roads and trails, cutting almost all contacts between the provinces and the capital city of Tehran where the absolutist Qajar kings ruled. In 1905, a motley group composed of young modernists, intellectuals, aristocrats, landowners, high-ranking clerics, and some bazaar merchants took advantage of the weakening of central authority in order to impose a parliamentary constitutional regime on the Shah.

The traditionalists reacted almost immediately against this import to Muslim Iran of institutions created by the Western infidels. The most vocal among them, Hojat-ol-Islam Nouri, author of several books and pamphlets about djinns and other demons, invited the Iranians to revolt against the modernists. “Wake up,” he repeated in his sermons, “Islam is in danger! What we need is not a parliament and a constitution, but an Islamic government.” His criticism of high-ranking mullahs favoring the constitutional reform provoked the ire of top clerics who accused him of heresy and sent him to an Islamic tribunal. He was condemned to death for “warring against God” (Today’s Iranian Islamic courts accuse modernists of the same “crime”!). Hojat-ol-Islam Nouri was eventually hanged in a public place with the enthusiastic approval of the crowds. Fearing a similar fate, fundamentalist mullahs fled from the capital and hid in the provinces where they opened Koranic schools. (Ruhollah Khomeini became a pupil in one such school.)

Ruhollah’s father died shortly after his birth in a brawl with the intendants of the local feudal landowner. His destitute and pregnant widow put the infant in the care of her sister who had married a wealthy merchant. In the household of his aunt, the boy learned the importance of vengeance, a character trait that would undergird his long fight against the Shah. One of the biographies spread after the 1979 revolution insisted on the fact that he was brought up by his aunt and uncle because of the parallel with Prophet Muhammad’s life. Indeed, the latter became an orphan at an early age and lived with his aunt and uncle! But at the time of his birth people dubbed Khomeini as badghadam (bird of ill-omen), because of the coincidence of his birth with the tragic death of his father. As a result, the villagers avoided him. . .” - Fereydoon Hoveyda, “The Shah And The Ayatollah: Iranian Mythology And Islamic Revolution” Praeger Publishers, 2003.

Wikipedia: 

Augury was the Roman religious practice of observing the behavior of birds to receive omens. When the individual, known as the augur, read these signs, it was referred to as “taking the auspices”. “Auspices” (Latin: auspicium) means “looking at birds”. Auspex, another word for augur, can be translated to “one who looks at birds”. Depending upon the birds, the auspices from the gods could be favorable or unfavorable (auspicious or inauspicious). Sometimes politically motivated augurs would fabricate unfavorable auspices in order to delay certain state functions, such as elections.

. . .This type of omen reading was already a millennium old in the time of Classical Greece: in the fourteenth-century BCE diplomatic correspondence preserved in Egypt called the Amarna correspondence, the practice was familiar to the king of Alasia in Cyprus who needed an “eagle diviner” to be sent from Egypt. This earlier, indigenous practice of divining by bird signs, familiar in the figure of Calchas, the bird-diviner to Agamemnon, who led the army (Iliad I.69), was largely replaced by sacrifice-divination through inspection of the sacrificial victim’s liver—haruspices—during the Orientalizing period of archaic Greek culture. Plato notes that hepatoscopy held greater prestige than augury by means of birds.