Khomeini also launched a campaign to "export" — the term was his — the revolution to surrounding Muslim countries. His provocations of Iraq in 1980 helped start a war that lasted eight years, at the cost of a million lives, and that ended only after America intervened to sink several Iranian warships in the Persian Gulf. Iranians asked whether God had revoked his blessing of the revolution. Khomeini described the defeat as "more deadly than taking poison."

To rally his demoralized supporters, he issued the celebrated fatwa condemning to death the writer Salman Rushdie for heresies contained in his novel The Satanic Verses. Though born a Muslim, Rushdie was not a Shi'ite; a British subject, he had no ties to Iran. The fatwa, an audacious claim of authority over Muslims everywhere, was the revolution's ultimate export. Khomeini died a few months later. But the fatwa lived on, a source of bitterness — as he intended it to be — between Iran and the West.

Beside the fatwa, what is Khomeini's legacy? The revolution, no longer at risk, still revels in having repeatedly, with impunity, defied the American Satan. The Islamic state was proof to the faithful — as the Soviet Union was to generations of communists — that the Western system need not be a universal model.

Yet Khomeini rejected a parallel between his doctrines and the fundamentalism propounded by other Muslim dissidents. He never described himself as fundamentalist. He often said that Islam is not for 14 centuries ago in Arabia but for all time.

Since Khomeini's death, the popular appeal of an Islamic state — and of fundamentalism — has surely dimmed. Thinkers still debate and warriors kill, but no country seems prepared to emulate Iran. Perhaps revolutions happen only under majestic leaders, and no one like Khomeini has since appeared.

Milton Viorst, a Middle East specialist, is the author of In the Shadow of the Prophet

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