In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
Dhou'l-Hijjah 1,1398 AH
Your Eminence Hujjat al-Islam wal-Muslimin Mr. Haj Sayyid Mahmoud Taleqani, may his blessings last long:
For a personage like you, who has spent his valuable life struggling for his country's freedom and independence, and constantly opposing the autocratic system and international plunderers, it is natural to be imprisoned, tortured and deprived of freedom. The freedom of people like you is against the Shah's logic and his government's standards. The pressure produced by the miraculous will of the people, has made the Shah so nervous that he has insanely committed some disgraceful crimes, and has put the history to shame. As you are aware, he has done some unimaginable crimes! In some cities, unknown groups of gypsies and hirelings carrying clubs and broadswords, supported by disciplinary forces, have come down on people and committed evil acts, and are still doing so. The government, which is supposed to maintain discipline, along with its disciplinary forces, have become vandal and turned into vandalizing forces.
In our time and in our hopeless country, logics and words have changed their meanings: Political freedom means strangulation and multilateral censorship; great civilization means worse savagery than the Middle Ages; reconciliation government is wiping people out with machine guns, tanks and recently, with clubs and broadsword; land reform is destroying agriculture; independence means economic, cultural and military dependence on foreigners; shouts of" Down with the Pahlavi rule" is interpreted as loving the Shah and the regime.
Now that you have been transferred from the small prison into the larger one, you will be facing these strange facts and new words, but on the other hand, you will be confronting a great emotional change in the people, in terms of comprehension, and a greater practical change in their acts. The people whom, before the occurrence of the great Islamic movement, believed in kingship as the symbol of nationalism and the country's axis of grandeur, and obeyed indisputably the Shah's orders, and due to the kings' and the speakers of the courts' braggings and eulogizings, assumed that the country was at the gates of the great civilization under the progressive and modern Shah, they presumed that the country's independence was guaranteed under the banner of monarchy, brought down all the columns and crenellations of this imaginary castle in a leap and with comprehension, and the contents of these deceiving and made-up words and expressions became known, and the vacuity of these noisy drums surfaced; and the economic bankruptcy, the plunderings of the treasury, the destruction of the agriculture, and the cultural and military dependence were uncovered.
And also, the same masses whom, before the occurrence of the movement, would start celebrating by the snap of a finger of a constable and would raise banners on the roofs of their shops, and would recognize the Shah's orders, following the exaggerations of the court poets, as God's order, rose up in one move, and man and woman, young and old, swarmed into streets with clenched fists screaming" Down with this Pahlavi monarchy," and heroically resisted against machine guns, cannons and tanks, and by sacrificing their lives and the blood of their brave youths, broke the monarchial power that was relying on the might of the superpowers, and forced him to surrender. But they have not and will not accept his surrendering. According to what logic could they forgive the endless disloyalties and crimes of this hellish devil, and still consent to his illegitimate rule? We are against this logic; and those who agree with it won't agree with the nation and us who are the nation's servants. And Allah is the hearer of complains. May God's peace and mercy be upon you.
Rouhullah al-Mousawi al-Khomeini