Word: ayatollahs
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...destroyed the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003, parties based in the Shi'ite majority - brutally suppressed for decades - were quick to stake their claim to the shape country's future. They embraced the American promise of democracy and, ordered to vote by their most respected spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, they turned out in their millions at the polling booths to elect the Arab-world's first Shi'ite government. And that inspired Shi'ites across the region to clamor for more rights and influence, challenging centuries-old arrangements that had kept them on the margins...
...Strasbourg. Rajavi has been talking in that epic tone for a long time, notwithstanding the MEK's checkered history. The group was founded in 1965 as a leftist-religious faction opposing the Shah's regime. But it was no less opposed to the Islamist regime that arrived with Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, which executed thousands of the group's supporters. By the mid-1980s, the group had cozied up to Saddam Hussein, who provided them with funds and a compound, Camp Ashraf, north of Baghdad. The U.S. government has accused the group of helping Saddam brutally put down a Kurdish...
...TIME's sources offered a glimpse into the internal Iranian debate on the issue, which involves Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Supreme National Security Council headed by Ali Larijani, as well as other senior Iranian officials. While radical elements inside the regime remain adamantly opposed to dealing with the "Great Satan," the sources said, a strong consensus has nonetheless developed among Iran's ruling conservatives in favor of talks with the U.S. The basis of this consensus is a belief that improved relations with the U.S. would serve Iranian interests on a variety of fronts, including...
...only by holding off the Israeli army and not returning the soldiers it kidnapped. The war turned Hizballah Secretary General Hasan Nasrallah into an icon of resistance across the Islamic world. One Lebanese Shi'a told me Nasrallah's standing now is higher than that of Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Khameini - which if true would be an earthshaking shift in the Middle East. Finally, considering that Hizballah's military forces are stronger and more disciplined than the Lebanese army's, why would Nasrallah defer to Lebanon's government on the tribunal, disarming, or anything else...
...Sunnis do not have a single dominant cleric in the way that the Shi'ites have in the person of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Al-Dari may head the AMS, which claims to include the imams of over 3,000 mosques, but unlike Sistani, he has never been able to mobilize the Sunni street. Despite the AMS's call for a boycott of the general election last December, Sunnis voted in large numbers. And even though al-Dari has heaped condemnation on the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), it has emerged as an important force in Sunni politics. An IIP leader...