Word: ayatullah
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Tehran, and Ayatullah Morteza Motahari, one of Iran's leading Islamic theologians, was leaving a home where he had been conferring with Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan. Behind the holy man, out of the shadows, stepped two gunmen. Motahari never saw them. A single shot rang out, and he fell mortally wounded with a bullet through the back of his head. His killers fled...
Some of the country's most prestigious leaders have joined the Prime Minister in calling for an end to the revolutionary trials. One of them is Ayatullah Mohammed Khaqani, powerful leader of 3 million Arabic-speaking Iranians in the vital oil province of Khuzistan. Last week Khaqani threatened to leave the country unless his objections to the komitehs were heeded. Iran, he said, had become "an unbearable place to Live" and discrimination against Arabs persisted. Khaqani warned that his exile would trigger labor disorders and further disruptions of oil production. Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran...
...postrevolutionary Iran, proximity to Ayatullah Khomeini probably counts more than any formal title. By that standard, few in the country carry more clout than Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi, 47. An aide to Khomeini during the Ayatullah's exile in France, Yazdi returned to Tehran on the 747 that brought Khomeini home in triumph, and became Deputy Prime Minister for Revolutionary Affairs in the provisional government of Mehdi Bazargan. Although he gave up that post when he took over the Foreign Ministry, most Tehran observers believe that Yazdi's star is still ascending. A resident...
...strict Muslim home. While he was a microbiology student at Tehran University he joined the National Movement of Former Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. When Mossadegh fell from power in a U.S.-sponsored coup in 1953, Yazdi joined the National Resistance Movement, whose founders included Bazargan and Ayatullah Mahmoud Taleghani, leader of Tehran's 4 million Shi'ites. In 1960, after most political organizations in Iran had been driven underground and their leaders jailed, Yazdi and his wife Sourour left for the U.S., where he studied at several universities, including the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. A specialist...
With a typically xenophobic broadside, Iran's Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini vainly sought last week to dismiss as the work of outside agitators the most serious challenge yet posed to his mastery over the country. "Mysterious hands are sowing disunity. Satanic plans are under way by America and its agents," he declared. His outburst had been provoked by the disaffection of a fellow Shi'ite leader, Ayatullah Mahmoud Taleghani, who touched off a new round of violent clashes and demonstrations by withdrawing from politics as a protest against the mysterious arrests of two of his sons and a daughter...