Word: ayatullah
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Khomeini collides with a rival Ayatullah...
...trials were an acute embarrassment to Premier Mehdi Bazargan. Last month, angered by accounts of the humiliation of Hoveida in midnight hearings, Bazargan went on TV to denounce the summary trials as "a disgrace." During a midnight visit to the holy city of Qum, he persuaded Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the revolution, to suspend all trials (including Hoveida's) until new guidelines could be set. But when regulations were announced two weeks ago, the trials resumed not under the jurisdiction of the ministry of justice, but of a hitherto unknown Council of Revolutionary Tribunals. The council...
Iran is the most telling example. Late last month millions of men and women went to the polls for a referendum in which they voted overwhelmingly in favor of an Islamic republic. The affirmative vote created the nation's first "government of God," declared the Ayatullah Khomeini. The monarchy will be replaced by a democratic system with an elected legislature; religious leaders will probably have some kind of veto power over prospective laws. The success of the yearlong Iranian revolution, which ousted a dynastic autocrat who dreamed of turning his country into a Western-style industrial and secular state...
...twelfth successor, who disappeared mysteriously in 878, is still alive and will return some day as the Mahdi (the Divinely Appointed Guide), a Messiah-like leader who will establish God's kingdom on earth. Meanwhile, Shi'ite religious leaders, such as Iran's Ayatullah Khomeini, have wide powers to advise the faithful on the presumed will of the "Hidden Imam." Sunni religious scholars, the ulama, have less authority, though both branches of Islam consider their leaders to be teachers and sages rather than ordained clergymen in the Western sense...
...place to place, subject to both history and geography. Islam was unhesitatingly considered to be an abstraction, never an experience. No one bothered to judge Muslims in political, social, anthropological terms that were vital and nuanced, rather than crude and provocative. Suddenly it appeared that "Islam" was back when Ayatullah Khomeini, who derives from a long tradition of opposition to an outrageous monarchy, stood on his national, religious and political legitimacy as an Islamic righteous man. Menachem Begin took himself to be speaking for the West when he said he feared this return to the Middle Ages, even...