Word: ayatullah
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Traditionally it is a time for family gatherings, exchanges of sweets and a long holiday from work, but this year's holiday for many people was not an altogether happy one. Revolutionary fervor was giving way to cynicism. There were unresolved quarrels among disparate forces claiming to represent Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. The government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, struggling to cope with economic chaos, faced a new threat: an outbreak of violence among rebellious Kurds in the western city of Sanandaj. As thousands clogged the highways to the Caspian Sea and other vacation spots out of Tehran, one Iranian...
...Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, 78, and Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, 71, had another showdown last week. Following days of equal-rights demonstrations by thousands of angry Iranian women and more secret trials that resulted in summary executions, Bazargan took to the air waves for an hourlong television and radio address that spared no one, least of all Khomeini, the acknowledged leader of the Iranian revolution. The Prime Minister denounced the secret trials as "unreligious and inhuman," charging that they made the new government appear "shameful" to the rest of the world. Describing his sessions in Qum with the Ayatullah, Bazargan said...
With the March 30 referendum on the creation of an Islamic republic drawing near, the Ayatullah has rejected the proposed constitution written by a group of lawyers at Bazargan's request. He prefers the strongly Islamic draft constitution put together by a group of his aides. The task of reconciling the two documents has fallen to Interior Minister Haj-Sayed-Javadi. .His biggest problem areas: the role of the Iranian parliament and the status of women. While the lawyers proposed that the parliament have full legislative powers, Khomeini at first favored merely an advisory role; he now appears...
Many Iranian women are furious over the Ayatullah's attempt to impose a subservient role on females. Last week, after Khomeini was quoted as proclaiming that "women must not come naked into ministries," thousands of women, many dressed defiantly in tight jeans and skirts, paraded in Tehran in protest. Orthodox Islamic men attacked the demonstrators, and though guerrillas protecting the women fired warning shots, the zealots stabbed one woman and injured others...
...Komiteh has no intention of relaxing its grip on Iran. In an interview with TIME Tehran Bureau Chief Bruce van Voorst, Mohammed Reza Mahdavi Kani, a Khomeini aide who calls himself "the Ayatullah's man for Komiteh activities," outlined a plan that would make the group and some of its 1.500 or so replicas across the country permanent features of Iran's government. In Tabriz, Abadan, and other places, local komitehs have already begun rendering decisions on everything from whether brothels can reopen (answer: no) to the prices grocery shops can charge. Kani, who operates...