Word: ayatullah
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When the time came to mount strikes and demonstrations, a whole network of mosques, Islamic schools and neighborhood associations was in place. The Ayatullah's operation never lacked money: devout Shi'ites contribute one-fifth of their earnings, and over the years wealthy Iranian bazaar merchants contributed heavily to his cause. Throughout the crisis, Khomeini issued daily Elamiehs (bulletins) from exile counseling his followers to share their grain, return to work in the oilfields, treat soldiers with kindness, and the like. These were recorded in Persian on a cassette, then played over the phone to a headquarters...
...Department specialist: "We are not trying to push Bakhtiar on the people of Iran. If they decide to select a new leader of their government, we are perfectly willing to cooperate with that choice." In anticipation of that possibility, U.S. diplomats were quietly engaged in unofficial contacts with the Ayatullah's aides, as well as direct ones with Bakhtiar and the top military leaders...
...today is the Shah reviled and Ayatullah Khomeini revered? One reason is that millions of Iranian poor were untouched by the new wealth of the monarch's industrializing society; meanwhile, many remember the role traditionally played by the Shi'ite mullahs as protectors of the oppressed. TIME Correspondent William McWhirter talked with one peasant family, uprooted from the Ayatullah's birthplace of Khomein (pop. 12,000) in central Iran. His report...
...equivalent of half a dollar, for a year's work. Tenant farmers who came to the area were given quotas to meet: often their entire crop of wheat was for the landlord, with nothing left over to make bread of their own. Mrs. Mokhtari remembers that the Ayatullah's grandfather and father were "always the dissenters, the militants." They allowed poorer farmers to take produce from their own lands, persuaded richer tenants to share their crops, distributed the tithes they received from the devout to those most in need...
...same time that she yearns for an Islamic republic guided by the Ayatullah, Mrs. Mokhtari is grateful for the new liberties for women that gave her three grown daughters the opportunity for an education and good jobs. She has no illusions about returning to the rough but simple life of Khomein a half-century ago. "We know the problems that any modern society faces," says Mrs. Mokhtari. "There is no way that we are going backward. The main trouble was that the government of the Shah was so corrupt. What we couldn't take was injustice...