Word: ayatullah
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...learning. In June 1963 the mullahs, having failed to block the Shah's reforms, called their people into the streets. Demonstrations turned into riots, and the Shah sent in his troops. When the rioting stopped several days later, 200 people were dead, and the leader of the mullah opposition, Ayatullah Khomeini, was sent into exile...
...Shah's new program seemed to satisfy some religious leaders. "We have no intention of implementing the traditional Islamic criminal codes such as cutting off thieves' hands or stoning adulterers to death," said one moderate leader, Ayatullah Sharietmadari. "We don't want to turn Iran into another Saudi Arabia or another Libya. But we shall demand strict adherence to the Islamic precepts of our country's constitution." Many members of the Western-educated elite were predictably appalled at the latest turn of events. "The Shah's concessions will only make the opposition demand more," complained...
...charged with negligence for having ordered his employees to lock the exits to prevent terrorists from entering the theater. But opposition groups outside Iran accused SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, of setting the blaze in order to provoke a backlash against dissident groups. Many Iranians, however, blamed Ayatullah Khomeini, a Shi'ite mullah (religious leader) who has lived in exile in Iraq since 1963. Khomeini swore unrelenting enmity to the Shah after hundreds of his followers were killed while protesting the monarch's land-reform program. Alone among Shi'ite leaders, Khomeini failed to condemn the Abadan atrocity...
...late leftist Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, who was ousted after a showdown with the Shah in 1953. But the main thrust of the present opposition comes from the Shi'ite mullahs, religious leaders who are, in a sense, priests and theologians of Islam. Led by bearded, bespectacled Ayatullah Shariet-madari, 81, a kindly scholar honored through the Shi'ite world for his learning, the mullahs want Iran to be governed by Islamic law, as are Saudi Arabia and Libya. The mullahs' differences with the Shah date back to 1963, when they were divested of vast religious endowments...