Word: ayatullah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...useful counterweight to Syrian and Iranian regional ambitions. But an anti-Western alliance that includes Iran, Syria, Hizballah and Hamas wants to roll back U.S. influence in the Middle East, using Lebanon as the pivot. "Lebanon will be the defeat point for Israel and America," Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei said last week. The country is holding its collective breath to see whether the demonstrations will escalate. "In the mid-1970s we passed through a similar situation and the country's leaders took us to civil war," recalls Wassef Awada, columnist for the Beirut daily As-Safir. "Will...
...most immediate is Muqtada al-Sadr, who must be removed from the equation. We cannot be the agency of his removal, of course, but Sadr has many enemies, including rivals within his own organization. The other Shi'ite parties will also be obstacles-and, of course, the Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani will need to be assuaged-but the strength of these groups has diminished as Sadr's power has increased in the past year, and it is possible they can be brought into the tent. The threat of a U.S. withdrawal, which would leave these groups at the mercy...
...most immediate is Muqtada al-Sadr, who must be removed from the equation. We cannot be the agency of his removal, of course, but Sadr has many enemies, including rivals within his own organization. The other Shi'ite parties will also be obstacles--and, of course, the Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani will need to be assuaged--but the strength of these groups has diminished as Sadr's power has increased in the past year, and it is possible they can be brought into the tent. The threat of a U.S. withdrawal, which would leave these groups at the mercy...
...President Bush may have put Iran in the "axis of evil," but Iran's Ayatullah Khomeini did it to the U.S. first. In 1979 he started what has become an Iranian tradition--calling the U.S. "the Great Satan...
...cash-for-fatwas" scandal has also led to a renewed debate on what constitutes a fatwa, and who has legitimate authority to issue one. Fatwas - like the one passed by Iran's Ayatullah Khomeini in 1989 against the novelist Salman Rushdie, or those issued by Osama bin Laden in 1996 and 1998 against America - have come to epitomize the intolerance of Islamic fundamentalists. Yet many Muslims argue that the purpose of fatwas has been misunderstood: A fatwa is, technically speaking, a ruling on a point of Islamic law made by a recognized Muslim scholar in response to a question...