Word: ayatullah
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...more than 6 in. apart, and they are advancing rapidly in tree-lined squares toward the perimeter of the 1.5-sq.-mi. cemetery. Aluminum-and-glass display cases contain photographs of the dead, many of them teenagers, along with family heirlooms. Most also bear a picture of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the octogenarian who guides Iran's side of the bloody campaign, as he does every other facet of life in Iran...
...only one hardship that presses in on Iranians. It is an irony of the Ayatullah's revolution that six years after the Shah's ouster, the average Iranian is no better off materially. And it would appear that the country has swapped one set of constraints on personal freedom for another. There is still abundant evidence of overcrowding and wretchedness. Two pounds of meat that cost just over a dollar in 1978 now costs $12 on the open market. Medical services have deteriorated, foreign travel is difficult...
...middle class Iranians, who have not been cowed or shorn of their natural bellicosity and are thus still suspect to many of the regime's leaders. They voice their criticism of the regime relatively freely, if privately. They crack jokes about the clergy, often at the expense of Ayatullah Hussein Ali Montazeri, Khomeini's heir apparent, who is regarded as pious but simple. "The clerics are making a mess of the economy," says a businessman who complains bitterly about the shortage of foreign exchange. "They should stick to preaching and let us run the economy...
...regime likes to blame much of what it regards as decadent behavior on Western influence, particularly that of the U.S. And there is no more powerful symbol of Iran's rigid stance before the outside world than the 25-acre American embassy compound at Ayatullah Talagani Street. Today it is in the hands of the Revolutionary Guards, its walls still daubed with the students' anti-American slogans...
...field of seven candidates, Ahmadinejad won about 19% of the popular vote, nowhere near the more than 50% needed to become President outright. But the favorite, the pragmatic Ayatullah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 70, won only 21%, hence this Friday's runoff vote between the two. The reformers on last week's ballot, supporters of the policies of outgoing President Mohammed Khatami, were badly trounced and now see in Ahmadinejad's smiling face a stealth campaign by Iran's conservative ruling ayatullahs to take the presidency, denying it even to Rafsanjani, who has his fair share of hard-line credentials...