Word: ayatullah
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...upheld a death sentence against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, wants to be a best-selling author himself. Rafsanjani's co-author is offering the 400-page manuscript for Our Revolution: The Ideology Behind the Movement to U.S. publishing houses. Excerpts from the work show that the Ayatullah Khomeini's political heir still has a jaundiced view of the Great Satan. "Our real desire, from the beginning, was to humiliate the United States throughout the world," writes Rafsanjani. Moreover, Westerners "are members of the school of pleasure-seeking, lasciviousness, enjoyment and entertainment . . . ((caught in)) the fetid, slimy...
Outside the city, a huge gold-domed shrine marking the tomb of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who died in 1989, is all but complete, and on weekends families flock there. But apart from a few offering fervent prayers near his tomb, most of the visitors chat and play with their children, unawed by the presence of the revolutionary imam's earthly remains...
...remarks ignited a debate among the country's mullahs that is still blazing. Two weeks ago, Ayatullah Abdul Karim Mousavi Ardebili, a conservative religious figure and former chief justice, said in a televised sermon that he was ashamed by the way hijab was being flouted and that "the revolution was headed for destruction" if the people did not step forward. Within a few days the Revolutionary Guards, who sometimes act independently of government wishes, began rounding up young women in the street whose dress they found objectionable. On Vali Asr Avenue, the capital's main shopping boulevard, a guardsman tried...
Rafsanjani cannot easily reverse 12 years of violent rhetoric directed against the "Great Satan." So while government officials have toned down the + diatribes against the U.S. in the hope of better relations, they still lash out now and again lest the contradictions become too obvious. Two weeks ago, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, the country's new spiritual leader, declared, "The U.S. will never have normal relations with a system that has made Islamic values its most cherished desire...
...Iraq and by treating any objections from Saddam with the same contempt voiced by the French. It could send similar aid to refugees reaching Iran. Such cooperation in concert with a country that has been hostile to the U.S. for more than a decade might even help to draw % Ayatullah Khomeini's more moderate successors back into the world community...