Word: ayatullah
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week Iran's supreme spiritual leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, reaffirmed the death sentence against Rushdie proclaimed a year ago by his predecessor, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. "Mercenary hands which try to diminish Islam by cultural plots like writing blasphemous books," Khamenei said, would be punished...
...Hundreds of Azerbaijani Muslims who had illegally entered into Iran returned home, many of them bearing weapons. Ayatullah Abdul Karim Moussavi Ardebili, a former Iranian Chief Justice, said in Tehran that Communist states are "anti-God" and that Soviet Azerbaijan is now a "great market for the introduction of Islam." Though Iranian officials played down the crisis, perhaps fearing that Iran's Azerbaijani minority might take a lesson from events across the border, Ardebili's speech raised the possibility that Gorbachev should be less worried about Azerbaijan's becoming another Afghanistan than about its turning into another Iran...
Iran, which has been working to improve relations with Moscow since the death of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini last year, seemed embarrassed by the turmoil. In fact, Khomeini's successor, Hashemi Rafsanjani, may have inadvertently fueled the rise of ethnic nationalism in Soviet Azerbaijan when he stopped off there last June after visiting Moscow. He told large crowds in Baku that bilateral agreements he had just signed would lead to increased tourism and trade between the two Azerbaijani regions...
...mind." The metaphysics of global power has changed. Markets are now more valuable than territory, information more powerful than military hardware. For many years, the Soviets lived in paranoid isolation, fearful of Western culture (an old Russian tradition) and estranged from it in somewhat the way that Ayatullah Khomeini's Iranians quarantined themselves from the secular poisons of the West. Peasant cultures shrink from foreign contamination...
...abroad, but if so, only three countries seemed likely to accept them: China, which also sends tanks against its own people; North Korea, where dictator Kim Il Sung maintains a cult as extravagant as Ceausescu's; and Iran, where the Rumanian despot last week placed a wreath on the Ayatullah Khomeini's grave. At week's end Rumanian TV said the Ceausescus had been captured...