Word: ayatullah
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Khomeini was educated as a scholar in Qum, the holy city where he worked as a teacher, married and reared a family of six children. An excellent instructor, he was fascinated by the Greek philosophers, especially Plato, whose Republic provided the Ayatullah with a model for his own concept of the ideal state, in which the philosopher-king was replaced by the Islamic theologian...
Then the Shah's government made the crucial mistake of asking Iraq to expel Khomeini. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein complied, thereby earning Khomeini's abiding hostility. In October 1978 the Ayatullah went to France and settled in Neauphle-le-Chateau, a Paris suburb, where for the first time he enjoyed the full glare of Western press attention. Shortly after his arrival, the continuing massive street demonstrations and battles between the Iranian soldiers and protesters turned the tide against the regime and led, within three months, to the Shah's exile. In February 1979 Khomeini made his triumphant return to Iran...
...urged his followers to remain nonviolent. In part, this was a shrewd wish to avoid harsh military reprisals, but his caution also reflected Khomeini's temperament at that time. Abolhassan Banisadr, whom Khomeini ousted as President in 1981, notes that in the final weeks of Khomeini's exile the Ayatullah "would not even kill a fly." Yet after Khomeini became Iran's ruler, he exhorted his countrymen to kill, burn and destroy...
...gaining greater cultural and political autonomy. The excesses led to nearly 10,000 executions -- some put the actual figure as high as 20,000 -- and tens of thousands of arrests. This provoked a campaign of assassination by dissident Islamic guerrillas that eliminated hundreds of top members of the Ayatullah's regime...
Wylie, 41, is a peevish Manhattan literary agent whose most famous client is Salman Rushdie. It was Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, that prompted the Ayatullah Khomeini to order his execution. The Wylie-Rushdie pairing is apt: if only one of them is an agent, both are provocateurs. At a time when many agents have turned mercenary, Wylie tops them all in aggressiveness and acerbity. Says he: "This little East Hampton approach to publishing, where publishers and agents share summer houses so that they can get together and shaft the writers, has gone by the board -- I'd like...