Word: ayatullahs
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...Salman Rushdie hadn't been sentenced to death by Ayatullah Khomeini and if he weren't chummy with the likes of Kylie Minogue, he would be famous merely for being one of the world's greatest living writers. He chats with TIME's Lev Grossman about his new novel, Shalimar the Clown (coming in September), the crisis in Kashmir, the nature of tragedy and the future of the Klingon race...
...Iranian penetration of Iraq was a long time in planning. On Sept. 9, 2002, with U.S. bases being readied in Kuwait, Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei summoned his war council in Tehran. According to Iranian sources, the Supreme National Security Council concluded, "It is necessary to adopt an active policy in order to prevent long-term and short-term dangers to Iran." Iran's security services had supported the armed wings of several Iraqi groups they had sheltered in Iran from Saddam. Iranian intelligence sources say that the various groups were organized under the command of Brigadier General Qassim Sullaimani...
...attacks on September 11, 2001, orchestrated by Saudi native Osama bin Laden and carried out by 15 Saudi militants, ensured that Fahd would go down in history as the Saudi ruler who turned a blind eye to growing Islamic extremism. To protect the regime from spreading Islamic revolution following Ayatullah Khomeini's overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Fahd gave the Kingdom's ultra conservative Islamic establishment the green light to promote an ever rigid Wahhabi form of Islam so long as it continued to recognize the legitimacy of the House of Saud as Saudi Arabia's political leadership. After...
...basij are on a roll right now, having organized the get-out-the-vote effort that propelled hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a landslide victory in last month's presidential election. The militia, whose name means mobilization in Persian, was created by Ayatullah Khomeini in the 1980s to recruit young men to fight against Iraq. But a decade later, they took on the role of an official morality police, becoming better known for raiding parties than for raiding the Iraqi front line. June's election, however, marked the first use of the basij as a mobilizing tool in electoral politics...
...biggest winner in this election is Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. Since succeeding to the head of the theocracy with the death of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, Khamenei has always had to contend with rival conservatives like Rafsanjani or with reformist Mohammed Khatami, who has held the presidency since then. While that office has always been much less powerful than that of the venerable Supreme Leader (Khamenei, while theoretically above politics, runs Iranian foreign and nuclear policy from behind closed doors), the presidency has been a strategic bully pulpit for those with ideas different from the theocracy...