Word: hashemi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Iran's retreat from the anti-American orthodoxy of the late Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini accelerated last week. At the opening session of an international oil conference in Isfahan, President Hashemi Rafsanjani called for increased economic and political cooperation with the West and better relations with Iran's gulf neighbors. The overture was fueled largely by the need on the part of Tehran for foreign help to rebuild after its debilitating eight-year war with Iraq, which ended in 1988, as well as for long-term, reliable customers for its oil. Last year Iran launched a five-year campaign to attract...
Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful Shi'ite literary critic who 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...
Much of that change, dramatic by the standards of revolutionary Iran, has been at least indirectly endorsed by President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who came to power two months after Khomeini's death. Rafsanjani has not actually called for a reversal of strict Islamic injunctions, but in oblique ways he is signaling that he favors a more relaxed approach, especially in the enforcement of hijab. In a much publicized sermon last November, for example, Rafsanjani chided fellow clerics who make a virtue of "austerity" and argued that "appreciating beauty and seeking embellishment are serious feelings. To fight them...
Iran's motives in seizing the planes are more political than material. President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani plainly hopes to redeem Iran's tough behavior toward Iraq for better ties with the West and the gulf countries. Iran may still use the planes -- and their pilots, who remain in detention -- as leverage in any future bargaining with Iraq over a final settlement of the Iran-Iraq war, for which there is now only an oral peace pact. If that fails and the planes eventually decompose into pricey rust heaps, at least Iran will have the satisfaction of knowing that Saddam...
...rabble-rousers also included a large number of Shi'ite fundamentalists, some of whom paraded portraits of Mohammed Bakr Hakim, Iraq's leading Shi'ite cleric. Hakim lives in exile in Iran and aims to install a Tehran-like revolutionary government in Baghdad; Iran's President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani last week called on Saddam's regime to "surrender to the will of the people." Hakim cheered the insurrection but denied assertions that he had orchestrated it. "What we're seeing," said a senior Western envoy in Riyadh, "is a case of spontaneous internal combustion...