Word: hojatoleslam
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...Hojatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 52. Widely regarded as the second most powerful man in Iran, after Khomeini, Rafsanjani is a sharp-witted and clever politician. His power base is his position as Speaker of the mullah- dominated Majlis, or parliament, but he also has close ties to Khomeini and to the paramilitary Revolutionary Guards. Though his title of hojatoleslam is just one rank below ayatullah, Rafsanjani is no Islamic zealot. On most national issues he is said to have recently become a pragmatist, willing, for instance, to open doors to the West and to compromise in order...
...Hojatoleslam Seyed Ali Khamene'i, 47. Now serving his second term as President of Iran, Khamene'i is one of the regime's hard-liners. He has tried to undercut Rafsanjani, so far without success. Khamene'i is a strong proponent of exporting the Islamic revolution and a passionate enforcer of Islamic codes. At a January meeting of nonaligned states in Harare, Zimbabwe, he refused to shake hands with female officials from that African nation because Islamic practice requires strict separation of the sexes...
Last August, Iran's prosecutor-general, Hojatoleslam Hossein Musavi Tabrizi, ordered the abolition of all Baha'i organizations. The community obediently shut down its 400 local meetinghouses and dissolved the national and local governing councils. In the months since Tabrizi's declaration, a farmer was lynched, a young woman was slain by a mob just after she gave birth, and 190 more Baha'is were arrested. Says Mehri Mavaddat, an Iranian refugee lawyer now living in Toronto whose husband was executed in 1981: "The killings are very casual. That's what makes them so horrible...