Word: khomeini
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Khomeini may even wish to transcend Iranian nationalism and export his fundamentalist Islamic revival. The prospect of such contagious piety disturbs other Muslim leaders, the Saudi royal family, for example. But it also raises apprehension and a certain amount of bewilderment in the West. When Mahdist Saudi zealots took over the mosque in Mecca last month, the Islamic world displayed a disconcerting readiness to believe Khomeini's incendiary report that the attack had been the work of Zionists and U.S. imperialists. "The Americans have done it again," many Muslims told themselves reflexively. Some Americans have responded by asking with...
...great is the mutual incomprehension that international relations degenerate rapidly to the chaotic psychology of the mob. Although U.S. reactions have been, all things considered, remarkably mild, the Iranian crisis has legitimized among Americans a new stereotype of the demented Muslim. Says University of Wisconsin Historian Kemal H. Karpat: "Khomeini has done more harm to the Islamic image in one month than all the propaganda of the past 15 years...
...some ways the Islamic world's excuse for its own failures, confusions and periodic collapses into incoherence. It is more convenient morally to blame the West than to gaze steadily at the Islamic dilemma, easier to devise revenge for the past than ideas for the future. Khomeini, with his absolutist pretensions and aggressive fantasies of jihad (holy war) against the West, demeans Islam; he gives it the aspect of a bizarre, dangerous but spiritually trivial cult. To the extent that Muslims support Khomeini, they share in the image of Islam that he has created...
After the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by Iranian radicals, some of Washington's Middle East experts predicted that this outrageous violation of international custom would brand Ayatullah Khomeini as a pariah in the Islamic world. The experts were wrong. Certainly the majority of Khomeini's neighboring rulers disapprove of the embassy invasion and the holding of diplomatic hostages. But the denunciations of the Ayatullah have not been as loud or as specific as the U.S. would like. That is partly because Khomeini's skill at rousing Iranian mobs to a pitch of zealotry...
Beyond that, Khomeini's Islamic revolution over the long term probably poses as great a threat to the Soviet Union, with its huge Muslim population (some 50 million) as it does to U.S. interests. Moscow's best hope lies in the fact that as long as the current state of near anarchy prevails in Iran, there is the chance of a new revolution that would bring the Marxist left to the fore...