Word: khomeini
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Salman Rushdie did not ask to become the free-speech hero to the literary world; he is too complex a writer to wave any flags. Rushdie was transformed into the world's most famous living author by the Ayatolla Khomeini's 1989 fatwah, a chilling text, and perhaps a more revolutionary piece of writing than Rushdie's novel...
Coming from Salman Rushdie, the notion of a man writing under a death sentence takes on a certain poignance. And the temptation exists, since he is the West's most prominent enforced recluse, to read everything he has written since the Ayatullah Khomeini's infamous fatwa in 1988 as a comment on his personal dilemma. But The Moor's Last Sigh--Rushdie's first novel since The Satanic Verses--should not be taken only, or even principally, as veiled autobiography. It is much too teeming and turbulent, too crammed with history and dreams, to fit into any imaginable category, except...
...Iran's variety of militant political Islam? To Bill Clinton and Warren Christopher, it is one of the most dangerous forces on earth. But listen to what an Iranian housewife named Hafezeh has to say. Earlier this month, just before the sixth anniversary of the death of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, she sat on a carpet inside his gold-domed mausoleum. Under her loosely draped chador she wore blue jeans and a bright turquoise blouse...
...that, Iran is still a much less fervid, single-minded country than it was under Khomeini. Suffering as it does from a discredited ideology, unbridled corruption and a ruined economy, it most nearly resembles the Soviet Union in its last years. At the moment there is no realistic alternative to the revolutionary institutions that govern Iran, but in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s there was no obvious alternative to the Communist Party, and still it collapsed. Moreover, Iran is threatened by the pull of Western culture and democracy. Iranians crave the prosperity they see in the West...
DIED. AHMAD KHOMEINI, 48, militant son of the late Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini; after a heart attack; in Tehran. He played no official role but was considered the standard bearer of the Ayatullah's revolutionary preachings...