Word: khomeini
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...death the writer Salman Rushdie for heresies contained in his novel The Satanic Verses. Though born a Muslim, Rushdie was not a Shi'ite; a British subject, he had no ties to Iran. The fatwa, an audacious claim of authority over Muslims everywhere, was the revolution's ultimate export. Khomeini died a few months later. But the fatwa lived on, a source of bitterness--as he intended it to be--between Iran and the West...
Beside the fatwa, what is Khomeini's legacy? The revolution, no longer at risk, still revels in having repeatedly, with impunity, defied the American Satan. The Islamic state was proof to the faithful--as the Soviet Union was to generations of communists--that the Western system need not be a universal model...
...Khomeini rejected a parallel between his doctrines and the fundamentalism propounded by other Muslim dissidents. He never described himself as fundamentalist. He often said that Islam is not for 14 centuries ago in Arabia but for all time...
...Since Khomeini's death, the popular appeal of an Islamic state--and of fundamentalism--has surely dimmed. Thinkers still debate and warriors kill, but no country seems prepared to emulate Iran. Perhaps revolutions happen only under majestic leaders, and no one like Khomeini has since appeared...
...thugs and the monsters as well as the role models. In fact, it should be noted at once that at least five of the men on the list were opponents, in one way or another, of women's rights: Hitler, with his famed Kinder, Kuche, Kirche policy; Khomeini, the fashion expert who brought back the chador; Reagan, with his hostility to abortion rights and the ERA; the sweet but incorrigibly patriarchal Pope John Paul...