Word: khomeini
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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While historians ponder this question, it is enough to say that Khomeini presided brilliantly over the overthrow of a wounded regime. He was merciless and cunning. His well-advertised piety complemented a prodigious skill in grasping and shaping Iran's complex politics. Most important, he knew how to exploit the feelings of nationalist resentment that characterized his time...
...Ruhollah Khomeini--his given name means "inspired of God"--was born to a family of Shi'ite scholars in a village near Tehran in 1902. Shi'ism, a minority sect in Islam, is Iran's official religion. Like his father, he moved from theological studies to a career as an Islamic jurist. Throughout his life, he was acclaimed for the depth of his religious learning...
...young seminary teacher, Khomeini was no activist. From the 1920s to the 1940s, he watched passively as Reza Shah, a monarch who took Ataturk as his model, promoted secularization and narrowed clerical powers. Similarly, Khomeini was detached from the great crisis of the 1950s in which Reza Shah's son Mohammed Reza Pahlavi turned to America to save himself from demonstrators on Tehran's streets who were clamoring for democratic reform...
...Khomeini was then the disciple of Iran's pre-eminent cleric, Ayatullah Mohammed Boroujerdi, a defender of the tradition of clerical deference to established power. But in 1962, after Boroujerdi's death, Khomeini revealed his long-hidden wrath and acquired a substantial following as a sharp-tongued antagonist of the Shah...
...Khomeini was clearly at home with populist demagogy. He taunted the Shah for his ties with Israel, warning that the Jews were seeking to take over Iran. He denounced as non-Islamic a bill to grant the vote to women. He called a proposal to permit American servicemen based in Iran to be tried in U.S. military courts "a document for Iran's enslavement." In 1964 he was banished by the Shah to Turkey, then was permitted to relocate in the Shi'ite holy city of An Najaf in Iraq. But the Shah erred in thinking Khomeini would be forgotten...