Word: khomeini
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...recent Saturday, 30 years to the day when Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in France, the Iranian government held a celebration in the massive shrine to Khomeini that is still under construction near the Tehran airport. The ceremony was a feel-good affair, with a marching band and schoolgirls in white chadors with pink butterfly wings. Speakers ranging from Khomeini's grandson to former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani celebrated the endurance of the world's only Islamic system of clerical and democratic rule. And each person who rose to the flower-strewn podium also used the occasion...
Anti-Americanism is a potent political trope here because it is rooted in grievances. Just down the road from the Khomeini shrine is the Behesht-e Zahra martyrs' cemetery--one of many such scattered plots that contain the remains of more than 200,000 Iranian soldiers who died in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. The widows and mothers who come here on Thursdays--the beginning of the weekend in Iran--to wash graves and pass out sweets and fruit to strangers remember that the rockets, jets and chemical weapons used to kill their sons and husbands were provided...
Three decades after Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's triumphant return to Iran to claim power on the ruins of the Shah's regime, Iran's Islamic revolution can still draw a crowd. That much was clear Tuesday as several hundred thousand people converged on Tehran's Freedom Square to celebrate its 30th anniversary at the very spot where Khomeini was first welcomed home from his exile in France. (See pictures of Khomeini's triumphant return to Iran...
...rally, at once gaudy and solemn, marked the culmination of weeks of celebrations that have seen streets bedecked with posters of Khomeini, TV and radio broadcasts of songs with lyrics such as "When the demon [the Shah] leaves, the angel [Khomeini] enters," and endless interviews with heroes of the struggle against the Shah's regime. (See images of the rise and fall of the Shah of Iran...
...pink coats and hijabs performed a combination of martial arts and dance moves to a techno version of a marching song. They were followed on the stage by Tom & Jerry and a moderator who offered a prize for the right response to a quiz question: "Where did the Imam [Khomeini] deliver his first speech?" There were at least a dozen wrong guesses before someone ventured, "At the airport...