Word: khomeini
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Founded in Iran in the 1960s on an ideological platform merging Marxism and Islamism, the MEK worked alongside followers of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini to overthrow the shah in the 1979 Islamic revolution, and assisted in the ensuing U.S. embassy hostage crisis. But they clashed with Khomeini in the years that followed, leading to the killing, imprisonment and exile of thousands of the group's members. In 1986 the MEK set up a base at Camp Ashraf, located in Iraq's eastern Diyala province, and began receiving funding and protection from Saddam to launch attacks over the border into Iran...
...work, Midnight's Children, through his current The Enchantress of Florence, he has been obsessed with both formal and informal belief, but from the point of view of a highly-educated Muslim-born sceptic. This potentially flammable combination combusted in 1989 when Iran's then supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, sanctioned Rushdie's execution by the faithful for alleged blasphemies in his fictional exploration of Islam's origins, The Satanic Verses...
...course, the occasion of that pulpit stint was the fourth anniversary of Khomeini's fatwa, over which Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Iran and during which time Rushdie, on whose head a private Muslim foundation had placed a $2 million bounty, was under police protection. Finally in 1998 Iran said it would neither "help nor hinder" Rushdie's execution, and Rushdie resumed his version of a normal life: there was no obvious security at last week's event. But that experience allowed him to make a strong indirect point in favor of the new Institute. Conservative clerics and talk...
Rushdie emphasized this with regard to Islam, whose understanding of the Koran as an inerrant divine document dictated by an angel to the prophet Mohammed makes any Muslim study of its non-supernatural origins almost impossible. One of the several things that offended Khomeini was The Satanic Verses' willing creation of a fiction around precisely that historical process. But in some ways historical research is more threatening than invention. "There is so much contemporary scholarship about the origins of Islam," Rushdie said, pointing out that Mohammed lived well within the historical era. "If you insist that the text...
...flying to Iraq, which has been at war with Iran for six years. The diplomatic boot was part of the French government's attempt to improve relations with Iran in hopes of winning freedom for nine French hostages in Lebanon. The French expect that Iran's Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who spent four months of political exile in France in 1978-79, can wield influence over Lebanese Muslim extremists holding the nine. Earlier, the French government hinted that as part of a deal to free the hostages, it would be willing to negotiate the repayment of a $1 billion loan made...