Word: khomeini
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Popularly acclaimed as leader, Khomeini set out to confirm his authority and lay the groundwork for a clerical state. With revolutionary fervor riding high, armed vigilante bands and kangaroo courts made bloody work of the Shah's last partisans. Khomeini canceled an experiment with parliamentarism and ordered an Assembly of Experts to draft an Islamic constitution. Overriding reservations from the Shi'ite hierarchy, the delegates designed a state that Khomeini would command and the clergy would run, enforcing religious law. In November, Khomeini partisans, with anti-American passions still rising, seized the U.S. embassy and held 52 hostages...
Over the remaining decade of his life, Khomeini consolidated his rule. Proving himself as ruthless as the Shah had been, he had thousands killed while stamping out a rebellion of the secular left. He stacked the state bureaucracies with faithful clerics and drenched the schools and the media with his personal doctrines. After purging the military and security services, he rebuilt them to ensure their loyalty to the clerical state...
...Khomeini also launched a campaign to "export"--the term was his--the revolution to surrounding Muslim countries. His provocations of Iraq in 1980 helped start a war that lasted eight years, at the cost of a million lives, and that ended only after America intervened to sink several Iranian warships in the Persian Gulf. Iranians asked whether God had revoked his blessing of the revolution. Khomeini described the defeat as "more deadly than taking poison...
...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...