Word: khomeini
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Saturday was not the only time last week that Clinton used the symbolic power of the presidency to defend free speech. Earlier, Clinton met with author Salman Rushdie, whose 1989 book The Satanic Verses earned him a death sentence from Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. President Bush had shunned such meetings, with his press secretary derisively dismissing Rushdie as just another "author promoting his book...
...cover caused a sensation, including innumerable phone protests and a then record 3,430 letters to the editor. That controversy was far overshadowed in 1979 by the selection of the Ayatullah Khomeini as Man of the Year, which drew 14,180 protests...
...safer place for the sheik to be. Since he first rose to global prominence last February, the state-influenced Egyptian press has been warning darkly of a "crisis" in U.S.-Egyptian relations. Rattled by reports in the U.S. media that depicted Abdel Rahman as "a new Khomeini" and Egypt as a state on the edge of a fundamentalist revolution, Egyptians sniped back that the Americans were bungling the entire affair and turning an otherwise inconsequential cleric into a hero for Egypt's disaffected youth. Mubarak was quoted in the Egyptian press as saying "the sheik has been a CIA agent...
Four and a half years after the end of Iran's disastrous war with Iraq, nearly four years after Ayatullah Khomeini's death, a happier national spirit is struggling to emerge. The problem for outsiders is to square what sometimes appears to be a Persian lamb with a notably lion-like personality. The superficial prosperity of Tehran is illusory. Because of war and runaway population growth -- estimated at 3.6% a year, though that may be declining -- per capita economic output has shrunk about 40% since 1979. Many factories are running at only 40% to 50% of capacity...
More important, Abdelkarim Soroush, a leading intellectual of the anti-Shah revolution, has openly challenged the clergy's infallibility. "Religion is sacred," he said in an interview, "but the understanding and interpretation are not necessarily sacred." Religious interpretations, he said, "are like chemistry and mathematics. They are debatable." Khomeini's heirs will increasingly have to reconcile the everyday requirements of national life with the exigencies of holy law. If they also intend to be taken seriously in the community of nations, they will have to stop using violence and terror in the pursuit of Iran's interests...