Word: khomeini
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Outside the city, a huge gold-domed shrine marking the tomb of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who died in 1989, is all but complete, and on weekends families flock there. But apart from a few offering fervent prayers near his tomb, most of the visitors chat and play with their children, unawed by the presence of the revolutionary imam's earthly remains...
Twelve years after Khomeini came to power, Iran's Islamic revolution has finally softened around the edges. The signs of fitful change are everywhere. On Tehran's streets women still observe hijab (the veil), the Islamic injunction that women keep themselves covered save for their faces and hands. But some have exchanged their shapeless black chadors for slightly fitted raincoats in colors like green and purple. Veils that are supposed to completely cover a woman's hair are inching back to reveal hints of the lush coiffures underneath. Women's lips and fingernails are beginning to sport glosses...
Much of that change, dramatic by the standards of revolutionary Iran, has been at least indirectly endorsed by President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who came to power two months after Khomeini's death. Rafsanjani has not actually called for a reversal of strict Islamic injunctions, but in oblique ways he is signaling that he favors a more relaxed approach, especially in the enforcement of hijab. In a much publicized sermon last November, for example, Rafsanjani chided fellow clerics who make a virtue of "austerity" and argued that "appreciating beauty and seeking embellishment are serious feelings. To fight them...
...weapons sales to Iraq before August 1990. Explain to the public that it was in the country's interest to sell military technology to Iraq to help Saddam wreak havoc on Iran during their eight-year war. Remind citizens about the U.S. hostages and our opposition to the Khomeini-led regime...
...treating any objections from Saddam with the same contempt voiced by the French. It could send similar aid to refugees reaching Iran. Such cooperation in concert with a country that has been hostile to the U.S. for more than a decade might even help to draw % Ayatullah Khomeini's more moderate successors back into the world community...