Word: khomeini
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...Khomeini's long rise to power began with a series of confrontations with the regime of the Shah. In 1962 he led a general strike of the clergy to protest reforms allowing witnesses in court to swear by any "divine book," instead of the Koran alone. By the spring of 1963 he was under house arrest for telling huge crowds at Qum that just a "flick of the finger" could sweep away the Shah. Soon after his release a few months later, Khomeini was arrested again, this time for fomenting riots against a modernization program that included land reform...
Then the Shah's government made the crucial mistake of asking Iraq to expel Khomeini. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein complied, thereby earning Khomeini's abiding hostility. In October 1978 the Ayatullah went to France and settled in Neauphle-le-Chateau, a Paris suburb, where for the first time he enjoyed the full glare of Western press attention. Shortly after his arrival, the continuing massive street demonstrations and battles between the Iranian soldiers and protesters turned the tide against the regime and led, within three months, to the Shah's exile. In February 1979 Khomeini made his triumphant return to Iran...
...Khomeini's ascent to power worked a remarkable change in a man who had once seemed a gentle, if extraordinarily zealous, cleric. During the upheaval that toppled the Shah, Khomeini urged his followers to remain nonviolent. In part, this was a shrewd wish to avoid harsh military reprisals, but his caution also reflected Khomeini's temperament at that time. Abolhassan Banisadr, whom Khomeini ousted as President in 1981, notes that in the final weeks of Khomeini's exile the Ayatullah "would not even kill a fly." Yet after Khomeini became Iran's ruler, he exhorted his countrymen to kill, burn...
...Khomeini and his followers attempted to stifle every vestige of opposition to the imposition of a Muslim theocracy. In so doing they set standards for brutality and injustice that at least equaled -- and probably surpassed -- the worst excesses of the Shah's regime. A clergy-dominated security system soon rivaled SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, in terror and bloodthirstiness...
While he was consolidating his revolution at home, Khomeini was seeking to extend it to other nations. Iraq attacked Iran across the Shatt al-Arab in September 1980 after Khomeini called for an uprising of Iraqi Shi'ites and fomented skirmishes along the border. Iranian forces blunted the Iraqi offensive, and two months after the war began, the conflict was largely stalemated. After years of fighting, Tehran lost all hope of victory when Iraq stopped an Iranian drive for the port city of Basra in early 1987; a year later, Iraq began the offensive that eventually brought Iran...