Word: khomeini
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...Khomeini vowed to pursue the conflict with Iraq to the "frontiers of martyrdom," and sent an estimated 900,000 Iranians, many of them not yet teenagers, beyond that frontier. But in August 1988, the loss of key positions forced Tehran to accept a United Nations-sponsored cease-fire in the eight- year war. It was, said the Ayatullah, a decision "more deadly than drinking poison...
...before the cease-fire decision, when a U.S. frigate mistakenly shot down an Iranian jetliner with 290 people aboard: international response was notably muted. In the following months, leading Iranian politicians such as Parliamentary Speaker Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 54, attempted to soften their country's radical image. But Khomeini would have none of it. Last February he prompted a worldwide outcry when he demanded the death of Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born, British author of The Satanic Verses, a book many regard as blasphemous to Islam. "It is incumbent on every Muslim to do everything possible to send...
...Khomeini's reassertion of radical Islamic rejectionism soon claimed his appointed successor, Ayatullah Ali Montazeri, 65, as a victim. Montazeri had harshly criticized the war with Iraq and did not endorse the killing of Rushdie. In late March he was forced to resign...
...obscure religious fanatic to lead one of the great revolutionary upheavals of this century? To begin with, the time was ripe. The Shah had pushed his feudal and devout country into the modern, secular world too far and too fast, using torture and execution to suppress dissent. In addition, Khomeini's place in the world of Shi'ite theology gave him a platform. Unlike Sunni Muslims, members of Islam's other, much larger branch, Shi'ites believe in an intermediary between God and man. In Shi'ism's first centuries, this role of mediator was played by the Twelve Imams...
...Khomeini was educated as a scholar in Qum, the holy city where he worked as a teacher, married and reared a family of six children. An excellent instructor, he was fascinated by the Greek philosophers, especially Plato, whose Republic provided the Ayatullah with a model for his own concept of the ideal state, in which the philosopher-king was replaced by the Islamic theologian...