Word: leader
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This hope of playing a win-win game shows up in overtures to Jews in particular, made mainly after Muhammad moved to the city of Medina and became its political and religious leader. Muhammad decided his followers should have an annual 24-hour fast, as Jews did on Yom Kippur. He even called it Yom Kippur - at least he used the term some Arabian Jews were using for Yom Kippur. The Jewish ban on eating pork was mirrored in a Muslim ban. Muhammad also told his followers to pray facing Jerusalem. He said God, in his "prescience," chose "the children...
Despite the convulsions in Tehran's streets in the aftermath of a disputed presidential election, Iranians - and the smart folks in Washington - know that Iran's presidency is not the seat of executive power. Unelected mullahs hold veto power over the decisions of the elected government, and their Supreme Leader, currently Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, must approve all political policies and make the key foreign policy and security decisions. No one can run for president without the approval of the clerics, and they routinely narrow the field to those deemed acceptable within the parameters of the Islamic Revolution...
...Khamenei has now done something extraordinary to the regime's democratic apparatus. Even though Iran's Electoral Commission allows three days to hear challenges before presenting results to Khamenei for approval, the Supreme Leader rushed to put his seal of approval on the outcome, and warned all political factions to refrain from challenging it. His imposition of the result, just hours after the polls closed, stunned the country as doubts about the legitimacy of vote were voiced widely both inside and outside Iran. ((Read TIME"s coverage of Iran's post-election street fighting...
...Iran has been governed by a power structure that combines unelected clerics with an elected legislature and presidency. Under the revolution's principle of velayat e-faqi or "guardianship of the jurisprudent," ultimate political authority rests in the hands of the Shi'ite clergy, first among them the Supreme Leader, chosen by an unelected Assembly of Experts. Still, the regime always sought to affirm its legitimacy through holding elections for parliament and the president...
...restrictions, the country's democratic institutions have been capable of surprising and rebuking the conservative mullahs - as occurred in 1997, when reformist Mohammed Khatami won the presidency by a landslide. But if Khatami's failed reformist tenure highlighted the limits of the power of Iran's presidency, the Supreme Leader has also traditionally sought consensus within the regime. While Khamenei has clearly favored those, like Ahmadinejad, who most closely reflect his own views, he has tried to protect the cohesion of the Islamic Republic's system by seeking to balance the influence of competing factions within its political establishment...