Word: motahari
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...gave the deposed Shah his weapons?" asked Rafsanjani. "Who supported him as long as he could kill?" At week's end Rafsanjani was himself shot and wounded in an assassination attempt by Forghan, a terrorist group that earlier killed a former army chief of staff and Ayatullah Morteza Motahari, one of Iran's leading theologians...
...include two businessmen who had held no official positions in the Shah's regime. At the same time, the conflict between the ruling Islamic conservatives and the angry left grew wider, as government and religious leaders blamed the Communists for the assassination on May 1 of Morteza Motahari, a prominent Ayatullah and a member of the Revolutionary Council...
Although twelve reputed members of Forghan are reported to have been arrested for the murders of Motahari and Major General Mohammed Vali Gharani, former army Chief of Staff, the government was releasing little information on the case. Leaflets left by the group tried to portray its members as devoted to "Islam without the clergy." But many observers, in fact, believe that the professionally carried-out assassinations were the work of former SAVAK agents bent on creating anarchy or of vengeance squads associated with former top officials who have been executed...
...government, for its part, said that the assassination was an attack on the very heart of the revolution-and some blamed the Communists. Motahari was the author of several theological textbooks widely used in Iran, and like most Shi'ite leaders he shared Khomeini's views of Islam as a political religion. A day of mourning was proclaimed, and he was honored as a martyr. After a huge funeral procession in the holy city of Qum, where Motahari had taught at the Faizieh School, one of Iran's leading theological colleges, Khomeini mourned...
Criticism of the regime seems to be rising at both extremes of Iran's political spectrum. Hours before Motahari's murder, 200,000 demonstrators, most of them leftists, joined in a May Day march in Tehran to protest high unemployment and the stagnation of the country's economy. Trying to cool tempers, Islamic leaders called on all Iranians to exercise "revolutionary patience" and cautioned against "professional, foreign-led agitators and antirevolutionaries...