Word: mullah
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hojatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 52. Widely regarded as the second most powerful man in Iran, after Khomeini, Rafsanjani is a sharp-witted and clever politician. His power base is his position as Speaker of the mullah- dominated Majlis, or parliament, but he also has close ties to Khomeini and to the paramilitary Revolutionary Guards. Though his title of hojatoleslam is just one rank below ayatullah, Rafsanjani is no Islamic zealot. On most national issues he is said to have recently become a pragmatist, willing, for instance, to open doors to the West and to compromise in order...
...very bad man, a reactionary cleric, a towel-headed mullah ("towel-head" for short), a "cruel despot," a new shah...
...religious principles, or should one continue to dissimulate in the face of a government that is at least nominally devout. For Shi'its, the issue came to a head with the despotism of the Pahlavi dynasty in the last half-century. Finally, in 1963, a leading Shi'ite mullah declared the end of taqiya. The time had come, said Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, for Shi'its to stop rationalizing injustice...
...Muslim sect that dominates Iran and constitutes a majority in Bahrain. The nation is an obvious target for Iranian attempts to export the Ayatullah Khomeini's Islamic revolution. One of the masterminds of the December "incident," as it is called in Bahrain, was Hadi Modaresi, a mullah who had lived in Bahrain during the rule of the Shah and fomented trouble among the Shi'ites there. After the fall of the Shah, Modaresi returned to Iran, and he has been among the principal organizers of the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain. Pro-Western Arab intelligence organizations...
...rarely sees a mullah on the street, a clear sign of how hated the clergy are. Khomeini, once the idol of the people, has managed to become as hated as the Shah, if not more. The reason he has managed to retain his power is simple: a minority of Iranians are ferociously committed to him. But the people who do not support him have become cautious for two reasons: the regime's medieval brutality and their bitter disillusionment with revolutionary change. They are not willing to trust another leader easily, fearing a new, perhaps even more devastating betrayal...