Word: qum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...trials were an acute embarrassment to Premier Mehdi Bazargan. Last month, angered by accounts of the humiliation of Hoveida in midnight hearings, Bazargan went on TV to denounce the summary trials as "a disgrace." During a midnight visit to the holy city of Qum, he persuaded Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the revolution, to suspend all trials (including Hoveida's) until new guidelines could be set. But when regulations were announced two weeks ago, the trials resumed not under the jurisdiction of the ministry of justice, but of a hitherto unknown Council of Revolutionary Tribunals. The council...
...television and radio address that spared no one, least of all Khomeini, the acknowledged leader of the Iranian revolution. The Prime Minister denounced the secret trials as "unreligious and inhuman," charging that they made the new government appear "shameful" to the rest of the world. Describing his sessions in Qum with the Ayatullah, Bazargan said he had told Khomeini, "You are making us desperate. At least you could consult us before you issue orders...
...Iran, for his "confidence in the holy writ of Islam" and his "past record in the national and Islamic struggle." By last week, the 78-year-old Shi'ite leader's view had changed sharply. Speaking to theological students at his headquarters in the holy city of Qum, he rapped his slightly younger (71) appointee. "You are weak, mister," he thundered. He also lambasted Bazargan's 17-member Cabinet as "weak characters" who believe that "everything should be copied from the West." Under Bazargan, Khomeini scoffed, "the nation lives in caves and nothing has changed." To make...
Among the more vulnerable items was clearly Bazargan, the gentle, democratic-minded engineer-politician who had been the chief adviser on oil matters to Iran's last revolutionary leader, Mohammed Mossadegh. Stung by Khomeini's diatribe, Bazargan went to Qum with an offer to resign. After some deliberation, Khomeini refused the resignation and pledged greater support for the government. But if that promise was not kept and Bazargan were to quit, authority in Iran would apparently rest solely with the Komiteh, the mullahs and other fervent Shi'ites whose grab for power has literally pulled the Persian...
...three days, the 300,000 residents of the holy city of Qum had carefully scrubbed the dusty streets and minareted buildings, making ready for the Ayatullah's return. Now, hundreds of thousands of people, chanting "God is great," lined the narrow highway from Tehran to catch a glimpse of him as his motorcade drove by. When the blue Mercedes bearing the 78-year-old Shi'ite leader neared the city, the throng burst through a cordon of police and armed Islamic guerrillas. It engulfed the car in a sea of humanity so dense that it took nearly...