Word: qum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Those who know the Ayatullah expect that eventually he will settle in the Shi'ite holy city of Qum and resume a life of teaching and prayer. It seems improbable that he would try to become a kind of Archbishop Makarios of Iran, directly holding the reins of power. Khomeini believes that Iran should become a parliamentary democracy, with several political parties. But he is unlikely to withdraw to shadows and silence until Iran adopts a new constitution and the threat of civil war is removed...
American experts on Iran tend to believe the Ayatullah's aides when they insist that he has no ambitions to head any new government. Expectations are that he will eventually return to his home in the holy city of Qum (pronounced, roughly, koom) and resume a life of prayer and learning. He may serve as an arbiter of last resort, leaving the details of government to professional politicians. The Shi'ite branch of Islam, to which most Iranians adhere, has no formal hierarchy. Five other Ayatullahs are deemed theoretically equal to Khomeini as spiritual leaders. They may urge...
...cause. Throughout the crisis, Khomeini issued daily Elamiehs (bulletins) from exile counseling his followers to share their grain, return to work in the oilfields, treat soldiers with kindness, and the like. These were recorded in Persian on a cassette, then played over the phone to a headquarters in Qum, reported TIME Correspondent Sandy Burton from Paris. That cassette was then transcribed by followers who mimeographed it and distributed it in the form of flyers to Shi'ites in that city. At the same time, the messages were played over telephone lines to some 9,000 mosques all over Iran...
...Ayatullah (an honorific title meaning sign of God) was born in central Iran, the son of a mullah who was shot to death-according to Khomeini followers, by Iranian government agents-while on a pilgrimage to Iraq. Educated largely at the holy city of Qum, Iran's orthodox Shi'ite center of learning, Khomeini became what has been described as a "fine medieval scholar." That did not mean he was an expert on the Iranian Middle Ages, but rather that his Islamic philosophical and legal expertise belong to an intellectual tradition unstudied in the West since the 16th...
...number of symptoms of a growing restiveness within the Shah's army as its small-scale clashes with the citizenry continue. In Najafabad, located near the industrial city of Isfahan, security forces were reported to have gone on a rampage against political dissidents. In the holy city of Qum, soldiers fired on a group of marchers. In the northeastern town of Mashhad, troops and police burst into a hospital and beat up the staff for having tended injured protesters...