Word: qum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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AYATULLAH SHARIETMADARI, 76, a Shi'ite scholar who speaks for the conservative, religious-based resistance to the Shah from within Iran, as Khomeini speaks for it from without. Sharietmadari, who lives in the holy city of Qum, is slightly less militant than his fellow mullah. He believes in an Islamic state but has not ruled out a constitutional monarchy so long as it adheres to Islamic principles. A holy war, he argues, is acceptable only as a last resort-that is, if the Shah ignores the Islamic community's legitimate demands. He insists on the segregation of sexes...
...hotel. Italian police, after combing hotels, boardinghouses and the homes of Lebanese in Rome, announced that there was no evidence that the Imam had ever been in the Italian capital. Throughout the Middle East, there were rumors that the Imam, who was born in the Iranian holy city of Qum, had secretly returned to his homeland to join the anti-Shah underground. Alternatively, there was a rumor he had been kidnaped by the Shah's secret police...
Sharietmadari's headquarters?and thus the heart of Iran's internal Islamic opposition?is Qum, a city of 300,000 that ranks with Najaf in Iraq as one of the world's greatest centers of Shi'ite learning. Located 75 miles south of Tehran, Qum is both a symbol and a model of the Iran that the mullahs yearn to preserve. No television aerials mar the pristine skyline; no public cinemas threaten to seduce the inquisitive; no bars or liquor stores offend the strict life of the observant. All women wear the chador and devote much of their lives...
...mosques of Qum are not simply places of learning and prayer. They have also become centers for political action. Says one dissident lawyer: "We have not been allowed to form political parties. We have no newspapers of our own. But the religious leaders have a built-in communications system. They easily reach the masses through their weekly sermons in the mosques and their network of mullahs throughout the nation. That is why so many nonreligious elements cloak their opposition in the mantle of religion...
Turbaned, gray-bearded and bespectacled Ayatullah Sharietmadari, 76, looks like anything but a revolutionary. He has a kindly, gentle manner. A revered scholar, he spends most of his days sitting on the floor of his bone-bare home in Qum, discussing the subtleties of Islamic thought with theological students who come to him from all over the Muslim world. His name is less a symbol of political resistance than that of Ayatullah Khomeini, 80, who has been in exile since 1963 and now lives in Iraq. But among those mullahs still inside Iran, Sharietmadari is the acknowledged leader...