Word: qum
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Ayatullah Hussein Ali Montazeri, 64. One of Iran's most revered holy men, Montazeri has ties to Khomeini that go back more than 40 years, to the time when Montazeri was a student of the revolutionary cleric in the holy city of Qum. A year ago, Montazeri was designated Khomeini's successor as spiritual leader of Iran. His clout is already substantial. He appoints members of the Supreme Judicial Council, Iran's highest court, and is the "supreme guide" for the country's universities and seminaries. Other leaders, though, have recently been intriguing to curb his growing influence...
...found plenty of them, thanks in part to his physiognomy. Naipaul's Indian heritage made him appear sympathetic to some who might otherwise have mistrusted him. Ayatullahs in Qum found his looks puzzling but nonthreatening; in Pakistan he was taken for a Pakistani; a teacher in Indonesia remarked admiringly: "You look like our Prophet." Such appearances were deceiving. Naipaul is a man of the West, through and through. He may have grown up as an alien in Trinidad, then a British colony, but his escape from that subjugation came not through mysticism or political revolution but through secular education...
After the failed rescue mission, Metrinko was driven to the holy city of Qum and held for a week with two other hostages in a filthy, rat-infested prison cell whose windows were covered with blankets. He often heard the crack of a whip followed by screams; once when a blanket fell, he caught a glimpse of some Iranians being flogged...
...lymphatic cancer in a New York City hospital. The Ayatullah, then 79, a Muslim mystic and fundamentalist who despised the West and held the U.S. in special hatred for its long support of the Shah, had flown into a pious rage. At his headquarters in the holy city of Qum, 80 miles to the south of Tehran, he told student followers that the U.S. embassy was "a nest of spies" and "a center of intrigue...
...demands, just as a solution had seemed possible. Travelers leaving Iran last week reported that increasingly violent demonstrations have broken out against Ayatullah Khomeini and the ruling Muslim mullahs. There have been almost daily street protests in Tehran, Shiraz, Tabriz, Isfahan and even the religious centers of Mashhad and Qum. One report estimated that 100 people had been killed in Tabriz when an anti-Khomeini crowd clashed with soldiers and revolutionary guards...