Word: qum
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...watched soccer matches on TV during his four-month exile in Neauphlele-Château, outside Paris, in 1978-79. He attended Koranic school in Khomein, and was later sent to Arak to study under a well-known Islamic scholar, Abdul Karim Haeri. In 1920, when Haeri moved to Qum and established the famed Madresseh Faizieh, a center of Islamic learning, Ruhollah went with him. Except for his years in exile, Khomeini has lived and taught there ever since...
...Back in Qum, Khomeini remained something of a theological maverick. At the Madresseh Faizieh, he lectured on the need for Islamic mullahs to involve themselves in politics, as the prophet had done. Khomeini also taught a course in ethics that was, in reality, a discussion of political science from an Islamic viewpoint. Despite his unorthodox ways, or perhaps because of them, he became increasingly popular with students...
During the late 1930s, the religious community in Qum came under heavy pressure from the Reza Shah, who had undertaken a campaign to modernize his country, in the manner of Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. By 1941, as a result, the number of students at the Faizieh had dropped from several thousand to 500. Khomeini urged the new director of the school, the Ayatullah Boroujerdi, to oppose the Shah more openly. When Boroujerdi refused, Khomeini was bitterly disappointed. Thereafter he called on his superior only once a year, as required. Shortly after Reza Shah was deposed...
Khomeini confronted the government again a few months later after it had confiscated the property of a family that contributed much of its income to the religious institutions of Qum. The Shah's police attacked the Madresseh Faizieh, killing as many as 18 young mullahs, and Khomeini fired off angry telegrams of protest to the Shah. At this point, for the first time since the days of Mossadegh, university students in Tehran came to the support of the clergy against the Shah. Khomeini wrote to then Premier Asadollah Alam: "My heart is ready for the bayonet of your troops...
...Ayatullah himself could have expected. Within four months of his arrival in France, Khomeini was able to make his triumphant return to Iran, where he quickly replaced the post-Shah government with a Cabinet of his own. A month later he was back in his old house in Qum, where he has been ever since, trying to guide his country's unfinished revolution...