Word: sharietmadari
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...revolutionary government. One document described him as "actively interested in maintaining contacts with the United States and sincerely trying to mend bilateral relations between Iran and the United States." Summoned to Tehran, supposedly for consultations, Entezam was arrested at the airport on charges of disloyalty. Meanwhile, the Ayatullah Kazem Sharietmadari, Khomeini's chief religious rival, went into seclusion. As a result, his disappointed followers, the Azerbaijanis, who had been demonstrating for two weeks in Tabriz, suspended their protest against the central government...
Soon afterward, a three-member commission from Tehran, headed by Economic and Finance Minister Abol Hassan Banisadr, arrived in Tabriz to negotiate a truce with Sharietmadari's supporters. But the emissaries were immediately discredited by Banisadr, who announced insultingly that he would deal only with individual Azerbaijanis, not with Sharietmadari's political organization, the Muslim People's Republic Party...
Banisadr did, however, manage to have talks with scores of prominent Azerbaijanis. In one session with 30 mullahs, he was presented with an eight-point resolution demanding that all government appointments in the region be vetted by Sharietmadari and that secular curbs be placed on the near dictatorial powers given Khomeini under Iran's new constitution. A mullah then rose and recounted acts of brutality committed in Tabriz by the revolutionary guards. Whereupon all the other mullahs wept profusely...
Undaunted, Banisadr organized a pro-government rally at a soccer stadium. Carrying Khomeini posters, some 4,000 people-hardly a crowd by Iranian standards-gathered in the middle of the field. Suddenly, they were charged by some 2,000 Azerbaijanis waving Sharietmadari posters and chanting "Down with Bani-sadr!" Gradually, a phalanx of Khomeini supporters drove the Sharietmadari forces out of the stadium...
...holy city of Qum, which is the home of most Shi'ite leaders, Sharietmadari met repeatedly with Khomeini and grew uncharacteristically angry. The normally meek ayatullah warned that unless the Tehran government granted more self-rule to the Azerbaijanis, "dis-turbances will continue, tensions will increase, people will start to kill each other, and civil war will take place." He gave Khomeini an uncommonly aggressive lecture about insisting that the West was responsible for the uprising. Said Sharietmadari: "Everything that happens in this country should not be blamed on 'international Zionism and imperialism.' The legitimate demands...