Word: shia
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...supported Khomeini during the Ayatullah's long exile in Iraq and later in France. Fouad Ajami, director of Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, describes the galvanizing effect of the Iranian upheaval in the spring issue of Foreign Affairs. "For the moderate Shia mainstream, this was a chance for the country's largest group to lay claim to its legitimate share of power," he says. "For more marginal and intemperate men, there was something to the recent events resembling a millennial fulfillment...
Kraft isn't the only Western journalist to misunderstand and misportray Khomeini Richard Reeves, in a long story for The New Yorker on Pakistan last October, managed to slip in this gem: "Ayatollah Khomeini (or Imam Khomeini; the title applies to all Shia leaders...
...unclear whether "the title that applies to all Shia leaders" is "ayatollah" or "imam," but both are incorrect. In fact, "imam" has extreme, messianic connotations among Shia Muslims, and it raised more than a few eyebrows a few years ago when Khomeini's followers began to call him by that nomenclature...
...Peninsula. "I was," he writes, "humbled by my illiterate companions, who possessed in so much greater measure generosity, courage, endurance, patience, good temper and light-hearted gallantry. Among no other people have I felt the same sense of personal inferiority." He also shared the soggy life of the Madan, Shia Muslims who inhabit the reedy swamps of southeastern Iraq. His two books about these experiences have become contemporary classics: Arabian Sands (1959) and The Marsh Arabs...
...Abdel Nasser a decade ago, Faisal faces other political complications. One is the Shahanshah of Iran across the Persian Gulf (Saudis doggedly refer to it as the "Arabian Gulf). Like Faisal, the Shah is an oil-rich absolute monarch, but he disagrees with the King about religion (Iranians are Shia Moslems; Saudis, more orthodox Sunnis) and the military steps necessary to protect the Gulf...