Word: shying
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...head any new government. Expectations are that he will eventually return to his home in the holy city of Qum (pronounced, roughly, koom) and resume a life of prayer and learning. He may serve as an arbiter of last resort, leaving the details of government to professional politicians. The Shi'ite branch of Islam, to which most Iranians adhere, has no formal hierarchy. Five other Ayatullahs are deemed theoretically equal to Khomeini as spiritual leaders. They may urge him to maintain a low profile, partly for his own safety, partly, perhaps, out of rivalry. Said Ayatullah Sharietmadari last week...
...country, nearly everybody utters his name with reverence; his photograph, hawked on virtually every Iranian street corner, is now as ubiquitous as the Shah's portrait once was. Yet little is known of the private life and thought of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the enigmatic patriarch of 32 million Shi'ite Muslims who regard him as their guiding light...
...Ayatullah (an honorific title meaning sign of God) was born in central Iran, the son of a mullah who was shot to death-according to Khomeini followers, by Iranian government agents-while on a pilgrimage to Iraq. Educated largely at the holy city of Qum, Iran's orthodox Shi'ite center of learning, Khomeini became what has been described as a "fine medieval scholar." That did not mean he was an expert on the Iranian Middle Ages, but rather that his Islamic philosophical and legal expertise belong to an intellectual tradition unstudied in the West since the 16th...
...nuances came clearer. TIME'S September cover story "Iran in Turmoil," for example, reports "the mullahs, for all their abhorrence of the decadent excesses of modernism, have traditionally been political progressives." (The Columbia Review article overlooks such considered judgments, and itself may have too cockily declared that the Shi'ites "are not interested in running the country...
Some of the worst fighting of the war occurred over the New Year's weekend in the city of Mashhad, with its blue mosque and shrine to the 8th century Shi'ite Imam Reza, the holiest sites in Iran. "Three days after the rioting," reported TIME Correspondent Roland Flamini, "gutted buildings smoldered in Mashhad, and burned-out trucks and cars littered the semideserted streets. Though the city seemed calm, the army, which had withdrawn to barracks, did not appear in control. A bus full of foreign journalists who had been flown from Tehran was escorted by five truckloads...