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Khomeini, Ruhollah
(redirected from Ruhollah Khomeini)

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Khomeini, Ruhollah

 orig. Ruhollah Musavi

(born May 17, 1900?, Khomeyn, Iran—died June 3, 1989, Tehran) Shi'ite cleric and leader of Iran (1979–89). He received a traditional religious education and settled in Qom c. 1922, where he became a Shi'ite scholar of some repute and an outspoken opponent first of Iran's ruler, Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1926–41), and then of his son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1941–79). Popularly recognized as a grand ayatollah in the early 1960s, he was imprisoned and then exiled (1964) for his criticism of the government. He settled first in Iraq—where he taught at the shrine city of Al-Najaf for some years—and then, in 1978, near Paris, where he continued to speak out against the shah. During that time he also refined his theory of velayat-e faqih (“government of the jurist”), in which the Shi'ite clergy—traditionally politically quiescent in Iran—would govern the state. Iranian unrest increased until the shah fled in 1979; Khomeini returned shortly thereafter and was eventually named Iran's political and religious leader (rahbar). He ruled over a system in which the clergy dominated the government, and his foreign policies were both anti-Western and anticommunist. During the first year of his leadership, Iranian militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran—greatly exacerbating tensions with the U.S.—and the devastating Iran-Iraq War (1980–90) began.



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Members of the Basij, set up by Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to defend the 1979 Islamic revolution, were used extensively to crack down on protesters after June's disputed presidential poll.
The studentsÕ action grew out of the Iranian revolution, in which supporters of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrow Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had long ruled Iran.
The Mardomsalari newspaper cited "pressure" on the family of late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to call off the speeches traditionally held at his shrine near Tehran to mark the seventh century death of Imam Ali, Shi ite Islam s most revered figure after the Prophet Mohammad.
 
 
 
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