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| [Ayatullah Khomeini] approved the seizure and mistreatment of U.S. hostages by [Iranian] "students' |
I guess lefty TIME magazine was happy with the Iranian mullah for hating America and ousting our ally, the Shah, but was offended when the Ayatollah didn't form an alliance with the USSR.
Article is mixed but on balance negative.
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Iron-fisted mystic Ayatullah Khomeini heralded a newly militant Islam
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The dour old man shuffled to the rooftop and waved apathetically to crowds that surrounded his modest home in the holy city of Qum. The hooded eyes that glared balefully from beneath his black turban often turned upward, as if seeking inspiration from on high -- which, as a religious mystic, he indeed was. To Iran's Shi'ite Muslims, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini was an ascetic spiritual leader whose teachings were law. To the West he was a fanatical foe whose judgments were harsh and whose reasoning was surreal. Yet to millions of all faiths around the world, the Ayatullah was most significant as the prophet of a rejuvenated Islamic fundamentalism. Just as Mao Zedong had proclaimed to the world on gaining power that China had "stood up," so too the Ayatullah was the herald of a new breed of extremist Muslims, militant in their determination to shape their own destiny.
Khameini was learned in the ways of Islamic law and Platonic philosophy, yet he would remain astonishingly ignorant of cultures other than his own. Rarely had so improbable a leader shaken the world. Only a few years before the Iranian revolution, Khomeini was an austere theologian almost totally unknown in the West. For decades he had nursed an inflexible devotion to a few simple ideas and developed a finely tuned instinct for articulating the passions and rages of his people. Khomeini was no politician in the Western sense, yet he possessed the most potent of political gifts: the ability to rouse millions to both blind adulation and blind fury.
Sign of God. Khomeini's career traced the classic trajectory of 20th century rebels: from agitation to arrest, from arrest to exile, from exile to triumphant return. His nemesis was the ruling family of Iran, personified in the figure of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who ruled through the strong support of the U.S. In 1963 Iran was swept by riots stirred up by its powerful Islamic clergy. The Shah suppressed the disturbances, in part by jailing one of the instigators, an ascetic theologian named Ruhollah Khomeini, who had recently attained the title of Ayatullah -- "sign of God," a popularly bestowed honorific. Khomeini had drawn crowds to fiery sermons in which he denounced the Shah as a traitor to Islam. In 1964 he was arrested and exiled, first to Turkey, then to Iraq, where he continued to preach against the idolatrous Shah and to promulgate his vision of Iran as an "Islamic republic."
By 1978 the Shah had alienated almost all elements of Iranian society. Westernized intellectuals were infuriated by rampant corruption, workers by the selective prosperity that raised glittering apartments for the rich while the poor remained in mud hovels, the clergy by Westernized gambling casinos and bars/ Everyone hated the secret police, the SAVAK. But the U.S. regarded the Shah as a valuable ally [against the USSR during the Cold War ] and funneled to him money and weapons.
Late in 1978, small anti-Shah demonstrations swelled into protest marches of hundreds of thousands in Tehran. At the outset the revolt had no visible leaders. But even in exile Khomeini was well known inside Iran for his unyielding insistence that the Shah must go. When demonstrators began waving the Ayatullah's picture, the frightened Shah pressured Iraq to boot Khomeini out. It was a fatal blunder; in October 1978 the Ayatullah settled outside Paris, where he gathered a circle of exiles and for the first time publicized his views through the Western press.
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| January 7, 1980 |
1900 Born in Khomein, Iran
1963 Exiled for leading anti-Shah protests
1978 Moves to France
1979 Returns to lead Iran; approves taking U.S. hostages
1989 Dies in Qum
Return of the prophet. Khomeini now became the active head of the revolution. Cassettes of his anti-Shah sermons sold like pop records in bazaars. When he called for strikes, his followers shut down banks, the postal service, the factories, the food stores and, most important, the oil wells, bringing the country close to paralysis. The Shah imposed martial law, but to no avail. In January 1979 the Shah and his Empress went off into exile, leaving behind a "regency council." But Khomeini announced that no one ruling in the Shah's name would be acceptable, and Iran was torn by the largest riots of the entire revolution. Now his time was at hand, and the Ayatullah returned to Tehran to a tumultuous welcome: "The holy one has come!" The vast, adoring throng stalled Khomein's motorcade so that he had to be lifted over the heads of his adulators by helicopter. He withdrew to the holy city of Qum and appointed a government. But it quickly became apparent that real power resided in the revolutionary
komitehs that had sprung up all over the country and took orders only from the 15-man Revolutionary Council headed by Khomeini.
In power, Khomeini and his followers displayed a retaliatory streak, and revolutionary courts condemned enemies to the death or life imprisonment. Troubled by ethnic minorities, Khomeini seized upon a successful student attack on the U.S. embassy in November 1979 as a way of directing popular attention away from the country's increasing internal problems. When the U.N. and the world court condemned the seizure of the embassy, it was Iran against the world -- indeed, all Islam [at least the Shia vs Sunni branch] against the "infidels." Glorying in his power over the West, a defiant Khomeini successfully held his 50 American hostages for 544 days, watching in delight as President Jimmy Carter's helicopter-rescue attempt fizzled in the desert. [8 servicemen were killed in
Operation Eagle Claw - so lefty journalist flippantly characterizing the failure as "fizzled" seems tone death to veterans] When the hostages had finally lost their purpose, he released them -- bit not until the very day Carter yielded the presidency to Ronald Reagan.
Khomeini soon found new enemies, this time within the Islamic world; he became embroiled in a lengthy war with Iraq that was not settled until 1988. Early in 1989, the Ayatullah again surfaced to surprise the West, denouncing Salman Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses" as blasphemous, and issuing a
fatwah (death sentence) that drove Rushdie into an underground exile that continues in 1996, seven years after Khomeini's death in June 1989.
The Ayatullah's funeral was a bizarre spectacle. As a frantic crowd of nearly 1 million mourners gathered around the open wooden coffin containing his remains, the corpse spilled to the ground, bare feet protruding from beneath a white shroud. Revolutionary Guards had to beat back the adoring crowds to bury the body. Yet even in death Khomeini managed to excoriate his enemies, raging in his will against "the atheist East" and "the infidel West." Like the Ayatullah himself, the intense passions he ignited could not easily to put to rest.
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| REVOLT IN THE DESERT: Born the son of an Ayatullah, in 1952, became one of six grand Ayatullahs of Iran's Shi'ite Muslims |
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| After [Ayatullah Khomeini's] return from exile in Paris |
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