Ruhollah Khomeini
Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini was an Iranian cleric, politician, political theorist and revolutionary who founded the Islamic Republic of Iran and served as its first supreme leader from 1979 until his death in 1989. He was the main leader of the Iranian Revolution, which overthrew Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and transformed Iran into a theocratic Islamic republic.
Born in Khomeyn, in what is now Iran's Markazi province, his father was murdered when Khomeini was two years old. He began studying the Quran and Arabic from a young age assisted by his relatives. Khomeini became a high ranking cleric in Twelver Shi'ism, an ayatollah, a marja', a mujtahid, faqīha and a hafiz, and author of more than 40 books. His opposition to the White Revolution resulted in his state-sponsored expulsion to Bursa in 1964. Nearly a year later, he moved to Najaf, where speeches he gave outlining his religiopolitical theory of Guardianship of the Jurist were compiled into the book Islamic Government.
After the success of the Iranian Revolution, Khomeini served as the country's de facto head of state from February 1979 until his appointment as supreme leader in December of that same year. Khomeini was Time magazine's Man of the Year in 1979 for his international influence and in the next decade was described as the "virtual face of Shia Islam in Western popular culture". He was known for his support of the hostage takers during the Iran hostage crisis; his fatwa calling for the murder of British Indian novelist Salman Rushdie for Rushdie's description of Islamic prophet Muhammad in his novel The Satanic Verses, which Khomeini considered blasphemous; pursuing the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in the Iran–Iraq War; and for referring to the United States as the "Great Satan" and Israel as the "Little Satan".
The subject of a pervasive cult of personality, Khomeini held the title Ayatollah and is officially known as Imam Khomeini inside Iran and by his supporters internationally. His state funeral was attended by up to 10 million people, one fifth of Iran's population, and is considered the second-largest funeral in history. In Iran, he is legally considered "inviolable"—insulting him is punishable with imprisonment; his gold-domed tomb in Tehran's Behesht-e Zahra cemetery has become a shrine for his adherents. His supporters view him as a champion of Islamic revival, independence, anti-imperialism, and resistance to foreign influence in Iran. Conversely, he has been criticized for anti-Western and antisemitic rhetoric, anti-democratic actions, human rights violations including the 1988 execution of thousands of Iranian political prisoners, and for using child soldiers extensively during the Iran–Iraq War for human wave attacks.
Early years
Background
Ruhollah Khomeini came from a lineage of small land owners, clerics, and merchants. His ancestors migrated towards the end of the 18th century from their original home in Nishapur, then part of Khorasan province, in northeastern Iran for a short stay to the Kingdom of Awadh, a region in the modern state of Uttar Pradesh, India, whose rulers were Twelver Shi'a Muslims of Persian origin. During their rule, they extensively invited and received a steady stream of Persian scholars, poets, jurists, architects, and painters. The family eventually settled in the small town of Kintoor, near Lucknow, the capital of Awadh.Khomeini's paternal grandfather, Ahmad Hindi, was born in Kintoor. He left Lucknow in 1830, on a pilgrimage to the tomb of Ali in Najaf, Ottoman Iraq, and never returned. According to biographer Baqer Moin, this migration was to escape from the spread of British power in India. In 1834, Seyyed Ahmad Musavi Hindi visited Iran, and in 1839, he settled in Khomein. Although he stayed and settled in Iran, he continued to be known as Hindi, indicating his stay in India, and Ruhollah Khomeini even used Hindi as a pen name in some of his ghazals. Khomeini's grandfather, Mirza Ahmad Mojtahed-e Khonsari was the cleric issuing a fatwa to forbid usage of tobacco during the Tobacco Protest.
Childhood
According to his birth certificate, Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, whose first name means "spirit of Allah", was born on 17 May 1900 in Khomeyn, Markazi province, although his brother Mortaza gives his birth date of 24 September 1902, the birth anniversary of Muhammad's daughter, Fatima. He was raised by his mother, Agha Khanum, and his aunt, Sahebeth, following the murder of his father, Mustafa Musawi, over two years after his birth in 1903.Ruhollah began to study the Qur'an and elementary Persian at the age of six. The following year, he began to attend a local school, where he learned religion, noheh khani, and other traditional subjects. Throughout his childhood, he continued his religious education with the assistance of his relatives, including his mother's cousin, Ja'far, and his elder half-brother, Morteza Pasandideh, a cleric and poet.
Education and lecturing
After World War I, arrangements were made for him to study at the Islamic seminary in Isfahan, but he was attracted instead to the seminary in Arak. He was placed under the leadership of Ayatollah Abdolkarim Haeri Yazdi. In 1920, Khomeini moved to Arak and commenced his studies. The following year, Ayatollah Haeri Yazdi transferred to the Islamic seminary in the holy city of Qom, southwest of Tehran, and invited his students to follow. Khomeini accepted the invitation, moved, and took up residence at the Dar al-Shafa school in Qom. Khomeini's studies included Islamic law and jurisprudence, but by that time, Khomeini had also acquired an interest in poetry and philosophy. So, upon arriving in Qom, Khomeini sought the guidance of Mirza Ali Akbar Yazdi, a scholar of philosophy and mysticism. Yazdi died in 1924, but Khomeini continued to pursue his interest in philosophy with two other teachers, Javad Aqa Maleki Tabrizi and Rafi'i Qazvini. However, perhaps Khomeini's biggest influences were another teacher, Mohammad Ali Shah Abadi, and a variety of historic Sufi mystics, including Mulla Sadra and Ibn Arabi.Khomeini studied ancient Greek philosophy and was influenced by both the philosophy of Aristotle, whom he regarded as the founder of logic, and Plato, whose views "in the field of divinity" he regarded as "grave and solid". Among Islamic philosophers, Khomeini was mainly influenced by Avicenna and Mulla Sadra. Apart from philosophy, Khomeini was interested in literature and poetry. His poetry collection was released after his death. Beginning in his adolescent years, Khomeini composed mystic, political and social poetry. His poetry works were published in three collections: The Confidant, The Decanter of Love and Turning Point, and Divan. His knowledge of poetry is further attested by the modern poet Nader Naderpour, who "had spent many hours exchanging poems with Khomeini in the early 1960s". Naderpour remembered: "For four hours we recited poetry. Every single line I recited from any poet, he recited the next."
Ruhollah Khomeini was a lecturer at Najaf and Qom seminaries for decades before he was known on the political scene. He soon became a leading scholar of Shia Islam. He taught political philosophy, Islamic history and ethics. Several of his students, for example Morteza Motahhari, later became leading Islamic philosophers and also marja'. As a scholar and teacher, Khomeini produced numerous writings on Islamic philosophy, law, and ethics. He showed an exceptional interest in subjects like philosophy and mysticism that not only were usually absent from the curriculum of seminaries but were often an object of hostility and suspicion.
Inaugurating his teaching career at the age of 27 by giving private lessons on irfan and Mulla Sadra to a private circle, around the same time, in 1928, he also released his first publication, Sharh Du'a al-Sahar, "a detailed commentary, in Arabic, on the prayer recited before dawn during Ramadan by Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq", followed, some years later, by Sirr al-Salat, where "the symbolic dimensions and inner meaning of every part of the prayer, from the ablution that precedes it to the salam that concludes it, are expounded in a rich, complex, and eloquent language that owes much to the concepts and terminology of Ibn 'Arabi. As Sayyid Fihri, the editor and translator of Sirr al-Salat, has remarked, the work is addressed only to the foremost among the spiritual elite and establishes its author as one of their number." The second book has been translated by Sayyid Amjad H. Shah Naqavi and released by Brill Publishers in 2015 under the title The Mystery of Prayer: The Ascension of the Wayfarers and the Prayer of the Gnostics.
Political aspects
His seminary teaching often focused on the importance of religion to practical social and political issues of the day, and he worked against secularism in the 1940s. His first political book Kashf al-Asrar, published in 1942, was a point-by-point refutation of Asrar-e Hezar Sale, a tract written by a disciple of Iran's leading anti-clerical historian Ahmad Kasravi, as well as a condemnation of innovations such as international time zones,and the banning of hijab by Reza Shah, whom he always blamed for his father's murder. In addition, he went from Qom to Tehran to listen to Ayatullah Hasan Mudarris, the leader of the opposition majority in Iran's parliament during the 1920s. Khomeini became a marja in 1963, following the death of Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Husayn Borujerdi. Khomeini also valued the ideals of Islamists such as Sheikh Fazlollah Noori and Abol-Ghasem Kashani. Khomeini saw Fazlollah Nuri as a "heroic figure", and his own objections to constitutionalism and a secular government derived from Nuri's objections to the 1907 constitution.