Ruhollah Khomeini

Ruhollah Khomeini (c. 1900-1989), Iranian ayatollah (“gift of God”, a religious title of honour), who led the revolution that toppled the shah of Iran in 1979, and the Islamic state established thereafter. Born in the desert town of Khomein and originally named Ruhollah Hendi, he became a disciple of a respected teacher of Islam and moved with him to Qom in 1922. Khomeini became a religious scholar, wrote more than 20 books on Islamic subjects, and was gradually recognized as an ayatollah and leader of the Shiite sect. An active critic of the Pahlavi dynasty since the 1930s, he was arrested in 1963, for opposing land reform and women's emancipation, and exiled, first to Turkey and then Iraq, where he settled (1964) in the holy Shiite town of An Najaf. When expelled from Iraq (1978), he found refuge in a suburb of Paris. From there he continued his campaign against the shah's regime and its principal backer, the United States. Khomeini produced tape recordings that called for massive disobedience. These were smuggled into Iran and broadcast to the people by short-wave radio. Returning to Iran in February 1979, after the shah had fled, Khomeini presided over an Islamic revolution that attempted to rid Iran of all Western influence, as well as all possible opposition to the clerical regime.

In November 1979 Khomeini's diatribes against the United States led to the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran and the seizure of 53 US citizens as hostages—an action that he later endorsed. The new constitution of the Islamic republic, approved in December 1979, named him supreme political and religious leader for life. His regime actively sponsored terrorism and the propagation of radical fundamentalist Islamic beliefs. He also prolonged the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) in the hope of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, only reluctantly agreeing to the final ceasefire. Despite the economic and human cost of his rule, Khomeini enjoyed considerable support within Iran, as demonstrated by the crowds who attended his funeral, but his extremism was abandoned after his death, as Iran adopted a more pragmatic foreign policy.