Biography Of Ayatolla Sayyid Ruhollah Khomeini – Free PDF Download

EARLY LIFE

• Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, whose first name means “spirit of Allah”, was born on 24 September 1902 in Khomeyn Markazi Province.
• He was raised by his mother, Hajieh Agha Khanum, and his aunt, Sahebeth, following the murder of his father, Mustapha Musavi, five months 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, and other traditional subjects.

EARLY LIFE

• Throughout his childhood, he continued his religious education with the assistance of his relatives, including his mother’s cousin, Ja’far,and his elder brother, Morteza Pasandideh.
• In 1920, Khomeini moved to Arak and commenced his studies. Khomeini’s studies included Islamic law (sharia) but by that time, Khomeini had also acquired an interest in poetry and philosophy .
• Khomeini studied Greek philosophy and was influenced by both the philosophy of Aristotle, whom he regarded as the founder of logic.Apart from philosophy, Khomeini was interested in literature and poetry.

EARLY LIFE

• 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.
• Ruhollah Khomeini was a lecturer at Najaf and Qom seminaries for decades.He soon became a leading scholar of Shia Islam. He taught political philosophy, Islamic history and ethics.
• 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

THE RISING

• Most Iranians had a deep respect for the Shi’a clergy or Ulama, and tended to be religious, traditional, and alienated from the process of Westernization pursued by the Shah.
• In the late 19th century the clergy had shown themselves to be a powerful political force in Iran initiating the Tobacco Protest against a concession to a foreign (British) interest.
• At the age of 61, Khomeini found the arena of leadership open following the deaths of Ayatollah Sayyed Husayn Borujerdi (1961).

THE RISING

• The clerical class had been on the defensive ever since the 1920s when the secular, anti-clerical modernizer Reza Shah Pahlavi rose to power.
• In January 1963, the Shah announced the “White Revolution”, a six-point programme of reform calling for land reform, nationalization of the forests, the sale of state-owned enterprises to private interests, electoral changes to enfranchise women and allow non-Muslims to hold office, profit-sharing in industry, and a literacy campaign in the nation’s schools.
• Ayatollah Khomeini summoned a meeting of the other senior marjas of Qom and persuaded them to decree a boycott of the referendum on the White Revolution.
• On 26 October 1964, Khomeini denounced both the Shah and the United States. Khomeini was arrested in November 1964 and held for half a year.

 EXILED

• Khomeini spent more than 14 years in exile, mostly in the holy Iraqi city of Najaf. Initially, he was sent to Turkey on 4 November 1964.In October 1965, after less than a year, he was allowed to move to Najaf, Iraq, where he stayed until 1978, when he was expelled by then-Vice President Saddam Hussein.
• After the 1977 death of Ali Shariati(an Islamic reformist and political revolutionary author/academic/philosopher who greatly assisted the Islamic revival among young educated Iranians), Khomeini became the most influential leader of the opposition to the Shah.
• In late 1978 he was increasingly regarded as a messianic figure in Iran.

REVOLUTION IN IRAN – COUP

• As protests grew, so did his profile and importance. Although several thousand kilometers away from Iran in Paris, Khomeini set the course of the revolution, urging Iranians not to compromise and ordering work stoppages against the regime.
• Khomeini was not allowed to return to Iran during the Shah’s reign (as he had been in exile). On 16 January 1979, the Shah left the country for medical treatment (ostensibly “on vacation”), never to return.
• Two weeks later, on Thursday, 1 February 1979, Khomeini returned in triumph to Iran, welcomed by a joyous crowd estimated (by the BBC) to be of up to five million people.
• On 30 and 31 March 1979, a referendum to replace the monarchy with an Islamic Republic passed with 98% voting in favour of the replacement.

SUPREME LEADER OF IRAN

• Khomeini and his supporters worked to suppress some former allies and rewrote the proposed constitution. In November 1979, the new constitution of the Islamic Republic was adopted by national referendum.Khomeini himself became instituted as the Supreme Leader (Guardian Jurist), and officially became known as the “Leader of the Revolution.”
• On 4 November, a group of Iranian college students calling themselves the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line, took control of the American Embassy Tehran, holding 52 embassy staff hostage for 444 days – an event known as the Iran hostage crisis.

SUPREME LEADER OF IRAN

• In September 1980, Iraq launched a full-scale invasion of Iran, beginning the Iran–Iraq War(September 1980 – August 1988). The Iran–Iraq War ended in 1988, with 320,000–720,000 Iranian soldiers and militia killed.
• In July 1988, Khomeini, in his words, “drank the cup of poison” and accepted a truce mediated by the United Nations.
• In early 1989, Khomeini issued a fatwā calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie, an India-born British author. Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, was alleged to commit blasphemy

ADMINISTRATION

• Under Khomeini’s rule, Sharia (Islamic law) was introduced, with the Islamic dress code enforced for both men and women by Islamic Revolutionary Guards and other Islamic groups.
• The Iranian educational curriculum was Islamized at all levels with the Islamic Cultural Revolution.Khomeini went on to lower the minimum age of marrying of girls to 13 and even permitted girls over seven years old to be married if a physician signed a certificate agreeing to their sexual maturity.
•  Laws were passed that encouraged polygamy, made it impossible for women to divorce men, and treated adultery as the highest form of criminal offense.
• At the same times, amidst the religious orthodoxy, there was an active effort to rehabilitate women into employment. Female participation in health-care, education and workforce increased drastically during his regimes.

ADMINISTRATION

• Shortly after his accession as supreme leader in February 1979, Khomeini imposed capital punishment on homosexuals. Khomeini encouraged the clerical courts to continue implementing their version of the Shari’a.
• In 1979, he had declared that the execution of homosexuals (as well as prostitutes and adulterers) was reasonable in a moral civilization in the same sense as cutting off decayed skin.
• Due to the Iran–Iraq War, poverty is said to have risen by nearly 45% during the first 6 years of Khomeini’s rule. Since the revolution and war with Iraq, an estimated “two to four million entrepreneurs, professionals, technicians, and skilled craftspeople (and their capital)” have emigrated to other countries.

ADMINISTRATION

• Conversion to Islam was encouraged but Four of the 270 seats in parliament were reserved for each three non-Muslim minority religions, under the Islamic constitution that Khomeini oversaw. Khomeini also called for unity between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims. Sunni Muslims make up 9% of the entire Muslim population.
• After the Shah left Iran in 1979, a Kurdish delegation traveled to Qom to present the Kurds’ demands to Khomeini. Their demands included language rights and the provision for a degree of political autonomy.
• Khomeini responded that such demands were unacceptable since it involved the division of the Iranian nation. The following months saw numerous clashes between Kurdish militia groups and the Revolutionary Guards.

ADMINISTRATION

• After spending eleven days in Jamaran hospital, Ruhollah Khomeini died on 3 June 1989 after suffering five heart attacks in just ten days,at the age of 86 just before midnight.
• He was succeeded as Supreme Leader by Ali Khamenei.
• According to Iran’s official estimates, 10.2 million people lined the 32-kilometre (20 mi) route to Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery on 11 June 1989, for the funeral of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

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