Ruhollah Khomeini, orig. Ruhollah Musavi, (born May 17, 1900?, Khomeyn, Iran—died June 3, 1989, Tehrān), Shīʿite cleric and leader of Iran (1979–89). He received a traditional religious education and settled in Qom c. 1922, where he became a Shīʿite 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 velāyat-e faqīh (“government of the jurist”), in which the Shīʿite 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 Tehrān—greatly exacerbating tensions with the U.S.—and the devastating Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) began.
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