Khomeini Dies: Iran's Supreme Leader Leaves Theocratic State

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from fifteen years of exile in Paris on February 1, 1979, and within ten months had dismantled the Iranian monarchy, executed hundreds of officials of the old regime, and established a theocratic republic governed by Islamic jurists. Born on September 24, 1902, in Khomein, Iran, he was a Shia cleric who rose through the seminary system to become a Grand Ayatollah, the highest rank in Shia religious scholarship. He first gained national prominence in 1963 when he publicly denounced the Shah's White Revolution, a modernization program that included land reform and women's suffrage. The Shah's government arrested him, exiled him first to Turkey and then to Iraq, where he spent 13 years developing his theory of velayat-e faqih, governance by Islamic jurists, which argued that the most qualified cleric should have supreme political authority over the state. He moved to Paris in 1978 as the Iranian revolution gathered momentum. From a suburb of Paris, he directed the revolution through cassette tapes and telephone calls, coordinating strikes and demonstrations that paralyzed the Shah's government. His return to Tehran was watched by millions. No comparable revolution in the twentieth century moved from exile to total power faster. He sent a generation of young men to the front in the Iran-Iraq War with plastic keys around their necks, keys they were told would open the gates of paradise if they died as martyrs. He issued the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989 for "The Satanic Verses." He died on June 3, 1989, at age 86. His funeral drew an estimated three million mourners. His picture hangs in government buildings across Iran today. The system he built has outlived him by over three decades.