Ruhollah Khomeini: Biography from Answers.com Mobile

Ruhollah Khomeini

(born May 17, 1900?, Khomeyn, Iran — died June 3, 1989, Tehran) Shi'ite cleric and leader of Iran (1979 – 89). He received a traditional religious education and settled in Qom c. 1922, where he became a Shi'ite 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 velayat-e faqih ("government of the jurist"), in which the Shi'ite 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 Tehran — greatly exacerbating tensions with the U.S. — and the devastating Iran-Iraq War (1980 – 88) began.

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