* 1979 – The Ayatollah Khomeini is welcomed back to Tehran, Iran after nearly 15 years of exile.

* 1989 – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini offers a US $ 3 million bounty for the death of The Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie.

* 1980 – Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini states that Iran's parliament will decide the fate of the American embassy hostages.

* 1979 – Islamic revolution of Iran establishes an Islamic theocracy under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 pronounced a death sentence on Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses.

* 1980 – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini names Abolhassan Banisadr as president of Iran.

The media, in an attempt to explain the ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution to a Western audience described it as a " fundamentalist version of Islam " by way of analogy to the Christian fundamentalist movement in the U. S. Thus was born the term " Islamic fundamentalist ", which would come to be one of the most common usages of the term in the following years.

Its leaders were inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini, and its forces were trained and organized by a contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

Hezbollah was largely formed with the aid of the Ayatollah Khomeini's followers in the early 1980s in order to spread Islamic revolution and follows a distinct version of Islamic Shi ' a ideology ( Valiyat al-faqih or Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists ) developed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the " Islamic Revolution " in Iran.

... As for our culture, it is based on the Holy Quran, the Sunna and the legal rulings of the faqih who is our source of imitation ...</ div > Hezbollah follows the Islamic Shi ' a theology developed by Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Central figures of modern Islamism include Sayyid Qutb, Hasan al-Banna, Abul Ala Maududi, Taqiuddin al-Nabhani, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and Navvab Safavi.

Ayatollah Khomeini sparked attacks on American embassies when he announced:

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini

In a major shock to the rest of the world, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to overthrow the oil-rich, well-armed, Westernized and pro-American secular monarchy ruled by Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi.

While Iran has outlawed homosexuality, Iranian Shi ' a thinkers such as Ayatollah Khomeini have allowed for transsexuals to change their sex so that they can enter heterosexual relationships.

* 1963 – Movement of 15 Khordad: Protest against arrest of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini by Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

He defended Salman Rushdie, the novelist who was subject to a fatwā requiring Rushdie's execution by Ayatollah Khomeini, and took a strongly pro-interventionist position against Serbia during its conflict with Croatia and Bosnia, supporting NATO forces whilst citing defence of civilian populations in the latter countries.

The Basij militia founded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in November 1979 is composed of 10, 000 regular soldiers, and ultimately draws from about 11 million members, and is subordinate to their Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

* 1979 – Iran hostage crisis: Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini orders the release of 13 female and black American hostages being held at the US Embassy in Tehran.

He defended Salman Rushdie after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned Rushdie to death in 1989, but also criticized his Satanic Verses as " insulting " to Islam.

In 1989, after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie and his publishers to be killed, Mahfouz called Khomeini a terrorist.

Khomeini held the title of Grand Ayatollah and is officially known as Imam Khomeini inside Iran and by his supporters internationally, and generally referred to as Ayatollah Khomeini by others.

Only a few of the most important ayatollah are accorded the rank of Grand Ayatollah ( Ayatollah Uzma, " Great Sign of God ").

Only a few of the most important ayatollah are accorded the rank of Grand Ayatollah ( Ayatollah Uzma, " Great Sign of God ").

The Joker himself, meanwhile, has met none other than the Ayatollah Khomeini, who offers him a position in the Iranian government.

In 1988, the term " poisoned chalice " became famous when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran had to acept the UN ceasefire ending the Iran-Iraq War.

The idea behind the plan was for Israel to ship weapons through an intermediary ( identified as Manucher Ghorbanifar ) to the Islamic republic as a way of aiding a supposedly moderate, politically influential faction within the regime of Ayatollah Khomeni who were believed to be seeking a rapprochement with the United States ; after the transaction, the U. S. would reimburse Israel with the same weapons, while receiving monetary benefits.

< imagemap > File: 1970s decade montage. png | From left, clockwise: US President Richard Nixon doing the V for Victory sign after his resignation from office after the Watergate scandal in 1974 ; Refugees aboard a US naval boat after the Fall of Saigon, leading to the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 ; The 1973 oil crisis puts the nation of America in gridlock ; Both the leaders of Israel and Egypt shake hands after the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1978 ; The 1970 Bhola cyclone kills an estimated 500, 000 people in the densely populated Ganges Delta region of East Pakistan in November 1970 ; The Iranian Revolution of 1979 transformed Iran from an autocratic pro-western monarchy to a theocratic Islamist government under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ; The popularity of the disco music genre peaked during the middle to late 1970s .| 420px | thumb

These groups came under the umbrella of the " Council for the Islamic Revolution ", which was supervised by Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, the designated heir of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Tensions between Bahrain and Iran had already been raised in the summer of 2007, when Hossein Shariatmadari, an Advisor to Iran ’ s supreme leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and editor of the Iranian newspaper, Kayan, called for Bahrain to be incorporated into Iran as its 14th province – a stance that echoed Saddam Hussein ’ s designs on Kuwait in the late 1980s.

Clifford made waves by threatening the newly established regime of Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran with war for its intransigence in negotiating the release of the hostages seized from the U. S. embassy in Tehran.

The leader of Iran's Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa declaring sex reassignment surgery permissible for " diagnosed transsexuals.

Ayatollah Abbasali Amid Zanjani ( عباسعلی عميد زنجانی ) is a professor in Law, is known for his strong ties to Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1979 revolution, and had spent time in the Shah's prisons before the Islamic Revolution.

The essay was written by British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, who found controversy in 1988 over one of his books gaining him a religious fatwa for Rushdie's death from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini which ultimately resulted in United Kingdom and Iran breaking diplomatic ties to each other a year later.

Khatami's father, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khatami, was a high-ranking cleric and the Khateeb ( the one who delivers the sermon for Friday prayers ) in the city of Yazd in the early years of the Iranian Revolution.

More than 80 people were killed, including the influential cleric Ayatollah Sayyid Muħammad Bāqir al-Ħakīm, the Shīia leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq ( SCIRI ).

General Hassan Pakravan, Director of Savak from 1961 – 1965, had an almost benevolent reputation, for example dining with the Ayatollah Khomeini while Khomeini was under house arrest on a weekly basis, and later intervened to prevent Khomeini's execution, on the grounds it would " anger the common people of Iran ".

A turning point in SAVAK's reputation for ruthless brutality was reportedly an attack on a gendarmerie post in the Caspian village of Siahkal by a small band of armed Marxists in February 1971, although it is also reported to have tortured to death a Shia cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad Reza Sa ' idi, in 1970.

As a result of the public backlash it received from the United States for naming the Ayatollah Khomeini Man of the Year in 1979, Time has shied away from using figures that are controversial in the United States.

They included Mozzafar Baghai, head of the worker-based Toilers party ; Hussein Makki, who had helped lead the takeover of the Abadan refinery and was at one point considered Mosadegh's heir apparent ; and most outspokenly Ayatollah Kashani, who damned Mosaddegh with the " vitriol he had once reserved for the British ".

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 caught the CIA and the US very much off guard ( as CIA reporting a mere month earlier predicted no imminent insurrectionary turbulence whatsoever for the Shah's regime ), and resulted in the overthrow of the Shah ( himself a non-democratic ruler ) by a fundamentalist, non-democratic faction opposed to the US, headed by Ayatollah Khomeini.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ordered an election for the Assembly of Experts, the body tasked with writing the constitution.

Revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — who had been exiled by the Shah for 15 years — heightened rhetoric against the " Great Satan ", the United States, talking of what he called " evidence of American plotting ".

After the Shah's entry into the U. S., the Ayatollah Khomeini called for anti-American street demonstrations.

On two occasions when he expressed his opinion of Ayatollah Khomeini and he was punished especially severely in relation to the ordinary mistreatment of the hostages — the first time being kept in handcuffs for 24 hours a day for two weeks, and being beaten and kept alone in a freezing cell for two weeks with a diet of bread and water the second time.