- The life of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was so shadowy, so overlain with myth and rumor, that there was lingering disagreement or uncertainty about his ancestry, his true name and his date of birth.
Then he had another dream, and he told it to his brothers. “Listen,” he said, “I had another dream, and this time the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me.”
Genesis 37:9 NIV
- In a fury, Iranians clambered over the walls of the American Embassy in Teheran on Nov. 4, 1979, seizing diplomats, staff members and military personnel as hostages to trade in exchange for the Shah.
- It was not until Jan. 20, 1981, Inauguration Day for Ronald Reagan, that the hostages were released, after 444 days.
- On July 31, 1987, thousands of chanting Iranian pilgrims in the holy city of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, rampaged and fought with the Saudi Arabian riot police.
- But he [Ruhollah Khomeini] held to his dream of an Islamic republic and retained his Islamic fervor -scuttling a tentative economic and political opening to the West in with his call for the killing of a British author, Salman Rushdie, whose novel ‘‘The Satanic Verses’’ was deemed to have blasphemed the faith.