Today in Middle Eastern history: Khomeini returns from exile (1979)

One of the ironies of the modern Middle East is that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini became the most popular person in Iran during a time when he wasn’t living there. After a career spent mostly as a non-political religious scholar (albeit one who was known within academic circles to be skeptical about anything that smacked of “Westernization”), Khomeini emerged suddenly into the public consciousness in the the 1960s as perhaps the most vocal domestic critic of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. But he reputation really grew only once he’d been exiled for that criticism.

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