Abbas Amanat

So they gave themselves more grand titles.

Yeah, more adjectives.

More adjectives, more grand titles, such as Ayatollah.

that became a kind of a highest rank of the religious hierarchy.

Which incidentally was in an unofficial hierarchy.

It's not like Catholic Church that you have bishops and federal.

It was very unofficial model.

And he was an ayatollah.

He was eventually recognized as an ayatollah.

No, no, no, not at all.

The Ayatollahs were before him ever since the beginning of the century.

But he was eventually recognized as an Ayatollah.

And if I want to start it this way, Ayatollah Khomeini was born in 1900.

And in a sense, all this tremendous change that Iran witnessed in the course of the 20th century was, in a sense, materializing this person.

He become a mullah of a lower rank,

went to the traditional madrasas, to the traditional centers for the education of the seminarians, never had a secular education.

had a very complex Islamic education on this one hand, jurisprudence, on the other hand, probably a little bit of Islamic philosophy and mysticism, which is unusual for the jurists, for the faqih, as they call them, these religious scholars or legal scholars of Islam.

And then he, in the 1960s, when he was residing in Tehran and gradually becoming more important,

he became a voice of opposition against the Shah.

And the reason for opposition in the early 1960s was the fact that the Shah carried through a series of extensive modernization policies, of which the most important was the land reform.