Principal Terms

Ayatollah: High clerical figure in the Shiite Muslim religion. The word means "reflection of Allah."

Chador: Loose, shapeless veil worn by Muslim women to cover the entire body from head to toes.

Jihad: Muslim holy war against nonbelievers.

Mullah: Member of the Shiite clergy.

Taghouti: Iranians who had, according to the mullahs, become too Westernized during the Shah's regime; the word means "devil's followers."

Velayat-e-faghih: Government based on law interpreted by religious leaders.

Sponded that Iran is a different type of country and government and that cultural differences must be taken into account when a group is examining the legal system of a country.

In the 1979 revolution the Shiite Muslim clergy made themselves responsible for every aspect of Iranian life. Khomeini saw it as the duty of the country to provide "workers and laborers" with all they needed for productive labor. He also believed that the revolutionaries had to reform the educational system and purge it of all influences from both the East and the West. Khomeini insisted that Islam itself provided all that students needed to know and that universities must be organized so that students could benefit from study of the "Islamic sciences."

Believing that the Shiite religion was the true religion of God, the leaders of the revolution were not tolerant of other religions. Twenty years after the revolution there was evidence that other religious faiths existed in Iran but that these faiths still faced persecution.

From the time of the 1979 revolution through the early twenty-first century, members of the Baha'i religion, a group that believes that during the nineteenth century an Iranian prophet named Bahaullah appeared on Earth, reported much persecution from the Iranian government. The Shiites are particularly skeptical of the Baha'is because, according to the Shiites, Muhammad was the last prophet.

In August, 2001, Maurice Copithorne, the United Nations Human Rights Commission's special representative on Iran, issued a report testifying that the 300,000 Baha'is remaining in Iran continued to experience discrimination from the Iranian government in virtually all areas of life. The following December, the United Nations passed a resolution calling on Iran to cease religious discrimination in general and to respect a long series of U. N. resolutions that called for the fair and equal treatment of Baha'is. There was no indication that Iranian authorities would yield to international criticism on that issue.