[custom_adv] In June 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral was held in Iran. Millions of Iranians flocked to the streets of Tehran to pay tribute to the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran. [custom_adv] As the coffin made its way along the funeral procession route, the highly emotional crowd took the coffin from the guards and tore off the white shroud. [custom_adv] Khomeini was a marja ("source of emulation") in Twelver Shia Islam, a Mujtahid or faqih (an expert in Islamic law) and author of more than 40 books, but he is primarily known for his political activities. He spent more than 15 years in exile for his opposition to the last Shah. In his writings and preachings he expanded the theory of velayat-e faqih, the "Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist (clerical authority)", to include theocratic political rule by Islamic jurists. [custom_adv] Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, whose name means "spirit of God", was born on 22 or 24 September 1902 in Khomeyn, Markazi Province. He was raised by his mother, Hajieh Agha Khanum, and his aunt, Sahebeth, following the murder of his father, Seyed Mostafa Hindi, five months after his birth in 1903. [custom_adv] Yet the protests in 1979 were as nothing to the extraordinary scenes of mourning at the funeral of the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini a decade later. The chaotic display of grief during those June days of 1989 revealed to an astonished international public rather more of the Persian soul than it wanted to see. [custom_adv] Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini died aged 86, after repeated heart failure, just before midnight on Saturday 3 June 1989, at a clinic near his house in the village of Jamaran, just north of Tehran. [custom_adv] Westerners found as bizarre, frightening — and ultimately incomprehensible, wrote Time. As a helicopter brought the open wooden coffin containing the mortal remains of the Imam, nearly a million mourners thrust forward in the blistering heat and choking dust to touch the body and snatch a piece of the linen burial shroud, leading to an ignominious exposing of the remains. [custom_adv] Khomeini held the title of Grand Ayatollah and is officially known as Imam Khomeini inside Iran and by his supporters internationally.He is generally referred to as Ayatollah Khomeini by others.In Iran, his gold-domed tomb in Tehrān's Behesht-e Zahrāʾ cemetery has become a shrine for his supporters,and he is legally considered "inviolable", with Iranians regularly punished for insulting him. [custom_adv] He has also been lauded as a "charismatic leader of immense popularity", a "champion of Islamic revival" by Shia scholars, who attempted to establish good relations between Sunnis and Shias, and a major innovator in political theory and religious-oriented populist political strategy. [custom_adv] Khomeini believed in Muslim unity and solidarity and the export of his revolution throughout the world. He believed Shia and (the significantly more numerous) Sunni Muslims should be "united and stand firmly against Western and arrogant powers. "Establishing the Islamic state world-wide belong to the great goals of the revolution."[131] He declared the birth week of Muhammad (the week between 12th to 17th of Rabi' al-awwal) as the Unity week. Then he declared the last Friday of Ramadan as International Day of Quds in 1981.
