Ayatollah al-Uzma Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini was a Shi’ite scholar and mystic. He was the leader of the Islamic Revolution (1979) that abolished the Iranian Monarchy and founded the Islamic Republic, and is for many Muslims the greatest figure in their modern history.

Khomeini was born September 24, 1902 in the western Iranian city of Khomein to Sayyid Mustafa, whose father, Sayyid Ahmad, had settled there some fifty years earlier. (Although of Iranian origin, Khomeini’s ancestors spent several generations in India; Sayyid Ahmad was the first to resettle in Iran.) Sayyid Mustafa was killed five months after Khomeini’s birth under disputed circumstances. His mother and a paternal aunt had charge of his early upbringing. In 1918 Khomeini’s elder brother determined that he should begin his madrasa (Islamic school) education in the nearby city of Arak under Shaikh abd al-Karim Ha’eri. In 1920, Ha’eri left for Qom to reform the religious teaching institution in that city, and Khomeini accompanied him. Thereafter his whole career, down to his exile from Iran in 1964, was closely associated with the city of Qom.

In addition to law – the core of the madrasa curriculum – Khomeini devoted much attention during his early years to traditional philosophy and mysticism; it was these subjects – particularly the latter—that formed the subject matter of his earliest writings. It was also as an instructor in philosophy and mysticism that Khomeini made his debut as a teacher, drawing many people who later remained his associates during the years of revolutionary struggle, notably the ayatollahs Mutahhari and Montazeri. Although Khomeini’s first two decades in Qom were largely devoid of political activity, primarily because of the quietist policies of Ha’eri, he participated in the 1923 protest movement led by Agha Nurollah Isfahani, delivered well-attended lectures on ethics that had political implications, and composed poetry that was partly political in content.

On May 14, 1944, about three years after the deposition of Reza Shah, Khomeini issued his first public declaration, calling on the nation, especially the ulama (Islamic Scholars), to “rise up for God” and revive Islam in Iran. At about the same time, he published Kashf al-asrar (The Revelation of Secrets), a book that primarily refuted an anti-Shi’ite tract but also criticized the Pahlavi family and intimated vilayat-i faqih (the governance of the jusrisprudent), the political theory that later became the constitutional basis of the Islamic Republic.

After an interval of ten years, Ayatollah Burujirdi succeeded Ha’eri in 1964 as head of the religious institution in Qom. Khomeini was among those instrumental in promoting him, evidently in the hope that he would prove more militant than Ha’eri.