scholar, Ayatollah Abdul Karim Haeri. Haeri himself had been
trained by Shirazi, the famous cleric who had declared tobacco
illegal a generation earlier. Ruhollah was being groomed to
follow in Haeri’s footsteps as one of the region’s principal
Islamic theologians.
In 1922, Ayatollah Haeri moved to the city of Qom, an ancient
center of the Shiite faith located in a dry, dusty region about 1 00
miles south of the capital. Haeri was invited there to take over
the local school and develop it into a respected Muslim training
center. The school became known as the Madraseh Faizieh.
Ruhollah, who accompanied him to Qom, would become one
of Haeri’s most impressive students. He showed remarkable
skill in debate and analysis. In time, he became one of the
center’s prominent teachers. He would be widely known as a
Muslim scholar.
Qom is a city of special importance to Shiite Muslims because
the historic tomb of Fatimah Ma’suma is there. Fatimah was the
sister of Ali al-Rida, an ancient imam—a holy man descended
from the prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali ibn Abu Talib.
For centuries, Shiites had made pilgrimages to Qom to pay their
respects at Fatimah’s tomb.
It was at Qom that Ruhollah married. When he was twenty-
five, he asked an older friend for the matrimonial hand of the
friend’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Khadijah. According to
author Mohamed Heikal, “When she heard of the marriage
proposal she protested. She had no wish to marry a mullah, her
ambition being to marry a government official and go to live in
Tehran.”^5 But she consented after being convinced in a dream to
accept Ruhollah as her husband.
Shortly after the revolution, Heikal wrote of Khadijah:
Khomeini’s wife is a woman of great strength of character,
energy and charm. When he was deported from Qom in 1963
and dumped on the Turkish frontier, Khomeini told her not to
try to follow him, but she ignored his instructions and made
her way to Najaf [in Iraq, where he ultimately found exile].^6The Scholar From Khomein 21