“And you are Muslim?

“And you are Muslim?” “Praise Allah!” The young revolutionaries with their short thin beard grinned in wonder that an American Muslim was in Tehran and wanted to read the poetry of Imam Khomeini. They wished me well and gave me a small photograph of Imam being kissed by his grandson.

This was not the image of ‘the Ayatullah’ with which Americans had become familiar during what was called ‘the hostage crisis’ in the US, and the ‘spy crisis’ in Iran, nor was it the image of the revolutionary leader, ‘the hope of the oppressed people of the world,’ which had been presented by the Iranian media.

The poetry, like that photograph, offered a glimpse into an intensely personal aspect of the life of Imam Khomeini, an aspect which even now, more than two years after Imam’s departure, has largely remained veiled from the English speaking world. The poet and mystic, Ruhullah Musawi Khomeini, was born in 1902 in the town of Khomein, which is about half way between Tehran and the southwestern city of Ahwaz. Ruhullah’s father and grandfather were religious scholars in Khomein.

His father, Ayatullah Mustafa, is said to have been murdered by bandits when Ruhullah was less than six months old. His mother, Hajar, was the daughter of the religious scholar Aqa Mirza Ahmad Mujtahid Khwansari. The boy was raised by his mother and an aunt, both of whom died of cholera when he was six. His education was then supervised by his older brother, Ayatullah Pasandideh.

At nineteen, Ruhullah traveled northwest from Khomein to the city of Arak, where he became a student of Shaykh ‘Abd al-Karim Ha’eri, a leading religious scholar of his day. The following year, Shaykh Ha’eri and his student Ruhullah moved to Qum, where the Shaykh reorganized and revitalized the entire institution of religious education in that city, which was already famous as a center of learning.

Ruhullah studied in Qum until the death of Shaykh Ha’eri, in 1936, after which he began teaching theology, ethics, philosophy, and mysticism. It was during his first fourteen years in Qum that Ayatullah Khomeini became familiar with the intertwined traditions of philosophy and mysticism which flourished during Iran’s Safawid period (16th and 17th centuries) and which continue to exert an enormous influence on contemporary Shi‘ite thought.