A third explanation is that Sayyid Mustafa...

A third explanation is that Sayyid Mustafa, in his capacity of shari’a judge of Khumayn, had punished someone for a public violation of the fast of Ramadan and that the family of the offender then exacted a deadly revenge.[^5] The attempts of Sahiba, Sayyid Mustafa’s sister, to have the killer punished in Khumayn proved fruitless, so his widow, Hajar, went to Tehran to appeal for justice, according to one account carrying the infant Ruhullah in her arms.

She was followed there by her two elder sons, Murtaza and Nur al- Din , and finally, in Rabi’ al-Awwal 1323/ May 1925, Ja’far-quli Khan was publicly executed in Tehran on the orders of ‘Ayn al-Dawla, the prime minister of the day. In 1918, the Imam lost both his aunt, Sahiba, who had played a great role in his early upbringing, and his mother, Hajar. Responsibility for the family then devolved on the eldest brother, Sayyid Murtaza (later to be known as Ayatullah Pasandida).

The material welfare of the brothers seems to have been ensured by their father’s estate, but the insecurity and lawlessness that had cost him his life continued. In addition to the incessant feuds among landowners, Khumayn was plagued by the raids mounted on the town by the Bakhtiyari and Lurr tribesmen whenever they had the chance.

Once when a Bakhtiyari chieftain by the name of Rajab ‘Ali came raiding, the young Imam was obliged to take up a rifle together with his brothers and defend the family home.

When recounting these events many years later, the Imam remarked, “I have been at war since my childhood.”[^6] Among the scenes, he witnessed during his youth and that remained in his memory to help shape his later political activity mention may also be made of the arbitrary and oppressive deeds of landowners and provincial governors.

Thus, he recalled in later years how a newly arrived governor had arrested and bastinadoed the chief of the merchants’ guild of Gulpaygan for no other purpose than the intimidation of its citizens.[^7] Imam Khumayni began his education by memorizing the Qur’an at a maktab operated near his home by a certain Mullah Abu ‘l-Qasim; he became a hafiz by the age of seven.

He next embarked on the study of Arabic with Shaykh Ja’far, one of his mother’s cousins, and took lessons on other subjects first from Mirza Mahmud Iftikhar al-' Ulama ’ and then from his maternal uncle, Hajji Mirza Muhammad Mahdi. His first teacher in logic was Mirza Riza Najafi, his brother-in-law.