Once when a Bakhtiyari chieftain by the name of Rajab ‘Ali came raiding...

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.”[^5] 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.[^6] Imam Khomeini 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.

Finally, among his instructors in Khumayn mention may be made of the Imam’s elder brother, Murtaza, who taught him Najm al- Din Katib Qazvini’s al-Mutawwal on badi’ and ma’ani and one of the treatises of al-Suyuti on grammar and syntax.

(Although Sayyid Murtaza - who took the surname Pasandida after the law mandating the choice of a surname in 1928 - studied for a while in Isfahan, he never completed the higher levels of religious education; after working for a while in the registrar’s office in Khumayn, he moved to Qum where he was to spend the rest of his life).

In 1339/1920-21, Sayyid Murtaza sent the Imam to the city of Arak (or Sultanabad, as it was then known) in order for him to benefit from the more ample educational resources available there. Arak had become an important center of religious learning because of the presence of Ayatullah ‘Abd al-Karim Ha’iri (d.1936), one of the principal scholars of the day.

He had arrived there in 1332/1914 at the invitation of the townspeople, and some three hundred students - a relatively large number - attended his lectures at the Mirza Yusuf Khan Madrasa.