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Essay on Ayatollah Khomeini
Rouhollah Mousavi Khomeini was born on 24 September 1902 (20 Jamadi al-Akhir 1320), the anniversary of the birth of Hazrat Fatima, in the small town of Khomein, some 160 kilometres to the southwest of Qom. He was the child of a family with a long tradition of religious scholarship. His ancestors, descendants of Imam Mousa al-Kazim, the seventh Imam of the Ahl al-Bayt, had migrated towards the end of the eighteenth century from their original home in Neishapour (in Khorasan province of Iran) to the Lucknow region of northern India. There they settled and began devoting themselves to the religious instruction and guidance of the region's predominantly Shi'i population.
Khomeini's grandfather, Seyed Ahmad, left Lucknow (according to a statement of Khomeini's elder brother, Seyed Morteza Pasandideh, his point of departure was Kashmir, not Lucknow) some time in the middle of the nineteenth century on pilgrimage to the tomb of Hazrat 'Ali in Najaf. While in Najaf, Seyed Ahmad met Yousef Khan, a prominent citizen of Khomein. Accepting his invitation, he decided to settle in Khomein to assume responsibility for the religious needs of its citizens and also took Yousef Khan's daughter in marriage.
Seyed Ahmad, by the time of death, the date of which is unknown, had two children: a daughter by the name of Sahiba, and Seyed Moustafa Hindi, born in 1885, the father of Khomeini. Seyed Moustafa began his religious education in Esfahan and continued his advanced studies in Najaf and Samarra (this corresponded to a pattern of preliminary study in Iran followed by advanced study in the "Atabat", the shrine cities of Iraq; Ayatollah Khomeini was in fact the first religious leader of prominence whose formation took place entirely in Iran). After accomplishing his advanced studies he returned to Khomein, and then married with Hajar (mother of Rouhollah Khomeini)....
