ABSTRACT
IMAM RUHULLAH AL-MUSAVI AL-KHOMEINI was born on September 24, 1902 into a family of strong religious traditions in Khumayn, a small town some hundred kilometers to the southwest of Tehran. 1 Both his grandfather and father were religious scholars. The former, Sayyid Ahmad, was known as aI-Hindi because of a period he had spent in India, where a distant branch of the family is said still to exist. The latter, Ayatullah Mustafa, was murdered by bandits only five months after the birth of Ruhullah, so that his mother and an aunt were responsible for his early upbringing. At the age of sixteen, he lost both mother and aunt in the course of a single year, and the task of supervising his education then fell to an elder brother, Sayyid Murtaza (better known, in later years, as Ayatullah Pasandida). Ayatullah Pasandida recalls that even in his youth, Imam Khomeini showed great piety, seriousness, and determination. It was the general consensus in Khumayn that a significant if turbulent career awaited him.2
