Ruhollah Khomeini

Ruhollah Khomeini was an exiled Shia cleric who became the leading figure of the Iranian Revolution and returned to Tehran on 1 February 1979 to found the Islamic Republic of Iran, serving as its first Supreme Leader until his death on 3 June 1989. He developed the doctrine of velayat-e faqih, guardianship of the Islamic jurist, in lectures delivered during his exile in Najaf in 1970, publishing them as the book Islamic Government, and it became the constitutional basis of the state he founded. His government fought the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1989 and carried out a mass wave of executions of political prisoners in 1988, while suppressing the secular, leftist, and liberal groups that had joined the revolution against the Shah.