18
Khomeini's dicta may seem irrelevant now that he has long been
dead, but his words have actually gained in influence since his demise.
Early in the '90s, Iraq's humiliation in the Gulf War undermined the
credibility of the secular Moslem regimes, leaving a power vacuum
into which Fundamentalism leaped.46  There are currently roughly one
100,000,000 Islamic fundamentalists (rechristened "Islamic revivalists"
by some scholars47).  Activists among them, employing the slogan
"Africa for Islam," are making diligent--and often violent--efforts to
seize power in numerous sub-Saharan states.48   They have gained
sufficient favor with South Africa's ANC that Nelson Mandela, in a
1992 visit to Teheran, told the Iranians that Africa must be reshaped
along the lines of the Iranian revolution.49    (Ironically,  when  South
African leader Bishop Desmond Tutu gave a speech to a Palestinian
crowd in 1989 lauding Palestinian interests, he failed to realize that the
Arabic banners carried by his listeners read "On Saturday We Will Kill
the Jews, on Sunday We Will Kill the Christians!")50
Khomeini-style fundamentalists have become vigorous political
forces in areas like China's Xinjiang region (where as of 1994, Beijing
officials were seriously concerned that the area's inhabitants,
influenced by propaganda from Iran, would attempt to break away
and found a fundamentalist Islamic republic).51      Islamic
fundamentalists have been involved in the Indian state of Kashmir's
vicious civil war.52  They've been active in Malaysia,53 Thailand (where
Moslem guerilla forces were fighting in 1993),54 and the Sudan55 (where
an Iranian-backed fundamentalist regime is engaged in a campaign to
subjugate, exterminate or--according to the United Nations
International Labor Organization--literally enslave the black Christians
and animists in the southern region of the country).56  Followers of
Khomeini have been moving aggressively in Algeria,57 Jordan,58
Tunisia,59 Lebanon, Kuwait,60 Pakistan,61 Afghanistan, Azerbaijan,
Turkmenistan (where by 1992 posters and portraits of the ayatollah
had become a particularly strong sales item in local stores),62 France,63
and, according to Greek Defense Minister Ioannis Varvitsiotes and the
University of Belgrade's Dragoljub R. Zivojinovic, Czechoslovakia,
Albania and Yugoslavia.64  In many of these cases, fundamentalists are
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