Iranian of the Day

Washington Post -- Nosratollah Amini, 94, an Iranian lawyer and politician who became the personal attorney of Mohammad Mossadegh, the nationalist prime minister deposed in a U.S.-backed coup in 1953, died April 20 at Potomac Hospital in Woodbridge. He had pneumonia.

Mr. Amini lived through many turbulent periods of Iranian rule: as mayor of the capital city of Tehran during Mossadegh's rule from 1951 to 1953; then as a private lawyer under the autocratic shah through the 1970s; and briefly as a provincial governor under the Muslim religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Mr. Amini had been married in 1945 by Khomeini, then a young cleric. They shared an interest in Persian poetry, which Mr. Amini memorized by the hundreds. After settling in the Washington area in 1979, Mr. Amini opened his home in McLean to Iranians across the political spectrum.

Mr. Amini, whose first name means "God's victory" in Arabic, was born in the west-central Iranian city of Arak. He graduated from the University of Tehran law school in 1938 and became an inspector for the justice ministry. He later was a federal social services director and a judge before Mossadegh appointed him mayor of Tehran after noticing his skill at resolving disputes, his family said>>>