Literary Scholarship
Khamenei is fluent in both Persian and Arabic. He has translated several books into Persian from Arabic, including the works of the famous Egyptian Islamist theoretician Sayyid Qutb. He is a less fluent speaker of the Azerbaijani language, his father's native language and has some understanding of English.
In his analysis of the Persian poetry of Muhammad Iqbal, he states that "We have a large number of non-Persian-speaking poets in the history of our literature, but I cannot point out any of them whose poetry possesses the qualities of Iqbal's Persian poetry. Iqbal was not acquainted with Persian idiom, as he spoke Urdu at home and talked to his friends in Urdu or English. He did not know the rules of Persian prose writing." Nevertheless, he admires Iqbal.
Like many other politically active clerics at the time, Khamenei was far more involved with politics than religious scholarship.
Read more about this topic: Ali Khamenei
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