Personal Life and Health
Khamenei has six children. Khamenei says that he sometimes reads American magazines such as Time and Newsweek.
Although not nearly as elderly as some other senior clerics, Khamenei's health has been called into question. In January 2007, after he had not been seen in public for some weeks, and hadn't appeared (as he traditionally does) at celebrations for Eid al-Adha, rumours spread of his illness or death. Khamenei issued a statement declaring that "enemies of the Islamic system fabricated various rumors about death and health to demoralize the Iranian nation," but according to author Hooman Majd he appeared to be "visibly weak" in photos released with the statement.
An unidentified ally of former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani stated in autumn 2009 that Khamenei had terminal leukemia and was expected to die within months, and Rafsanjani's unwillingness to act after the disputed Presidential election in 2009 was coming from his wish to succeed Khamenei and annul Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election afterwards. Three years later, Khamenei is still alive, as shown in the intense political stand-off with former protégé Ahmadinejad in 2011.
Read more about this topic: Ali Khamenei
Famous quotes containing the words personal, life and/or health:
“... feminism is a political term and it must be recognized as such: it is political in women’s terms. What are these terms? Essentially it means making connections: between personal power and economic power, between domestic oppression and labor exploitation, between plants and chemicals, feelings and theories; it means making connections between our inside worlds and the outside world.”
—Anica Vesel Mander, U.S. author and feminist, and Anne Kent Rush (b. 1945)
“Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Nothing in Nature’s sober found,
But an eternal health goes round.
Fill up the bowl, then, fill it high,
Fill all the glasses there—for why
Should every creature drink but I?
Why, man of morals, tell me why?”
—Abraham Cowley (1618–1667)