[Interesting background.]
http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/lyons-khameneis-past-power-play-against.html
Friday, June 19, 2009 Informed Comment
Jonathan Lyons writes in a guest op-ed for IC:
Khamenei's Past Power Play against the Clerics May Weaken him Now in Confronting the Reformers
As the latest political drama unfolds in Iran, Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei may yet come to rue the day, in 1999, that he sought to muzzle
one of the nation's most important constituencies - the handful of most
senior clerics who provide spiritual and personal guidance to millions
of pious Shi'ites. The attention of the world is rivetted by events in
the streets of Tehran, Shiraz, and other urban centers, but much of the
real battle is taking place, unseen and unremarked, in the seminaries,
popular shrines, teaching circles, and extended clerical households
that make up the holy Shi'ite city of Qom. Here, some of the Shi'ite
world's most senior theologians, the marja-e taqlid, or sources of
religious-legal authority for the laity, zealously guard their
independence from a state that claims to act in the name of Islam.
These grand ayatollahs and their legions of aides collect religious
taxes from individual believers worldwide, and then use these funds to
run seminaries, carry out good works, oversee global media operations,
propagate their views, and provide their networks of followers with
religious rulings to guide their daily lives.
Despite its formal name - the Islamic Republic of Iran - the political
system now overseen by Ali Khamenei has few supporters among the
recognized grand ayatollahs and their large circle of clerical
fellow-travellers. In traditional Shi'ite thought, legitimate political
authority may be exercised only by the line of the Holy Imams, the last
of whom went into hiding to escape the agents of the rival Sunni
caliphs and has not been heard from since 941. The return of the Hidden
Imam, which will usher in an era of perfect peace and justice on earth,
is eagerly awaited by all believers. Until then, all political power is
seen as corrupt and corrupting by its very nature, and as such it must
be avoided whenever possible.
Historically, this has served the Shi'ite clergy well, forging a close
bond with the people, as intercessors with the state authorities at
times of acute crisis, a privileged and influential position only
rarely achieved by their Sunni counterparts. Yet, it stands in direct
opposition to Ayatollah Khomeini's radical religious notion of direct
clerical rule and has been the source of underlying tensions within the
clerical class for three decades. The dirty little secret of the
Islamic Republic is the fact that it is seen as illegitimate by huge
swathes of the traditional Shi'ite clergy.
Khomeini's personal charisma and his own religious standing, as well as
the revolutionary exigencies of the early days of the Islamic Republic,
drove much of this religious opposition into the background. So did
harsh repression of the few senior religious figures who dared to stand
up to him, including his one-time political heir, Grand Ayatollah
Hossein Ali Montazeri. What's more, the powerful quietist tradition in
Shi'ism reinforced the tendency of many theoligians to withdraw into
their seminaries and to carry on their religious work outside the
structures of a state system that they reject. All that began to change
with the designation in 1989 of Ali Khamenei, a mid-ranking cleric with
no real religious standing or intellectual credentials, to succeed
Khomeni as supreme leader.
Khamenei's rise also saw the rise of the "political mullahs" for whom
political power easily trumps Shi'ite religious thought and practice.
To strengthen his hand, Khamenei was summarily "promoted" to the senior
rank of ayatollah, competely disregarding the traditional system of
clerial advancement based on learning and popular acclaim. Second, the
constitutional role of supreme leader was redefined: he was no longer
required to be recognized as a marja-e taqlid, an honor the plodding
Khamenei could never hope to achieve. Most important of all, other
constitutional changes further centralized executive power in the hands
of the leader, weakened the role of the elected president, and
eliminated altogether the position of prime minister. Thus, the stage
was set for the clerical dictatorship that Khamenei has successfully
forged for himself and his allies, a position now put into play by the
latest events.
Still, the supreme leader has not always had his own way, and the
traditional clergy remain a potentially powerful adversary should they
sense that the time has come to throw their support behind a popular
movement in its struggles against an illegitimate state. Ten years ago,
Khamenei shocked the clerical establishment when he sought to interdict
the enormous financial flows that sustain the independence of the grand
ayatollahs and demanded the diversion of the religious taxes and other
contributions to a centralized state fund under his direct control. The
proposal was shot down, as was an earlier, ham-handed attempt to see
Khamenei included in this elite circle as a recognized marja-e taqlid.
But the bad blood between the ruling political mullahs and the main
body of clergy in Qom remains, and it is this influential constituency,
not the green-clad demonstrators in the streets, that holds the
long-term danger for Iran's ruling elite. In a recent statement on his
Web site, the highly-respected Montazeri, a founding father of the
Islamic Republic turned leading dissident, denounced the election
results as a sham [for more, see this link].
Among Montazeri's long-standing critiques of the regime is its use of
religious authority to enforce its political will and secure its own
political power. This is often seen in the regime's use of the
draconian charge of "fighting against God," a religious offense
punishable in theory by death, brought against its political opponents.
In this way, the revolutionary grand ayatollah and the more traditional
clerics share the same essential view: political power has corrupted
the clergy and destroyed its vital link to the people. In Montazeri's
eyes and those of his numerous allies, Khamenei's inability to obtain
the level of learning, popular acclaim, and scholarly recognition
required of a marja-e taqlid has removed any trace of the popular
legitimacy that lies at the heart of a true Islamic democracy. So, too,
does his direct intervention in the political affairs of the nation.
Instead, Montazeri and others have argued, the supreme leader should be
elected from among the grand ayatollas by his fellow senior clerics,
and he should provide moral and spiritual leadership to the nation
rather than exercise executive power. This would restore to the Shi'ite
clergy the respected role it has played for centuries.
Iran's large clerical class, of course, cannot be neatly slotted into
any one, single category, and clearly some of them are supporting the
status quo, in the forms of Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Others are likely taking a wait-and-see attitude, while still others
remain deeply committed to their quietist roots. Likewise, fissures
among the political mullahs themselves have also appeared, most notably
around former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose differences
with Khamenei have broken out into the open.
With the supreme leader's address to Friday prayers in Tehran affirming
the election result and warning protesters to stay off the streets, it
is hard to see how the protests can end in anything but a violent
crackdown....
<end excerpt>
Jonathan Lyons, Reuters Tehran bureau chief from 1998-2001, is the
co-author of Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in 21st-Century
Iran. His latest book, The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed
Western Civilization, was published earlier this year by Bloomsbury
Press.