A voice from Iran on the edge of the precipice
A voice from Iran on the eve of tomorrow’s “Day of Destiny”:
Juan Cole posts a fascinating piece by Jonathan Lyons on the conflicts within the Shiite cleric over the legitimacy of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
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.
Go read the rest here.
June 19th, 2009