One reason why "left" and "right" are not very good terms for dealing with the different factions here.
The real conservatives are not the mullahs in power.
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Friday, June 19, 2009
Lyons: Khamenei's Past Power Play against the Clerics May Weaken him Now in Confronting the Reformers
Jonathan Lyons writes in a guest op-ed for IC:
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...
juancole.com
...but my understanding is that those underpinnings turn on Ayatollah Khomeini's novel reading of the concept of the Guardianship of Jurists (velayat-e faqih). As I understand it, Islamic jurists (in Shi'a Islam) are normally thought to have guardianship over various rather non-contentious things: things that are plainly within their purview (e.g., religious trusts), people who are plainly in need of guardians (orphans, the insane), and so forth.
But within orthodox Shi'a theology, they are not supposed to have guardianship over whole countries. The idea that they should was an innovation of Ayatollah Khomeini's, and in theology, innovation is generally not seen as a good thing...
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