Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (32 page)

Someone in the room recorded the lecture, and soon it was circulating clandestinely throughout Qom on cassette tapes, just as Khomeini’s words had been transmitted to thousands of Iranian mosques in the months before the revolution. State-controlled radio didn’t broadcast it, but the Persian-language service of the BBC did, over and over, and many Iranians monitor the BBC. I was given a copy of the lecture by an Asian diplomat. Angry rioters then attacked Montazeri’s house and offices and ransacked his Koranic school before security guards used tear gas to disperse them. Khamenei branded the man who was once destined to have his job as “politically bankrupt, pathetic, and naive.”

But even after that, Montazeri wasn’t rendered powerless. The attack on his house was widely condemned. It had crossed that curious line that defines Iran, the line between public and private. It had violated the special boundaries held sacred in Qom. And it evoked the repression the clergy had suffered under the Shah. Even the most conservative clerics in town were appalled by such an overt attack on a
marja.
Another senior ayatollah, the usually mild-mannered Nasser Makarem-Shirazi, told visitors that even though he disagreed with what Montazeri had been arguing, Montazeri never should have been humiliated like that.

Montazeri was considered so outrageous—and so dangerous—that in mid-1999 the Special Clerical Court banned the press from even printing his photograph or mentioning his name. But Montazeri continued to get out his message through his son, through phone conversations with trusted associates and students, and through reformist newspapers that often published Montazeri’s private sermons and dicta. “Despotism is despotism, whether it is imposed by the Shah or the clergy!” the independent Iranian weekly
Payam-e Hajar
quoted Montazeri as saying in 1999. He called for an independent investigation into whether Iran should restore relations with the United States, adding that even though Khomeini had called America the “Great Satan” and rejected such a move, “that ruling obviously had been temporary and could change according to economic and political conditions.” He smuggled out a letter condemning the supervisory Guardian Council for abusing its power by eliminating many reformist candidates who had wanted to run in the 2000 parliamentary election.

No authority could stop Montazeri from talking, because that’s what Shiite Muslim clerics are taught to do. The clerical system is a democratic, even raucous one in which students are trained to speak their minds and challenge the authority of their professors. Students choose which professor they want to follow; professors in turn develop their own followings. The art of persuasion is key. That’s why sitting down with a cleric is never a short encounter. Clerics are trained to lecture in paragraph-long sentences until the listener is convinced. The process is particularly frustrating for journalists, who demand clarity, brevity, and news. It also is the Achilles heel of authoritarianism in the Islamic Republic, the reason that its reliance on an all-powerful Supreme Leader will not go unchallenged.

Even Ayatollah Khomeini had been known as too much of a talker. Talking, after all, was what had gotten him into trouble with the Shah in the first place. In 1963, Khomeini gave an angry sermon in Qom in which he railed against the Shah, branded him a puppet of the West, and called his regime “tyrannical.” The Shah expelled him. Fifteen years later, in the months leading up to the revolution, Ayatollah Morteza Mottahari is said to have told Khomeini when he was still in exile in France: “You are not a cleric in Qom anymore. You are the leader of a revolution. You should not say many of the things you say. You should talk less.”

The informality of the clerical system thus survives, so much so that no central authority grants theological students the authority to don a turban, a long tunic, and a cloak—or to take them off. Students decide for themselves when they think they have learned enough to dress up. Some very learned clerics never wear clerical dress; some put it on early and later decide to take it off; many clerics who have chosen other professions wear secular clothes. I once sat in on an undergraduate class in “Major Western Political Thinkers from Hobbes to Marx” at Mofid University in Qom. Most of the students were dressed in sports shirts and pants; only a few wore turbans and cloaks. I later found out that all of them were clerics.

An ex-cleric from Qom once tried to help me understand the making of a mullah. The vocation, he said, is usually passed down within a clerical or deeply religious family, although people from any class or family are eligible. In general, lower-class men receive informal basic religious training either from a family member or mentor. These clerics are called
rowzeh khan,
and are not considered religious scholars but only preachers for hire who specialize in reciting stories about the sufferings of the sacred figures of Shiism. Religious scholars must attend religious seminaries at a shrine city like Qom or Mashad and follow a strict classical curriculum that includes theology, philosophy, rhetoric, Islamic jurisprudence, logic, debate, mathematics, and Arabic. This course of study takes about two decades and eventually leads to the equivalent of a doctoral degree. High religious scholars are expected to publish original theses and specialize in specific areas of Islam. A beginning scholar is referred to as a
talabeh
; the next level is
hojjatoleslam
; the highest rank is ayatollah. A half dozen or so of the highest-ranking ayatollahs are considered
marjas.
Khomeini was one, as is Montazeri.

Unlike catholic Christianity, in which priests are ordained by higher-ranking clergy, Muslim clerics rise through a democratic process—the consensus of their peers. A cleric can’t call himself an ayatollah; other people give him the title, based ostensibly on the depth of his learning and the sagacity of his writings.

Sometimes the title is handed out for political reasons, however. Ali Khamenei did not become an ayatollah until he was given the job of Supreme Leader after Khomeini’s death. Sometimes the title is contested. Rafsanjani, the former President, is a
hojjatoleslam.
But some newspapers have taken to calling him ayatollah; others have not.

Titles are one thing, influence another. Within the rarefied world of theological politics that governs Qom, popularity can matter most of all. And popularity is one thing Montazeri enjoys, even after all else has been stripped from him. He has interacted with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of clerics, training them to think for themselves, just as he does. And in the religious schools in Qom and in the pages of the reformist newspapers, other clerics are doing that too.

After twenty years of mixing theological authority and temporal rule, the same ideological and generational gap that exists in Iranian society at large has begun to show up in what once was a closed community of clerics. At the time of the revolution, there were only about eighty-thousand clerics in Iran; more than twenty years later, their numbers have swelled to an estimated 600,000 or more. Many of the more established clerics have become rich off the revolution; others have become powerful politicians who hardly ever go to Qom. But many other clerics disapprove of the idea of mixing God’s world with Caesar’s. They want the clergy to get out of politics and business and go back to prayer. They don’t know where they fit or what their role should be. Some feel they have the worst of all possible worlds: they aren’t rich, they aren’t respected either. And some are even more outspoken than their spiritual fathers. Emblematic of the dissatisfaction is that according to some estimates, about 70 percent of the voters in Qom supported Mohammad Khatami in the 1997 presidential election.

The ex-cleric who told me about clerical training, for example, had come to the conclusion that “clerics are nothing but ‘shopkeepers’ of religion,” a parasitic class. “They are alien to the real message and teachings of Islam, whose goal is the moral upbringing of people,” he said. “All they do is fill up people’s minds and hearts with rules that have no basis in the Koran and are based in false interpretations and unsubstantiated tales.” Clerics generally receive a stipend from the government, from their followers, or from their mentors. But according to the sayings of the Prophet Mohammad, the ex-cleric explained, no one should make a living from religion. He added that the only way he could hope to discover true Islam was to relinquish his turban and cloak, study religion on his own, and earn a living in the outside world. He now sells chutney at a small factory.

I never did get the chance to talk with Montazeri. During one visit to Qom, I approached his house, but the police guard outside was too intimidating. Over time, though, I did get to know another cleric, Mohammad-Ali Ayazi, a
hojjatoleslam
who considers Montazeri his mentor. A generation after the revolution, Ayazi is a driven man. He is only in his mid-forties but has been studying for thirty years, many of them under Montazeri. So he is armed with arguments about how the Islamic system has gone off course and needs to be led back to the right path. “A citizen has the right to express himself as long as it is within the framework of the law,” he explained, his eyes blazing with passion. “Religion and government must be separated,” Ayazi said. “Religion must be cultivated for freedom to thrive. It must not be imposed. People must accept religion freely; we do not need to impose it on people with violence and terror.”

Ayazi is typical of a class of clerics, many of them young. They contend that the most important holy war in Islam is the one inside one’s soul, and their mounting hostility to the conservative clerical establishment is forcing them to rethink the very meaning of the Islamic Republic and the role of religion in modern society. But Ayazi is leading his challenge from within the traditions of Shiite Islam. His life story confirms this. His father had been a cleric, as are three of his four brothers. The most glorious day in Ayazi’s life, he told me, was February 11, 1979, the day the revolution triumphed. Not only was the Shah gone; the young cleric’s wife gave birth that day to the first of their six children, a son.

Ayazi’s life centers around study, writing, and prayer. He gets up two or three hours before sunrise to pray. He takes a brisk long hike every morning to keep himself in shape. He spends part of the morning praying at the mosque, then comes home to write. And all this before breakfast, which is served to him by his wife. The rest of the day is spent with more writing and praying, a long nap after lunch, then playing with his children and helping them with homework. Ayazi considers himself worldly. He has lived abroad—in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon—and has traveled to Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. He works on a personal computer with a fast Internet connection, monitors the BBC’s Persianlanguage broadcasts every day, and studies the Bible and the Torah as well as the Koran. He writes books on Koranic interpretations, political exegeses on the meaning of a civil society, and guidance on infertility and birth control. His vast library of thousands of beautifully bound books includes works in English by Erich Fromm, Raymond Aron, Harold Laski, and Karl Popper, as well as older classics by Marx, Kant, Hegel, and Adam Smith.

Ayazi stated openly that the Islamic Republic will survive only if it reforms itself from within. So I was not surprised that he also believes that the silencing of Ayatollah Montazeri is not only unjust but also threatening to the Islamic system. “What happened to Montazeri is not fair at all, absolutely not,” Ayazi said, his piercing honey-colored eyes looking through me. “Montazeri is one of the pillars of the revolution. He went to prison and was tortured for the sake of this revolution. That is why he is now so critical of all the system’s shortcomings. And naturally it is his right to express his ideas. Those who believe otherwise should challenge him to a debate.”

Ayazi said that the popular belief that all the clerics of Qom are part of the ruling class is dead wrong. He mentioned the cases of other clerics who have been silenced for their views. According to Ayazi, they are being punished simply because they are clerics. The existence of the Special Clerical Court makes it easy for conservatives to persecute those in their midst who disagree with their views. “This court can easily target the clergy,” Ayazi said. “Many secular people have said the same things these men have said but they are left alone because they are not clerics. The clergy are more oppressed than they have been in years.”

This certainly was a switch. The clergy in an Islamic Republic oppressed?

“You make it sound as if you are the most oppressed class in society,” I said.

“Absolutely,” he replied. “Ordinary people are punished, because of crimes or wrongdoings they committed,” he replied. “In our case it’s different. The conservatives punish us simply to ruin our reputations. They know our influence depends on our reputations. We are definitely the most oppressed class.”

Hard as it seemed to accept this statement as anything more than a self-pitying complaint, I realized that this was an ominous comment about the future of the Islamic Republic. Ayazi was warning that the ruling class was devouring itself with its internal political arguments, and in the long run such political cannibalism could threaten the very basis of the Islamic Republic itself. It was quite a moment. Here was a young cleric whose friends were in prison, whose mentor was under house arrest, saying in essence that the official interpretation of Islam that had developed under the Islamic Republic was wrong. And he was getting away with it, voicing his outrage over tea to a foreign journalist sitting in his study and preparing to tell the outside world about his intimations of doom.

But in another sense, Ayazi was tempting fate. The red lines that define allowable conduct keep moving, and with his blunt words he might cross them at any time. One of his closest friends is Mohsen Kadivar, a young university professor who also holds the rank of
hojjatoleslam,
who had been sentenced to prison for disseminating lies, defaming Islam, and disturbing public opinion in newspaper commentaries in which he even made comparisons between the Islamic Republic and the monarchy it had overthrown. “The Islamic Republic is faced with a historic catastrophe in its twentieth year of life in Iran,” Kadivar wrote in a letter to his wife in May 1999 that was later described in an article in the daily newspaper
Iran.
“The main goal of the Islamic Republic was the end of absolute monarchy and the transformation to an Islamic Republic. So the return to the same conduct of absolute monarchy cannot be called an Islamic Republic.”