In the New York Review of Books, Roger Cohen writes in startling detail about the aftermath of Iran’s elections:
Millions of Iranians have moved from reluctant acquiescence to a system over which they believed they had some limited, quadrennial influence into outright opposition to a regime they now view with undiluted contempt. The clerical and political establishment is more split—and more volatile—than at any time since the bloody postrevolutionary years, when scores were settled as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini outmaneuvered those who had fought for democracy rather than theocracy.
Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has undermined the core concept of Velayat-e faqih, or the guardianship of the Islamic jurist. He has forsaken his role as divine arbiter—a man standing in for the occulted twelfth imam until his expected reappearance—in favor of a partisan role at the flank of Ahmadinejad. This carries none of his former aura—the French translate his title as le Guide—or former plausible deniability. No longer a representative of heaven, Khamenei is now implanted in the trenches.
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If political opposition has been clear, religious disquiet has been even clearer. In Qom, the country’s religious center, two important associations of clerics have denounced the election as fraudulent. Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri—who fell out with Khomeini and, later, with Khamenei in part over the concept of the guardianship of the Islamic jurist—called the election result one “that no wise person in their right mind can believe” and dismissed Iran’s rulers as “usurpers and transgressors.” Ayatollah Sayyed Hossein Mousavi Tabrizi, who was chief prosecutor under Khomeini, said protesters had the right to demonstrate. “The Shah also called the demonstrating people rioters,” Tabrizi said. “It was due to such reasons that the Shah’s regime was illegitimate.”
Read the full article here.