Shi'ite supremacists emerge
from Iran's shadows From a Special
Correspondent
TEHRAN - When mild-mannered
former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami lashed
out in a post-election sermon at the "powerful
organization" behind the "shallow-thinking
traditionalists with their Stone-Age backwardness"
currently running the country, it became clear
that Iran's political establishment is worried by
the ideology propelling the government of new
hardline President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
Khatami's attack coincides
with mounting evidence that a radically
anti-Bahai [1] and anti-Sunni semi-clandestine
society, called the Hojjatieh, is reemerging in
the corridors of power in Tehran. The
group flourished during the 1979 revolution that
ousted the Shah and installed an Islamic
government in his place, and was banned in 1983 by
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the
revolution.
Khomeini objected to the
Hojjatieh's rejection of his doctrine of
velayat-e faqih (Guardianship of the
Jurist) and its conviction
that chaos must be created
to hasten the coming of the Mahdi, the
12th Shi'ite imam. Only then,
they argue, can a genuine Islamic republic be
established.
"Those who regarded
the revolution, during Imam Khomeini's time,
as a deviation, are now [wielding] the tools of
terror and oppression," Khatami was reported as
saying at a speech in the conservative
northeastern town of Mashhad, the same location
chosen by Ahmadinejad to convene the first meeting
of his cabinet.
"The shallow-thinking traditionalists with their Stone-Age backwardness now
have a powerful organization behind them," he said, in
what was interpreted as an indirect reference to
the Hojjatieh society.
Khatami's sharp
comments followed an outburst by Ahmad Tavassoli,
a former chief of staff of Khomeini. Tavassoli
claimed that the executive branch of the Iranian
government as well as the crack troops of the
Revolutionary Guards had been hijacked by the
Hojjatieh, which, he implied, now also controls
Ahmadinejad.
Amid talk that the recent
election was a silent coup carried out by elements
of the hardline Revolutionary Guard after eight
years of reformist rule, Western embassies have
been scrambling to understand what the Hojjatieh
stands for and to what extent the influence of its
teachings will be felt in the new government's
domestic and foreign policies.
Asia Times
Online spoke last week with European and North
American diplomats in Tehran who are trying to
identify which of the new government's ministers
have sympathies with the Hojjatieh or a part in
the organization.
After its banning in the
1980s, the Hojjatieh's members faded into the
ranks of the bazaar-based Islamic Coalition
Society (Mo'talife). Reports in the past few years
that the society is reviving have stressed that
the neo-Hojjatieh are not so much anti-Bahai as
"fanning the flames of discord between Shi'ites
and Sunnis", according to the August 28, 2002
edition of the Hamshahri daily.
Ahmadinejad himself is said to have
sympathies with the Hojjatieh, if he was not a
member outright at some point in his career. The
Islamic society he belonged to at Alm-u Sanat
University where he attended was an extreme
traditional and fundamentalist group that
contained a large number of students from the
provinces and maintained grass-roots links with
the Hojjatieh. The society's anti-leftism also
chimes with reports that Ahmadinejad was pushing
for a takeover of the Soviet Embassy alongside or
instead of the US compound in Tehran during the
1979 revolution.
Of the 21 new ministers
in Ahmadinejad's cabinet, three are said to have
Hojjatieh backgrounds, including Intelligence
chief Hojatoleslam Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejehyi,
a graduate of the Hojjatieh-founded Haqqani
theological school with a long background in the
intelligence services. Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi
Mesbah-Yazdi, a hardline Shi'ite cleric who is
said to have issued a fatwa urging all 2
million members of the bassij Islamic
militia [2] to vote for Ahmadinejad in the recent
presidential elections, is also associated with
that university.
The hardline minister of
the interior, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, is another
Haqqani alumnus with suspected Hojjatieh
sympathies. His appointment was greeted with
outrage by some Iranian politicians. Tehran member
of parliament Emad Afruq was reported by Islamic
Republic News Agency on August 24 to have
challenged Pourmohammadi's appointment on the
basis of his questionable human rights record
while at the Ministry of Intelligence: "You must
recognize that when someone comes from such a
ministry, with this past and the absence of
supervisory mechanisms, our reaction is that we
shudder with fear in the public arena. And have we
not shuddered? Have we not felt insecure in the
past?"
A few days after the new cabinet
was revealed, a dinner party in North Tehran's
exclusive Elahiyeh neighborhood was buzzing with
talk of Hojjatieh involvement in the new
government. One Iranian working as a political
analyst for a Western embassy fingered the
controversial Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi as the main
reason behind the transformation of an initially
anarchist movement that rejected any form of
government, especially an Islamic one, into a key
actor influencing the policies of the Ahmadinejad
administration.
The powerful cleric is
said to be Ahmadinejad's marja-e taqlid
(object of emulation) and the ultimate proponent
of an elite theory of government best summed up in
his once saying: "It doesn't matter what the
people think. The people are ignorant sheep."
"There is no doubt that Mesbah and the new
crew, whether formally Hojjatieh or not, are more
attached to core Shi'ite identity and values,"
said Vali Nast, a professor of Middle East
politics at the Department of National Security
Affairs. "But an equally important faction,
especially in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards
Council, is simply anti-Ba'athist. These are
people who fought in the Iran-Iraq war and that
may also be important in deciding attitudes
towards Saudi Arabia and Iraq."
At a time
of rising Sunni-Shi'ite tensions in the region,
and as Iraq increasingly turns into a proxy
battleground for its neighbors, it is not
surprising that a Shi'ite supremacist government
in Tehran, whether related to the Hojjatieh or
not, should reemerge.
Saudi Arabia and
Iran are battling it out in Iraq as both seek to
win the hearts and minds of ordinary Iraqis, the
majority of whom are Shi'ites. While Iran is
believed to have a better intelligence presence in
the country and a more organized military
capability, Saudis account for a large percentage
of the suicide bombers active there.
In an
August Newsweek article, former Central
Intelligence Agency agent Robert Baer quoted a
high-level Syrian official telling him that of
1,200 suspected suicide bombers arrested by the
Syrians since Iraq was invaded in 2003, 85% have
been Saudis. Baer went on to quote Iran's Grand
Ayatollah Saanei reacting to the news by
describing Wahhabi suicide bombers as "wolves
without pity" and saying that "sooner rather than
later, Iran will have to put them down".
Saudi Arabia is also reported to be active
in Iran, especially in the ethnically Arab,
oil-rich south of the country, where it is
whispered that Riyadh is offering financial
incentives for locals to convert from Shi'ite to
Sunni Islam. News of this strategy has reached
Qom, the clerical heartland of Iran.
In an
April 2004 article, Persian-language Baztab news
website that is written by well-connected insiders
and read by Iran's political elite, published a
piece alleging that the Hojjatieh had adopted a
strategy of trying to sharpen domestic tensions
between Sunnis and Shi'ites through launching a
propaganda campaign against the minority religious
group inside Iran (Sunnis). The report alleged
that some Hojjatieh-aligned publishers have been
issuing books in Arabic that are critical of
Sunnis. The books have been distributed in Qom,
but are fictitiously marked "Published in Beirut"
to give them further credibility and mask the fact
they are Shi'ite propaganda.
This is a
potentially dangerous move with grave foreign
policy implications for Iran. Iran's Sunni
minorities live in some of the least-developed
provinces and are under-represented in parliament,
the army and the civil service. Iran's Kurds, who
are Sunni, have been rioting in the north, while
the ethnic Arab south is another location that has
suffered riots and a bombing campaign in the past
six months.
But whether the Hojjatieh is
being resurrected by its former adherents or is
being used as a battering ram by those Iranian
politicians opposed to the current government, its
reappearance coincides with a Shi'ite resurgence
across the region and a new era of conservative
factional infighting in Tehran.
"This
particular form of mud-slinging that had
disappeared a quarter of a century ago - when the
secular left accused the religious establishment
of having clandestine Hojjatieh affiliations - is
gaining currency again in the new battle of
Titans: the traditional right-wing versus the
revolutionary right-wing clerical establishment -
over ideological hegemony in Iran," concluded
Mahmoud Sadri, a US-based Iranian academic.
Note [1] A religion
founded in 1863 in Persia and emphasizing the
spiritual unity of all humankind.
[2]
Islamic vigilantes loyal to Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
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