At first glance, nothing is unusual. President Rouhani’s first vice president travels to the holy city of Qom and meets with an ayatollah. But when a group of hardliners lead a string of protests condemning the meeting, what can it mean? The answer lies in the ayatollah in question: Yousef Saanei. To grasp the significance of the Qom meeting, it’s important to have an understanding of just who this ayatollah is, as well as the nature of his relationship with previous governments.
On Thursday, 30 January, just before the 35th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, First Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri and Majid Ansari, parliamentary vice president and himself a cleric, traveled to Qom to report on the first six months of the Rouhani administration – assessing in particular its performance on Iran’s economy. However, the meeting with the Grand Ayatollah Yousef Saanei overshadowed the entire enterprise.
Qom is the most important center of Shi’ite theology in Iran; it’s known as the Qom Seminary. One hardline cleric and member of parliament, Hamid Resai, referred to the meeting between Saanei and Jahangiri as an act of “deliberate disrespect” to the Qom Seminary. He warned President Rouhani that, in future, he should prevent his cabinet ministers, vice presidents and other officials from repeating such an offence. Resai also claimed that the meeting was an effort to acknowledge and in some way rehabilitate the reputations of those who had been active in the “sedition” of 2009 – “sedition” being the code word for the disputed presidential elections of 2009 and its aftermath.
Certainly, in the eyes of hardliners, this alone is a serious demerit. But it’s clear that the meeting was interpreted as a significant and multi-layered insult to many conservative clerics and politicians. Though he was once a venerated figure in the power structure of the Islamic Republic, in recent years, Saanei has been accused of a number of offences, and those who associate with him are likely to come under scrutiny too.
Saanei’s list of offences is impressive:
– In 2009, after the death of Ayatollah Montazeri, once Ayatollah Khomeini’s deputy but later pushed aside, Saanei declared that the government was illegitimate because it ruled with “terror, murder, torture and imprisonment”.
– Following the 2009 elections, Saanei criticized President Ahmadinejad, claiming he was not legitimate. There were even rumors that he had issued a fatwa, or a religious edict, forbidding any cooperation with Ahmadinejad’s government.
– Saanei believes that under Islam, men and women are equal, and that women can become religious leaders, or even ayatollahs.
– He has called suicide bombing a terrorist act and an act against Islam.
– He has strongly condemned forced confessions, which are regularly used in Iran, particularly in the case of political prisoners.
Stripped of Authority
In 2010, the Qom Theological Lecturers Association stripped Saanei of his position as a “source of emulation”, the highest rank among Shi’ite clerics. Traditionalists and conservatives, who do not recognize that the association or other bodies have the authority to take such action, condemned the move.
It is no surprise, then, that, during the eight years of Ahmadinejad’s presidency, no government official visited Saanei.
In the 35 years since the Islamic Revolution, successive governments have tried to keep high Shi’ite clerics on their side, as they provide strong spiritual support. With this goal in mind, officials have often traveled to Qom to build relationships with the clergy there – usually boasting about these good relationships afterwards. Ahmadinejad’s government, however, did not have a very close or cordial relationship with Qom.
The initial souring of the relationship started with the “Halo of Light” episode. After his first appearance at the United Nations in New York, Ahmadinejad claimed that during his speech he was surrounded by a halo. (He later denied it, but the statement was captured on video.) Many members of the high clergy referred to the claim as a “superstition” and Ahmadinejad was widely ridiculed for it.
In 2009, Saanei was among the high-level clerics who objected to the brutal suppression of the opposition. But fundamentalists and the Qom Theological Lecturers Association strongly disagreed with his position, calling him “unjust” and not fit to be a source of emulation.
As a cleric, Saanei started from a position of privilege. He was a student of Ayatollah Khomeini and other grand ayatollahs, became a “source of emulation” when he was just 22 and started teaching at the Qom Seminary in 1976. After the Islamic Revolution, his close relationship with Khomeini made him first a member of the Guardian Council of the Constitution and then the prosecutor of Tehran. Later, he was elected as the Tehran representative to the influential Assembly of Experts of the Leadership.
Over the past two decades, his position on the rights of women and other issues his made him popular among reformists and religious intellectuals. At the same time, however, these beliefs have eroded and largely destroyed his standing among hardliners.
After his was stripped of his credentials as an ayatollah, agents of the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance removed his books from bookstores; his offices in Tehran and the holy city of Mashhad were ransacked. Government-owned media routinely censor news about him and the hardliner national newspaper refers to him a “sheikh” instead of an ayatollah.
Outside the country, Saanei has been the subject of humorous reflection. Aref-Adib, a blog run by an Iranian living in the UK, features a photograph of Saanei next to one of American actor Charles Bronson. The post highlights the resemblance between the two men. Of course, whether this comparison helps or damages Saanei’s standing among various factions in Iran is purely a matter of speculation.
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