In Iran’s Holy City, Dissent Over Mixing Islam and Politics

In Qom, clerics and others check the news before the March elections.

Similarly, another re-nowned cleric, Hojatoles-lam Mohsen Kadivar, has argued since the 1990s that Iran could not have clerical rule and claim to be a democracy at the same time. Because of his criticisms, Kadivar was convicted by the Special Court for Clergy in 1999 for spreading false information about Iran's "sacred system of the Islamic Republic." He was released from the notorious Evin prison in mid-2000, and now, sidelined by the clergy, is engaged in various reform efforts in Iran.

The cleric from Mofid University who witnessed the hangings is mindful of the perils of speaking out. But he fears that, as religious conservatives tighten their grip on power in Iran, "the regime might become more zealous in its attempts to make 'true Islamists' out of Iranians.'' This is particularly the case, he adds, as tensions grow with the West. "The regime is always paranoid about Iranians turning antiestablishment," he says. "That's made them obsessed with ensuring that Iranians remain loyal to Islamic norms and don't drift toward America or a decadent West.''

Mosque and state. There are 7,000 mosques in Iran today—almost 5,000 of them built since the 1979 revolution. They are controlled by a body called the "headquarters of mosques," whose chief is chosen the supreme leader. This chief, in turn, selects the imams for every mosque, vetting candidates who can be counted upon to be loyal to the religious leadership. Mosques, which relied only on khoms (donations collected from merchants as an Islamic levy) in the prerevolution years, are now flush with funding directly from the government.

The mosques, as a result, have become a powerful arm of the government. Despite a bad economy, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who promised in his 2005 presidential campaign to bring the benefits of oil revenues to people's lives, has authorized a more than seven-fold increase in government spending for "religious activities" this year, according to Rooz, a Persian news website staffed by exiled reformist Iranian journalists. Last year, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance reportedly had a budget equivalent to $2.2 million for religious activities. Ahmadinejad has proposed increasing this amount to $16.6 million.

Facing complaints that little of the oil-price windfall seems to be improving the hard lives of ordinary Iranians, Ahmadinejad in his recent speeches has blamed the bad economy on the "economic mafia," and his surrogates have sought to discredit some dissident clerics with allegations of corruption. In May, one Ahmadinejad ally, midlevel government official Abbas Palizdar, made speeches in which he denounced several clerics for corruption, including powerful ex-President Hashemi Rafsanjani. That move exposed a rift between Ahmadinejad and some clerical powers. In late June, Palizdar was arrested and charged with "propagating lies," a development seen as demonstrating the power of the clerics who oversee the government.

Even if the allegations of corruption are true, many Iranians now blame the bad economy on Ahmadinejad's imprudent economic policies and his confrontational attitude toward the West. "Most of his economic policies stem from a return-of-Imam mentality,'' says a senior official at a state-owned oil company. That is a reference to the Imam Mahdi, a messianic figure sometimes called the Hidden Imam, who the faithful believe will one day emerge from 1,000 years in hiding to reign over a just world in which Islam is universally embraced.

Clerical criticism. Ahmad-inejad says that the Hidden Imam guides him in running the country, a claim to religious authority for his actions that doesn't sit well with some clerics. In May, for instance, a senior conservative cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad Reza Mahdavi Kani, publicly rebuked Ahmadinejad for claiming a bond with the Hidden Imam, pointedly urging that the president address himself to the nation's current social and economic problems.