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

QOM, IRAN—On a snowy day early this year, a cheery crowd gathered in a busy square here, undeterred by the sting of icy wind gusts. A mobile crane moved into place to serve as a makeshift gallows, followed by black-masked hangmen. Three convicted drug traffickers were brought out, each made to stand on a stool as a noose was placed around his neck. Moments later, the hangmen swiftly pulled away the stools. For hours, the three bodies were left dangling.

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

Standing nearby was a lean, gray-bearded cleric from Mofid University, which is regarded as a relatively liberal seminary in this Shiite holy city south of Tehran. As he watched the grim spectacle, not the first he has witnessed, he was troubled by the number of public hangings in Iran and the message this sends not only to the outside world but at home as well. In 2007, Iran executed at least 317 people, most by hanging, up from 177 in 2006, according to Amnesty International. There have been at least 108 executions so far this year. "Through public executions, they create an atmosphere of intimidation and silence," he remarked a few days later, asking not to be named for his safety. "They want to frighten people, to make them afraid of voicing criticism. This is not the Islam I know.''

Such dissent fomenting in Qom, a center of Shiite scholarship, shows that the current Iranian government leadership faces rumblings of opposition not just from secular-minded intellectuals in affluent areas of northern Tehran but from elements in Iran's clerical class, too. This cleric—once a staunch supporter of the 1979 Islamic Revolution—is disillusioned with the "frightening direction" the revolution has veered toward, making way for what some have labeled a "turbaned dictatorship."

The revolution, which toppled U.S.-backed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, brought to power Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and transformed Iran into a theocracy. Clerics wear both the hats of government and the turbans of religion. The principle of velayat e faqih [rule of Islamic jurisprudence], which places the clergy above all other institutions, holds that society should be governed by a supreme leader, a cleric best qualified to enforce Islamic law, until the appearance of the Shiite messiah. It is this doctrine that makes Khomeini's successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader and all others subordinate to him.

While Iranian liberals have yearned for a constitutional separation of religion and state, Qom, too, was never completely at ease with Khomeini's idea of velayat e faqih. With its many decrepit buildings bearing scribbled slogans and stenciled portraits of an unsmiling Khomeini, Qom is home to hundreds of seminaries. It might appear to be the nerve center of global Islamic fundamentalism. Yet views here are not homogeneous. Some revered clerics, in private conversations, repudiate the idea of involving religion so deeply in politics and governance. And they blame the politicization of Islam for Iran's pressing woes—human-rights abuses, international isolation, and an economy that is crippled despite being blessed with the world's fourth-largest oil reserves.

Hard-liners. Those views, though, may be in the minority, overshadowed by more hard-line clerics like Mohsen Rezvani from the political department of the radical Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute, who declares that fealty to Islam is the only way to govern. "Islam prescribes a way to deal with every situation in the world," he says in his large office. "It has rid the world of the responsibility to create modern laws." He sips tea, sucks on a sugar cube, and, with a placid expression, justifies the public executions. "In Islam, punishment is very harsh," he says, "because the philosophy of punishment in the Koran is to prevent people from committing a crime."

There is no doubt that the clerical class has benefited, both financially and politically, in this theocracy. In March elections for the Majlis, the Iranian Parliament, conservative clerics strengthened their grip on power. An unprecedented number of reformists were barred from running in elections by the powerful Guardian Council, a cleric-led group that vets candidates for loyalty to the country's Islamic system.

Some dissident clerics have challenged the legitimacy of a parliament chosen under such restrictions and argue that politics may undercut religious principles. One of those is Grand Ayatollah Ali Hossein Montazeri, a revered elderly cleric who was Khomeini's heir apparent until they had a falling out over political freedoms and other issues. "The clergy must keep themselves as far as possible from executive roles and from the centers of power so as not to compromise its role as the spiritual guide of the population," he told the Italian news agency Adnkronos International in March.

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.

One of the first acts of the government when Ahmadinejad took office in 2005 was a donation of the equivalent of $20 million to the Jamkaran Mosque near Qom, where it is believed the Hidden Imam will appear. That money is being used to turn the small Jamkaran mosque into a gargantuan complex of prayer halls and minarets .

Many Iranians—even among those who are devout—look at this extravagant government spending on religion as a waste of money. "The government spends more on enforcing religious morality than improving the economic conditions of its poor,'' says the senior official at a state-owned oil company. "If you need to construct a building, you hire a civil engineer,'' he says in his plush office in central Tehran. "And if you want to run a country efficiently, you need to appoint efficient, qualified people to run it, not clerics.''

With all its oil income, this could be a very prosperous nation, says the official, but it isn't one now. "Iran," he adds, "needs a government answerable not just to God but also its own people."