News analysis about Iran
We will, of course, have to judge these insights by paying attention to what happens in the months and years to come, but this article might be helpful in explaining things about Iran to our students.Michael Slackman wrote in The New York Times: As Iran Calms, a Struggle for Political Power Intensifies
The streets of Iran have been largely silenced, but a power struggle grinds on behind the scenes, this time over the very nature of the state itself...
In postelection Iran, there is growing unease among many of the nation’s political and clerical elite that the very system of governance they rely on for power and privilege has been stripped of its religious and electoral legitimacy, creating a virtual dictatorship enforced by an emboldened security apparatus, analysts said...
Some of Iran’s most influential grand ayatollahs, clerics at the very top of the Shiite faith’s hierarchy who have become identified with the reformists, have condemned the results as a fraud and the government’s handling of the protests as brutal. On Saturday, an influential Qum-based clerical association called the new government illegitimate...
For now, Iran’s most hard-line forces have been emboldened. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s spiritual adviser, Ayatollah Muhammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, has said elected institutions are anathema to a religious government and should be no more than window dressing...
But victory for the hard-liners, for Ayatollah Yazdi’s vision of a state run exclusively by a clerical elite, is both ascendant and at the same time undermined by events. In immediate terms, many analysts say, Ayatollah Khamenei has compromised his divinely inspired authority by openly taking sides — a move that is in conflict with the legal, religious and customary role of the leader as a neutral arbiter of events. In essence, he has become just another politician, albeit the most powerful one...
To understand the nature of the conflict, it is essential to look back to the founding of the republic. Ayatollah Khomeini built on two different and often contradictory principles, one of public accountability and one of religious authority. To tie it all together, Ayatollah Khomeini imported a centuries-old religious idea, called velayat-e faqih, or governance of the Islamic jurist...
From the start, there were intense disagreements over how this idea should work. Those conflicts, though, were muted partly by Ayatollah Khomeini’s exalted status, and by a unity forged by an eight-year war with Iraq. When the war ended and Ayatollah Khomeini died, the conflicts erupted...
The competing poles of Iran’s system have produced a fight-to-the-death ethos. Compromise is not just elusive but a sign of weakness.
Labels: constitution, Iran, politics, regime
posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:28 AM
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