IN 2009 Iran witnessed a massive show of public opposition to the results of the national elections. Millions of people came out to support Mir-Hussein Mousavi’s claim against Ahmadinejad. Much like thirty years ago, when the SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, which had been created under the guidance of Israeli and US intelligence officers cracked down on any dissent, the protests in 2009 were heavily suppressed by the police and the Basij, a state-sponsored civilian militia. Thousands of people were arrested and an unknown number of people killed.

In the aftermath of these events, various people tried to address questions relating to finding the roots of this opposition. Although the protests had large public support, unfortunately most analyses have tended to ignore the role of the city of Qom in providing a counterpoint to the views of the ‘establishment’. Qom and its theological schools are often misrepresented as a monolithic block and the ulama, en masse, are viewed with suspicion. However, the city is and has been a centre of protest and in 2009 a number of prominent clerics and their supporters were arrested and cautioned against speaking out against the regime. This role of the ulama of Qom in formulating and expressing opposition is not new.

On the 8th of January 1978 an article attacking Ayatollah Khomeini appeared in the government run newspaper, Etelat. The Shah thought that he could smear the Ayatollah’s reputation and one of the charges levelled against him was that he was Indian, merely because his grandfather had lived in India before moving to Najaf. The second part of the article lambasted him for being a madman who wanted to break national unity and lacked even common sense.

 

The first city to react to the article was the shrine city of Qom. People were gunned down by government forces in the streets and squares and when the time came to commemorate the dead, the 40th day, other cities also came out to hold protests and vigils. The state police repressed these uprisings too. This led to a bloody cycle of violence erupting every forty days, which swept through cities like Isfahan and Tabriz and eventually reached Tehran.

Revolutions tend to occur in places where the patience of people is exhausted. The state does not know how to contain this ‘anxious’ energy and people cannot but loathe a regime that they have come to associate with repression and suffering. Although a variety of factors led to the events of 1979, it is perhaps possible to argue that the protests in Qom were the beginning a chain of events that eventually culminated in the ‘Revolution’.

 

The city of Qom has traditionally been a centre of Shi’a scholarship with a large number of seminaries which have come up around the shrine of the Fatima al-Masumah, the daughter of the 7th Imam and the sister of the 8th Imam, Imam Ali ar-Rida, who is buried in the city of Mashad. Although the dominant tendency has been to view the theological establishment with suspicion, in reality there is a tremendous variety of opinions concerning all matters of theological and jurisprudential thought.

During the 2009 protests, a number of senior clerics were arrested and those too powerful to be openly jailed were kept under house arrest. Grand Ayatollah Montazeri was one of the stalwarts of the revolution. He was designated the successor to Ayatollah Khomeini until he was summararily removed, technically he ‘resigned’, because he disagreed with what he saw as repressive policies and violations of human rights. Ayatollah Montazeri was nearly continuously under house arrest and in the aftermath of the 2009 elections issued a statement saying that, ‘The incidents and tragedies of recent months, which occurred after the country’s presidential election, ring an alarm bell for the clerical institution and religious authority. In the course of these events, rights were trampled upon, and numerous injustices and offenses committed in the name of religion and with the approval of a minority of state and state-affiliated clerics.’

A few months after the elections he passed away and even his funeral was heavily monitored and participation limited because officials feared that there might be spontaneous uprisings by the mourners. Grand Ayatollahs Ardibili, Javod Amuli, Yusuf Sanei, Jooybari, Baiyat Zanjani and others also denounced the outcome of the elections and the tactics used by the government to suppress dissent. This group of ulama have long expressed reservations about the institution of velayat-e faqih or the Guardianship of the Jurisconsult, which is the theological concept used to justify a theocratic government. The concept of the velayat-e faqih has been one of the most contentious topics in international affairs and also within Islamic discourse. Though its roots lie in classical Shi’i jurisprudence, it has acquired a new meaning and has evolved during the last century, especially in the period before the revolution of 1979.

The current vali-e amr, or Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has perhaps sensed a deep sense of unease amongst many of the ulama in Qom and thus has visited the shrine city on two separate occasions in the last month. On one trip he spent nearly 12 days in the city. Today Qom is still an intellectual powerhouse despite the fact that many of the voices of opposition amongst senior clerics remain stifled. There are nearly 50 seminaries, 55,000 students and approximately 250 centres of research that employ over 5000 people. Most of the institutions are connected to the internet.

 

One of the main concerns of the government, and more importantly the government-affiliated clerics, is that an increasing number of people are looking beyond Iran for choosing their marja-e taqlid. The majority of Shi’as in the world are Twelver Shia’s because of their belief that the Prophet was succeeded, not in Prophethood but in political and spiritual leadership, by Twelve Imams who were descended from his daughter Fatima and her husband, his cousin, Ali. Within Twelver Shi’ism, the marja-e taqlid is the highest juridical authority who acts as a source of emulation in legal and jurisprudential matters, but not in matters of faith or belief. People are free to choose which marja they want to follow depending on their expertise and their position on the various minutae of Islamic law. Today, there are a large number of maraji (plural of marja) in various countries in the world.

 

Iran, of course, has a number of maraji but the worrying shift for Ayatollah Khamenei is that an increasing number of people are choosing Ayatollah Sistani as their marja. Although Ayatollah Sistani is originally an Iranian, he lives in the shrine city of Najaf in Iraq. Part of the reason that this shift is so worrying for many members of the establishment in Iran is that the question of the validity of velayat-e faqih also varies from one marja to another. Ayatollah Sistani does not subscribe to the system and has time and again said that clerics should not have a direct role in governance and at best can serve as ‘advisors’.

Within Qom, the opposition to velayat-e faqih is understandably more nuanced and subtle because of the very real danger of openly criticising the regime. Ayatollah Yusuf Sanei is widely heralded as someone with a very dynamic approach to jurisprudential and legal issues. Although he does not oppose the concept itself, he does criticize the various acts that are carried out in its name, thus implying that the regime’s current interpretation of velayat-e faqih is flawed. Also on a number of important issues, Ayatollah Sanei has issued fatwas which have not been popular with pro-government members of the ulama like Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi. Ayatollah Sanei was once close to Ayatollah Khomeini and held the position of Chair of the Guardian Council. He has passed a number of fatawa concerning women’s rights in which he has stated that there is no problem in women occupying the highest posts in the land and so can become judges, leaders and even president. He has openly condemned suicide bombing and the ill-treatment of minorities.

 

After the 2009 election he stated that the results of the presidential election were wrong, that Ahmadinejad was not the president and, therefore, any cooperation with him or his government was haraam, or forbidden. Perhaps it is these various stances that led to the Association of Qom Theological Lecturers passing a resolution in January 2010 questioning Ayatollah Sanei’s qualifications for being a marja and opining that people should no longer follow him as one. Interestingly, the document bore the signature of Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, who is a member of the Assembly of Experts, another powerful council of ulama which elects and monitors the Supreme Leader. The other Lecturers Associations of Qom and indeed leading maraji from other countries have also condemned this move.

The increasing rift between members of the ulama is illustrative of how change can come from within systems that are often viewed as being fundamentally stagnant, monolithic and conservative. When Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran in 1979, he first briefly visited Tehran but then went to Qom where the school building in which he was living was besieged by a mob of supporters. The last thirty years have not seen the role of Qom diminish and the inner workings of the various seminaries can thus serve as a useful barometer of the desire for transformation and change.