The New York Times‘s Saturday story about Qom’s Association of Religious Scholars’ call for new elections is worth further commentary. Stanford’s always-insightful Abbas Milani is probably guilty of understatement when he remarked that Qom’s declaration is “the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic.” This is likely a monumental blow to Ali Khamenei’s position as Supreme Leader. It’s no secret that Qom, the most important center of Islamic learning in Iran, has never been friendly territory for Khamenei. Politically skilled, as a religious scholar Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s successor is even less accomplished than his brother-in-arms-turned-deadly-foe, Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the revolution’s most ambidextrous political cleric. The pride of Qom’s senior clerics, who have given their lives to the serious study of Islamic law, has never stopped bristling at the religious pretensions of Khamenei, who cannot stop trying to promote himself as the most important politico-religious authority in the Shi’ite Muslim world.
Khamenei just cannot escape from the religious roots of his political office, the vilayat-e faqih. He is, to put it politely, a standing joke as a faqih, a religious scholar, in Qom, in Mashhad, where Khamenei controls Iran’s richest religious foundation and uses that money energetically to promote himself, and in Najaf, Iraq’s Shi’ite clerical headquarters where the Iranian-born and enormously influential Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani resides. One suspects that even highly accomplished legal scholars who are philosophically allied to Khamenei and his office–for example, Ayatollah Muhammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s so-called spiritual advisor–have a hard time getting excited about Khamenei as the Supreme Leader. This constant clerical tension, which degrades the legitimacy of Khamenei’s right to rule among the most important constituency of the Islamic Republic, has now gone hyper because of the crisis of the June 12th presidential elections.
