Free The Ayatollah Begs to Differ by Hooman Majd

flew to Paris in September 2006 to meet with President Jacques Chirac and deliver a private message from Ahmadinejad. Very shortly afterward, he was appointed deputy interior minister for political affairs, a post he would assume along with his full-time duties as senior adviser. To opponents of Ahmadinejad, and more particularly opponents of Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, it became alarmingly clear that October why Hashemi-Samareh had chosen to take the somewhat higher-profile position in government; as part of his duties he was also appointed head of the election commission, supervisor of the poll for the Assembly of Experts (the body that oversees the work of the Supreme Leader)—an election where Mesbah-Yazdi and his allies hoped to gain ground against the more moderate clerics. To his credit, I suppose, and to the credit of the election process, Hashemi-Samareh must not have interfered with the vote count: his mentor Mesbah-Yazdi suffered a humiliating sixth-place finish in the Tehran municipality (barely squeezing into his seat in the Assembly), and his and Ahmadinejad’s allies generally fared far worse than expected, perhaps contributing to Hashemi-Samareh’s reasons for resigning his post a few months later, in the summer of 2007, ostensibly to spend
less
time with his family while his duties as top presidential adviser became all-encompassing, as he claimed, and allowed him not a waking moment to ponder such pedestrian issues as poll supervision. Persian cats, it appears, when they come together once in a while, find a way to trim the whiskers of even the laat cats.

THE AYATOLLAH HAS A COLD
    The Supreme Leader of the Islamic
Revolution
, not Republic, is his official title, but in Iran he is known simply as
Rahbar
, or “Leader.” The title betrays two conflicting sides of the national character (plus an emphatic statement that Iran is forever a revolutionary state). Iranians have traditionally, at least in the last few centuries, despised their leaders no matter their character or their deeds, been quick to turn on and mock them, but at the same time yearned for strong leadership and someone to look up to.
    Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic and the leader of its revolution, was arguably the first genuinely popular leader in recent Iranian history (except for the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq, whose premiership was short-lived, courtesy of the CIA 1 ), but he recognized better than most that the Iranian habit of souring on the subjects of their hero worship meant his dream of a long-lived Islamic state could easily evaporate on the whims of an unruly populace. His concept of
velayat-e-faqih—
“guardianship of the jurist” or “rule of the jurisprudent,” depending on interpretation—which he revealed in a published work in 1970 from his exile in Najaf, Iraq, had Shia Islam as its rationale and basis. But apart from the implication that he would be the
faqih
, which also means “leader,” it conveniently also envisioned a leadership removed enough from public scrutiny (partly owing to its religious credentials but also because of its inherent aloofness from day-to-day political considerations) that it would not suffer the wrath of the people, should they become wrathful, as other leaders traditionally had. Although some Shia clerics rejected the concept entirely and others have disputed the extent to which the faqih can exercise power—for example, whether he should be limited to purely Islamic questions and issues, or whether he is a “ruler” or “guardian”—it was nonetheless enshrined in the Islamic Republic’s constitution after the revolution.
    Khomeini, as father of the revolution and someone who was elevated (some argue inappropriately) to Imam, an honorific that has seldom been applied to any Grand Ayatollah, as it implies sainthood of the sort that is the basis of Shia Islam with its twelve Imams, didn’t need to worry about his