Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri Dies at 87

Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, died in his sleep on 19 December 2009. He was 87 years old, and was one of Iran’s most senior clerics and had for many years been a trenchant critic of the Islamic Republic’s hardline leadership.

Montazeri became a critic of successive regimes after having been one of the architects of the revolution which saw the deposition of the Shah in 1979, and might well have become Supreme Leader himself. Formerly a close ally of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, he fell out with his former teacher over general policy and human rights and found himself marginalised. Later he was placed under house arrest for criticising Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; and more recently he fell foul of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, insisting that the elections that returned the president to power last June were fraudulent; he also issued a fatwa condemning the government.

Born into a farming family in 1922 in the province of Isfahan, Hossein Ali Montazeri studied as a young man under Khomeini at the holy city of Qom before becoming a teacher at the Faiziyeh Theological School. He was an early recruit to Khomeini’s campaign against the Shah, and after Khomeini had been forced into exile in 1964 Montazeri was his designated representative in Iran. He spent four years in jail in the 1970s. Following the Shah’s overthrow in 1979, he helped to draft Iran’s new constitution. Khomeini had once written to him: “All of the people know that you are the harvest of what I have sown during my life. The people must follow you” — and in 1985 Montazeri was chosen as Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader. This close relationship would not last, however. Montazeri — who was a member of the Revolutionary Council — believed that the role of the Islamic jurists supervising the administration should be primarily advisory, not executive, and he was becoming increasingly uneasy about the direction being taken by the Republic. He openly criticised the leadership, and in November 1987 called for the legalisation of political parties. He also condemned the mass execution of political prisoners in 1988 and the fatwa issued against the novelist Salman Rushdie.

In 1989 Khomeini announced that Montazeri had “resigned”. State radio ceased to refer to him, his portraits were removed from mosques and offices, and his security guards were withdrawn. Khomeini died in 1989, to be succeeded by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In 1997 Montazeri gave a speech in which he declared that the people had the right to choose their Supreme Leader and that Iran’s rulers should be subject to the law. His reward was to be placed under house arrest at his home in Qom until January 2003. His theological school was closed down by the authorities; the state-run media stopped referring to him by his religious title, describing him instead as a “simple-minded” cleric; and all references to him in schoolbooks were removed, while streets named after him were renamed.

Montazeri remained a strong voice of the opposition until his death, repeatedly accusing his nation’s rulers of imposing dictatorship in the name of Islam. After the demonstrations which greeted last summer’s disputed election result, he led calls for three days of national mourning for the student Neda Agha-Soltan and others shot dead by government security forces. Although Montazeri believed that Iran had a right to develop nuclear energy, he denounced President Ahmadinejad’s provocative stance on the matter. As a critic of the regime, Montazeri retained the respect of many Iranians, who continued to observe his religious rulings or supported his calls for democratic change. In 2004 he remarked: “The people were not happy with the Shah’s regime and nor are they happy now.”

Source: The Telegraph