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 State radio ceased to refer to him, his portraits were removed from mosques and offices, and his security guards were withdrawn.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

A Lone Cleric Is Loudly Defying Iran’s Leaders

A short midlevel cleric, with a neat white beard and a clergyman’s calm bearing, Mehdi Karroubi has watched from his home in Tehran in recent months as his aides have been arrested, his offices raided, his newspaper shut down. He himself has been threatened with arrest and, indirectly, the death penalty.

Once a second-tier opposition figure operating in the shadow of Mir Hussein Moussavi, his fellow challenger in Iran’s discredited presidential election in June, Mr. Karroubi has emerged in recent months as the last and most defiant opponent of the country’s leadership. The authorities have dismissed as fabrications his accusations of official corruption, voting fraud and the torture and rape of detained protesters. A former confidant of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and a longtime conservative politician, he has lately been accused by the government of fomenting unrest and aiding Iran’s foreign enemies.

Four months after mass protests erupted in response to the dubious victory claims of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the opposition’s efforts have largely stalled in the face of unrelenting government pressure, arrests, long detentions, harsh sentences, censorship and a strategic refusal to compromise. But for all its success at preserving authority, the government has been unable to silence or intimidate Mr. Karroubi, its most tenacious and, in many ways, most problematic critic. While other opposition figures, including Mr. Moussavi and two former presidents, Mohammad Khatami and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, are seldom heard now, Mr. Karroubi has been unsparing and highly vocal in his criticism of the government, which he feels has lost all legitimacy.

After the government dismissed those allegations last month, Mr. Karroubi was summoned to appear before a three-judge panel investigating his actions. He welcomed the invitation. “It will be a good opportunity for me to talk again about crimes that would make the shah look good,” he said, according to the Green Freedom Wave Web site.

As calls for his arrest grow louder, he remains defiant. “If only I were not alive and had not seen the day that in the Islamic republic, a citizen would come to me and complain that every variety of appalling and unnatural act would be done in unknown buildings and by less-known people: stripping people and making them face each other and subjecting them to vile insults and urinating in their faces,” he wrote in his letter to the nation. “I said to myself, ‘Where indeed have we arrived 30 years after the revolution?’ ”

Sourc: New York Times

Khomeini, Imam of Iran And Foe of U.S., Is Dead

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's spiritual and political leader, died today, 12 days after he underwent surgery for bleeding in his digestive system, the official Iranian news agency reported. He was believed to be 89 years old. ''The leader of the Islamic revolution and founder of the Islamic Republic, Imam Khomeini, passed away at a Teheran Hospital,'' the Islamic Republic News Agency reported in an urgent dispatch.

Yesterday, Iran had said Ayatollah Khomeini's health was deteriorating and urged the nation to pray for the leader, who underwent surgery last month for bleeding in his digestive system. Iran's state-run radio and television, monitored in Nicosia, had said the Ayatollah's condition was declining but it gave no details.

Both carried a brief statement from Ayatollah Khomeini's office that said: ''At 3:00 P.M. on Saturday a complication arose in the imam's condition, which the doctors are trying to control. We urge the nation to pray for the imam's health, and hope that their prayers will be answered.'' Earlier in the week, the television said a ''slight cardiac complication'' had arisen May 27, but that it was relieved the next day.

Iran's main opposition group, the Mujahedeen Khalq, or People's Holy Warriors, said last week that Ayatollah Khomeini suffered a heart attack on May 27. The statement by the Iraq-based group said the heart attack came five days after he underwent surgery on the duodenum, a part of the small intestine close to the stomach. The Mujahedeen's claim could not be independently confirmed.

Ayatollah Khomeini had been reported ailing since he suffered a heart attack in 1986. Since then he was rarely seen outside his home in the north Teheran suburb of Jamaran. But his hospitalization heightened already intense speculation about who will succeed Ayatollah Khomeini as leader of the theocratic state. Political turmoil has gripped the country since Ayatollah Khomeini launched a radical resurgence in February with his death decree against British author Salman Rushdie for allegedly blaspheming against Islam in his novel, ''The Satanic Verses.'' A purge of so-called moderates who apparently favored rebuilding ties with the West followed as the 10-year-old Islamic regime withdrew into its traditional isolationist stance.

Ayatollah Khomeini in March ousted his designated successor, Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, 64, who had openly criticized the regime's shortcomings, and then appointed a 20-member committee to review the succession. But in the absence of a single personality who could match the patriarch's political and revolutionary authority, there was widespread speculation that Iran may be ruled by a collective leadership in the post-Khomeini era.

Source: New York Times

LEADERS OF 37 NATIONS AND P.L.O. TO OPEN TALKS TODAY

Leaders of 37 Moslem nations and the Palestine Liberation Organization converged on this resort city today for tomorrow's opening of the Islamic summit conference, which is expected to focus on collective action against Israel. The participants' hopes of negotiating an end to the Iran-Iraq war appear to have been dashed by Iran's refusal to attend the talks. A five-man delegation returned from Teheran today after having failed to persuade the Iranians to reconsider their boycott of the meeting.

Conference sources said the Islamic nations had hoped to mediate the four-month-old war between Iran and Iraq. But Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader, said yesterday that Iran would boycott the conference because President Saddam Hussein of Iraq would be present. Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf's largest oil exporter and the host for the conference, has expressed concern that the war might spread to neighboring countries.

A number of Moslem nations besides Iran will not be represented at the conference. Libya is boycotting the meeting to express its displeasure over the basing of United States radar surveillance planes in Saudi Arabia since the outbreak of the Persian Gulf war. Afghanistan was banned from the conference because its Sovietbacked Government is trying, with the help of Soviet troops, to put down Moslem rebels. Egypt was excluded because of its peace treaty with Israel.

The summit meeting will hold its opening session tomorrow in the open-air courtyard of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, birthplace of Islam. Security was extremely tight in the area, the site of fighting a year ago between Saudi security forces and Moslem extremists who occupied the mosque.

The agenda calls for talks on the Palestinian cause and ways of putting pressure on Israel to yield Arab territories occupied during the 1967 Mideast war. The Islamic nations are especially concerned about Israel's control of largely Arab East Jerusalem, which contains one of Islam's holiest shrines, the Al Aksa Mosque. The conference, including nations representing some 800 million Moslems, is calling itself the ''Palestine and Jerusalem summit'' and is expected to reach a rapid consensus on an anti-Israeli program, a Saudi delegate said. ''While the aim of the summit is to put Islamic 'swords into plowshares,' resolutions on economic and political sanctions against the enemies of the Islamic nations are perfectly relevant,'' he said.

No official indication was given of specific actions to put pressure on Israel. But political sources said the campaign would probably be directed against Israel's supporters in Western Europe and the United States.

Source: New York Times

Shah's Departure Hailed In Message by Ayatollah; Ayatollah Calls for Unity Return to Iran Not Specified

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leading religious opponent of the Shah of Iran, sent congratulations to the Iranian people today on having forcing the Shah to leave the country and called his departure "the first step" toward ending the 57-year reign of the Pahlevi dynasty.

Source: New York Times