Author: Elaine Sciolino
Publication: The New York Times
Date: February 1, 2003
The invisible man of Qum has returned
to the battlefield of Islamic politics.
Freed from the shackles of house
arrest after five years on Wednesday, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri
- the man once destined to become spiritual leader of the Islamic Republic,
who then became its most outspoken dissident cleric - today did what he
does best.
He talked.
He talked to a delegation of Parliament
deputies seated cross-legged at his feet in a simple office decorated with
artificial plants and machine-made rugs. He delivered speech after speech
to hundreds of men and black-veiled women who rotated in and out of a warehouse-like
auditorium. He chatted with almost anyone who turned up to see him: students,
relatives of political prisoners, journalists and folks from his hometown
of Najafabad, about 100 miles south of here.
Ayatollah Montazeri considers himself
in the "reformist" camp of President Mohammad Khatami. But while Mr. Khatami
is a conciliator, Ayatollah Montazeri is overtly hostile to the conservative
clerical establishment.
As one of the country's senior clerics
- he is certainly considered a far more learned cleric than either Mr.
Khatami or even the country's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
- every word he utters carries extraordinary weight.
In his conversations today, the
80-year-old ayatollah once again wasted no time in attacking the conservative
clerics for their repression and for trying to still his voice.
"They kept me isolated from society
for five years and wasted five years of my life this way," he said in a
brief interview in his office. "It was such a cruel thing to do. I could
have been useful, given advice, but they deprived me from doing it. This
is oppression."
His words made clear that he would
keep his pledge to accept no conditions for his release and to speak out
just as loudly and clearly as before.
He told members of Parliament and
students that the harsh sentences given political prisoners by two special
courts - one for political activists, one for clerics - were "baseless,"
adding, "They do not exist in the Constitution."
Rather, he said, these courts "have
alienated the clerics, have jailed religious and revolutionary figures"
and should be disbanded. He called on the authorities to "come to their
senses" and release all political prisoners.
Even more stunning, he said Ayatollah
Khamenei was "not infallible" and could be challenged by Parliament.
As for Iran's place in the world,
he said: "Chanting death to this and that is not the way to run a country.
We have lost our prestige in the world. We are constantly falling behind."
At the same time, he is firm in
his opposition to American foreign policy, arguing today as he has since
the days of the 1979 revolution, that the United States wrongheadedly supported
Israel and meddled where it should not. The American government "is stretching
its leg beyond its territory," he said in the interview. "It wants to interfere
into the affairs of other parts of the world."
Talking is what Shiite Muslim clerics
like Ayatollah Montazeri are trained to do. In principle, the clerical
system is supposed to be a democratic, even chaotic one in which students
are trained to speak their minds and challenge the authority of their professors.
Qum, the dusty 1,000-year-old city on the edge of Iran's great salt desert
90 miles south of Tehran, is the national headquarters for that discourse.
So Ayatollah Montazeri has been
talking again since Wednesday, when the five-year house arrest that barred
him from delivering sermons, training seminary students or conducting public
activities was lifted.
That freedom arrived only after
pressure from some of Iran's other senior clerics and members of Parliament
and reports from relatives that he suffers from diabetes, heart problems,
convulsions and depression and was sleeping 16 hours a day.
Today, the aging ayatollah's round
face is thinner, his grizzled beard whiter than five years ago. But he
does not look like a man on his deathbed.
In one of the sermons to his followers,
he kept it apolitical, advising them as "brothers and sisters" to seek
knowledge and "don't chant slogans about it."
The ayatollah has been a son of
Qum since he arrived as a student in the 1930's. He became a leader of
the religious opposition against the American- backed shah, who was overthrown
in the 1979 revolution, and he spent time in prison.
Afterward, the leader of that revolution,
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, often referred to his younger charge as "the
fruit of my life," and he was designated to be Ayatollah Khomeini's successor
after his death.
Paradoxically, Ayatollah Montazeri
was one of the architects of the clauses in the Constitution calling for
ultimate rule by a single supreme leader. On foreign policy, he succeeded
in channeling money, weapons and other support to Islamic political movements
around the world. He denounced Saudi Arabia for what he called its "filthy"
regime and routinely condemned the United States as evil.
When an American warship in the
Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in 1988, he called
for retaliatory attacks on American military, political, cultural and economic
installations.
But at home, the message was different.
In the late 1980's, he broke the code of silence that had largely governed
the ruling clerical elite and went public with his complaints - what he
considered the revolution's internal excesses.
When, for instance, the judiciary
punished hundreds of political opponents with swift execution, Ayatollah
Montazeri lamented that "people in the world got the idea that our business
in Iran is just murdering people."
When officials blamed foreign powers
for Iran's economic woes, he openly criticized the government for creating
shortages and inflation that paralyzed the economy. When Ayatollah Khomeini
issued a ruling calling for the assassination of the novelist Salman Rushdie,
Ayatollah Montazeri refused to endorse it.
In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini unceremoniously
stripped Ayatollah Montazeri of his position as designated successor. He
was marginalized, but he was not put on trial as a traitor or sent to prison.
His private classes were filled; his followers generously gave him money.
As a "marja," one of the highest-ranking Shiite theologians, he had the
respect of the clerics of Qum, even if they disagreed with his politics.
Then in late 1997, he told a group
of students visiting his home that Ayatollah Khamenei lacked the necessary
religious credentials for the job of supreme leader, which he still is
today. Indeed, he added, the autocratic rule that Ayatollah Khamenei and
his supporters exercised has made people "disgusted with the clerics."
Ayatollah Montazeri was put under
house arrest. Rioters attacked his house. Ayatollah Khamenei branded the
man who was once destined to have his job as "politically bankrupt, pathetic
and naïve."
But even when Ayatollah Montazeri
was under house arrest, many of his students kept in touch with him from
the roof of the house next door while he was in the garden below. His son
fielded their phone calls and smuggled out statements to reformist newspapers.
"The comings and goings of all the
supporters today prove that the house arrest of Ayatollah Montazeri has
failed, absolutely failed," said Mohammad Ali Ayazi, a midranking cleric
and one of his protégés. "They can never again do that to
him. Still, some people believe Mr. Montazeri is hazardous for them. So
I worry about his security."
Indeed, not everyone in Qum is happy
with the ayatollah's restored voice. At the official Friday Prayers sermon
at a shrine today, tough-looking thugs distributed anti-Montazeri leaflets.
They accused him of attacking "the
organs of the Islamic revolution with his poisonous words," adding, "We
revolutionary people of Qum have never forgotten his treason."
