THOUSANDS OF Iranians gathered yesterday in the holy city of Qom to mourn Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, the country’s most prominent dissident cleric and harshest critic of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
His death from natural causes at 87 was announced by his family early in the day. But the authorities, fearing demonstrations against the regime by the opposition Green Movement, withheld the news for 10 hours. He will be buried today at the shrine of Hazrate Masoumen, a female saint revered by Shias.
Ayatollah Montazeri, one of the architects of the 1979 revolution that toppled the shah, was born in 1922 into a provincial farming family and educated at Shia seminaries in Isfahan and Qom. As he gained status as a theologian, he rose through the Shia hierarchy to become a grand ayatollah and marja, a figure to emulate. At any time there are about half a dozen grand ayatollahs in the Shia world.
He began his career as an early supporter and confident of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, father of the Islamic Republic, and was detained and tortured for leading protests against the shah and his drive to transform Iran into a secular state along western lines.
Montazeri acted as Khomenei’s representative in Iran after he went into exile first in Iraq and later in Paris. Montazeri was the author of the Islamic Republic’s constitution, a document that provided for democratic elections of Iran’s rulers but gave senior clerics an advisory status.
However, Khomeini, as supreme guide, emerged as the ultimate arbiter of policy in the state. In 1985 Montazeri was tipped to succeed him but only months before Khomeini’s death in 1989 the two fell out. Montazeri called for the legalisation of political parties. He rejected Khomeini’s call for the assassination of British author Salman Rushdie over his negative depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in the Satanic Verses. Montazeri also condemned the execution of members of the Mujahedin Khalq movement (People’s Holy Warriors) which had tried and failed to take power during the early days of the revolution and had fought against Iran during its eight year war with Iraq. Khomenei named Ali Khamenei as his successor.
Over the next 20 years, Montazeri, a pillar of the revolution, became the regime’s most vehement critic. In 1997, he questioned Ayatollah Khamenei’s authorianism and suggested he should be elected. Montazeri was placed under house arrest and his theological seminary was closed down. He was released in 2003 but continued to criticise the government.
Following the disputed presidential contest in June of this year Montazeri condemned Ahmadinejad’s re-election and declared the opposition to be “the real representative of the legitimate demands of the majority of the Iranian nation”. He warned the country’s rulers that they would bring about the collapse of the Islamic Republic if they did not abide by the law and respect human rights.
Montazeri’s death has made the authorities nervous because it occurred during the Muslim month of Muharram, when Shias mark the slaying of Ali, founder of their sect, with mass demonstrations which could become protests against the regime.
