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Shia schism deepens Ahmadi-Nejad’s woes

Financial Times, August 23, 2010 – The infighting between Iran’s fundamentalists has deepened the gulf between supporters and opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad.
These differences are not merely about economic policies, amid unemployment of 14.6 per cent. The president has faced criticism for his management of the economy since he won power in 2005 and, if that was the only cause of the present tension, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, probably would not have seen fit to intervene.
Instead, perhaps the most important trigger for the recent infighting between radical and conservative fundamentalists is a highly controversial interpretation of the Shia faith advanced by close allies of Mr Ahmadi-Nejad, who advocate a radical mixture of Islam and nationalism.
Khamenei’salliance with hardliners
For more than two decades, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been Iran’s supreme leader, positioned at the apex of his country’s labyrinthine power structure. While Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, his vociferous president, has won a higher international profile, the ayatollah takes the final decision on all significant policy questions.
That, at least, is the theory. Whether the regime actually works in such a logical fashion is doubtful: the evidence suggests that on some issues Mr Khamenei arbitrates between the factions instead of having the final say. But he holds a unique position, with personal representatives in every ministry and province, and command over both the regular armed forces and the Revolutionary Guards – a parallel army, navy and air force, explicitly loyal to the regime.
Mr Khamenei was born in July 1939, the son of a religious scholar, and studied in the seminaries of the Shia holy city of Qom. There, he became a follower of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the inspiration behind the Islamic Revolution of 1979. By his own account, everything that Mr Khamenei believes today is derived from Khomeini’s austere vision of Islam.
Mr Khamenei spent three years in jail and three in internal exile during the rule of Shah Mohammed-Reza Pahlavi. After the revolution, he joined Khomeini’s inner circle, serving as defence minister and, from 1981, as president. An assassination attempt organised by an armed Opposition group left Mr Khamenei severely wounded, paralysing his right arm.
When Khomeini died in 1989, Mr Khamenei was an unlikely successor. At the time, he was not an ayatollah and lacked credibility as a religious scholar. Other power-brokers engineered his promotion, probably thinking that he could be controlled.
But Mr Khamenei established his authority by allying with the Revolutionary Guards and the hardliners, now the dominant force in Iranian politics.
Allies of Mr Ahmadi-Nejad allegedly hold that Muslims do not need the clergy – a pillar of the Shia faith – to connect with God and that direct links can be made with the , or “Hidden Imam”, who is believed to have disappeared in 1947.
Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, the head of the president’s office, has emphasised a stridently nationalist message, saying that the “Iranian school” should be promoted in the world instead of the “Islamic school”. He sought to justify his remarks by adding that if it were not for Iranians, “no Islam would have remained”.
Some prominent fundamentalists, who describe themselves as moderates, have warned about the emergence of a “deviant” religious group around the president. In a theocratic regime, dedicated to upholding the message of Islam, disputes of this nature are of crucial importance.
Ali Motahari, a fundamentalist member of parliament, is the leading critic of Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s allies in this ideological fight. He has likened the president’s small circle of aides to the Forghan group, an earlier movement that opposed the clergy and emphasised the imminent return of the Hidden Imam. A sworn enemy of the Islamic regime, Forghan assassinated about a dozen senior clerics after the 1979 revolution.
Analysts believe that the emergence of this ideological tendency around the president could probably only have happened with a green light from Mr Khamenei. In the past, he has consistently backed Mr Ahmadi-Nejad, notably in the aftermath of year’s disputed election when he endorsed the president’s controversial victory and urged all Iranians to rally behind him.
During that crisis, Mr Khamenei appealed for national unity, but he tailored that message as an attack on the reformist Opposition who were urged to abandon their challenge to Mr Ahmadi-Nejad.
This time, however, the supreme leader’s call for unity is directed at the fundamentalists who are his political allies and dominate the regime. There is suspicion that Mr Khamenei’s unconditional support for Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s government may be ending.
“The supreme leader is under enormous pressure, which is mounting every day, by moderate fundamentalists, including those in his own office, to remove Mr Ahmadi-Nejad,” said one political analyst.
“But the leader and the senior commanders of the Revolutionary Guards will try to keep Mr Ahmadi-Nejad in office as long as they can because they don’t want the president they have brought to power to leave his job unfinished.”
Ali Larijani, the speaker of parliament, and his older brother, Sadeq Larijani, the head of the judiciary, are both opponents of the president.
But they are also loyal to the supreme leader and so they have held recent meetings with Mr Ahmadi-Nejad in a show of unity, apparently at the behest of Mr Khamenei.
But the Islamic establishment has been rocked by infighting since year’s election, which led to the biggest unrest since the 1979 revolution.
Fundamentalists have occasionally said that Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s opponents outnumber his supporters in the political hierarchy – and they have hinted at their readiness to bypass the president to save the regime.
Zahra Rahnavard, the wife of Mir-Hossein Moussavi, Iran’s Opposition leader, said the possibility of the “collapse” of the government was “very high”.
Not all reformists, however, want this to happen. “I hope the government does not fall and stays in power to finish its mess so that Iran can see fundamental changes,” said a senior reformist.

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