January 6, 2003
In Iran, a debate simmers over church and state ties
___By Farnaz Fassihi
___Religion News Service
___QOM, Iran (RNS)--In this desert city 90 miles south of Tehran, scores of blue and green domes and gold pillars mark Shi'a Islam's theological schools, called hozah.
___The students, some as young as 16, come from all over Iran and the greater Shi'a world, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.
___Some spend a year or two and then go back to their hometowns to preach. Others stay on to study and teach for decades and climb the ranks to become hojatol-Islams and ayatollahs, gaining the right to interpret the laws of Islam.
___Every prominent cleric in Iran, from the founder of the revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to today's top officials, including the supreme leader and the president, studied in Qom's hozah. The city is often referred to as Iran's "other" capital for its political influence through history as the pre-eminent city for Shi'a Islam, one of the two main Muslim sects. The other is the Sunni sect.
___But Qom is not the medieval scholastic city it appears to be, nor are its residents all fundamentalist Muslim thinkers.
___The small city has 20 cyber-cafes, and Islam's first encyclopedia written strictly by Muslims, as opposed to Western scholars, is being completed in Qom. The Computer Research Center of Islamic Studies boasts of putting 1,000 volumes of Islam's most important texts and references on CD-ROMs and computer discs and exporting them around the world.
___And behind the closed doors of the hozah, where student clerics sit cross-legged on carpeted floors, a key debate is gaining momentum. It is the same question wracking Iranian society elsewhere in the country: What role should religion play, if any, in the politics of Iran?
___The question of religion and the state, according to Ayatollah Seyed Hussain Mousavi Tabrizi, former chief prosecutor of Iran's Revolutionary Court and a prominent reformist-minded lawyer, is highly controversial and divides the Qom clergy into two distinct camps.
___"There are two lines of thinking here," Mousavi Tabrizi said, sitting in the basement of his house in Qom. "The first group thinks religion must meddle in every little detail of government affairs and people's lives and the leader has God-like powers.
___"The second group, like myself, thinks there is no mandate in Islam to dictate how a president or parliament or army should operate; the will and vote of the people must decide who shall run a country and how," he said. "It is written in a hundred places in the Koran that the will of people must be implemented. Any other way is not only illegal, but against Islam and such a system is bound for failure."
___As the world's only existing national theocracy--where the government claims to rule with divine authority--the outcome of this debate in Iran is especially important, experts say. It could have widespread repercussions both at home and in other Muslim countries that look to Iran as an example.
___"The old debate used to accuse these hard-liners as being undemocratic," said a Western diplomat in Tehran. "And they responded by saying, 'Yes, we're an Islamic country.' But the more dangerous debate is for a clergy to question the government and say, 'What you're doing is not Islamic.' The real threat in Iran is not an uprising or an outside force; it is the cracks within the clergy."
___The call for giving the clerics less power and the people more say in government matters--thus weakening the marriage of religion and state in Iran--began with Ayatollah Hossain Ali Montazeri, who once was considered Khomeini's successor.
___But Montazeri, a highly respected cleric, has been placed under house arrest in Qom since 1997 for his views, including that the supreme leader must be elected by the public and not appointed by a select few.
___The clerics who oppose such unorthodox views, like parliament member Mohammad Mohammadi, say they are appalled by talk of reforming religion or the constitution and see it as interfering with the word of God.
___"These talks are utterly unacceptable and un-Islamic," Mohammadi said in a recent interview in his apartment in Tehran. "Islam does not need to be reformed or changed. Neither does our system. There is a minority making noise about this, but it's pointless and they are digging their own graves. I'm sure they are being guided by a foreign enemy."
___Lately, university students also have called for secularism. In Tehran and smaller cities like Isfahan and Ahwaz, thousands of students have staged protests in universities in the past month protesting the hard-liners' grip on power. They call for separation of church and state and demand a referendum on the issue.
___"I think the influence of religion will pale in Iran's future politics," said Hojatol-Islam Mohammad Taqi Fazel-Meibodi, a prominent cleric in Qom who is a close friend of President Mohammad Khatami. "The youth feel that our attempt at merging religion and government has failed. And the hozah will be forced to listen to them. At any case, neither of us can go it alone."
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