Wampum

Return of the ... One True King (IV)

[Note: We fudged the date on this to move it down, relative to MB's announcement. The real date is a about 8 hours after MB's announcement. 784.]

[Update: 2/17, 11pm EST, the NYT runs an op-ed piece by Ali Safavi, who cheerfully mentions Maryam Rajavi (Mujahedin-e Khalq) as a bell weather for the popularity of Western-initiated regime change in Tehran. Interested readers should read this.]

I spent part of yesterday evening reading From ijtihad to wilayat-i faqih: The Evolving of the Shi’ite Legal Authority to Political Power by Abbas Amanat. The "why" is unimportant, though the proximal cause was looking up the press coverage on Professor Hashim Aghajari -- I'm only tracking a few arrests, and I bumped his to the top of my stack after reading this in Al Jazeera.

It isn't often I find stuff on Iran that makes me sit back and think, think, think. [Too much "Blue's Clues". Ed.]

OK. So the current Western and Arabic press has reform 0, clerics 1, as of this evening, but ...

550 candidates approved by the Guardian Council during its 2nd pass over the 3k candidates it had disqualified earlier, at the specific instruction of Ayatollah Khamenei ... recall them? They just stood down. First there were 50 or so, then a day of chicken followed, then there were 600 more, and that was it, as far as the GC would go, and then only on the specific instruction of Ayatollah Khamenei.

So why did they stand down? To support the boycott? Read this carefully. Recall that both President Muhammad Khatami and speaker of the 6th Majlis, Mahdi Karubi, wrote, as did Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, Secretary of the Guardian Council, to Ayatollah Khamenei in his capacity as ... what?

This from another article in Al Jazeera:

One candidate who withdrew, Abu al-Fazl Rauf, said he had not been vetted "according to defined legal procedure".

"I see this against my dignity as an Iranian citizen," said Rauf, an independent.

There is no difference between the statement, and more importantly, the act, by Abu al-Fazl Rauf, and the substance of the intellectual arguement advanced at Hamedan 18 months ago by Professor Hashim Aghajari. Rauf rejects the vetting which passed him -- the 2nd one -- the one that took place at the specific instruction of Ayatollah Khamenei, as extra-legal and contrary to the dignity of a citizen of Iran.

This. This is the big stuff. The guy in Tienamin Square stopping a tank. There are between 5 and 6 thousand GC-approved candidates for the 7th Majlis -- between 15 and 25 compeating for each seat. Ten percent just took a bye, and the soundbite is ... Ayatollah Khamenei lacks the legal standing, the institutional role he holds, the direct successor of Ayatollah Khomeini, sometimes referred to as Imam Khomeini, lacks the legal foundations to have ordered the second vetting. Neither the letter by the Secretary of the Guardian Council, nor the letter by President and Speaker, each addressing the same electoral issue, could have been answered one way or another by ... a cleric. Even a ranking cleric. Even the highest ranking ... cleric.

Abu al-Fazl Rauf teaches neither at Yale, nor at Tarbiat Modarress University in Tehran. That is what makes his act important.

Back on 2/7 I wrote

[Update: 2/7, 1pm EST: Islam Online reports that Khatami committed to holding the election earlier today, with a letter to Ayatollah Khamenei oddly similar to the languate INRA quoted GC Sec. (and Ayatollah) Jannati -- elections were due to expediency and by order of Ayatollah Khamenei. In effect, this has both parties -- {President, Speaker of the Majlis, majority of members, provincial governments}, and {Sec. of the Guardian Council, etc.} -- pointing their fingers at Ayatollah Khamenei. The GC has implemented "term limits" in the form of ineligiblity for a plurality pro-reform incumbants. That doesn't mean they control the voters, or have eliminated all the ballot choices the reform parties can select from.

Today's Le Monde (always a lifetime ahead of the American press which is still running the "reform 0, clerics 1story") has this:

Nombreux sont ceux qui ont le sentiment qu'ils ne trouveront pas leurs candidats dans maintes circonscriptions, mais ils peuvent, avec un peu d'indulgence, trouver ceux qui se rapprochent le plus de leurs conceptions"

Khatami is doing what I thought he'd do. He's reversing course, and telling the people to vote, to pick any candidate of the 19 average per seat, and designate that person as the reform candidate. The question is no longer how many well-known reformers are qualified to be elected to the 7th Majlis, but how few seats the clerics manage to capture. The 7th Majlis may be comprised of mostly little known men and women, neither "reformers" nor "conservatives", who've managed to electorally annihilate each other, in coup and counter-coup.

Appologies to my spouse, who'd really like to be above the fold for a whole day on the day she tossed her hat into the electoral ring.

Posted by at February 14, 2004 06:00 PM | TrackBack