Imitation of Religion
I was mildly surprised by the news that Mohammed Kazemeini Boroujerdi had been, or was about to be, arrested. It isn't every day that an Ayatollah is arrested by the Islamic Republic, though it has happened previously, and of course, by the governments of the Pahlavi Shahs -- Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and the Reza Shah Pahlavi, and the Qajar Shahs -- Ahmed Shah, Mohammed Ali Shah, Mozaffar o-Din Shah, Naser o-Din Shah, Mohammad Shah, Fath'Ali Shah and Agha Mohammad Khan before the Pahlavis, and of course the brief spot of republican democracy of Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq (a Qajar), put to pasture by the CIA during Dwight Eisenhower's tenure in the Oval.
Some of the more interesting bits of modern Iranian history is, at least for me, demarked by the arrests, and assassinations, of, and also the public madness of, certain Ayatollahs. Ayatollah Taleghani, poisioned. A friend of a friend. Ayatollah Beheshti, assassinated. Ayatollah Shariatmadari, stripped of the title of marja-e taqlid. Ayatollah Montazeri, denounced and subject to house arrest. Ayatollah Khalkhali, the crazy, the murderer. Ayatollah Tabatabaei, the scholar. And Hojjat ol-Eslam Karrubi Are you loyal to Islam if you pray daily but flaut the rights of the people?
Before them all however was Boroujerdi, Ayatollah Uzma Brujerdi, the father of Mohammed Kazemeini, and one of the notables of the 2nd Pahlavi regime. Ayatollah Behbahani, Ayatollah Kashani and Ayatollah Falsafi all obtained political cover from Uzma Brujerdi in overthrowing Mosaddeq and restoring the Anglo-American Pahlavi regime.
So I was mildly surprised by the news that Mohammed Kazemeini Boroujerdi was both in, or proximal to, the hoosegow, and styled as "Ayatollah" or "dissident cleric" and advocating some variation on the velayat-e faqeeh -- a return to "traditional religion", a return to the quietism of Ayatollah Haeri (Qom), or modernly, of Ayatollah Sistani (Najef), from Khomeini's activism -- Governance of Jurist ( Velayat-e Faqeeh ) / Islamic Government (94pp, .pdf).
But that wasn't the only thing that caught my eye in the space of a day or so. There was the question Jimmy Carter posed of his guest -- Do you believe we should ignore the advice of Jesus ("Render under Caesar...") and Thomas Jefferson ("Build a wall...") in keeping separate the church and state?.
In the background of course is the statements of ordinary Iranians, and some not so ordinary Iranians. The guy in the Majlis who wouldn't accept the legality of religious intrusion into his, or anyone else's, status as a candidate. The professor at Tehran U who wrote that emulation isn't an exercise for monkeys, and nearly hung for it.
The Religious Right in the US is attempting to subordinate religion to the state, and to a political party. They think they are restoring religion to its rightful place, dominating the state and politics, but the experience of Iranians is that when religion becomes the state, it is the institution of religion, not the institution of the state, that is deformed. They will give the Caesars their Churches.
Incidently, the RTL/RFE and their financial downstream media outlets, and the Moonie Times, are really playing up the Boroujerdi non-event, which is about as silly as Timmy Keating scrambling planes all over North America on the actionable information from ... whatever some excitable television newsreader had put in front of him or her.