Apocalyptic power struggle in Iran - SIR 30 November 2006

The international focus on Iran’s nuclear programme and its alleged activities in neighbouring Iraq is diverting attention from a crucial power struggle inside the country. Ahead of two elections scheduled for mid-December, an SIR special correspondent in the region explains what is really happening inside Iranian politics.

The two polls – one for municipal councils and the second for the powerful assembly that oversees the regime and its military – are shaping up to be a trial of strength between Iran’s hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Republic’s conservative supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The municipal election scheduled for 15 December is being seen as a litmus test of popular support for Ahmadinejad, particularly within the conservative camp which has become increasingly divided since the former Revolutionary Guard’s unexpected victory in the 2005 presidential elections.

On the same day as the local polls there will be elections for the Assembly of Experts, an 86-member body of senior clerics whose task is to monitor the supreme leader and to choose his successor. This contest will be the more crucial of the two tests.

Khamenei and his allies, including former president Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, currently control the assembly, whose membership is selected every eight years. However, Ahmadinejad is pushing hard to seize control of this key centre of authority in a power struggle that is set to intensify.

Ahmadinejad’s chosen candidate to head the assembly is Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, the president’s spiritual guide and the leader of an extreme Islamic society known as the Hojjatieh. According to Iranian insiders, this group has been steadily gaining influence for several years and is increasingly seen as a threat to the conservative camp led by Khamenei.

The president relied heavily on support from the Hojjatieh when he won the presidential election in June 2005. Since then he has appointed members of the society to key positions in government, the diplomatic service, and the military in order to consolidate his - and the society’s - grip on the centres of power in Iran.

Mesbah-Yazdi, Hojjatieh’s chief ideologue, founded the ultra-conservative Haqqani seminary whose list of alumni reads like a who’s who of hardline Islamic fundamentalists. Many of the clerics who graduated from his establishment now hold senior government positions. They include the Iranian Intelligence Minister, Hojatoleslam Gholam-Hussein Mohseni-Ezhei, who has played a key role in crushing dissidents, and the current Interior Minister Hojatoleslam Mustafa Pour-Mohammadi. Both of these hardliners are alleged to have masterminded the assassination of dozens of Iranian dissidents and intellectuals in the 1990s. First Vice-President Parviz Davoudi is another Haqqani alumnus.

The Hojjatieh was founded in 1953 by Sheikh Mahmoud Halabi, a preacher from the holy city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran. Its core belief is that true Islamic government must await the return of the Hidden Imam, or Mahdi, the 12th descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. That meant it opposed even Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s concept of Islamic government, velayat-e faqih (the Guardianship of the Supreme Jurist).

The society maintains that a functioning Islamic government actually delays the return of the Mahdi, who according to Shia beliefs went into hiding as a child 1,300 years ago. Members also believe that causing chaos will accelerate his reappearance. The Hojjatieh opposes religious involvement in political affairs, although it has set that precept aside when it suits its purpose to subvert the political establishment, as it now seems to be doing.

If Mezbah-Yazdi succeeds in taking over the Assembly of Experts, he could promote the Hojjatieh concept of the apocalypse needed to bring the return of the Mahdi and the dawn of a New Islamic world. This frightening vision is apparently shared by Ahmadinejad who has taken a tough line on Iran’s drive to become a nuclear power.

Relatively inactive during the reign of Shah Mohammed Raza Pahlavi, the Hojjatieh enjoyed a revival during the 1979 Islamic revolution. The society temporarily set aside its opposition to Khomeini’s rule because it feared a communist takeover.

However, Khomeini became increasingly intolerant of the society and its secretive ways, and on 12 July 1983 he ordered it disbanded. It went through the motions, but many of its members simply joined the conservative Islamic Coalition Association and kept their infrastructure intact clandestinely.

For several years, Iranian conservatives have been warning that the Hojjatieh was quietly infiltrating the centres of power. According to such diverse political figures as former president Mohammad Khatami, a leading reformist, and Ayatollah Mohammad-Reza Tavassoli, Khamenei’s former chief of staff (and no ideological liberal), the Hojjatieh pulled off a "silent coup" by getting their man, Ahmadinejad, elected in 2005.

It is worth noting that the new president’s first list of cabinet nominees included Hojjatieh members and old comrades from his days as a commander of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Although Khamenei, through parliament, was able to block the appointment of some of Ahmadinejad’s associates, the cabinet that emerged remains arguably the most militant since the early days of Khomeini’s rule. At least 17 of the 21 nominees had held senior positions in the IRGC or in the intelligence community.

Soon after the presidential election, Tavassoli delivered a broadside against the Hojjatieh at a meeting of the Expediency Council, a powerful body that adjudicates in legislative disputes between parliament and the Council of Guardians. According to Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, a cleric who was Khatami’s deputy for legislative affairs until he resigned in October 2004, Tavassoli "voiced alarm that the leaders of the Hojjatieh group were now practically in control of the executive branch of the government and the Revolutionary Guards, and that the new president-elect was under their domination".

Although conservatives controlled every centre of power in Iran for the first time in a decade, in the opaque world of Iranian politics in which the various factions are constantly vying with each other for dominance, Khamenei saw Ahmadinejad and his associates as a potential threat to his authority and Iran’s political equilibrium at a particularly delicate moment in the republic’s dealings with the West.

The new administration’s uncompromising position in the nuclear stand-off with the US, along with its populist economic policies, violent rhetoric, and lack of experience in foreign affairs, are causing alarm within the political establishment, especially among the old guard who spearheaded the Islamic revolution with Khomeini. In some respects this confrontation is as much a generational clash as anything else. Ahmadinejad, widely seen as an incorruptible man of the people, campaigned on a populist platform for economic and social justice and against rampant corruption in the clerical and ideological establishment.

Khamenei has sought to outflank Amhadinejad and curb what many Iranian leaders see as his impulsive tendencies. In late 2005, the supreme leader turned to his old revolutionary comrade, and sometime political rival, Rafsanjani in a bid to counter the young president’s self-proclaimed "second revolution".

Khamenei also amended Iran’s power structure by giving the Expediency Council, a non-elected political arbitration body chaired by the pragmatic Rafsanjani, sweeping new authority to supervise parliament, the judiciary, and the executive. This move created, in effect, a parallel supreme authority.

Mesbah-Yazdi, who has long advocated so-called "martyrdom operations" to combat the enemies of Islam, is the new president’s ideological mentor and a Shia marja’a-e taqlid (object of emulation). His hand was seen in Ahmadinejad’s meteoric rise in Iranian politics, from provincial governor to high-profile mayor of Tehran, both appointed posts, to president in just two years.

Before the June 2005 elections this firebrand cleric issued a fatwa – religious decree – instructing all the members of the Basij, an Islamic paramilitary force popularly known as "the army of 20 million" that supports the IRGC, to vote for Ahmadinejad. No doubt similar pressure will be exerted by the Hojjatieh’s cadres during the December polls.

At the same time, General Yadollah Javani, chief of staff of the IRGC - whose officer corps largely supports Ahmadinejad - has been publicly exhorting his forces to back the president’s candidates in the forthcoming elections. In contrast, the government-controlled media has been denouncing Rafsanjani’s candidate in the assembly election, Mesbah-Yazdi’s main rival, as a pro-Western stooge.

The outcome of December’s elections will prove crucial for Iran’s foreign policy. A victory for the Hojjatieh would undermine current diplomatic moves, thus propelling the Islamic Republic towards a direct confrontation with the West.