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In Iran, Even Some On Right Warning Against Extremes
In Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's nine months as president, Iran's hard-liners have commandeered the nation's political debate, putting reformists on the sidelines.
(By Alireza Sot Akbar -- Associated Press)
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"Because of their religious beliefs, these people are inflexible," said a former senior official in Khatami's government, who declined to be identified further. "Although their number might be few, the certainty of their belief lets them resist a larger population. The supporters of civil society and reformists are less hard, less ready to be damaged because of their belief."
"Whenever someone is fixed in his thinking, we call them hard-liners," said Mehdi Karrubi, a moderate cleric who lost narrowly to Ahmadinejad in the first round of last year's presidential balloting. "A group of people just come together. They talk to each other and say: This is what the society thinks!"
Mesbah, the cleric whose speech touched off the current conflict in the conservative camp, is praised even by critics for his intellect. He leads a well-funded seminary in the holy city of Qom and has forged a reputation for steeling the resolve of Iran's harshest conservatives, famously declaring: "If someone tells you he has a new interpretation of Islam, sock him in the mouth!"
A cartoonist dubbed him "Ayatollah Crocodile" for encouraging suppression of the press. One follower, now Ahmadinejad's intelligence minister, once bit a journalist on the shoulder. Another, now Ahmadinejad's interior minister, oversaw the execution of thousands of prisoners in the late 1980s.
Many of Mesbah's former students hold places in the Revolutionary Guard's ideological and political section. The cleric encourages students to study in Canada and the United States, which critics say does little to soften their views. Most eventually return to Qom.
Mesbah's followers have now set their sights, Hadian-Jazy said, on gaining control of the panel of clerics that is empowered to name Iran's supreme leader -- an open-ended appointment that has been assumed to run a lifetime. Called the Assembly of Experts, the 86-member body will be elected in nationwide balloting set for October.
Mesbah is expected to field a slate of graduates from his seminary, and in the preelection positioning now underway, some see preparations for a kind of coup. But the boldness hard-liners have shown since Ahmadinejad's surprise win -- on a populist platform that emphasized quality of life -- has unsettled many here.
"I believe the traditional right wing is worried," said Saeed Laylaz, an analyst who served in the first reformist administration of Khatami. "Until now they used each other as a horse to ride from one place to the other, and each thought the other was the rider."
Ahmadinejad's triumph, he said, clarified the driving force.
"When you create radicals, they don't stop when you want them to," Laylaz said. "The leader can order when they leave the barracks, but they decide when to go back. This is the dangerous position of the supreme leader and the right wing right now."
