Cleric group revolts in Iran

NY Times:

The most important group of religious leaders in Iran has called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate, an act of defiance against the country’s supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country’s clerical establishment.

The statement by the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final. The government has tried to paint the opposition and its top presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, as criminals and traitors, a strategy that now becomes more difficult — if not impossible.

“This crack in the clerical establishment and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”

Since the election, the bulk of the clerical establishment in the holy city of Qum, an important religious and political center of power, has remained largely silent, leaving many to wonder when, or if, the nation’s most senior religious leaders would jump into the events that have posed the most significant challenge to the country’s leadership since the Islamic Revolution. With its statement Saturday, the association of clerics — formed under the leadership of the revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — came down squarely on the side of the reform movement.

The association includes reformists, but Iranian political analysts describe it as independent and it did not support any candidate in the recent election.

The clerics’ decision to speak up is not itself a game changer and could fizzle under pressure from the state. Some seminaries in Qum rely on the government for funds, and the supreme leader and the man he has declared the winner of the election, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have powerful backers there. They also retain the support of the powerful security forces and the elite Revolutionary Guards. In addition, the country’s highest-ranking clerics have yet to speak out individually against the election results.

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It is a challenge to the religious bigots in charge, but it is not one that will change the status quo at this point. More than likely it will mean retribution against the critics. That has been the pattern in Iran.

Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad is acting like he is in charge and is challenging Obama to public negotiations at the UN CNN reports. Obama has been pushing for UN sponsored negotiation, so this appears to call him on that. I suspect that Ahmadinejad wants to use the negotiation as a forum for pushing his anti west anti Israel agenda. He would be grabbing a big stage for his demagoguery.