Senior cleric calls for seminaries to supervise parties

Iranian seminaries should supervise political parties, senior Iranian cleric Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi said today.

ISNA reports that Ayatollah Makerem Shirazi raised the subject while speaking at the start of the new academic session at the Tehran Seminary, saying: “In Iran, seminaries have established the regime and are independent from it. We can also say their financial independence, along with their independence in all other areas, allows them to supervise the actions of the government and point out their mistakes with constructive criticism.”

He added that the Tehran Seminary should supervise political parties “because some parties may take deviant paths.”

He emphasized: “This does not mean that the seminary is a party, but we must remember that so long as the seminary seeks the truth in politics, it can oversee the actions of all political parties.”

Iranian political parties are supervised by the Political Parties Commission, which is comprised of the political deputy of the interior minister, two parliamentarians, Iran’s prosecutor general, a Qom Seminary representative and an intelligence ministry representative.

Ayatollah Makerem Shirazi added: “The Tehran Seminary should collaborate with universities to cleanse the humanities of imported Western materialism and ideas of Western supremacy, because if universities continue to spread these ideas in society, we will face great problems in the future.”

He said the seminaries must also fight back against “false mysticisms and deviant ideologies” and added that the Tehran Seminary could collaborate with the Qom Seminary to train the judges needed by the judiciary.

Source: Street Journalist