We Wanted a Religious Government, not a State Religion

Roozonline - Ay Khamenei’s Rep in IRGC:

Cleric Ali Saaedi, the representative of Iran’s supreme leader ayatollah Khamenei in the influential Revolutionary Guards, the IRGC, last week spoke of groups that he perceived are opposed to the Islamic republic during the Friday congregational prayers in the religious city of Ghom. “Right from the first days of the victory of the revolution (in 1971) we were witness to the dialog pursued by Bani-Sadr, the reformists, agents of reconstruction and others. Ayatollah Khomeini even the drew the lines among his students and we in the Guards must be knowledgeable in these dialogs,” he said, continuing, ”There have been two interpretations of an Islamic state, one is religious democracy and the other a secular democracy. We were after a religious government not a state religion.”

These remarks are noteworthy because ayatollah Khamenei has in recent years been emphasizing that there is no difference between a state religion and a religious government. In one instance soon after Hassan Rouhani’s presidential victory in 2013 during a meeting with the members of the supreme cultural revolution he said, “We have a religious responsibility and a legal responsibility vis-à-vis the culture of this country and the public culture in the country. We notice that some in the media try to limit or break the government’s supervisory powers by talking about state religion or state culture. They want to put a negative label to it such as the argument that some people want to turn religion into a state institution, turn culture into a state institution. What’s all this? There is no difference between a state religion and a religious government. The government is part of people; a state religion means people’s religion; the government has the same religion that people have.”

But those remarks were racially different than what ayatollah Khamenei had said when Mohammad Khatami was president. In 2000 when meeting with members of the supreme cultural revolution, Khamenei said that religion was something that belonged to the heart and belief. He rejected the notion of a state religion and said, “A state religion is different from are religious government. A government whose foundation is religion must fully act to protect people’s religion and culture without fear and through the right means.”

These views changed in time and today ayatollah Khamenei expressly defends state religion. His official site there is a poster that reads, “Religious government or state religion?” which stresses his current views.

In another recent speech, Khamenei said the term “government cleric” was a concept created by enemies. “Categorizing clerics to those that are governmental and non-governmental are two deviant and wrong concepts aimed at first, depriving the state of the intellectual backing from clerics, and second to isolate those active and revolutionary clerics and disengage them. What they want to convey is that there is a government or state cleric who is bad and there is a non-governmental cleric who is good.”

He continued, “Independence of the theological centers did not mean that the state would not support the centers and the centers would not support the state. There are some who want this. Some want to use the pretext of independence to cut the relations between clerics and the state. This will not happen. Dependency is different from support or cooperation.”

Khamenei’s defense of governmentalizing theological centers and religion are in fact efforts that he has been pursuing when he was president. Separating state from religion in recent years had already been formulated in recent years by religious modernizers in Iran but Khamenei stopped this by his express defense of the notion of religious government.

As an example, Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari, a well known Iranian religious modernist and reformer theologian, publicly announced last year, “Today everybody negates the governmentalization of religion but they do not realize that a government with a religious narrative means the same. If religion is not governmentalized then different interpretations can present uniform social rights while this is not the case right now. If some argue that a non governmentalization of religion means that the rulers do not pronounce a specific religious interpretation but allow other groups to do this and the state uses that interpretation as the basis and does not allow other interpretations to express themselves, then this is nothing but a state religion. What is the difference between the state itself pronouncing a religious interpretation or asking a group to announce one and then provide support to it and act on that narrative?”

Mohsen Kadivar is another Iranian religious thinker and modernist who discussed the same issue in1998 in Rahe No magazine in which he defended the independence of the clerics and the theological centers from the government. “A society in which there is no criticism will slip and eventually fall. At the same time religion in such a society will be controlled by politics and politicians. It will gradually rot from the inside. Certainly no lover of religion wants such a catastrophe. The way to prevent this and a government religion is to accept the separation of institution of religion and the institution of politics so that each will remain undiluted. It is clear that such a separation is different from the separation of religion from politics.” He continued, “The Shiite establishment has never reached out to the government to spread its message and if there are some today who desire to do this, not only will this be a deviation from the established tradition but they will also be destroying the independence of the religious establishment while at the same time creating a government religion.”

Some political observers believe that ayatollah Khamenei’s change from advocating a separation of religion from politics to subsequently defending a government religion,

Some political observers believe that ayatollah Khamenei’s efforts in opposing religious critics and modernization of religion are now so strong that he has in fact completely changed his views on the subject. His representative in the Revolutionary Guards however seems to be on a different page.

by Jalal Yaghoubi