A day after the one-year anniversary of the disputed 12 June elections, a series of YouTube clips appeared on the web showing a group of plain-clothed young men and a smattering of young clerics calling for the removal of corrupt individuals and “death” to the enemies of Velayat-i Faqih, or the Guardianship of (Islamic) Jurists.
The small group gathered outside the home and offices of Grand Ayatollah Sane’i, kicking at his door. Images depicting crowd-fueled vandalism soon appeared on the Ayatollah’s website. His home in the holy city of Qum was smeared with graffiti reiterating chants like “Death to Sane’i.” Similar acts of vandalism were reported at the offices of the late Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, often regarded as the spiritual leader of the Green Movement.
What had precipitated these attacks on Sane’i’s home and authority? As a marja' al-taqlid (a grand ayatollah with the authority to make legal decisions within the confines of Islamic law), isn’t he a source of emulation for pious Shi'as?
Mehdi Karroubi, an oppositional movement leader and presidential candidate in the 2009 election, had planned a visit to the grand ayatollah that day. Sane’i, for his part, has been vociferous in his disapproval of the current regime and their actions towards the Green Movement. BBC Persian picked up the YouTube videos and asked Hujjat Al-Islam Mohsen Kadivar, a leading opposition figure and visiting faculty member at Duke University, to comment on the attacks.
The network wanted to know what effects these videos could have on the country’s political environment—particularly, the well-publicized divisions between rank and file ayatollahs and politicians who align themselves with Ayatollah Khomeini, and the “conservative” ayatollahs, now linked to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad.
Kadivar immediately dismissed the young men and their activism as mere hooligan behavior, which he insisted was not representative of the majority of clerics in the city of Qum. The knowledgeable and esteemed theoretician of Islamic jurisprudence, claimed these young men, was aligned with the Haqqani seminary in Qum, headed by the ultra-conservative thinker Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi—the same Yazdi who has been noted to be the spiritual advisor of Ahmadinejad. Many pundits, meanwhile, allege that this circle represents a small yet volatile group of religious students and followers, who had previously been linked to attacks on a Sufi house of worship in the city of Qum in 2007.
Kadivar and many others familiar with Qum’s seminarians have remarked that the chants and the slogans displayed in these videos are highly incendiary and without precedence, even in monarchical Iran. The place and authority of Shi’a clerics had never been so disrespected, they argued. Much of what occurs amongst the clerical establishment in Qum is considered crucial and signifies power shifts in the relationship between the ‘ulama (religious authorities) and the everyday politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The video clips that appeared were significant for one obvious reason: Very few films or pictures are ever taken in Qum. Filming has always been tightly restricted in the city unless authorized by the regime through state-run television cameras. The recent events captured on film, moreover, appear to mimic the Green Movement’s citizen journalism in content and style. In one clip, a group of people shout slogans, kick at the door and push each other, while the camera captures others filming the very same event on their cell phones.
The second clip has a smaller number of students listening to a young speaker praising the supreme leader, while others in the audience react with the well-known chant, “Allahu akbar” (God is greatest). The young man is asking the citizens of Qum to get rid of “the houses of corruption”—a bold reference to the grand ayatollahs’ edifices in the city. Moreover, these scenes were filmed in the same truncated, jumpy fashion as the Green Movement’s footage covering the 2009 Iranian election, which were then published on YouTube.
As Kadivar rightly points out in his interview with the BBC, these young religious scholars do not matter in Qum. They are not considered to have any power or influence in changing the attitude of people towards the leading clerics, or those actively aligning themselves with the opposition movement. The attacks and their filmic representation are significant primarily because they display an open hostility and harassment which did not occur, Kadivar reminds us, even during the Pahlavi regime.
So what does this act of disesteem really mean? On one level, it can be seen as a warning to the clerics and their followers who may harbor attitudes similar to the opposition. It can also be interpreted as a direct response to the Green Movement’s open disrespect towards the supreme leader and its questioning of his legitimacy, authority and the very concept of Velayt-i Faqih. The young hooligans, Kadivar says, were prompted by the supreme leader’s visit to Qum a day before the attacks. As Kadivar and others have pointed out, these aggressive overtures could have only been ordered by the office of the supreme leader, in conjunction with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This logic follows the reality of regime violence against those actively sympathetic towards the Green Movement.
Ahmadinejad and Khamenei have both expressed that the election results are the will of the people. The regime, then, acknowledges not only the power of the people, but the inherent power of short, violent video clips as well. Though the recent attacks may be perceived as underwritten and even encouraged by the Islamic polity, they are not being touted as such. Many claim that this was simply a spontaneous act to uphold the tenets of the Islamic Republic. Of course, there is some value in couching these attacks as spontaneous, grassroots acts of defiance against the opposition movement. Because these grainy shots actually say very little, the public response could parallel that of the Green Movement,
Underpinning these clips, then, is a system of power derivatives—a kind of exchange based on immediate perceptions of a suddenly global audience. In this context, the market of power derivatives would revolve around an implicit understanding of how emotionally powerful these clips can be if packaged in a way that “speaks” to the people. However, this approach may not show immediate results, and it may very well be a risky move, with little to gain. But the intent of these clips was to encompass a myriad of contradictory messages: unprecedented disrespect for a source of imitation and emulation, portrayed in a style which mirrors footage from last summer’s Green Movement. On a most fundamental level, these video clips simply demonstrate the ways in which “raw footage” can be subconsciously synonymous with the “power of the people”—a 21 century cinematic technique, which may very well be mimicked by “people” to defend the Iranian state.
Narges Erami - Assistant professor of Anthropology at Yale University. Her research is on the relationship between religion and economics in the holy city of Qum.
