IThey were only a few dozen, on January 8, to demonstrate in front of the French Embassy in Tehran, in protest against the publication by Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Ayatollah Khamenei. They were not more numerous to gather, at the same time, in the town of Qom, however the seat of the principal religious seminaries of the country. The failure of this very unspontaneous mobilization, despite the commitment of the various political police, is only an additional illustration of the growing unpopularity of the man who succeeded Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 as Supreme Guide of the Republic. Islam from Iran.
By way of comparison, in January 1978, the dissemination of calumnies against Khomeini by the services of the Shah had sufficed to throw crowds into the streets. The escalation of repression and protest led the sovereign to leave Iran a year later, Khomeini supplanting him shortly after at the head of the first “Islamic revolution” in history.
A junk ayatollah
It is a new kind of theocracy that Khomeini establishes by placing at the heart of the Constitution of his “Islamic Republic” the principle of velayat-e faqih, the “government of the religious judge”. The President of the Republic and the Parliament may be elected, but it is the Supreme Guide, a title that no one dares challenge Khomeini, who has the last word on all matters of importance. The triumphant Ayatollah puts all his prestige of “imitation reference” (marja-e taqlid), a title that loyal Shiites recognize only a handful of “grand ayatollahs”.
But Khomeini’s peers refuse such a political instrumentalization of religion and oppose the very principle of velayat-e faqih. This is why Khomeini, unable to hand over power to an ayatollah of his rank, chose as his successor, on the eve of his death in 1989, his faithful Ali Khamenei, a cleric who had not even reached the rank of ayatollah. and that the elite of the “grand ayatollahs” hold in low esteem.
The Islamic Republic of Iran therefore overcame the ordeal of the disappearance of its founder by favoring political loyalty, embodied by Khamenei, rather than religious charisma. Promoted ayatollah under questionable conditions, the new Supreme Guide is careful not to claim the title of “reference of imitation”. It was only in 1994 that he claimed to be such a reference, but only for Shiites residing outside Iran, for fear of arousing the wrath of the faithful living on the very territory of the Islamic Republic.
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