President Ahmadinejad may have clung onto power after last summer’s elections, but opposition to his government continues. That opposition is receiving support from an unlikely quarter – Iran’s conservative clergy.
This week’s edition of BBC Radio Four’s ‘Analysis’, produced for the domestic UK audience, investigates this phenomenon. The program contains an e-mail interview with Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri (pictured) – one of the Shi’ite world’s most senior and respected clerics and one of Iran’s most outspoken critics of President Ahmadinejad’s government.
In this interview, he calls on Iran’s clergy to work with political activists to bring about reform, urging them to be “in step with the people”. Grand Ayatollah Montazeri is at the forefront of a surprising alliance that is emerging in Iran – between hard-line secularists and orthodox Muslim clerics.
The BBC’s Edward Stourton asks whether this alliance could cause the collapse of the Islamic Republic as we know it and lead to a greater separation of Islam and the Iranian state.
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- Read the full text of Grand Ayatollah Montazeri’s email
- BBC Radio Four’s ‘Analysis’ program
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Anybody commenting on this interview should read it more carefully than I did. Something did strike me however: The ayatolla never gave an outright answer. They were very suggestive, which means, anybody can get anything out of this interview and theoretically be right. So: don’t base any policy decisions on this interview.