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Reporter Cyrus Farivar looks at how Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri used the Internet to promote Islamic scholarship in Iran.

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MARCO WERMAN: Montazeri’s impact on Iran extended beyond politics.  Cyrus Farivar reports that the Grand Ayatollah was also a forward thinker when it came to using the Internet.

CYRUS FARIVAR: Ayatollah Montazeri looked like a man from another age.  He wore centuries old style cloaks, a turban and a long beard.  He studied and restudied the Qur’an and wrote his own opinions.  Montazeri’s political and religious theories became the foundation of the Islamic revolution in 1979.  Scholars often speak about him in superlatives.

AHAMAD SADRI: I think about Ayatollah Montazeri as the most important political philosopher of Shi’ites in the 20^th century.

CYRUS: Professor Ahamad Sadri teaches sociology at Lake Forest College in Illinois.  He compares Montazeri with 17^th Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbs for having created the backbone for an authoritarian divine government.  Professor Sadri also finds a connection between Montazeri and another English philosopher, John Locke, for explaining the modern relationship between a legitimate government and the citizenry.  But here’s one of the most surprising things about him.  Nader Entessar of the University of South Alabama says Montazeri didn’t just bury his nose in century old texts.

NADER ENTESSAR: He was one of the early major Ayatollahs who began to use the Internet as the major source of dissemination of his ideas.  Now there’s almost every single Grand Ayatollah has his web site.

CYRUS: Professor Entessar points out that Montazeri was grounded in modernity.  In fact, Montazeri published a 600-page memoir on his web site in December 2000.  The document was largely an insider account of his role during the Iran/Iraq war and his disagreements with the first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.  In response says Professor Entessar, government officials created a fake web site with a slightly different web address to confuse Montazeri’s followers.

NADER: They did it a number of times actually.  A number of times, but that ultimately they gave it up because it was very clear to everybody that you could distinguish between the real web site and the fake web site.

CYRUS: In fact Iranian authorities learned a few things about the power of the Internet from Montazeri.  After all says Stanford University’s Abbas Milani, Montazeri was a pioneer.

ABBAS MILANI: He was very early advocate of not just the use of the Internet for his own purposes but the use of it in the seminaries and insisting that the clergy must become aware of what is happening around the world and use the technologies that are developing.

CYRUS: Indeed the Islamic Republic has gotten increasingly web savvy during the past several years.  It has imprisoned many bloggers, and has countered their writings with pro-regime blogs of it’s own including one by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Even the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini has his own web site.  It’s available in 13 languages including Indonesian, Chinese, and Hausa.  The Supreme Leader even used his Twitter account yesterday to send out a message of condolence about the passing of Ayatollah Montazeri.  For The World, I’m Cyrus Farivar in Oakland, California.

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