Mr Rafsanjani had chaired the Assembly of Experts, which selects the supreme leader and supervises his activities, for the past four years. But he was criticised by hardliners for being close to the opposition.

Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani was selected to replace him, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported.
Mr Rafsanjani said that for the sake of keeping the country united, he would not stand against Mr Kani.

“If he was ready and accepted responsibility, I would certainly not nominate myself, so that we could eliminate the differences and this sacred institution would not be damaged by my side,” he said.
He warned that divisiveness was becoming “very serious” and said the country should be “vigilant to keep people united”.
Mr Rafsanjani had chaired the Assembly – an elected body of clerics which has the theoretical power to dismiss the supreme leader – since 2007.

But he was stripped of his role as a leader of Friday prayers after criticising a crackdown on opposition protests after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed 2009 re-election.

Mr Rafsanjani remains the chairman of the Expediency Council, a committee which arbitrates disputes over legislation among state bodies.

THE president of Iran is a powerful communicator. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke live to the nation last month, he managed to combine seductive reasoning, patriotic appeals and more than a hint of menace. For once, though, he left even his most fervent supporters unmoved, for he was announcing the beginning of the end of subsidies on which millions of them depend. These measures are the gamble of his presidency—and may be the most important economic reform in the Islamic Republic’s three-decade history.

Read more about Iran’s [latest] struggle

Steve Inskeep talks to Dr. Abbas Milani about how events in Egypt compare to the 1979 Revolution in Iran. Milani is the director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and has just finished a biography of the Iranian monarch called The Shah.

In the summer of 2009 Iran’s divided conservatives came together to save the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after his disputed re-election provoked huge street protests by the reformist Green Movement. To have lost Mr Ahmadinejad to a liberal “plot” would, they judged, have imperilled the Islamic Republic which succours them all.

All the same, many conservatives are far from enamoured of Iran’s president. Challenging him, however, is turning out to be a different matter.

More on the power struggle from The Economist

Jason Rezaian offering a dispatch from Tehran for Slate

In the grotesque pageant of Iran’s show trials, former high officials—hollow-eyed, dressed in prison pajamas, and flanked by guards in uniform—sit in rows, listening to one another’s self-denunciations. Since the disputed Presidential elections of June 12th, about a hundred reformist politicians, journalists, student activists, and other dissidents have been accused of colluding with Western powers to overthrow the Islamic Republic. This month, a number of the accused have made videotaped confessions.

Laura Secor on Iranian Show Trials (2009, 2 pages)

Journalist Laura Secor details the recent suppression of the post-election Mousavi opposition in Iran and the intellectual roots of the detention, torture, and forced confessions hoisted upon civil leaders over the preceding decades.

View the video from the American Academy in Berlin

In 680, near Karbala in Iraq, a man was killed in the desert. His name was Husayn, and he was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. His death was a crucial episode in the growing split between two groups of Muslims – who would come to be known as the Sunni and the Shia.

And yet this dispute did not begin violently. Arguably, it was not at first a political or theological schism either, but a personal disagreement. And the two groups agree on many of the fundamentals of the religion.

So how did this profound split develop?

Listen to Melvyn Bragg conduct this round table discussion

 

What we are witnessing right now in the streets of Tehran is, first and foremost, a political battle for the future of the Iranian state. But closely linked to this political fight is also an old theological dispute about the nature of Shiism–a dispute that has been roiling Iran for more than a century.

Shiism, like most religions, is no stranger to heated schisms. Shia and Sunnis split over the question of whether Muhammad had designated his son-in-law, Ali, as his successor (Shia believed he had). Some Shia, called Alawites, believe the only divinely designated successor was Ali, while another group, Zaydis, believe there were four imams. A large, intellectually vibrant third group is known as the Ismailis because it believes the line of imams ended with the seventh, Ismail. And the largest Shia sect is called the Ithna Ashari–or the Twelvers. Dominant in Iran, they believe in twelve imams and posit that the last imam went into hiding some 1,100 years ago. His return, bloody and vengeful, will mark the redemptive dawn of the age of justice.

Read more about how the election protests have a deeply-rooted religious and intellectual history

“I am the absolute winner of the election by a very large margin,” Mousavi  in Tehran.

From the BBC

Wikipedia

Who Cares Who is the President of Iran? from Slate

BBC Video on Election Protests

On the Iranian Baby Book (and Youth Voters)

Newsweek predicts the fall of Islamic theocracy—though not necessarily the current regime—in Iran. The regime, based on the “divine” appointment of a supreme leader, now faces more dissent than ever: Top clerics are divided, and there are millions of Iranians who no longer believe in the government’s ideology. It will now be able to maintain power only by military intimidation. When it comes, the end of a 30-year experiment in political Islam will make waves across the Muslim world.

A profile of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei describes how the idealistic Shia cleric who loved poetry about oppression has become “that cold, hard weight of authority” he once chafed under. His complicated relationships with other members of the government go back decades, and his “indulgent” support for President Ahmadinejad suggests power has given him “tunnel vision.”
The Weekly Standard argues that whatever happens in Iran, the Islamic Republic as we know it is over. The government’s decision to announce the election result so quickly—without even making reasonable efforts to have it appear genuine—”shows how insular and insecure Khamenei, a politicized cleric of some intellectual sensitivity, has become.” Questions about the future of a “supreme leader” in Iran were being discussed before this month’s election, and Khamenei’s handling of the situation has all but ensured he’ll be the end of the line.

The Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies at St. Andrews University offer this analysis of the numbers.

Everything you know about Iran is wrong, or at least more complicated than you think. Take the bomb. The regime wants to be a nuclear power but could well be happy with a peaceful civilian program (which could make the challenge it poses more complex). What’s the evidence? Well, over the last five years, senior Iranian officials at every level have repeatedly asserted that they do not intend to build nuclear weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has quoted the regime’s founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who asserted that such weapons were “un-Islamic.” The country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in 2004 describing the use of nuclear weapons as immoral. In a subsequent sermon, he declared that “developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam.” Last year Khamenei reiterated all these points after meeting with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. Now, of course, they could all be lying. But it seems odd for a regime that derives its legitimacy from its fidelity to Islam to declare constantly that these weapons are un-Islamic if it intends to develop them. It would be far shrewder to stop reminding people of Khomeini’s statements and stop issuing new fatwas against nukes.

Read on From Zakaria in Newsweek

Read this analysis by Raz Zimmt

Raz Zimmt is a research fellow at the Center for Iranian Studies and a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker discusses on the latest developments between Iran and the United States regarding Iran’s nuclear power program. Hersh writes that the Bush administration has clandestine plans for a possible major attack on Iran.

Listen Here

Read the article Here

TIME is up for Iran‘s election candidates. Campaigning finished at 8am on Thursday 13th March, leaving voters to consider how to cast their votes in parliamentary elections the next day. For many the choice is simple: vote conservative or ultra-conservative. Opposition reformists had hoped to capitalise on widespread discontent about the government’s mismanagement of the economy but the disqualification of thousands of their candidates is a severe blow. Instead the challenge to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hardliners will come from traditional conservatives.

Read More Here

To succeed on this assignment, you must:

1. Read and analyze the documents on the following links:

Frontline on Democracy in Iran
BBC on Democracy in Iran
Iran Breifing Paper pages 35-40 ONLY (from “Citizens and Society” through “Gender”)

2. post (where it says “comments” below) a one page single-spaced op-ed citing ample evidence from EACH article (insufficient evidence from EACH article will result in a zero). Your op-ed should carefully address the relationship between Islam and Democracy in Iran.

Iran’s complex political system combines elements of a modern Islamic theocracy with democracy. The whole system operates under a Supreme Leader who is, in theory, appointed by an elected body but is in practice answerable to nobody. The key question is how this system develops in the ongoing struggle between reformists and conservatives.

To answer this question, I have two posted two interactive flow charts which should help you to cultivate structural-functional analyses of Iran’s Political system:

One is Here

The Other is Here

Here is a nice visual from the NYT 

Here is a short cartoon explainer

Here is some teacher who explains it reasonably well. If nothing else, he has a splendid haircut:

Your task is to be prepared for a quiz on the structures and functions of the Iranian government.

In Iran, Even Some On Right Warning Against Extremes

Executive Seeks To Extend Control As Local Elections Near

Assembly Election Significant Despite Heavy Vetting

The Response Sheet (just in case)

Read this Secor contribution to the NY Times Magazine.

Answer these questions and to be prepared to discuss this piece in class

 

In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
O, Almighty God, bestow upon humanity the perfect human being promised to all by You, and make us among his followers.

Feel more of this enlightened theocrat’s loving embrace here