A campaign was launched against Deputy Paula Yacoubian after she criticized the "ideological indoctrination" she considers more dangerous than weapons. The keyboard warriors' smear campaign released a flood of racist and misogynistic slurs: Yacoubian’s gender and Armenian heritage, to Hezbollah’s bigots, are stains that only blood can erase!
Ignorance grinned to reveal its fangs as well. The smears portrayed this criticism of "ideological indoctrination" as criticism of Shiites and Shiism, neither of which was mentioned by Yacoubian. It seems that this appropriation of Shiism and what it means to be Shiites, both of which are wider and richer than this shoddy equivalence suggests, has always been an insult to both.
Several junctures of Iran's own history have reflected the diversity of readings of Shiism and its culture.
Since the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, Iran’s religious establishment has been split into two factions. Ayatollah Nouri sided with the Qajar Shah at the time, inciting him against the revolutionaries and labeling the latter apostates. He also incited mobs against them, calling for their murder. To him, Sharia law was the only legitimate source of legislation, while constitutionalism, like equal citizenship and women’s education, were evil. Along with Hojjat al-Islam Zanjani, Nouri formed a militia that looted the warehouses of merchants who supported reform, attacking a few of them and murdering a member of parliament, Saad as-Saltaneh.
On the other side were "scholars" who sided with the revolution. Ayatollah Khorasani, one of Iran’s leading Mujtahids, was the most prominent of these scholars; his view was that governance could only be Islamic once the Hidden Imam returned, and until then, the constitutional system would remain the least evil of man-made political systems.
Building on his theory’s rebuke of Nouri, his student, Muhammad Hussein al-Naini, wrote a book, "Alerting the Ummah and Purifying the Religion," refuting his theory. Although Naini developed the ideas of his mentor Khorasani, he also argued that justifying parliament’s authority on religious grounds was not necessary in the first place, as parliamentarians represent the people, not the Imam.
When the constitutionalists emerged victorious (before eventually being defeated), they executed Sheikh Nouri for treason, applying the verdict of a court headed by a sheikh and endorsed by three ayatollahs, including Naini.
Three-quarters of a century later, however, Khomeini’s regime revalorized Nouri's legacy. The 1979 Revolution honored him as a martyr who defended Islam and Sharia against the West and its stooges.
Ali Shariati, who was dubbed the "ideologue of the Islamic Revolution" despite dying before it succeeded, lit another fuse. His battle was against the seventeenth-century teachings of Ayatollah Majlesi, whose ideas had held sway among some of the men who championed the 1979 Revolution and its regime. To reformist believers, Majlesi’s mystic teachings were a backlash against the progress achieved in the eleventh century through the efforts of Sheikh Mufid and Sharif Murtaza.
Shariati critiqued Majlessi’s work at length and made light of his teachings, coining the notion of "Safavid Shiism" as the cursed antithesis of "Ali's Shiism."
Unlike Khomeini, "Marjaa" (Grand Ayatollah) Borujerdi opposed interference in politics, arguing that the religious establishment’s role should not go beyond offering counsel when it was sought by the ruler.
His views were largely shared by Ayatollah Shariatmadari, the "Marjaa" who replaced him and promoted Khomeini to the rank of "Marjaa" to save him from the death penalty after his uprising in 1963.
Later on, Shariatmadari voiced reservations about the Velayet e-Faqih (Guardianship of the Jurist) political system. Shariatmadari also opposed changing the name "Iranian Republic" to the "Islamic Republic," fearing that harmful policies would be blamed on Islam, and he took a firm stand against executions and purges carried out by the Islamic republican regime.
Shots were fired at Shariatmadari's house in Qom; he faced home arrest, and his school and institutions were seized. In the end, Shariatmadari made a televised appearance pleading for Khomeini’s forgiveness and repenting for what he had done. When Shariatmadari was then diagnosed with cancer, he was denied treatment in Tehran and was prohibited from traveling abroad. He died an isolated "traitor."
As for Ayatollah Montazeri, whom Khomeini had chosen as his successor, his criticism of the regime and unequivocal opposition to its arrests, executions, and Iran-Contra were considered fatal "blunders." Montazeri was ultimately deposed, and Ali Khamenei was chosen instead.
Suspicions of foul play were echoed but never confirmed following the death of Ayatollah Taleghani in the summer of 1979. Known for his history of militantism, Khomeini had appointed the cleric as the preacher of the Tehran mosque, while the opposition claimed that his growing popularity had had a negative impact on him. The opposition ascribed to Taleghani opposing Valayet e-Faqih, the regime’s executions and trials, and its marginalization of leftists and liberals, as well as having warned against the "return of tyranny," before retiring from politics.
What we know for certain is that Taleghani republished Naini's book "Alerting the Ummah and Purifying the Religion," which argues that adopting a constitutional system is best until the return of the Twelfth Imam, and that Taleghani added a prologue that he had written endorsing the views expressed in the book. As for Taleghani’s death at the age of 68, it was seen to have validated the narrative that his death had been "planned."
In Lebanon, too, no school of thought can claim to represent all Shiism and all Shiites, and no faction can nationalize them. The fatwas of clerics affiliated with Hezbollah diverged from those of Sayyed Fadlallah or Sheikh Shams al-Din, and earlier on, the distance between the fatwas of Sayyed Mohsen al-Amin and Sayyed Abdul Hussein Sharaf al-Din was astronomical.
But it seems that Hezbollah does not know what this "Armenian," Ms. Yacoubian, knows about the breadth of Shiites and Shiism.
