Rafsanjani’s Historic Warning to the Clergy

Following his earlier warnings against what he has termed as anti-clerical events in Iran, the head of the powerful State Expediency Council Hashemi Rafsanjani - an institution that is constitutionally tasked to resolve differences between the various government branches of government - this time directed his remarks at the clergy itself and warned them to be careful not to make the mistake they made during the constitutional movement in the early years of the twentieth century. He described the mistake to be the clergy’s “alignment with the secret divisive plans of active colonialist groups inside the country.”

He issued the warning through a message on the anniversary of the imperial decree on  constitutionalism over a hundred years ago. In 1906 Mozafareddin Shah, a king from the Qajar dynasty in Iran, issued a decree to his prime minister for the creation of an elected national consultative council, the Majlis or parliament, for the first time ever in Iran.

This year, on the occasion of the victory of the constitutional movement, Rafsanjani wrote that “the planners of the deviant schemes during the constitutional era are back today to take advantage of domestic stylistic and discourse differences with the goal of finalizing their plans.”

Rafsanjani also said that these schemers knew very well that that clergy always stood with the people and so were bent on disassociating and alienating people from the clerics. He said that this was also apparent today and that these schemers worked to create differences among clerics as well.

Falling Deeper Into an Abyss

Rafsanjani, who recently withdrew his drive to run for the leadership of the powerful Assembly of Experts which constitutionally monitors the work of Iran’s supreme leader and has the authority to remove him in favor of another cleric, Mahdavi Kani

In his comments, Rafsanjani presented the constitutional movement to be ultimately a failed revolution which began as “a movement against foreigners and absolute rule of the king but in reality threw the country into a deeper abyss.” Despite this, he wrote that the constitutional movement planted the seeds of democracy in the minds of different social groups in Iran. And while the movement “failed, and was the cause of despair in people’s social movements, in time it was transformed into the revolution that culminated in 1979.”

The constitutional movement is accepted as the first Iranian attempt to attain modern ideals such as rule of law, parliament, and constitutional limits on the authority of absolute kings. But differences between the clergy and revolutionaries at the time, and the chaotic conditions that were prevalent then, resulted in the bombardment of the first Majlis by the Russian Colonel Liakhov on orders from king Mohammad Ali Shah, which also resulted in the massive arrest and killing of revolutionaries and Majlis representative and thus destroying the achievements of the constitutional movement, issues that Rafsanjani mentions in his remarks as well.

Rafsanjani’s Concerns

In his remarks, Rafsanjani, who is a former two-time president and Majlis speaker, drew on historic lessons from the failure of the constitutional movement and said that complex plans existed today against the clergy and deceit of people. He strongly criticized those who “unfairly displayed the shortcomings of the clergy” and wrote, “Those who have used every scheme against Iran, including the 8-year war and now the mobilization of world public opinion against the country, are in a cunning war against the revolution and have even deceived a group which was initially probably honest, are now active in separating the clergy from the people and have succeeded in instilling differences among the clerics, which we unfortunately are witness to today.”

In the past, Rafsanjani had regularly warned against a plan by a “deviant current” (i.e., a group) to instill the idea of the ineffectiveness of the clerics in running the country and even named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and some of his associates and appointees in the government as the agents for this “scheme.”

Last year when he was still the head of the Assembly of Experts, on the anniversary of the day in 1977  when an anti-Khomeini and anti-clergy article was written in a popular mainstream newspaper which provoked a response from the clergy, he issued a warning against those who he said were advancing an anti-clergy agenda and ideas among people and compared them to snakes who were bent on revenge. Ahmad Rashidi Motlagh wrote that article in Etelaat newspaper which ayatollah Khomeini’s associates at the time announced to be “insulting,” resulting in unexpected protests against the Pahlavi regime that subsequently resulted in the fall of the 2,500 year monarchy in Iran in 1979.

Government media responded to Rafsanjani’s warning. Resalat, which represents the views of the political and economic traditional right in Iran wrote in an editorial that the remarks were a “good comment” but also added that “if some senior clerics stop short of supporting the supreme leader and the velayate faghih (i.e., rule of clerics) we could end up with the same fate as the constitutional movement.”

The editor of the newspaper Mohammad Kazem Anbarlooi, who is also the head of the political center of the Islamic Coalition party wrote in the editorial, “Our nation confronted the 2009 sedition and expected that ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani who is unquestionably a pillar of the regime, to join the people in this struggle. But it did not see him on the side of the supreme leader, and instead heard his complaints during the country-wide demonstrations on December 30 and February 11.”

Rajanews also commented on Rafsanjani’s written comments on his website and wrote that the chairman’s piece had been written with the “same approach” that he had taken in recent years. It then quoted ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic regime, who also said that if the clergy, writers and committed intellectuals exhibited laxness and did not learn from the constitutional movement, then this revolution would have the same fate as that of the constitutional revolution.