Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran by Sciolino Elaine

Author:Sciolino, Elaine [Sciolino, Elaine]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Political History
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2000-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

I never did get the chance to talk with Montazeri. During one visit to Qom, I approached his house, but the police guard outside was too intimidating. Over time, though, I did get to know another cleric, Mohammad-Ali Ayazi, a hojjatoleslam who considers Montazeri his mentor. A generation after the revolution, Ayazi is a driven man. He is only in his mid-forties but has been studying for thirty years, many of them under Montazeri. So he is armed with arguments about how the Islamic system has gone off course and needs to be led back to the right path. “A citizen has the right to express himself as long as it is within the framework of the law,” he explained, his eyes blazing with passion. “Religion and government must be separated,” Ayazi said. “Religion must be cultivated for freedom to thrive. It must not be imposed. People must accept religion freely; we do not need to impose it on people with violence and terror.”

Ayazi is typical of a class of clerics, many of them young. They contend that the most important holy war in Islam is the one inside one’s soul, and their mounting hostility to the conservative clerical establishment is forcing them to rethink the very meaning of the Islamic Republic and the role of religion in modern society. But Ayazi is leading his challenge from within the traditions of Shiite Islam. His life story confirms this. His father had been a cleric, as are three of his four brothers. The most glorious day in Ayazi’s life, he told me, was February 11, 1979, the day the revolution triumphed. Not only was the Shah gone; the young cleric’s wife gave birth that day to the first of their six children, a son.

Ayazi’s life centers around study, writing, and prayer. He gets up two or three hours before sunrise to pray. He takes a brisk long hike every morning to keep himself in shape. He spends part of the morning praying at the mosque, then comes home to write. And all this before breakfast, which is served to him by his wife. The rest of the day is spent with more writing and praying, a long nap after lunch, then playing with his children and helping them with homework. Ayazi considers himself worldly. He has lived abroad—in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon—and has traveled to Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. He works on a personal computer with a fast Internet connection, monitors the BBC’s Persianlanguage broadcasts every day, and studies the Bible and the Torah as well as the Koran. He writes books on Koranic interpretations, political exegeses on the meaning of a civil society, and guidance on infertility and birth control. His vast library of thousands of beautifully bound books includes works in English by Erich Fromm, Raymond Aron, Harold Laski, and Karl Popper, as well as older classics by Marx, Kant, Hegel, and Adam Smith.

Ayazi stated openly that the Islamic Republic will survive only if it reforms itself from within.

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