Iran: Cracks in the Edifice

Here is an article from the NY Times that points out that the ground is shifting in Iran...

With Iran’s political establishment at war with itself, a central question lurking behind the postelection tumult is which side the country’s highly influential clerics will back.

So far the mullahs — a potentially critical swing vote — have remained largely silent, with the notable exception of a few prominent grand ayatollahs, including one who has attacked the vote count as “a gross injustice.” And few religious leaders have joined the tens of thousands of Iranians expressing their fury by marching through the streets of Tehran and other cities.

The clerics and their thousands of pupils, concentrated in the holy city of Qum, are a generally conservative lot who have been known to jump into the political fray en masse only when a clear winner starts to emerge.

“Some clergy have come onto the scene, but they are not in the leadership,” said Mohsen Sazegara, a former aide to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini now living in exile. Describing the protestors, he said, “They are not making religious or nationalistic demands, but just democratic demands.”

In the past when clerics weighed in, however, they tended to dominate, with the creation of the Islamic republic in 1979 the prime example.

One of the mysteries behind this week’s mass demonstrations is who is coordinating them. Some suspect that the hidden hand is the powerful political organization of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. His daughter Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former member of Parliament famous for opening sports to women, was spotted at a march for Mir Hussein Moussavi, who the Interior Ministry says came in second in a landslide for the country’s incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

One of the country’s most influential clerics, Mr. Rafsanjani has been notably silent since Mr. Ahmadinejad was declared the winner last week, and there has been speculation that Mr. Rafsanjani is in Qum trying to muster clerical opposition to the country’s leaders. But those reports are difficult to confirm with any authority.

Mr. Rafsanjani leads the 86-member Assembly of Experts, whose duties include endorsing the performance of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who on Saturday called the election’s outcome “a divine blessing.” In theory, the group has the power to remove him, but that has never been done and any attempt to do so would probably further inflame the situation, analysts said.

Watching social movement grow, transform, evolve is fascinating. The one thing that history teaches: you can't predict the outcome of a revolution. Once forces are let loose things tend to go out of control and previously overlooked ideas and elements in society come forward and transform the situation in unexpected ways. That is why social movements are so frightening to social elites. They can't be controlled. They grow in unexpected ways that terrify those who currently benefit from the status quo.