NCRI – In a message to religious authorities and clerics in various Iranian cities, Mr. Hossein-Ali Montazeri, Ruhollah Khomeini's former designated successor referred to “the current situation in the country, the injustices we witness on a daily basis and offenses committed in the name of religion, faith and Shiite Islam,” and said: What is being witnessed is in fact indicative of a military rule and not the rule of jurisprudence.
The message was addressed to religious leaders in the Iranian cities of Qom, Mashhad, Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz, Shiraz and others as well as in the Iraqi city of Najaf.
In it, Montazeri also declared, “The incidents and tragedies of recent months, which occurred after the country’s presidential election, ring an alarm bell for the clerical institution and religious authority.”
He added, “In the course of these events, rights were trampled upon, and numerous injustices and offenses were committed in the name of religion and with the approval of a minority of state and state-affiliated clerics. Subsequently, large segments of the disenchanted population chose the most peaceful avenues to voice their protest to the state in accordance with their Sharia and legal rights as well as Article 27 of the Constitution. But instead of responding in a positive and rational way to the people’s rightful demands and instead of making attempts to remedy violations of their rights, the state dubbed the millions of people as rioters, troublemakers, and foreign agents, and used utter violence to beat and suppress defenseless men and women. It also arrested a large number of people and martyred a group on the streets and others in terrifying prisons.”
Montazeri went on to say, “What comes as a shock is that the state relies on the military and police forces to pull out guns against unarmed and unshielded people, martyring or imprisoning them, and after it is all said and done, it refers to people as ‘Mohareb’ [those who wage war against God]. They themselves create crises and threaten the system, but call people and those who established the system as rioters and opponents of the system.”
Montazeri also condemned the forceful obtaining of confessions in the regime’s courts and exerting of pressure and issuing threats against the defeated candidates of the regime’s sham presidential race, Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karoubi, and added, “Simultaneous with the suppression of people, it [the state] arrests a number of political activists and members of the country’s elite, each of whom has for years done great service for the Islamic Republic, and in accordance with a pre-planned agenda and in contravention of Sharia and civil law, it creates cases against them and obtains false confessions. Subsequently it brings them out to appear in show trials, which run against Sharia and are illegal, thus ridiculing Islam’s judicial customs in the world’s eyes.”
In his message, Montazeri adds, “In such a situation, respectable religious authorities and Shiite clerics have a greater responsibility because in addition to their public duties which are a necessity for their fields of expertise and also [in view of] the attention people pay to clerics and religious authorities, they also have the duty of defending religion’s sanctity and cleansing it of the offenses which the state has and is committing in the name of religion. This is because those deeds which run counter to Sharia and as well contradict the initial goals of the revolution and are carried out under the banner of religion constitute a clear example of heresy. Heresy is not exclusive to the realm of legislation and the formal incorporation of an anti-religious decree in religion. It also includes anti-Sharia acts which are committed under the banner of Sharia and religion.”
Montazeri was Khomeini's successor for ten years (1979-1989). He was dismissed in March 1989 by Khomeini himself for protesting against the massacre of members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). Based on Khomeini’s decree, some 30,000 political prisoners, the vast majority of them members or supporters of the PMOI, were massacred in the span of a few weeks in the summer of 1988.
