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Rand emeritus David Ronfeldt posed an interesting question in the comment section of an earlier post that I wanted to bring to the fore, make a few observations about and open for some crowdsourcing to see if anyone has some good information on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC or Pasdaran) leadership:

I had a stray thought this morning about Iran’s IRGC, and wanted to risk asking about it somewhere.  in doing a quick search of blogs I follow, this is the only one that has recently made passing reference to the IRGC, specifically in this post.  so I’ll try first here.

I keep re-learning what a massive operation the IRGC is – tantamount to  what Jane Jacobs termed a “monstrous moral hybrid” perhaps.  the IRGC/IRG starts as an effort to consolidate various paramiltary forces following the 1979 iranian revolution.  now it has its own ground, naval, air, and special forces.  more interestingly, it has expanded economically, and acquired assets to become a multi-billions enterprise, including public construction projects, and even dentistry and travel.  it can shut out private business competition, for it can easily underbid and then overrun, while also using recruits and conscripts as labor.  in sum, it represents an hybrid of tribal, hierarchical, and market priniciples, if not network ones too. 

Now, that supports the usual way of looking at this:  just a gigantic hybrid operating inside a state, almost as a semi-autonomous state within a state.  and that’s not uncommon in many countries.  the chinese and cuban militaries are heavily involved in economic enterprises too.  and in parallel fashion, this is a growing trend  among criminal enterprises as well, like the zetas mentioned in your reading  recommendations above.  

but then I had this stray thought:  the IRGC is not so much a state within a state, as a caliphate within a state.  I am not well-informed about how to define and think about caliphates.  but the little I know leads me to think this might be a thought worth further consideration and analysis.  esp. if the irgc could be considered as a model for an emerging Shia caliphate, and one that is way ahead of radical Sunni aspirations. 

so: an emerging caliphate within a state.  any comment?  advice for further thinking?   

I am not a Persianist or expert on Twelver Islam but David’s questions cross a number of disciplinary boundaries, as most interesting questions usually do. Using one “lens” here, such as security studies or Iranian history or IR theory, by themselves, are not enough with a semi-opaque government like that of Iran. This analysis probably should be approached in a multi-disciplinary fashion, so I welcome anyone out there with a relevant perspective to add what you know about Iran and the Pasdaran in the comment section.

I think that the issues here are structure, behavior and motivation of the Pasdaran as an institution within Iran.

First on the “state within a state”model:

If we look at previous historical examples of “state within a state” entities with which to compare the Pasdaran, the SS and the NKVD stand out as superior in my mind to that of China’s PLA, which was always tightly integrated into the CCP ( much moreso than the Soviet Red Army leadership in the USSR) and as a regular army, never dominated the party after 1949.  By contrast, the SS after 1934 quickly “mestastasized” to “colonize” the Gestapo ( memory tells me that SS men were something like a third of Gestapo officers) and Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler attempted to do so with other ministries by granting influential Nazi party organ and German state officials high SS rank, enjoying a limited success in penetrating other centers of power in the Third Reich. The war and the Holocaust allowed the SS to field an elite guard army in the Waffen-SS and supplementary expeditionary/constabulary forces abroad in the form of Einsatzgruppen, Totenkopf and ordinary reserve police battalions under SS command.

The expanding concentration camp structure permitted the SS to become an economic power within the Third Reich in its own right both as a provider of slave labor to private industry and Nazi ministries for Labor, Agriculture and Armaments and War Production and in factories and mines controlled directly by SS concentration camp commandants. Albert Speer was Himmler’s most determined (and successful) rival in thwarting the growing power of the SS in economic affairs and Speer’s last book, published posthumously, INFILTRATION is a rambling but detailed account of Himmler’s bureaucratic imperialism and chilling ambitions for a postwar Nazi world ( an understudied and valuable book for insights into what might have been had Hitler won WWII).

The NKVD in the Beria period had an even more privileged and extensive place in Stalin’s USSR than the SS occupied in the Third Reich but the Soviet planned economy was substantially different from that of Germany’s or that of Iran’s today. While the NKVD had its own empire of enterprises, the capacity of the NKVD to maximize their value was sharply limited by fear of Stalin”s paranoid caprice and the absence of any private economy in the Soviet Union with which to profit from any ill-gotten gains. Nazi Germany’s weird, Fascist, economy with it’s mixture of oligopolistic cartels, private enterprise and state planning ( described well in Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy) and the place of the SS in it is a better analogy to Iran’s state enterprises, bazaari business elite, bonyads and undercapitalized small business sectors

On the IRGC as the seed or kernel of a “Caliphate”:

This is an ideological and motivational question that is apart from normal, secular, bureaucratic expansionism.

First, I’m not certain that “caliphate” is the best way to frame the discussion. All Shia Muslims are literally the Shiat ‘Ali or “Party of Ali”, going back to the dispute over succession to the Prophet Muhammed. I have to heavily qualify my comments by stating this is not my area of expertise, but as far as I am aware, “caliphate” has not been a major part of historical Shia dialogue as the modern Iranian clerical establishment emerged under the Qajar dynasty or later under the Pahlavis. The Persian Shahs did not claim that title, which was held by the Ottoman Sultan until it was abolished by Ataturk. A more appropriate question, which I believe David is getting at, would be “Is the IRGC leadership Mahdist?”.

If the IRGC is orthodox Shia in its orientation, then we might expect that the Pasdaran would behave more or less as a secular, if ideologically hardline, national security bureaucracy and a force within Iran for “siloviki” policies, Iranian style.

If the IRGC senior leadership has a heavy crossover in membership with the Hojjatiyeh, that would be far more worrisome and would raise the level of uncertainty regarding Iranian state behavior in crisis situations .

“Mahdi” theology is semi-heretical Islamic doctrine and has differing forms in Sunni and Shia Islam, on which I am not qualified to opine, but for our purposes, we can state that it contains a fairly dangerous element of apocalyptic millenarianism as a worldview. Moreover, in the Iranian context, the quasi-divine Hidden Imam emerging from Occultation, as virtually a messenger of Allah, would not be bound by any of the constraints contained within the Quran. Islamic jurisprudence normally disdains “innovation”, in interpreting scripture, but the Mahdi (and more importantly, his true believer followers) would be the great and messianic exception.

Of course, what we really need here is some hard data ( or at least reasonably informed speculation) regarding the factions within the Pasdaran and the clerical hierarchy, and their strength relative to one another. Since the election protests, the Pasdaran appears to have become the major political force inside the regime, akin to the KGB in the days of Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev, except the KGB in the 80’s saw the need for economic reform in the USSR and the Pasdaran today appears to be entirely reactionary in its policy prescriptions for Iran.

Comments? Questions? Complaints?

Returning as a guest-blogger, Charles Cameron, who is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. The topic is an update on Cameron’s previous cautionary post on the potential implications of an emerging strand of Mahdism among radical Islamists.

( Ed. There will be an update later with two supporting images when I resolve a minor technical issue….)

Iran or Afghanistan? The Black Flags of Khorasan… 

By Charles Cameron.

 i

A couple of days ago I saw a video, posted on YouTube September 12, 2009, titled “The Army Of Imam Mahdi”. It carries the subtitle: “Soon the Army of Imam Mahdi will start its march from Afghanistan towards The Holy Land( Palestine ) and liberate it from the claws of Israel”. I have embedded it for your viewing convenience at the bottom of this post.

This video suggests that I should follow-up on my previous post, “Mahdism in the News” at , in which I noted that the personal representative of Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Jurisprudent of (Shi’ite) Iran, had issued a call to neighboring and sympathetic nations to a joint mobilization in preparation for the return of the Mahdi.

That was a Shi’ite affair: but Sunni Muslims also await the Mahdi’s arrival, though not as the returning Shi’ite Twelfth Imam — and this video correspondingly offers us an appropriate parallel to Ali Saeedi’s call — but IMO should not be confused or conflated with it.

ii

I would like to make this much clear at the outset.

It is roughly as likely that the Ayatollah Khamenei would accept a Mahdi from among Al Qaida or the Taliban as it is that Pope Benedict would accept a Christ who staged his Second Coming in support of the fiercely anti-Catholic Rev. Ian Paisley of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster.

That’s not a scholarly comparison, by the way — more of a powerful hunch. But I think it needs to be said.

The Imam Mahdi of the Shi’ites is himself their Twelfth Imam, who was born in 869 CE and then “occulted” — hidden from mundane sight — centuries ago, returning among us in the fullness of time. He is Shi’a of the Shi’a, Muhammad ibn Hasan ibn ‘Ali, the last and greatest in the great Shi’ite lineage of the Twelve Imams.

iii

It was Joel Richardson’s blog at that first alerted me to this video (hat-tip, Joel). He writes:

This is the first time that I have seen solid proof that al-Qaeda and the Taliban is thoroughly guided by Islam’s demonic eschatology. For those who claim that Mahdism is only held by Shi’a, take note that it is a Sunni group that has created this thoroughly Mahdist video and not Shi’a. Al_Qaeda and the Taliban literally views themselves collectively as the Mahdi’s army carrying the Black Flags that will march to Jerusalem to “liberate” it from the Jews. This is a full blown Al-Qaeda / Mahdi Army recruitment video.

I think that’s a bit of an overstatement. I’d say more cautiously that this is evidence that al-Qaeda and the Taliban can be construed in light of Sunni Mahdist expectation, and may view themselves as the Mahdi’s army — and definitely shows that a Mahdist current is at work in some Sunni circles.

The sheikh who is quoted in the video is from Trinidad.

In a more far reaching post at , Joel also claims that the video was ” released under the al-Sahab label” — the al-Sahab logo appears on some of the footage, but the video itself is not from al-Sahab as far as I can determine — and his subtitle, which may have been provided for him by a WND editor, claims the video contains “footage confirming unity of apocalyptic Muslims”. Given Joel’s reference in the same post to the recent Iranian “mobilization” call on which my own earlier post was also based, I think it is important to emphasize:

(a) that while Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims may both be in expectation of the Mahdi, and may indeed both (sometimes) draw on ahadith about his army coming with black flags out of Khorasan, this does not mean that the two streams of Mahdism can be lumped together as a single movement, and

(b) that this video appears to be a production of sympathizers with the Taliban, rather than an Al-Q / al-Sahab production.

iv

The key passage in the video is a discourse attributed to Sufi Shayk Imran Nazar Hossein, who says:

The true messiah will destroy the false messiah. And when that happens then a Muslim army will liberate the Holy Land. The Prophet said, when you see the black flags coming from the direction of Khurasan, go and join that army. That army has already started its march. They know it, and that’s why they demonize as a terrorist anyone, anyone who supports that army. That army will liberate every single territory in a straight line until it reaches Jerusalem said Muhammad (as). At the heart of Khorasan is Afghanistan, and that’s why they have occupied Afghanistan. When that army liberates every territory on its way to Jerusalem, there will be in that army Imam al-Mahdi, and so the liberation from oppression in the Holy Land is not going to come about through any negotiations…

This would appear to be the Islamic scholar Imran Nazar Hosein (to use the spelling of his name used on the website dedicated to his work ), and the video clip that shows him was very likely taken some years back.

His biography can be found here. He appears to have had a distinguished career, including a period spent as Director of Islamic Studies for the Joint Committee of Muslim Organizations of Greater New York, and is the author of Jerusalem in the Qur’an – An Islamic View of the Destiny of Jerusalem.

v

The video includes clips of various mujahideen firing weapons and practicing martial arts, including one with shots of riders with a black flag…

and an image of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (Baitul Maqdas), which appears to be their final goal.

vi

The hadith about the “black flags of Khorasan” mentioned here are, as I understand it, not strongly supported in the hadith literature, but they are available for quotation by those who wish to suggest that the Mahdist army will come from the general area now known as Afghanistan — or Iran, for that matter — a suggestion that gains interest as Afghanistan — or Iran — gains in geopolitical prominence…

Some quick indicators:

Sheikh Salman al-Oadah — once imprisoned for criticizing the Saudi regime and now one of its approved religious spokesmen — writes:

The hadith about the army with black banners coming out of Khorasan has two chains of transmission, but both are weak and cannot be authenticated. If a Muslim believes in this hadith, he believes in something false. Anyone who cares about his religion and belief should avoid heading towards falsehood.

Some people have used this hadith to support their claim that the Mahdi is from the family of al-Abbas and that the Mahdi is from of the Abbasid dynasty. There were Abbasid Caliphs who went by the name al-Mahdi.

The banners of the Abbasid State were black. It is not hard to see how this weak hadith might have been fabricated or at least tampered with to support the Abbasid cause.

That’s the negative view, to be set against significant Sunni jihadist currents that find the hadith useful.

As David Cook notes in his Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, p. 173-74), Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden’s mentor, “popularized the position of Afghanistan as the messianic precursor to the future liberation of Palestine” in his book, From Kabul to Jerusalem. Cook also quotes an Egyptian apocalyptic author, Amin Jamal al-Din, as identifying the Taliban with the black flags and the Mahdi’s awaited campaign.

And while Ali-Saeedi, the spokesman for Khamenei, did not mention the Khorasan and black flag hadith in his call for a general mobilization in preparation for the Mahdi’s coming, Cook notes that the hadith in question have earlier been applied to the Iranian revolution of the 1980s under the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Timothy Furnish, in his book Holiest Wars: Islamic Manhdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden, discusses the Khorasan (“today eastern Iran and western Afghanistan”) and “black flags” hadith together with various Western theses as to their historicity, concluding that “the mass of hadiths” in general functions like a marketplace in which there is “a saying of the Prophet available off the shelf as a legitimizing agent for just about any position”.

Combine that with the apocalyptic habit of associating apocalyptic texts with events in today’s news, and you have a field ripe for what millennial historian Richard Landes calls “semeiotic arousal”.

vii

The video itself:

I am pleased to have as a guest-blogger, Charles Cameron, who is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.

MAHDISM IN THE NEWS

by Charles Cameron

I.

What’s this about the Mahdi and a call for Islamic mobilization?

Al-Arabiya carried what seems to me to be a significant article about the Mahdi, Islam’s end-times savior on August 17th. The report stated that the personal representative of the Supreme Leader was calling on Iran’s neighboring states “to mobilize their forces in preparation for the coming of the savior of Islam”.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s spokesman, Ali Saeedi, said countries like Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan should gather together all their forces in order to make drastic changes to prepare for the coming of al-Mahdi al-Montazar, Arabic for “the awaited guided one.”

“We still have a long way to go in order to achieve this. We have to train honest forces that can stop the obstacles that may hinder the coming of the Mahdi like the United States and Israel,” Saeedi said in statement posted by the Iranian Labor News Agency (ILNA).

Muslims must unite for Islam’s Savior: Iran, Al-Arabiya, Monday, 17 August 2009

That’s a call to arms, put out by a Shi’ite nation state, and addressed to Sunni and Shi’ite alike — and it drew almost no attention in the western press.We can safely disregard it, right? After all, Mahdism is a Shi’ite phenomenon, and whereas Iran has a conservative rearguard that expects the Mahdi’s soon-coming along with President Ahmadinejad, the Sunni world has no time for that kind of thing.

Except that bin Laden seems to share the apocalyptic expectation, if not the exclusively Shi’ite details — the view that the Mahdi has already been born once, into a Shi’ite family, and is presently in occultation prior to his soon return.

So I am not arguing that we should worry too much about Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan and Afghanistan all deciding to join forces with the Iranian Republican Guard any time soon. But I am arguing that we should be alert to Mahdism — and more generally, Messianism — as a contemporary driver.

II.

It so happens that Steve Coll was on the radio again this week, in a rebroadcast of a talk he gave in April, and here’s some of what he had to say on the subject of Osama bin Laden:

It’s a mistake to see him entirely as a political, or even to some extent mostly, as a political leader. He has a purchase on these grievances and he understands them and I’m sure he feels them — but he’s also a millenarian: he believes that he’s been called by God to wage a war that will only conclude at the end of time. He hasn’t built a political movement, he doesn’t offer any social services, he doesn’t build a hospital — he thinks he’s fighting until the end of time, that he’s carrying out a narrative that’s pre-ordained, and that his role is to awaken God’s followers to their righteous role so that they can pass to the next phase. And so there is this interaction of millenarian, apocalyptic thinking on the one hand — which justifies all violence — and this sort of terrestrial political critique on the other. And what happens when you read his statements in the west is that, well, everyone can understand the political critique, so that gets all the attention — and people’s eyes glaze over at the rest because it’s a little bit hard to digest. But when you read it in full it’s a very, very important aspect of why he’s doing what he’s doing and who he thinks he is.

Steve Coll, talking about his book The Bin Ladens for the World Affairs Council.

Should that surprise us?

Not if we noted Bin Laden’s quotation of the “Gharqad tree hadith” — which specifies the nature of the end times conflict:

Doomsday shall not come until Muslims fight Jews. A Jew would be hiding behind a tree or a stone. The tree or the stone would say, O Muslim, O subject of God, there is a Jew behind me come and kill him. The only exception is [Gharqad] tree is a tree that belongs to Jews.

and his comment:

Whoever claims that there is lasting peace with the Jews is a disbeliever of what the prophet, may the peace and blessings of God upon him, said. Our conflict with the enemies of Islam will continue until Doomsday.

No definite timeline is given, and bin Laden also remarks that his father waited forty years for the Mahdi — and indeed set aside $12 million to support him on his arrival — but the appeal is to end-times expectation,

FWIW, this isn’t the only time bin Laden has quoted the Gharqad tree hadith, and it is also quoted in the Charter of the Hamas — for more on the topic, see Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg, The Road to Martyrs’ Square, pp 19-21, and watch this chilling MEMRI video from of Sheikh Muhammad Al-Arifi, speaking on Al Aqsa TV, September 2008.

III.

Why is eschatological or apocalyptic rhetoric significant?

It is an accelerant. Simply put, it is a force-multiplier, acting on morale via the sphere of religion, by providing divine sanction for violence — zeal with a deadline.
.
Apocalyptic expectation is in part the expectation that “all the injustices of the old world will be put right” very soon, as Damian Thompson noted, and it creates “an especially potent form of charismatic authority, one that rubs off on ordinary believers as well as the prophet.” This extraordinary empowerment of the individual believer comes about because “foreknowledge about one of the most important subjects imaginable — the fate of the planet — creates a special, even intimate, bond between those who share it”:

In every case, the most striking feature of the millennial theodicy is the contrast between present misery and the glory to come: the latter justifies and makes tolerable the formed.

It may also justify and make tolerable the use of violence in the lead-up to apocalypse, as it clearly does in both the Shi’ite call to arms and the Sunni hadith quoted above. And furthermore, in all these cases the misery is the fruit of sin, whereas the glory is the glory of God.

The nature of millennial expectation is conditioned by culture, yet cross-cultural in its basic patterns, and transcendent in its authority. Thompson goes on to note that “the anticipation of violence does not constitute a cost of millenarianism, since the blood being shed will be that of the unsaved” — and Kerry Noble put the point quite succinctly in his retrospective account of a Christian millenarian movement he later left:

I was not looking forward to the coming war, but I was looking forward to the Kingdom of God that was to follow. That’s how many of us rationalized being soldiers of God. We wanted peace, but if purging had to precede peace, then let the purging begin.

Ahmadinejad or bin Laden might say much the same.

IV.

Who is awake to this pervasive strand of eschatological thinking, among the Shi’a, among the Sunni, and among ourselves?

I cannot speak for the intelligence community, except to say that a rational, secular analyst monitoring these matters is liable to note the “blips” of open source intel but miss the fire that underlies them. Or again, as Steve Coll put it,

people’s eyes glaze over at the rest because it’s a little bit hard to digest.

That’s not a feature — that’s a bug.

Some on the Christian right get it, because they live in the apocalyptic realm themselves. The two Joels, Rosenberg (author of Epicenter) and Richardson (author of The Islamic Antichrist), were among the few to blog Ali Saeedi’s comments, with Joel Rosenberg picking up on a piece on WND that quotes Joel Richardson, whose own blog,  Joel’s Trumpet, monitors Islamic apocalyptic closely from a Christian apocalyptic perspective.

But short of actual apocalyptic belief of one’s own — which will generally cause one to disparage if not dismiss the equivalent apocalypses of others — it takes an ear open to the whisperings of myth and dream, a mind open to the logic of music and poetry to understand such thinking, such imaginings.

Michael Vlahos of Johns Hopkins, the author of  Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change, certainly gets it, noting that 9/11 was the work of Holy Warriors “passionately steeped in ancient Muslim apocalyptic” — and that we responded “with out own brand of American apocalyptic”. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, senior members of Clinton’s National Security Council get it — noting in their book, The Age of Sacred Terror, that “so much of what was heard from al-Qaeda after the attacks sounded to Americans like gibberish that many chords of the apocalypse were missed.”

Ali Allawi knows it, and dedicated his 2007 talk at the Jamestown Foundation to noting the “under the radar” existence and significance of Mahdist millennialism in Iraq.

But who else?

V.

When the overtly millennial year two thousand CE was approaching, Boston University hosted the Center or Millennial Studies, brainchild of Richard Landes of BU and Stephen O’Leary of USC, and for almost a decade scholars gathered for conferences to share the commonalities and differences between millennial movements from before the birth of Christ to the coming century and beyond.

When the roll-over to 2000 passed without major apocalyptic incident, the Center closed — but the millennial season was not over, it has only just begun.

Just this month I saw a “birther” — someone who believes President Obama was born in Kenya, and is thus not eligible to be president of the United States — tying that position in with Joel Richardson’s “middle eastern” antichrist: apocalyptic fervor once again enhancing a political stance. There will be more…

We will keep seeing millennial outpourings of zeal — and perhaps, though not always, violence — at least until 2012, when Mayan calendar enthusiasts (and apparently some readers of the jihadist online magazine, Jihad Recollections, issue 3) expect apocalyptic changes. And if the world staggers through to 2013 then at least to 2033, when many Christians will no doubt wish to celebrate the 2000th anniversary of the crucifixion and resurrection of their Savior. And should that not suffice for an ending of an age, at least till the turn of the next Islamic century in 1500 AH or 2076 CE and arrival of that century’s mujaddid or “reformer”. Or indeed the climactic battle between Islam (represented by the Mahdi) and Buddhism, predicted, curiously enough, in one of the Dalai Lama’s preferred texts — the Kalachakra or Wheel of Time Tantra — to take place in 2424 CE..

VI.

Perhaps we should take a hint from the Kalachakra, which in addition to positing an end times war, suggests that this is no more than a “a metaphor for the inner battle of deep blissful awareness … against unawareness and destructive behavior”. Gandhi said much the same about the battle of Kurukshetra in the Bhagavad Gita.

One might wish that all apocalyptic believers felt that way: they don’t.

Pepe Escobar writing in the Asia Times had a very interesting article on Iran’s hardline faction, centered in the Pasdaran and security services, and the religious group behind them, the Hojjatiyeh, a term which I had not previously heard ( hat tip to Russ Wellen):

Requiem for a revolution 

An iron-clad cast
The key man to watch is Major General Mohammad-Ali Jafari. In 2006, he became the IRGC’s top commander. At the time he was already thinking in terms of the enemy within, not an external enemy. He was actively working on how to prevent a velvet revolution.It’s essential to remember that only a few days before the election, Brigadier General Yadollah Javani – the IRGC’s political director – was already accusing Mousavi of starting a “green revolution”. He said the Guards “will suffocate it before it is even born”.The IRGC has always been about repression. They literally killed – or supported the killing of – all secular political groups in Iran during the 1980s, especially from the left. After the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died in 1989 they split into two sides. One side thought Iran needed a (slight) opening; they were afraid of a popular counter-revolution. Today, they are mostly reformist leaders or reform sympathizers.

The other side was, and remains, ultra-conservative. They include the already mentioned Jafari and Javani, as well as Ahmadinejad and his current Minister of Interior, Sadegh Mahsouli, the man who oversaw the election.

The religious strand runs parallel and overlaps with the military strand – this is always about a military dictatorship of the mullahtariat. So one must refer to the Hojjatiyeh, an ultra-sectarian group founded in the 1950s. Khomeini banned them in 1983. But they were back in force during the 1990s. Their spiritual leader is Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, known as “the crocodile” in Iran. Two weeks before the elections, Yazdi issued a fatwa legitimizing any means necessary to keep Ahmadinejad in power.

That was the green light to steal the elections. It’s essential to remember that Ahmadinejad replaced no less than 10,000 key government bureaucrats with his cronies in these past four years. These people were in charge of the maze of official organizations involved in the election and the vote counting.

Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi believes that Iran’s supreme leader is chosen by Allah – when Allah tells the 86 members of the Council of Experts to find the leader. That’s how Khamenei was “found” in 1989 – even though he was (and remains) a minor scholar, and never a marja (source of imitation). What Yazdi wants is an oukoumat islami – a hardline Islamic government sanctioned by none other than Allah.

An informative piece. Read the rest here.

Escobar is also the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving Into Liquid War and Obama Does Globalistan, published by Nimble Books.

 

I am no Iran expert but it seems to me that the Islamist regime of Khameini and Ahmadinejad’s Pasdaran clique is soundly losing the information battle to “own” Iran’s critical cultural-political  myths, rooted in Persian history and Shia Islam, to Mousavi’s Green opposition.

Here’s a piece from an Iranian journalist at al Jazeera:

Some influential moderate clerics privately admit that Khamenei has not done “justice” to the presidential candidates and has not treated them with impartiality.

This behaviour, they believe, could jeopardise his position as leader since one of the main qualities required of the supreme leader is “justice”.

In an Iranian context, the requirement for justice in a ruler is a pre-Islamic, Persian concept known as “farr”. While somewhat ambiguous, it is akin to both the Confucian concept of a mandate of heaven and the Western notion of a social contract. I’m sure an Iranianist might quibble with me here ( please weigh in, if you are reading) but the point is that is their cultural bedrock of political legitimacy. To be “unjust” is like an American president seen to be repudiating liberty. Khameini has made himself appear as he actually is and has always been since his days as Khomeini’s political valet – a tyrannical and hypocritical partisan politician in religious robes.

Secondly, from Shia Islam comes the central idea of martydom of the virtuous. Shooting protestors, notably the young woman Neda, ramps up the sense of persecution and martyrdom that is deeply rooted in Iranian culture. Imagine the Kent State shooting on steroids.

Iran’s hardliners may or may not prevail but right now the protestors are clearly inside the regime’s OODA Loop.