A Very Islamist Coup – Iran and the Hojjatiyeh Society

This is a guest post by Abu Faris

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Duplicity and deviousness are almost bywords of Islamist organisations. The violent, bigoted and now frighteningly influential Hojjatiyeh Society in Iran is no exception. Gripped by a bloodthirsty and truly bizarre millenarianist theology, the Hojjatiyeh have now achieved influence over the most powerful organs of state power in Iran. In doing so, they have illustrated that Islamism’s commitment to democracy is entirely a matter of convenience. Democracy will be jettisoned when it has served its purposes, to be replaced by all-out and all-out clerical-fascist dictatorship.

The Hojjatiyeh Society was founded in 1954 by Sheikh Mahmoud Halabi, as an Islamist organization hell-bent on persecuting Bahai, Sunni, indeed any and all minority faiths and dissident beliefs in Iran. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Hojjatiyeh worked hand-in-mailed-fist with SAVAK, the Shah’s terrifying secret police, a weapon in the Shah’s struggle with the then very powerful Iranian Left.

The Hojjatiyeh did not take part in the 1979 Revolution in Iran. In fact, it actively worked against it. Like all Shi’a, Hojjatiyeh believe in the return of the 12^th Imam, who – it is believed – will usher in a time of justice, saving the world from evil. However, Hojjatiyeh members are also radical millenarianists, believing that they must actively prepare the world to open the gate for the Mahdi’s return. In order to force the reappearance of the Mahdi (who comes to save the world from oppression and wrong), Hojjatiyeh actively sought to make the world as unjust, chaotic and violent as possible so as to bring about the unbearable conditions that would trigger the re-appearance of the 12^th Imam from out of his Occultation. As a result, the Hojjatiyeh were firmly addicted to violence and disorder at all costs. This explains both their willingness to co-operate with the Shah’s regime (knowing full well that this regime bought pain and suffering upon the people of Iran) and their latter policy of prolonging the bloodshed, agony and the anarchy of the early days of the Revolution as the framework, so they believed, under which the Mahdi would return.

Simultaneously, like most Shi’a of a non-Khomeinist stripe then and now, the Hojjatiyeh rejected Khomeini’s innovatory and radical Islamist theory of Valaayat-e Faghih (governance of the Islamic jurist), which remains the cornerstone of Iran’s Constitution and bestows upon the Supreme Leader almost dictatorial powers. However, this rejection was down, in the main, to the Hojjatiyeh consistent belief in causing and sustaining as great a social, economic and political dislocation as possible, thus engendering mass suffering and thus, according to their lethal theology, triggering the return of the 12^th Imam.

Tellingly, Khomeini was not minded to move against the Hojjatiyeh because of their aberrant theology, nor yet their pure addiction to violence and mayhem, nor yet their opposition to the Revolution, nor yet even their collaboration with the hated ancien regime of the Shah. Rather, the uber-Islamist Khomeini banned the Hojjatiyeh because they refused to support his elevation of himself as Supreme Leader via the entirely innovatory device of the theory of Valaayat-e Faghih.

As with other Islamists who have found themselves on the back-foot, Hojjatiyeh quietly went underground and carefully began a re-invention of themselves in order to better operate in the new conditions. Islamists everywhere have adopted the strategy of identifying themselves with the main trajectory of political change in the countries in which they are at struggle. Hojjatiyeh proved no different.

In the conditions of the post-revolutionary period in the Islamic Republic, Hojjatiyeh repositioned themselves. Gone was the advocacy of a bloodthirsty millenarianist theology of violence to bring about the coming of the Mahdi. Out even went the opposition to Khomeini’s Valaayat-e Faghih that had seen them banned by Khomeini. They even stopped calling themselves the Hojjatiyeh.

With the death of Khomeini in 1989, the new-look Hojjatiyeh re-emerged from the shadows. Adopting the now familiar Islamist strategy of creeping coup, via infiltration of the bases of state power and led by arch-reactionary clerics such as Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, Hojjatiyeh now advocated an anti-democratic agenda, demanding an unelected Supreme Leader of an authoritarian Islamic Government as opposed to the already highly limited democratic institutions of the Islamic Republican Constitution. Muhammad Sahimi observes:

In order to create a political cover for himself and his followers and counter the accusations that he had opposed the Revolution and Ayatollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi… founded the Imam Khomeini Educational Institute in Qom – even though he opposed the Ayatollah and had turned down the invitation of his students to join the Revolution.

The re-invented Hojjatiyeh, along with all Islamists, believe that sovereignty does not reside with the people – it resides with God. In the conditions of post-revolutionary Iran, it developed the line that the Supreme Leader is selected by God and is the Mahdi’s deputy in his absence. Consequently, according to Muhammad Sahimi, Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, present leader of the Hojjatiyeh advocates that:

The task of the ayatollahs in the Assembly of Experts… a constitutional body that appoints the Supreme Leader and monitors his performance (and can even dismiss him), is to discover who the selected Leader is. He believes people must never question the Supreme Leader and obey him absolutely.

The same Ayatollah Yazdi infamously once asserted:

It does not matter what people think. They are ignorant sheep.

He underscored this in the recent and entirely fraudulent Presidential elections in Iran, issuing a fatwa suggesting that fraud and cheating were acceptable tactics in order to get Ahmadinejad re-elected, given the sterling work Ahmadinejad had done in advocating Islamism on the world stage and defending clerical fascism at home.

Despite ex-President Khatami’s withering depiction of Ayatollah Yazdi and his Hojjatiyeh goons as “shallow-thinking traditionalists with a Stone-Age backwardness”, Yazdi presently sits on the Assembly of Experts – the very group that Yazdi suggests should discover and appoint the Supreme Leader of his projected clerical-fascist dictatorial Iranian Islamic Government.

Muhammad Sahimi comments:

Ayatollah Mesbah Yard’s base of power is the Haghani seminary in Qom… His disciples include the Intelligence Minister Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejehei (a graduate of the Haghani), Mojtaba Hashemi Samareh (a senior aid to Mr. Ahmadinejad), and Mr. Ahmadinejad himself. In fact, all of Iran’s Intelligence Ministers since the 1979 Revolution are graduates of the Haghani. […]

[Yazdi] is the spiritual leader of many of the top commanders of the IRGC. The Basij militia, a paramilitary group controlled by the IRGC, has also been deeply penetrated by his disciples as well, as has been the Judiciary. Ayatollah Khomeini’s chief of staff, Ayatollah Ahmad Tavassoli, said after the election of Mr. Ahmadinejad in 2005 that, “the executive branch of the Iranian government, as well as the troops of the IRGC, have been hijacked by the Hojjatiyeh.”

Yazdi’s Hojjatiyeh make up an important fraction of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s support. Equally, since he was elected the President in 2005, Mr. Ahmadinejad has repeatedly spoken about the “Islamic Government of Iran,” rather than the “Islamic Republic of Iran,” as well as the return of Mahdi, suggesting that Ahmadinejad is supportive of Yazdi’s and the Hojjatiyeh’s line, as one would expect of a graduate of the Hojiatatiyeh’s seminary in Qom. Under Ahmadinejad, the Hojjatiyeh-infiltrated Revolutionary Guards have penetrated important sectors of Iran’s economy, and are rapidly developing a monopoly on a majority of a wide range of government projects as well as the private sector.

The Hojjatiyeh’s gradual assumption of power was made all the easier by the fundamental flaws and limitations of democracy in the Islamic Republic. Sahimi notes that:

In Iran the elections are supervised by the Interior Ministry. There is no independent organization for the elections. The Interior Minister, Mr. Sadegh Mahsouli, and his principal deputy for the elections, Mr. Kamran Daneshjou, are both close aids and friends of Mr. Ahmadinejad and former commanders in the IRGC. Many of the provincial governors who also play important roles in the elections are former military men. Mr. Mahsouli had actually come out in support of his old friend.

The goal of the Islamist Hojjatiyeh is to move the country towards to an “Islamic Government” – an openly clerical-fascist dictatorship dominated by like-minded theocrats. This has been achieved, in Sahimi’s words, by making elections a meaningless process by resorting to any means available, including rigging and manipulation. Islamist watchers everywhere will see a familiar pattern in all this.

The creeping coup of the Hojjatiyeh Society in Iran, led by Yazdi and fronted by a sinister, parochial clown like Ahmadinejad is but an example of the strategy of Islamism, whether Sunni or Shi’a. Infiltrating and entering the centres of state-power is, of course, the known strategy of other Islamist groups, for example Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Muslim Brotherhood. Cynically using democratic institutions in order to achieve the eventual ends of a clerical-fascist dictatorship, Islamism of any stripe, proves itself time and again to serve only its own interests and not the interests of the people so subjugated to its medievalist, totalitarian ideology..