The Flock of a Shepherd or the Sovereign Citizen: Ayatollah Montazeri on the Role of the People

26 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXIX, No.4, Summer 2016 The Flock of a Shepherd or the Sovereign Citizen: Ayatollah Montazeri on the Role of the People Sussan Siavoshi* For more than half of his life the Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a onetime heir apparent to Ayatollah Khomeini the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, promoted the idea of the people as the obedient followers of a wise and pious shepherd, the Guardian Jurist. He thought that such a submission to the judgment of the leader will not only protect people in this world but would prepare them for the next. His experience with the actual behavior of the leaders of the Islamic Republic forced him to rethink his position. By the end of his life in 2009 Montazeri’s idea of the role of the people was drastically different from his earlier years. He now considered people citizens with agency and labelled them as the ultimate sovereign of the temporal state. How and why this change happened is the focus of this paper. The Theological, epistemological, and Ontological Basis of the Rule of the Fatherly Government of the Guardian Jurist For Montazeri, as for most other Shi’ah clergy, justification for government on earth was derived from a chain of logical deductions, *Sussan Siavoshi is Cox Chapman Professor of Political Science at Trinity University. Her field is comparative politics and her specialty is politics of contemporary Middle East. She is the author of numerous articles on Iranian politics. Her first book, Liberalism Nationalism in Iran: The Defeat of a Movement was translated to Persian. Her most recent work, a book manuscript on Ayatollah Montazeri, will soon be published by the Cambridge University Press. 27 1 Montazeri’s philosophical views can be found in Az Aghaz ta Anjam: Dar Guftigu-ya Do Daneshjoo; Pasokh be Porsheshha-ye Piramoun-e Mabani-yi Nazari-yi Nabuvat; and Islam Din-i Fitrat. These along with all other writings of Montazeri can be accessed in http://www.amontazeri.com/farsi/frame4.asp. 2 Montazeri, Az Aghaz ta Anjam, 62–94. 3 This explanation of human soul, which has its origin in Plato’s theory of the soul elaborated in both Republic and Phaedrus, was and still is a standard approach in the traditional Islamic ontological and ethical writings. Khomeini in particular approached human soul using Plato’s parable in Phaedrus of the charioteer and the two horses of opposite characters. But Muslim thinkers went beyond Plato and developed further categories of powers of the soul. In his Islam Din-i Fitrat Montazeri speaks of several tendencies within the soul: amarah (lasciviousness), lavvamah (conscience/remorsefulness), mulhamah (revelatory/inspirational), and mutma’nah (capable of certitude), all of which are god given but not all necessarily harmonious . The way to bring them into harmony is to make the higher tendencies dominate the lower ones. For an elaboration of these categories, see, Islam Din-e Fetrat, (Tehran: Sayeh Publications, 2006)316–19. proceeding from articles of faith.1 If God created human beings for their own eternal felicity, then the means to achieve that state, which includes the formation of an earthly government, would also be a divine requirement. The reason for humans’ need for government lies in the peculiarity of their nature. Humans, he wrote, are creatures who belong simultaneously in three worlds.2 In the vegetable world humans are equipped with natural powers to protect life at its most basic level. The next level, the animal world, offers humans faculties which enable them to experience a higher level of sensation, along with basic understandings and power of imagination. The last and highest world, that of reason and intellect, belongs exclusively to humans, and only there do they find their true essence (fitrat). With reason in charge of other faculties of the soul, humans would develop the potential to have the knowledge required to reach salvation. Yet despite its necessity for achieving eternal felicity reason is imperfect, and on its own cannot know how to proceed. The imperfection of reason is due to the nature of humans. Like most traditional jurists Montazeri believed that the attributes of each being were closely...