Content area
Full Text
The death of Ayatollah Araki, the marja '-i taqlid or `source of emulation' for Twelver Shiites, at the end of November 1994 marked the beginning of a short-lived propaganda campaign for the selection of Ali Khamanei as his successor by parts of the Iranian media, such as the dailies Ittila'at and Tehran Times, and the Iranian state controlled radio and television. The nomination of Khamanei and the propaganda campaign were criticized immediately by Iranian dissidents, opponents of the Iranian Republic and Western media and the nomination was described as unacceptable and even as a religious coup.1
The criticism concentrated on two points; first, Khamanei did not meet in the least the required standards for the position of marja `iya, and second, involvement of Iranian political authorities in religious affairs had gone too far this time. The purpose of this article is to look into the motives for the nomination of Khamanei.
It is important to remark that the marja `iya as it emerged in the nineteenth century was never accompanied by a specific and strict selection method, for instance an election procedure, through which a new marja-i taqlid could be appointed. This was probably due to the fact that the prerequisites for a marja '-i taqlid were difficult to test and inadequate as a means to compare the candidates for the position because, apart from the two most important requisites, a'lamiya (superiority of learning in the field of religious law), these all lay in the field of moral behaviour, as for instance salahiya (righteousness).2As a result, it occurred only a few times in history that one person succeeded in becoming the sole marja '-i taqlid accepted by all Shiites, the last one being Aqa Husayn Burujirdi (d.1961).3
To understand the problems surrounding the nomination of Khamanei, we must go back to March 1989 when Ayatollah Muntaziri was forced by Khomeini to step down as his successor as rahbar (leader) of the Islamic Republic.4The dismissal had consequences for the succession of Khomeini, because the constitution required that the leader should also be a marja ' and among the clerics who followed `the line of the Imam' and who were therefore the only politically acceptable candidates for Khomeini's succession; no one measured up to this standard.5 Even...