In the aftermath of Iran’s presidential elections in June 2009, millions of Iranians contested Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory with a simple question: “Where is my vote?” Invoking the Twelfth Imam or Mahdi, the Shi’a messiah during whose absence revolutionary clerics rule Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei turned his militias on the peaceful demonstrators. Neda Agha Soltan, a young student shot by Khamenei’s snipers, was among the victims. She became the iconic face of an Iranian Spring; the flowering of a democracy out of a womb of light, love and life.
In the name of advancing peace and diplomacy, the Obama administration betrayed Neda’s sacrifice to strike the nuclear deal. As long as the Ayatollah promised not to pursue nuclear weapons, the United States would not contest the dictatorship’s divine right to rule Iran in the name of the Mahdi. With democracy and human rights bleeding on the altar of realpolitik, Khamenei could steal the Iranian people’s votes, rights, resources and sovereignty.
The Trump administration has thrown a wrench into this equation.
On Feb. 20, a day before Iran’s parliamentary elections, Brian Hook, U.S. Special Representative for Iran, further disturbed the Ayatollah’s peace. He announced sanctions on five senior members of the Guardian Council under executive order 13867. The five are members of the Guardian Council, 12 jurists and scholars who disqualify parliamentary and presidential candidates for failing to comply with “Islamic norms and principles.”
As Hook put it: “Together, these five officials oversee a process that silences the voice of the Iranian people, curtails their freedom, and limits their political participation. … They decide who gets on the ballot. They are the ones who really vote in Iran.”
The most notorious of the five is the chairman of the Guardian Council: Ahmad Jannati.
The 92-year old cleric has cast a long and lethal shadow over Iran for 40 years. Jannati has not only abused his position at the pinnacle of Iran’s theocracy to amputate democracy but to incite religious hatred.
As early as November 2005, Jannati was dividing Iran by dehumanizing others.
“Non-Muslims such as Zoroastrians, Christians and Jews cannot be called human beings,” Jannati said, “but are animals who roam the earth and engage in corruption.”
As the guardian of dogma, Jannati’s embrace of violence is total. In the aftermath of the 2009 protests, he labeled detainees as hypocrites to justify their summary execution.
“God ordered the Prophet Mohammad to brutally slay hypocrites and ill-intentioned people who stuck to their convictions,” Jannati said, adding, “May God never forgive anyone showing leniency towards the corrupt on earth.”
Jannati’s hatreds extend beyond Iran. As a revolutionary ideologue, he equates the fundamentals of Islam with death to America and destruction for Israel.
As Hook correctly notes, Jannati‘s obscurity must no longer mask his obscenity.
“He is a big part of the reason why the Iranian regime is the world’s leading sponsor of anti-Semitism. He is not well known to American and European media because the regime does not want him to be well known. That would be bad marketing. But the people of Iran know him quite well and clerics like Ahmad Jannati are why the regime is facing a crisis of credibility and legitimacy at home.”
Of course, beyond their symbolic power, sanctions will not harm Jannati. Dismissing Trump, he lamented that he must now cancel his Christmas holidays in America.
Ironically, what makes Jannati’s position fragile is not America’s economic and military power, but his albeit brief exposure to our tradition of religious pluralism.
As the guardian of a theocracy in which power and authority flow through the name of the Mahdi, Jannati himself can be charged for heresy and hypocrisy for his open embrace of an American Mahdi.
The cleric celebrated the 37th anniversary of the Islamic revolution in February 2016 by hosting the leaders of the Nation of Islam at the Guardian Council. The Americans, followers of Elijah Muhammad, diverge from Islamic orthodoxy by claiming that Allah appeared in America personified as the Mahdi.
As the Nation of Islam teaches, “Allah (God) appeared in the person of Master W. Fard Mohammad on July 1930, and that he, Fard Mohammad, was the long-awaited Messiah of the Christians and the Mahdi of the Muslims.”
Were Trump to tweet the photos of Jannati with the Nation of Islam — the followers of an American Mahdi — Iran’s theocracy would be exposed as a house of cards. The inquisitor who, for the slightest deviation, has butchered so many in the name of guarding the sanctity of the Mahdi’s realm would fall under the gravity of his own hypocrisy. He has killed many for much smaller breaches in theological purity.
Iranians may be reluctant to mint coins portraying Trump as the heir to Cyrus the Great. But they do owe the leaders of the Nation of Islam a debt of gratitude for exposing Jannati to America’s tradition of religious freedom.
Targeting a cleric who has converted the Iranian state into a divine instrument for the persecution of dissent and the coercion of consent is a just, moral and necessary act. Disarming a theocracy for holding a blade over the ballot box is neither a coup nor a crime. It is an act of solidarity that marks the end of Iran’s captivity.
Neda’s vote and voice will not remain buried in a theocracy’s blackbox. Her dream of a free and flourishing Iran belongs to us all.
Amir Soltani is a human rights activist and the author of “Zahra’s Paradise,” a graphic novel on Iran’s 2009 protests.