Firebrand Cleric's Supporters Campaign To Elevate His Political Status
Viral videos on social media showing eulogists praising the firebrand Friday Prayer Imam of Mashhad, Ahmad Alamolhoda, raise questions abut his political aims.
Viral videos on social media showing eulogists praising the firebrand Friday Prayer Imam of Mashhad, Ahmad Alamolhoda, raise questions abut his political aims.
The eulogists likened Alamolhoda to Shiite saint Abbas, a brother of Imam Hussain, the third Imam of the Shiites, and described him as "A great interpreter of the holy Koran, a wise scholar, a revolutionary character and the flag bearer of the Islamic revolutionary front in Khorasan and a religious, cultural and political leader." It is difficult to find any indication at all of any one of those attributes in Alamolhoda's track record though.
These are lofty words of praise while Alamolhoda is present, listens to the eulogists and has no reaction.
Criticism of Alamolhoda's complacency while listening to eulogists in Mashhad was so fierce, that he had to issue a belated statement on April 6, thanking the eulogists and the people for their support and saying that in fact the eulogists' praise for him was a sign of support for the prophet, mindless of the fact that putting himself in the same league as Muslim saints would entail further backlash.
However, this and another video posted on Iranian websites, are only two of several indications showing a propaganda campaign perhaps to groom the fundamentalist cleric for a position still unknown to the public. In yet another video, a cleric warns critics that "Alamolhoda is our red line. Please do not make us angry."
Pictures also surfaced on social media showing Iranian army's air force personnel saluting Alamolhoda exactly in the same way they showed up to welcome Khomeini in 1979 a week before the Islamic revolution.
Khomeini and also current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei used the show of respect by air force personnel to prove that they had support among the armed forces. Social media users have pointed out the similarity between these pictures and Khomeini’s 1979 publicity photos.
Also on April 6, 17 lawmakers from Khorasan Province wrote a letter to Khamenei in which they praised Alamolhoda for preventing women's entry into a stadium in Mashhad on March 29 where the Iranian and Lebanese soccer teams faced each other. Apparently at Alamolhoda's order, security forces prevented hundreds of women from entering the stadium to watch the game and attacked them with tear gas and pepper sprays, leaving several women injured.
Although Alamolhoda might be eying the position of Iran's next Supreme Leader, some Iranian social media users opined that he might be trying to garner support as a presidential candidate in the next election. The latter looks more realistic as the eulogists described Alamolhoda's virtues while addressing Khamenei, and the members of the parliament also addressed Khamenei in their letter.
Some Iranian media outlets including Rouydad24, however, have noted that the publicity stunt by Alamolhoda's camp could be a reaction to supporters of Majles Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. They won the Mashhad City Council election last year and one of them, Khalil Movahed has been criticizing Alamolhoda in public gatherings in the city since January 2018 when a major nationwide anti-government protest started from Mashhad.
Alamolhoda, who is the father-in-law of President Ebrahim Raisi, is known for banning a lot of social and cultural events in Mashhad. The news website Entekhab has summarized the bans in an infographic which shows concerts, playing electronic games, wearing certain type of clothes, riding bicycles and motorcycles and mountaineering by women are among the activities he banned in Mashhad. A social media user who has posted the infographic, wrote: "Thank God that breathing and going to toilet are still not banned!"
Because of his arbitrary rulings, some of Almolhoda's supporters nicknamed him the Sultan of Khorasan, but social media users objected by saying, albeit in not polite words, that "Khorasan is part of Iran and no one should indulge in the illusion of being the province's sultan."
"This sad incident which was perpetrated by one of the deviant agents of American [-made] Takfiri groups will cause evermore unity and solidarity of those who love Islam and the Islamic Iran and will tarnish deviant groups," Raisi said in a statement Wednesday.
Iranian officials use Takfiri as a vague umbrella term to refer to Sunni dissident groups and individuals in Iran and abroad, alleging that they are organized by western powers and Wahhabis.
A man who officials said Tuesday was a "foreign national" stabbed three clerics in the north-eastern city of Mashhad in Khorasan-e Razavi Province. One of the victims has died and two others who were seriously wounded have been hospitalized.
On Wednesday, Tasnim news agency close to the Revolutionary Guard said the suspect is Abdullatif Moradi, an Afghan of Uzbek ethnicity who entered Iran illegally through Pakistan one year ago. The report also confirmed that six other suspects are under arrest for collaborating with the suspect. Two of the detainees are Moradi’s brothers, Tasnim said and added that they were Takfiri extremists who believed the blood of Shiites must be spilled.
Raisi tasked the intelligence ministry with investigating the rare incident which happened on the third day of the holy month of Ramadan in the courtyard of the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth imam of Shiites, despite the usual heavy security measures in the compound. Such measures would normally prevent anyone smuggling a knife into the massive shrine complex.
Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf in parliament on Wednesday condemned the attack and indirectly confirmed that the assailant was of Afghan nationality.
"This incident should not destroy friendship and brotherhood between nations," he said, adding that many Afghans, presumably Afghan Shiites, had fought alongside Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) and in Syria in the past 10 years.
Mashhad has a very large Afghan community most of whom are Sunnis. Afghans mostly live in poverty-stricken neighborhoods of the city including where the assailant reportedly lived and the three clerics engaged in Shiite religious activities, the deputy of the Islamic Propaganda Organization said.
Millions of Afghans have lived in Iran as refugees or economic migrants for many years and their numbers have been increasing considerably since the Taliban takeover of the government in Kabul last year. Officials say as many as 5,000 Afghans enter Iran on a daily basis through official borders now while a large number also enter illegally whose numbers are not known.
The Imam Reza Shrine assailant's motive for the attack is not clear. Immediately after the incident some social media users said they suspected a connection with the Saturday shooting of two Sunni clerics in front of aSunni seminary mosque in Gonbad Kavus. The two incidents could have been meant to cause strife between Shiites and the minority Sunnis in the country, they said.
The majority of people in Gonbad Kavus, the second-largest city of the northern province of Golestan, are Sunni Turkmens.
Deputy governor of Golestan Province, Mehdi Dehrouyeh, on Monday said a suspect was being interrogated in connection with the gun attack on Sunni clerics, adding that it was highly likely that there were "personal reasons" for it.
The ultra-hardliner Kayhan newspaper on Wednesday said the incidents in Gonbad Kavus and Mashhad could be part of a "plot" to cause Shiite-Sunni sectarianism.
"It appears that the incident in Mashhad yesterday was part of a security puzzle designed by conspirators to create a national security crisis and sedition through causing a division between the Iranian nation and foreign nationals and discord between Shiites and Sunnis," Kayhan wrote.
Iranian officials often refer to Afghan refugees and economic migrants living in Iran as "foreign nationals".
The prosecutor decided that Farhadi, a twice Oscar winning filmmaker, has violated the intellectual property rights of one of his students at a filmmaking workshop in Tehran and the court has issued a summons.
According to the prosecutor, Farhadi's latest movie, A Hero, has been made based on the core idea of Azadeh Masihzadeh's documentary All Winners, All Losers.
As Farhadi's movie has European producers and distributors, the case has stirred controversy in the international film journals such as Hollywood Reporter. Lawyers in Europe and Iran are still chasing the case.
Farhadi's lawyer in Tehran, Kaveh Rad, said on his Instagram page that both Masihzadeh and the man whose life story was used in the film had filed complaints that have reportedly convinced the prosecutor in Tehran that Farhadi is guilty.
However, Rad, strangely denied that the court has accepted the arguments of the young filmmaker and the prisoner whose personal story has been made public in Farhadi's movie, and according to him, has damaged his reputation.
Rad said that even if the first court finds him guilty another court might over-rule the verdict and restore Farhadi's right over his movie.
According to Masihzadeh in her interviews with Iranian and foreign-based media, she shared her idea with Farhadi in the classroom and told him that she was going to make a documentary about a man who found a large amount of money and returned it to the person who had lost it.
About a year later, Farhadi made A Hero based on the same story and according to Massihzadeh, refused to pay her for the idea or to give her credit for her story in the film's title. Massihzadeh said that Farhadi forced her to sign papers to withdraw her claim, but she was lucky enough to have witnesses.
She told the media that Farhadi refused to see her and listen to her afterwards as his film became internationally acclaimed and was welcomed at several film festivals in Europe and America. It was also nominated for an Oscar, but it was not shortlisted for the award. At the time, Farhadi filed counter-complaints against Massihzadeh's charges, but she told Khabar Online in Tehran that the prosecutor ruled out Farhadi's argument.
Massihzadeh, then made her documentary available on Youtube, where film critics had a chance to decide for themselves about the charge of plagiarism.
Some Iranians on social media have said that plagiarism is Farhadi's personal problem, but he should be accountable for whitewashing the Islamic Republic's crimes. Farhadi was criticized by critics for showing Iranian prisons in a very good and favorable light in his film.
He was also criticized during the Cannes Film Festival in France for turning a blind eye to major social and political events such as the downing of a civilian aircraft by the IRGC in 2020, while he had a good opportunity to name and shame the culprits at international forum.
In his defense, Farhadi denied being an accomplice of the regime, and claimed that his passport was confiscated at the airport when he was returning from film festivals abroad.
CORRECTION: In its version, this report had said Farhadi was "reportedly convicted". This was a reporting error for which we apologize.
The incident happened during the third day of the holy month of Ramadan at the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth imam of Shiites, in the north-eastern city of Mashhad in Khorasan- Razavi Province despite the usual heavy security measures taken at the shrine.
Mahmoud Arefi, homicide prosecutor of Mashhad Public and Revolutionary Court, said Tuesday evening that two clerics wounded by the assailant were being treated at hospital and were in stable conditions. Iran's official and semi-official news agencies said the three clerics were seminary students and active volunteers in the slum areas of the city.
The official news agency IRNA posted a video of police arresting the assailant. Videos posted on social media show the victim, named as Mohammad Aslani, with the clerical rank of Hojjat ol-Eslam, in a pool of blood on the marble courtyard of the shrine after the stabbing.
Public and Revolutionary Prosecutor of Mashhad, Mohammad-Hossein Darrudi, said hours after the incident that five men were arrested in connection with the stabbing including the assailant and four suspected of collaborating with him.
Darrudi said the assailant was a "foreign national" and that further information would be announced after completion of the investigation. Iranian officials often refer to Afghan refugees and economic migrants living in Iran as "foreign nationals".
The political, social, and security deputy of Khorasan-Razavi Governor's Office, Hadi Tabatabaei, told Fars news agency that officials were meeting at the Governor's Office regarding Tuesday's stabbing and "various aspects of the incident" were being investigated.
The assailant's motive for the attack on the Shiite clerics in Mashhad is not clear. Some people on social media say they suspect a connection with the shooting of two Sunni clerics at a mosque in Gonbad Kavus, northernIran, two days earlier.
Some government supporters on social media have called the incident a terrorist attack by[Sunni] Wahhabis. Authorities have offered no explanation. They claim the attack was meant to cause strife between Iran's majority Shiites and Sunnis who constitute around 10 percent of the population.
An informed source speaking on condition of anonymity told Fars news agency that the assailant lived in the same Mashhad neighborhood as those he attacked. He also said that people in the neighborhood say the assailant had mental health issues and held personal grudges against the victims. However, this does not fit the theory that five other people helped the attacker.
Hostility towards clerics has been on the rise in Iran. In January a well-known cleric, Mohammadreza Zaeri, who often appears on state-controlled television programs, said people had a level of hatred and grudge against clerics that was creating a social crisis.
Zaeri said taxi drivers refused to pick him up and that he had been spat on and sworn at a few times recently. Another cleric, the reformist Mohammad-Taghi Fazel-Meybodi, also said in January that clerics and seminary students were avoiding their usual garb for fear of being insulted in public.
In late December, it was reported that a woman had been arrested at an earlier date in the religious city of Qom, after swearing at a cleric and trampling on his turban because he had hit her on the head with his cane for not complying with hijab rules.
Many Iranians see the clergy as responsible for their economic hardship and lack of social freedoms.
With hardliners loyal to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei occupying key government institutions by manipulating elections, most reformist and non-partisan observers have given up hope for steering the Islamic Republic toward democracy.
In an interview with the moderate Rouydad24 news website in Tehran, Moqaddari said the government's security approach to politics has led to political disillusionment for even loyal reformist politicians and led them to inaction and despair. There is no hope in a miracle in Iran, he said.
He added that there are two types of reformists in Iran: One group that is committed to values such as freedom, human rights and equality and is working to establish good governance through a transition to democracy, and another group that takes advantage of the idea of reformism as a brand only to be get a share in the country's political dynamics.
The first group has been pushed out of the country's political landscape by the totalitarian hard core of the regime and they are no longer capable of confronting those who have made elections meaningless and eliminated the republican nature of the government.The other group is happy to take part in the non-competitive elections in a minimal way, Moqaddari explained.
He added that the situation should be alarming for the regime as well as for Iran's political community and civil society. The immigration of Iranian political activists and academic elites is a result of this reality.
Asked why Iranians no longer welcome the idea of reformism, Moqaddari said that the disillusionment and despair is not about reformism. The people are annoyed by the entire political system as their non-participation in recent elections have shown.
A recent online opinion poll by a Netherlands-based institute found that over 60 percent of Iranians want regime change or "transition from the Islamic Republic".
Meanwhile, in an interview with Didban Iran website, Tehran university academic, Amanollah Gharaee Moghaddam, said that widespread corruption among Iranian statesmen have led Iranians not to trust the government and its officials.
The academic also said that a society in which everything is overshadowed by ideology will not develop.
"Iran has many experts and many factories and natural resources and has imported the technology it needs. Yet the country cannot develop. Because the people do not trust the government and its officials. It is every man for himself," he said. With widespread corruption in the state apparatus, even reaching lawmakers, the people cannot trust in anything having to do with the government.
He added that public distrust is all down to corruption, bribery and embezzlement. “So, even brothers do not trust each other let alone trust between the people and their employers."
Parallel with corruption, Gharaee cautiously also brought up the authoritarian nature of the government, that treats people as subjects rather than citizens.
He argued that a society overwhelmed by ideology and devoid of pluralism cannot grow and develop. "There will be no progress In a system where everything is dictated from the top and statemen are used to issuing orders without seeking the public's views, or in a system where reporters are put in jail."
Gharaee warned that "If the current situation continues, Iran will face a major political threat. The rulers should change this situation because otherwise, the political system and everything else will collapse."