They were only a few dozen, on January 8, to demonstrate before the French Embassy in Tehran, in protest against the publication by Charlie Hebdo of caricatures of Ayatollah Khamenei. There were no more many of them gathering, at the same time, in the city of Qom, however the seat of the main religious seminars of the country. The failure of this very spontaneous mobilization, despite the commitment of the various political police, is only an additional illustration of the growing unpopularity of the one who succeeded in 1989 at Ayatollah Khomeyni as the supreme guide of the Republic Islamic of Iran.
By comparison, it was enough, in January 1978, the dissemination of slanders against Khomeyni by the services of the chah to throw crowds in the streets. The escalation of repression and protest had led, a year later, the sovereign to leave Iran, Khomeyni supplanting him shortly after at the head of the first “Islamic Revolution” in history.
a junk ayatollah 2>
It is a new theocracy of a new genre that Khomeyni establishes by placing at the heart of the constitution of his “Islamic Republic” the principle of Velayat-E Faqih, the “government of the religious judge”. The President of the Republic and the Parliament may be elected, it is the supreme guide, a title that no one dares to contest in Khomeyni, who has the last word on all important subjects. The triumphant ayatollah puts at the service of this original construction all its prestige of “imitation reference” (Marja-e Taqlid), a title that the faithful Shiites recognize only a handful of “great ayatollahs”.
But the peers of Khomeyni refuse such a political instrumentalization of the religious and oppose the very principle of the Velayat-E Faqih. This is why Khomeyni, unable to transmit power to an Ayatollah of his rank, chose as successor, on the eve of his death in 1989, his faithful Ali Khamenei, a religious who did not even reach the rank of Ayatollah and that the elite of “great ayatollahs” holds in poor esteem.
The Islamic Republic of Iran therefore overcome the test of the disappearance of its founder by favoring political loyalty, embodied by Khamenei, rather than religious charism. Promoted Ayatollah under questionable conditions, the new supreme guide is careful not to claim the title of “Imitation reference”. It was not until 1994 that it claims to be such a reference, but only for Shiites residing outside Iran, for fear of arouing the wrath of the faithful living in the very territory of the Islamic Republic.
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