Is the Iranian regime going against the tide of modernity? Iranian researcher Constance Arminjon Hachem attempts to answer this and other questions in the French book titled Chiisme et Etat: Les clercs à l'épreuve de la modernité' or Shiism and the State: Religious clerics in the face of modernity. In the book, Hachem says that during the time of the twelve divinely ordained leaders, known as the Twelve Imams, Twelvler Shia Muslims regarded these "infallible" Imams as the spiritual and political successors to Prophet Mohammed. However, with the absence of these Imams, the link between the divine and the worldly was broken, and thus, Shiite religious scholars, clerics, and religious authorities continued to exercise religious authority, while worldly authority was left to the modernist politicians. In 1979, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared himself leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its eternal religious and political leader. He claimed this was the only way to combat Iranian society's worldliness and secularism. Khomeini developed the concept of Wilayat al Faqih (guardianship of the jurist), where a faqih (Islamic jurist) gains custodianship over the people and becomes their Supreme Leader. This concept became the basis of Iran's 1979 constitution despite the oppositions and reservations of most of the main Shiite religious authorities in Qom and Najaf. The predicament that arose lies in the fact that Wilayat al Faqih contradicts with the stance of traditional Shiite ideology towards political authority. In traditional Shiite ideology, absolute power can only be granted to the infallible Imam as he is the only one entitled to take the helm of both religious and political affairs. This doctrinal shift has the capacity to paralyze the Shiite religious establishment and strip it of its religious authority which is characterized by being pluralistic in nature and independent of state influence and authority.Through his new concept, Khomeini launched a true ideological and religious revolution by contradicting this mandate of traditional Shiite ideology and creating a somewhat functional duplicity within the religious establishment. Wilayat al Faqih will overlap with but not abolish religious authority only when the highest religious authority and the wali al-faqih are the same person. However, confusion develops when the wali al-faqih is not one of the high-ranking religious authorities. The revolutionary aspect of the Wilayat al Faqih concept and the opposition of traditional religious authority to it has created somewhat of a division amongst Shiite religious leaders. A number of religious authorities support Wilayat al Faqih while others of comparable importance and prestige do not, and consider it to be a distortion of traditional Shiite ideology. Those who oppose the concept believe that politics and power corrupt religious clerics as they are not infallible and the temptations of power are too great. Some attempts have been made to distinguish between Wilayat al Faqih and the well-established practices of traditional Shiite ideology, which distances itself from politics and worldly power, by considering the former a political institution that carries religious overtones and the latter a religious institution that may carry political overtones-but only in the unofficial sense. Differences in opinion exist even within the pluralistic Shiite tradition. These differences are based on the character, power and prestige of the highest ranking religious authority, attributes which determine his spiritual and moral authority over his followers. For example, in Iraq the highest ranking religious authority is powerful and may sometimes be even more powerful than the elected political authority, whereas in Iran, the high ranking religious authorities are overshadowed by state authority and authority of the Wali al-Faqih who declared himself the religious authority without necessarily possessing the right qualifications. This is a summary of an article written by Jawad Bishara and published in Middle East Online on 8 September 2013 The original text in Arabic http://www.middle-east-online.com/?id=161869
