Mesbah Yazdi and Hashem Aghajari

Hossein Bastani, Rooz Online:

Last week, students in Tehran held a meeting to remember one of their teachers and a disabled war veteran, Hashem Aghajari, who was sentenced to death for blasphemy in November 2002 by questioning the rule of clerics in Iran. The event sparked off a month of student protests that led to violence. In the February of the following year, the death sentence was quashed and July 2004 he was sentenced to a lesser offense, and then released the same month. But his initial sentence led to unprecedented demonstrations throughout Iran.

I would like to retrace those events that demonstrated the role of those that followed the views of ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, a mentor for many fundamentalist religious students. It is important to note that the views that these Yazdi-followers held belong to a time well before one of them - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - became the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. READ MORE

We are talking about a time when after Aghajari gave a speech in the June of 2002 in which he urged people to question religious teachings, saying that the words of clerics should not necessarily be considered sacred, Parto-e Sokhan magazine published by a company that was managed by cleric Mesbah Yazdi, posed this question: “Do the high clergy and Mesbah Yazdi consider Aghajari an apostate?” It then posed a follow up question: “If the high clergy consider him an apostate but a court does not rule so and releases him, what is the position of Islamic law on this?”

Following demonstrations and lobbying in favor of Yazdi’s support to execute Aghajari, the answer to the question appeared in a website run by Yazdi’s supporters. The site reported that Aghajari had been found guilty and sentenced to death. It is important to note that no official decision or ruling had been announced by any judiciary authority in Iran, so this was completely new and unofficial. It was only one month later that the Hamedan judiciary announced the sentence on Aghajari, which was identical to what the report in the website had published.

The execution announcement for a University history professor immediately led to wide student protests. This made the conservatists ponder. Students wrote letters and petitions to authorities. Even the members of the Association of the Representatives of the Leader wrote to the head of the Judiciary protesting the sentence. Even the right-wing Jomhuri Eslami newspaper criticized the ruling. As did conservative Kayhan newspaper.

While these protests continued, ayatollah Khamenei himself requested that the sentence and the trial be reviewed. At this time contrary to the expectations that the calls for the execution of Aghajari would subside with the leader’s intervention, their position hardened. The Attorney General announced that “unless Aghajari personally objected to the court sentence, his execution would be carried out after its 20 day deadline.” Regarding the instructions of the leader he said that the latter had merely said the law should be followed and more care should be taken in the case. He further added that the leader had not sent any written instructions, which would have been dealt with differently.

Just a few days later, the director of Guardian Council’s Research Center stressed that “nobody could rescind an execution ruling for an apostate.” He further said that being an apostate is part of a person’s nature and cannot be reviewed. Even repentance is not acceptable, he added.

Another conservative newspaper, Siyasate Rooz reminded its readers and perhaps the leader and officials that “a ruling against an apostate is a step that brings rewards from God,” a direct call to implement the sentence.

But these positions paled when compared to those of cleric Mesbah Yazdi’s. This is what he said in a speech in Qom:

"If someone objects to the sentence of an Islamic judge, despite the fact that he has decided according to the rulings of God and the express terms of the Quran, then the protest contradicts the Quran. If this person is not executed today, there will be 10 like him next year.”

Mesbah Yazdi’s media outlet, Parto-e Sokhan magazine had also warned the judiciary that if it entered into a bargaining deal with the “top” - meaning the leadership - and rescinded its ruling, then it too was an accomplice in Aghajari’s sin. The same magazine published other reports in which it basically argued that thousands of war veterans and volunteers looked up to the judiciary to implement the court ruling.

Finally in February 2003, when Seyed Mohammad Sajjadi, the clerk of the 27th branch of the Supreme Court announced in an interview that Aghajari’s death sentence had been quashed by the Supreme Court, ultra-conservative Resalat newspaper perhaps best described the thoughts and feelings of the conservatists. It wrote “This opinion did not emerge as a written legal or expert position, but through a hyper and politicized interview with IRNA news agency. This was an unprecedented event and it appears that a plan had been in place to overturn the sentence.”

Still, a group calling itself the Goroohe Alavi Ashabe Al-Safineh published a communiqué stating that it was ready to implement the death sentence. A few days later, a group of religious students and thinkers in Qom also announced that the “judiciary should without any delay carry out God’s sentence regarding the apostate, which would be a lesson to all plotters. Is it not right for us to conclude that political pressure has stopped the implementation of the sentence?”

Aghajari eventually went home from prison, but the events well demonstrated the views of the followers of ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi when confronted with pragmatic decisions regarding the sentence.

The message of these events is left up to the reader.

Hossein Bastani is a veteran journalist living in Europe.