Iran’s reform movement took the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri in the holy city Qom as an opportunity to strongly manifest its existence.

Security forces and the religious militia Basij attacked those mourners who broke the calm of the funeral to openly express their views about the regime. Following the presidential election in June, Montazeri gave them moral support in calling the regime in Iran a criminal one.

The security forces were less brutal on Monday than they have been during previous demonstrations, as the regime would have created more enemies among deeply religious Iranians if violence had resulted in deaths.

The regime knows that Montazeri had much greater religious authority than its own religious henchmen. Among the world’s Shia Muslims, the only person to have greater authority than Montazeri is Iran-born Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

Montazeri’s funeral showed that the regime’s brutal methods may be able to force demonstrators back to their homes, but with great courage they turn out at every opportunity.

The Grand Ayatollah’s death came at the most embarrassing moment for the regime’s clerics, during the traditional mourning period which culminates with Ashura on Sunday. It is here that millions of Iranians traditionally grieve for the martyr Imam Hossein – a symbol of the battle against tyranny. That day is expected to be directed at the modern dictatorship.

Freedom ideals for Iran
The demonstrators pledged to continue Montazeri’s views “even though the dictator fires at us”. They also called for the impending demise of the regime. But this will probably not be soon, as the regime is unlikely to refrain from mass murder if it feels its existence is in danger.

At the same time, the opposition movement’s great strength – and weakness - is that it does not have a unifying figure. The sort of figure that Montazeri was at the spiritual level.

He was both one of the opposition leaders in the showdown with the Shah’s regime, one of the architects of the Islamic revolution in 1979 and the first of the religious scholars to openly condemn the regime that he had helped create.

But he was never the politico-strategic leader of all those who became disenchanted when the Islamic regime chose to consolidate its dictatorship with violence.

Montazeri drew back when the constitution that he had been party to creating, gave the theocracy total power. This, according to Montazeri, was a cul de sac which slaughtered the ideals of liberty. He had seen the new system as an ‘Islamic democracy’ in which the clerics simply gave counsel to a democratically elected Parliament and president.

He wrote several critical letters to the father of the revolution – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – regarding the mass executions of political prisoners in 1988 and the ‘rape of young virgins in the prisons’.

As a result, Khomeini turned against Montazeri after having chosen him as his successor.

Grand Ayatollah Montazeri was one of the honourable men of this world, whose ideals of liberty for Iran may gain greater importance after his death.

The next major test will be on Sunday.

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