A popular website in Iran slammed a senior cleric and regime official recently for claiming that the main job of religious seminaries is engagement in politics.
“Who and what entities are supposed to promote Islam and the rules of Sharia if the main job of religious seminaries (Ḥowza-ye elmiyeh) is engagement in politics? You can’t say that the main job of seminaries is engaging in politics and [at the same time say] the main job of seminaries is promotion of religion,” Asr-e Iran asked Ayatollah Mohsen Araki in a commentary June 15.
Ḥowza-ye elmiyeh in Persian means a religious seminary where senior clerics, usually grand ayatollahs, teach various Islamic subjects including theology and law, according to the tenants of Shiism, to future clerics.
Mohsen Araki, a member of the Assembly of Experts and also a member of the Expediency Discernment Council
The city of Qom is home to the largest seminaries in the country but there are similar establishments in other cities including Najafabad in Esfahan Province and Mashhad, the capital of Khorasan-e Razavi. There are nearly three hundred thousand clerics in Iran’s seminaries.
Asr-e Iran, which has moderate conservative leanings but no known political affiliations and is usually more critical of authorities than similar news websites, argued that engagement in politics is permissible when promotion of religion requires it but that does not mean its main mandate is interference in politics.
The commentary also listed several prominent Shia academics of the highest rank who never got directly engaged in politics including Grand Ayatollahs Mohammad Fazel-Lankarani and Mohammad-Taghi Bahjat in Iran and Ali Sistani in Iraq.
“Like any other citizen, Ayatollah Araki has the right to become a political activist, get engaged in politics and even hold political office. No one has the right to deny this to him and others…There is no need for him to reduce the mandate of religious seminaries…to engagement in politics to [justify] the political activities of himself and other clerics,” the commentary said.
Araki, born into a family of notable Shia clerics in Najaf, Iraq, teaches at Qom Seminary. He has served as the head of the World Forum for Proximity of Islamic Schools of Thought by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei since 2012.
A view from the Qom Seminary
Araki was appointed as a member of the Expediency Council by Khamenei in 2022. He has also been a member of the Assembly of Experts since 1998, which is responsible for overseeing the performance of the supreme leader and election of a new leader if he passes away.
Many clerics in Iran hold government offices and the government also annually allocates tens of millions of dollars to religious seminaries and other religious institutions that play the role of its propaganda arm.
A report, claimed by an opposition group to have been hacked from the Iranian presidency servers, shows that the budget for seminaries increased by 96% last year. Iranian media had reported in January that the budget for religious organizations would increase by 130 percent, reaching $500 million, while at least 20 million more Iranians are now considered poor compared to two years ago.
In a recent speech, Iran’s top Sunni cleric Mowlavi Abdolhamid said clerics and religious seminaries must not be funded by the government to remain independent and critical.
“Clerics must be independent and have their own opinions to be able to speak the truth and call the government to enjoin what is good and forbid it from doing what is wrong,” Abdolhamid said in another fiery Friday sermon in the southeastern city of Zahedan on June 3.
