Jun 1, 2018

It sounds like the days of Ayatollah Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah Yazdi leading Iran's hard-liners are coming to a close. At 83, he appears ready to step aside for a new ayatollah. It has recently been reported by local news agencies that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, plans to appoint Mohammad-Mahdi Mir-Baqeri, 57, as Tehran's Friday prayer leader. Remarkably, Mir-Baqeri has not denied the rumors. The hard-line media is laying the ground for his likely appointment and leadership, a big step for Mir-Baqeri, the current leader of the Academy of Islamic Science.

Seyyed Monir-e-din Hosseini al-Hashemi, a proponent of the Islamic Revolution, established the Academy of Islamic Science in 1979 after the revolution, influenced by his father's thinking on indigenous science versus Western science as well as by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's political views. According to “The Clergy and Modernity with a Focus on Intellectual and Political Currents” (2010), a book by Abdulvahab Farati, Seyyed Monir believed that the Islamic clerical system should be independent of foreigners, bazaar merchants and the political system. Hence, he sought to design a system of clerical independence. In this vein, before the revolution he established an appliance-manufacturing company called Zherf, which eventually failed. He founded the company based on his view that the people should avoid Western technology.

In 1967, Seyyed Monir moved to the holy Iraqi city of Najaf, where he attended lectures by Khomeini on Islamic government that greatly influenced him. According to Seyyed Monir's memoirs (2004), before attending Khomeini's classes, he had been thinking about clerics entering industry to gain independence and establishing a party. On this he had been inspired by his father, who had established a party to try to influence government decisions and elections. Joining Khomeini's classes, however, turned Seyyed Monir into a proponent of establishing an Islamic political system. In establishing the Academy, Seyyed Monir was seeking to create a circle for producing Islamic science and severing Iran's educational system from Western science.

In “The Thoughts of Monir,” written by Mehdi Mozaffarinia (2011), Seyyed Davood Sajedi, a student of Monir, cites the motivation behind forming the academy. Sajedi states, “We were thinking that an academy should come to exist to organize the production of Islamic science in the sciences, and to develop the needed software and hardware for managing the Islamic [political] system.” Seyyed Monir passed away in 2000, and since then, one of his prominent students, Mir-Baqeri has been leading the academy.

Both the Academy and Mir-Baqeri have become influential actors in Iran. Mir-Baqeri got more involved in politics during the second term of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013). He continued to support and defend Ahmadinejad even as the hard-line Mesbah Yazdi distanced himself after the president changed his path and started following a “deviant” Islamic current led by his chief of staff, Rahim Mashai. As Ahmadinejad's positions challenging the supreme leader became clearer after leaving office, Mir-Baqeri put space between himself and the former president.