The Party of God Brigades were founded by Abu Mehdi al-Muhandis. The organization is not related to the Hezbollah in Lebanon, though the two have a collegial relationship. Al-Muhandis was assassinated by President Donald Trump on January 3, 2020 along with the Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani. Ever since, the Brigades have sought to force out of Iraq the remaining 2500 US troops there and to force out of Syria the remaining 900 US troops stationed in that country. US troops were put into those two countries by the Obama administration during the fight against the ISIL (ISIS, Daesh) terrorist organization, 2014-2018. In those years, the US was often de facto allied with Shiite militias such as the PGB and with their sponsor, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. In 2018, Trump destroyed the Iran nuclear deal of 2015 and placed a “maximum pressure” economic siege on the Iranian economy. That and his assassination of Soleimani and al-Muhandis set Iran and its allies, the Shiite militias of the Middle East, on an increasingly belligerent footing.

The Party of God Brigades and other Iraqi Shiite militias have launched around 150 attacks on bases housing US troops since the Gaza conflict broke out on October 7.

Al-Zaman [The Times of Baghdad] printed the communique it received from the God’s Party Brigades:

In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

“Leave is given to those who fight because they were wronged — surely God is able to help them .” [Qur’an 22:39].

Continuing our path of resisting the American occupation forces in Iraq and the region, and in response to the massacres of the Zionist entity against our people in Gaza, at dawn today, Sunday 1/28/2024, the fighters of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq attacked four enemy bases with unmanned aerial vehicles — three of them in Syria and they are Al-Shaddadi, al-Rukban and al-Tanf bases, and the fourth inside our occupied Palestinian lands, and it is the US Marines’ Zafulun Facility. The Islamic Resistance affirms that it will continue to destroy enemy compounds.

“Victory is only from God. God is Almighty, All-Wise.” [Qur’an 8:10].

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq
Sunday 16 Rajab 1445

God knows what Zafulun is, but apparently it is their term for the place that Tower 22 stands. It is interesting that the group views the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as part of occupied Palestine. Palestine and the Transjordan were conquered by the British army during World War I and Britain subsequently ruled the West Bank and the rest of Palestine as a League of Nations Mandate, while giving charge of the Transjordan to the family of the Sharif Hussain, the Naqib or leading noble of Mecca, who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad and his clan, the Banu Hashem. Hussain and his sons had supported the British against the Ottomans during WW I because the British lied to them and promised them an independent Arab state after the war. In any case, this Shiite militia appears to view the Hashemite Dynasty (King Abdullah II is a descendant of Sharif Hussain) as illegitimate.

In return, the highly capable and effective Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate, or GID, is even as we speak making plans to help track down and kill the PGB cadres behind this attack on Jordanian soil. Jordan will also have some harsh words for Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ Al Sudani, who came to power with the support of the Shiite militias and is thought to be close to them.

Aljazeera English Video: “Three US service members killed in drone attack on US post in Jordan near Syria”

The Ma`refa site says that al-Muhandis was born in 1954 or 1955 in Basra, originally named Jamal Jaafar Muhammad Ali Al Ibrahim. He married an Iranian woman. In 1973 he was in Baghdad, where he entered the Technological University in the Engineering School, being graduated with an engineering degree in 1977. While working as an engineer he did further degrees in political science. He also took off some time to study at a Shiite seminary in Basra that was part of the establishment of Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim, the clerical leader of Iraq’s Shiites in the 1960s.

Right from the time he was in high school in the early 1970s, he joined the Da`wa Party. Some say that Da`wa, or “the Call,” was founded in 1958 to compete with the Communists and Baathists, who were appealing to Shiite youths. Baathism is a mixture of socialism and Arab nationalism with a strong secularist cast, and it instituted an authoritarian Stalinist-style one-party state in Iraq from 1968. The Da`wa party, in contrast, theorized a Shiite state as a believers’ paradise in opposition to the Communists’ workers paradise. Its leaders made room for consultative government.

In 1979, the Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran began radicalizing Iraqi Shiites. Saddam Hussein came to power in an internal Baath Party putsch in 1979. In 1980 he outlawed the Da`wa Party, executed its clerical leader Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, and made belonging to it a capital crime. For the past twenty years the post-Baath government has been finding mass graves in the Shiite south of Iraq, where the Baath secret police shot down suspected Da`wa members.

Al-Muhandis, his nom de guerre, which means “the engineer,” was forced to flee to Kuwait. There, he was part of a Da`wa cell that turned radical and committed acts of terrorism against the US and French embassies, given the hostility of those countries to the Islamic Republic. He then appears to have gone to Iran, where he left the Da`wa Party for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an even more radical organization founded by Iraqi expatriates in Tehran in 1982 at the suggestion of Khomeini. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the son of Muhsin al-Hakim, became the head of it in 1984. Thousands of Iraqi Shiites defected to Iran during the 1980s, and SCIRI organized them. Those who remained loyal to the Da`wa Party, who mostly rejected Khomeini’s vision of a clerically ruled Muslim state, tended to make their way to London instead. The Supreme Council developed a paramilitary branch, the Badr Corps, which was trained and funded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, and which carried out operations against Baath installations in Iraq. Al-Muhandis Joined the Badr Corps and rose to become one of its commanders.

The independent Shiite site al-Khanadeq in Lebanon says that the Party of God Brigades was founded by al-Muhandis in 2003 when the US, as I wrote about, invaded Iraq, with the aim of forcing the occupiers back out. He appears to have broken with the Badr Corps at that point and formed his own militia, primarily out of armed groups based in the Shiite holy city of Karbala (the Ali Akbar Brigades, the Karbala Brigades and the Abu al-Fadl Abbas Brigades). By 2007, they had begun jointly calling themselves the Party of God Brigades. They mounted some attacks on US bases. I also wrote about the role of the Shiite militias in that era

The organization became prominent in 2014 when Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called on Iraqi young men to rise up to defend the country from ISIL, which had taken Mosul, at a time when the Iraqi Army built by the Bush administration had collapsed. The Party of God Brigades and other Shiite militias armed themselves and went to fight, with training and support from the iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and Gen. Soleimani, against ISIL in Amerli and later in Tikrit and Fallujah. They helped ensure that ISIL was defeated. The militias developed political parties which got a fair-sized bloc of seats in parliament. In 2018 parliament recognized the Shiite militias or “Popular Mobilization Forces” as a formal part of the Iraqi military — a sort of national guard.

After 2018, when ISIL was rolled up, the US kept several thousand troops in Iraq for mop-up operations and to continue to train the new Iraqi army.

Israel is accused of committing covert ops against Iraqi Shiite militias inside Iraq, blowing up a weapons depot in 2019.

In Syria, the government of Bashar al-Assad initially faced a rebellion by civil society groups in 2011, but attacked the demonstrators militarily and turned the struggle into a civil war. It took on sectarian tones, since most rebels were Sunnis, while the elite of the government were Alawi Shiites. Lebanon’s Hezbollah came in on the side of Damascus, as did the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Party of God Brigades came up from Iraq along with some other Shiite militias. With help from the Russian air force, the Shiite militias defeated the Sunni rebels and drove their remnant into the far north Idlib province.

In the east of Syria, the US enlisted the YPG Syrian Kurdish militia as ground troops to defeat ISIL in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces, with US air support. The US put in a small number of its own troops, embedded with the YPG. After ISIL was defeated, the US maintained a small military presence in Syria’s southeast. Again, they aimed to mop up ISIL and prevent it from reconstituting itself, and to lend continued support to the YPG in these largely Arab provinces. It is alleged that they also attempt to block Iranian activities, including shipments of weapons to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, on behalf of Israel. Further, they may be helping the Kurds siphon off oil from fields in the southeast, denying the petroleum wealth to Damascus. If this latter charge is true, it is a war crime.

On January 3, 2020, Trump blew away al-Muhandis and Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport. Soleimani had just come on a civilian airliner with a diplomatic passport to negotiate better relations with Saudi Arabia via the good offices of then Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi.

The Party of God Brigades went to war with the US troops in the country, subjecting the Iraqi bases that housed them to rocket and drone strikes. The Iraqi parliament demanded that Abdul Mahdi find a way to kick US troops out of Iraq (he never did).

Since October 7, the Party of God Brigades’ secretary-general, Ahmad al-Hamidawi, has branded the US an equal partner in the Israeli war on Gaza and it and other Shiite militias have launched dozens of attacks on US bases. None had resulted in a fatality until Sunday.

In a historical irony, one of the reasons some Neocons around George W Bush wanted to invade Iraq was to stop it from being a danger to Israel. Over two decades later, the PGB hit a school in Eilat with a drone, and the US, having destroyed the secular Baath Party, is at war with political Shiism in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Maybe the problem is US policy in the region, and maybe no number of wars and conquests are going to reshape the Middle East in ways really favorable to that policy?

Except for the last year when my family moved to Turkey, my high school years, from 1970 to 1975, were spent at Ettefagh. Of the 2000 or so student body at the time about 20 percent where non-Jewish — Muslim, Zoroastrian, Christian, Baha’i and other faiths. My brother and I were among this minority, even if the only difference between our Jewish classmates and us was exemption from Hebrew class. I still remember vividly our beloved principal Dr. Beroukhim, who had a doctorate in physics from France and an undying passion for his subject, stopping noisy boys racing up and down our school’s central marble staircase, ordering them to instead ‘Go study physics!’.

Though from a practicing Muslim family, I also liked going to the synagogue with my Jewish classmates. My multi-cultural upbringing was not limited to school either — my parents had always honored the place of all of Iran’s religious minorities, and actively encouraged diversity at home. At any rate in those years no one was forced to pray, and no one was prohibited from it, either — religion seemed to matter less than academic and social skills, and education was revered by all. In hindsight Ettefagh was a microcosm of Iranian society then: those early 70s coincided with the golden age of contemporary Iran itself, halcyon days of a nation believing in endless future possibilities, forging its way towards modernity and prosperity — not quite there yet, but definitely on the path.

During high school I had started learning about the Holocaust on my own, devouring books like Leon Uris’ Exodus and Mila 18 — I still remember haunting nightmares of those teenage years, about the Nazi concentration camps. I also remember that when we heard of the death of Yonatan Netanyahu, elder brother of Israel’s current prime minister and leader of the 1976 rescue operation at Entebbe, Uganda, to free the passengers of a hijacked Air France plane headed to Israel, I wept. In those days many Iranians looked admiringly to Israel and its achievements, especially its greening of the Negev Desert — a model for arid Iran, with its own massive interior deserts.

With the 1979 Islamic revolution, the promises of a secular and forward-looking Iran as ‘the Japan of the Middle East’ disintegrated. Almost immediately relations with Israel soured as well. But even after the revolution, among ordinary Iranians admiration for Israel remained strong: while the mollahs, Iran’s new masters, were busy mass executing political prisoners, brutalizing women for not properly covering their hair, and supporting terrorist groups, Israel was building a thriving economy, a diverse society, and proudly asserting itself as a hub of science and technology, and the only democracy in the Middle East — all despite the hostility of the Arab world around it.

Meanwhile most of my Jewish classmates — like vast numbers of Iranians of all faiths and backgrounds — started fleeing the brutality of Iran’s theocratic regime, settling mainly in Israel, New York or Southern California, with pockets in Canada and Europe. We remained connected though, even as our life paths diverged. I joined the United Nations and spent my career working in different countries. Over time I also started learning of the plight of Palestinians, through eyewitness testimonies of colleagues working in the West Bank and Gaza. When I was based at UN headquarters in New York, the lectures of the scholar Edward Said brought home the tragedy of the Palestinians — expelled from their own lands as payment for the sins of the Europeans who had perpetrated the Holocaust. Learning of the daily humiliations endured by the Palestinians, from courageous figures such as the Gaza-born human rights lawyer Raji Sourani or the Israeli-born journalist and author Amira Hass was enlightening, and heartbreaking.

Ettefagh School, h/t Wikimaps

Israel’s forefathers — giants of the calibre of Yitzhak Rabin or Shimon Peres — though unequivocally devoted to protecting their country, were also profoundly human. They fought hard, but never shunned peace. Especially they did not belittle the Palestinian tragedy. Who can forget the speeches of Shimon Peres, or those of the erudite former Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban, defending at the UN the right of Israel to exist? But political and societal changes in Israel over the past years, and more recently the arrogant reign of Benjamin Netanyahu, with his visible disdain for Palestinian life, his inclusion of openly extremist settlers in his governing coalitions, and his ultimately catastrophic cynicism made it increasingly difficult to remain supportive of Israeli policies. With my former classmates we avoided discussing Palestine.

On October 7th this year, after the first shock at Hamas’ macabre murder of 1200 Israelis and kidnapping of hundreds of others, our immediate response as a family was to reach out to our Jewish Iranian circles — we knew many had relatives in Israel. But even before worldwide solidarity with Israel’s nightmare could consolidate, another nightmare began — this one of daily bombings of Palestinians at schools, hospitals, mosques and refugee camps in Gaza. Thousands of children killed, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, already living lives of extreme hardship and indignity on a sliver of land, pushed to move, again. Where could these families go, how many times were they to be uprooted, and what new cycles of violence would their sorrow and rage, at seeing loved ones killed and maimed by Israeli bombs, bring to the region tomorrow?

The questions are complex and endless but my high school years at Ettefagh at least taught me that the tragedies unfolding in Israel and Gaza are far less about religion than they are about fear, loss of dignity, greed and especially lamentable and power-hungry political leaders and their disregard for human rights. Judaism, Christianity or Islam do not cause these tragedies, leaders who use them for their own objectives do. When tyrants of the likes of Syrian president Assad or Iranian president Raisi sit at the podium of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, as they did a few weeks ago, to speak of Palestinian human rights even as they trample, daily, on the most basic rights of their own countrymen and women, they become a stain on Islam, not its representatives. Equally, the violent Israeli settlers and the extremists on Netanyahu’s cabinet can be an insult to Judaism, they certainly do not represent it. I know because I have lived through and experienced far kinder, wiser, inclusive versions of both these religions.

The time has come, on this 75th anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to reclaim the multicultural traditions of our lands, lands that form the cultural and geographic kernel of the world, the meeting place for Asia, Africa and Europe. From the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean to Pakistan and Afghanistan, from Central Asia and the Iranian plateau to the Persian Gulf, Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, in the name of religion our countries have been mired in conflict and violence for far too long. We have experimented with every shape and form of exclusion and hatred, yet if we think carefully, again and again throughout millennia of our collective histories, whenever we have been tolerant of diversity and inclusive of the ‘other’, we have done better.

Persian Jews, globally no more than 350,000, are one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities, having arrived in Iran according to recent scholarship even earlier than during the thus-far assumed Achaemenid Empire, maybe as early as the 8th century BC — roughly 1300 years before the arrival of Islam! The overlaying of Judaic and Persian characteristics has produced a culture more vibrant than the sum of the two — a people with deep respect for learning, great sense of humor, warmth, resilience, subtlety and love of life. Diversity and inclusivity make every community, every country, richer. Why do we keep depriving ourselves of such a treasure bestowed on us?

A few weeks ago walking past the Hiroshima A-Bomb Dome, I came upon a candle-light ceremony for the Israel/Gaza war. A young couple — she Jewish and he Muslim — were chanting prayers in Hebrew and Arabic, holding hands and weeping openly. Seeing the depth of pain ‘leaders’ in our region have caused these young people filled me with anger and shame. We are tired of ruthless despots, tired of their obscurantism and small-mindedness, tired of seeing religion used and abused to unleash so much suffering. As Ettefagh taught me all those decades ago, everyone simply aspires to genuine respect, dignity and a fair and level playing field. That is all. The rest will work itself out. What is the use of thousands of years of culture and history, if we are not even able to grasp the wisdom of this simple and obvious truth?

Nassrine Azimi served most of her career with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), where she has led numerous initiatives, programs and offices on three continents. She currently coordinates the Green Legacy Hiroshima (GLH) Initiative (http://glh.unitar.org), a global campaign she co-founded in 2011 to disseminate and plant worldwide seeds and saplings of the hibakujumoku, trees that survived the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima. She is an adjunct professor at Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts, a visiting professor at Hiroshima Shudo University and a Research Fellow at the San Diego Botanic Garden, where she has been part of efforts to bring botanic gardens to post-conflict and least developed countries. She chairs the EDEN Seminars — Emerging and Developing Economies Network – in Japan.

Reprinted from The Chukogu Shimbun with the author’s permission.

Verses 19:17-35:

And once remote from them, she hid behind a screen. Then we sent to her our spirit, who took the shape of a well-formed man.
She said, “I take refuge in the All-Merciful from you, if you are pious.”
He said, “I am but an angel of your lord, come to bestow on you a son without blemish.”
She said, “Will I have a son, when no mortal has touched me, and I was not rebellious?”
He said, “So it is.” He said, “Your Lord says, it is easy for me. We will make him a sign for the people and a mercy from us. The matter has already been decreed.”
So she bore him, and withdrew with him to a remote place.
And the pangs of childbirth drove her to the trunk of a palm tree. She said, “I wish I had died before now, and had been forgotten in oblivion.”
But he called to her from beneath her, saying, “Do not be sad. For your Lord has made a stream run beneath you.”
So shake the trunk of the palm tree toward you, and ripe, fresh dates will fall to you. So eat and drink and be comforted. If you see any human being, say, “I have taken a vow to the All-Merciful to fast, and will speak to no one today.”

Many of these details are from material circulating in the late antique Christian community that also reached the Prophet Muhammad. In the Qur’an Jesus is depicted as in a line of God’s prophets, including Moses, Solomon, David, and others, a line that went on to include the Prophet Muhammad as of the early 600s CE.

The tradition of Persian and Mughal miniature painting — of painting leaves intended to go into manuscript books for the libraries of kings or very wealthy notables — flowered in the 1200s and after, in Iran, Central Asia, India and what is now Turkey. It was influenced by Chinese techniques that came in through the Mongol conquests and the Silk Road and sometimes the people depicted look a little Chinese.

In 1519-1687, the Qutb-Shahi dynasty ruled the Kingdom of Golconda, named after their initial capital, a city near Hyderabad in South India. From 1591 Hyderabad itself became the capital. That city today is the capital of Telengana State and is the fourth-most-populous city in the Indian Republic. The dynasty was founded by an adventurer from Hamadan in Iran, who was a Shiite, and so the kingdom had Shiism for its state religion, even though most of its subjects were Hindus and most of its Muslim subjects were Sunnis. In its later decades it became a vassal of the Mughals based up north, and ultimately was absorbed into the Mughal Empire.

During the 1600s in particular there was a lot of contact with European maritime empires and merchants, who brought books and paintings from Europe, and so the Renaissance tradition of depicting the Nativity had an impact on court artists. But these paintings were commissioned by Muslim rulers for Muslim court purposes, as their own celebration of Jesus, whom they considered, as did all Muslims, one of their prophets.

The National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian has a spectacular miniature painting from Golconda, dated to about 1630, of the adoration of the baby Jesus.



Jesus and Mary are both shown with golden halos. Joseph is also there but without a halo.

One of the adorers is, (extremely) anachronistically, a 17th-century European merchant in boots, almost certainly Dutch. He also seems to have brought gold vessels, and he has in his hand what looks to me like fine cloth, dyed purple. Indigo dye was one of India’s trading major commodities. More on all that later.

There are three winged angels, two hovering above and one on the ground in front of the manger. One of the angels above is holding what looks to me like a crown. Since the Muslim tradition doesn’t know about the Gospel language regarding the messiah being the king of the Jews, my guess is that this motif was borrowed from a European artist. Also, gold was one of the gifts traditionally thought by Christians to be brought to the Christ child by one of the 3 magi.

The other angel has a bow. In South India, the crown and the bow were royal symbols. So I think the angels are depicted as exalting Jesus in the way royalty was exalted. These symbols raise the possibility that the royal treatment given here to baby Jesus is not Christian in origin but Hindu Indian. After all, the beloved god Ram was a king. For these Indian artists, who did not know the Bible, the symbols may not be an assertion that he was royalty, only that he deserved the sort of glorification that kings received.

Although in the West of the Muslim world Arab artists were reluctant to depict holy figures, this Indian artist has no problem with it. Most did not, and they painted Muhammad, as well. Mary is shown wearing hijab but with her face visible, and Joseph and Jesus also have their faces depicted.

Shiite Islam puts special emphasis on piety centering on the family of the Prophet, including Muhammad’s son-in-law and first cousin, Ali, Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah, and the two sons of Ali and Fatimah, Hasan and Husayn. Although Sunni courts also produced nativity paintings, it could be that this form of Christian piety especially appealed to the Shiite rulers of Golconda.



As for the Dutch merchant or factor, Sanu Kainikara explains,

“In 1627, the Dutch had a disagreement with the Governor of Golconda, under whose jurisdiction the region fell, regarding the grant of a ‘farming’ permit for Masulipatam (Macchilipatanam). They withdrew to Pulicat and blockaded Masulipatam from the sea. The Qutb Shah dismissed his governor and invited the Dutch to return to Masulipatam. The reason for the Qutb Shahi sultan’s action was that the Dutch possessed a preponderance of naval strength that was able to threaten an adversary from the sea without exposing themselves to any significant danger—a capability that no other European power in India could lay claim to at that time.”

“The Dutch trade from Masulipatam amounted to Rupees 600,000 per year throughout most of the 17th century. In 1660, the Dutch opened a factory in Golconda, whose chief merchant also doubled as the ambassador to the Qutb Shahi king.”

One of the key commodities traded from Golconda to the Netherlands and later to Britain was diamonds.


Map of Hyderabad state, c. 1730, H/t Wikipedia, UM Clement Library .

So that Dutch merchant was almost certainly in Hyderabad seeking diamonds. But maybe also indigo dye and textiles, which he is shown in turn offering to baby Jesus.

And the court painter, having been commissioned by the king to do a nativity scene, obligingly incorporated the trader into the painting, a common practice. It is unlikely that the painting was commissioned by the foreigner– it stayed in India until a British officer purchased it. It just shows that the Prophet Jesus (`Isa in Arabic) had acquired another connotation in the Renaissance period, being associated with the expanding maritime trade empires of the Christian Europeans. The Dutch had just displaced the Portuguese, who can be seen in earlier miniatures.

The painting is a reminder that Christmas is not parochial — not northern European, as it is often conceived in the US, but a global commemoration of a global event. Not only do Muslims celebrate Jesus as a holy figure, but many Hindus also respect him (and more used to before the rise of Hindutva, Hindu nationalism). And Jews who live alongside Christians often have Christmas trees, even if they can’t go along with Christian beliefs about Jesus, who after all was born and bred a Jew. Christmas should be for celebrating rebirth and renewal and hope, in a world that desperately needs all three, for Christians and for everyone.

Almost a decade ago, the Sunni jihadist network known as the “Islamic State” (IS) declared the formation of an Islamic Caliphate after they captured the Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014.

In response, tens of thousands of Shia men joined a complex patchwork of militias to fight against IS. Many of these militias are notoriously violent and directly loyal to Iran’s theocratic state.

But very little is known about how these Shia militias were so quickly and so effectively mobilised. In our research, we have taken a novel approach, examining the many popular music videos produced by these militias.

These music videos drew on a complex cocktail of historical myths and contemporary clergymen to mobilise Iraq’s Shia population to fight the IS.

Foundational myths, historical grievances

The popular music videos explicitly reference a deeply held set of religious myths and symbols that have informed Shia politics since its inception.

One video shows images of militiamen driving towards the front-lines and firing from a bunker at IS targets.

The singer extols the religious virtues of fighting the IS by comparing those killed today with the Shia martyrs at the Battle of Karbala:

We fight our enemies. Our martyrs are similar to the martyrs of Karbala. Our people are supporters of Hussein.

The divide between the Sunni and Shia sects dates back to the early years of Islam.

A debate emerged after the Prophet Muhammad’s death about who should lead the Islamic community. The majority accepted the authority of the Prophet’s senior companion, Abu Bakr. A minority, later identified as Shiites, believed only a blood relative of the Prophet – in particular, his cousin Ali – had the right to lead.

In the year 680, the division between the two sects escalated at the Battle of Karbala, where Ali’s son Hussein and many of his followers were defeated and executed by Sunni forces.

The legend of the Battle of Karbala has come to symbolise the historical injustice of the Shia faithful at the hands of the Sunni majority. It is commemorated at the annual Ashura festival in which Shiites reenact the battle, including by self-flagellation.

The emotive lyrics and tone of the song are specifically designed to resonate with this history of suffering.

The Shia jihad against the IS

The popular music videos produced by different Shia militias also draw on fatwas (religious edicts) issued by several prominent Shia clerics in response to the violence of the IS.

In 2014, Iraq’s most senior Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Sistani issued a fatwa announcing a jihad (holy war) against the IS.

He called for a mass Shia mobilisation, arguing

It is the legal and national responsibility of whoever can hold a weapon to take up arms to defend the country, the citizens and the holy sites.

Some popular music videos explicitly cite the fatwas of Sistani and other clerics, encouraging their young supporters to heed these calls. A short clip shows armed members of one militia chanting: “Al-Sistani is like a crown on our heads. Your wish is our command.”

One very slickly produced music video refers to both historical grievances over the failure to recognise Ali as the legitimate heir of the Prophet Muhammad and to the centrality of Sistani’s fatwa to their decision to fight the IS:

We are the Turkmen [of Iraq]

We follow Ali’s path

Iraq must live in peace and happiness

When Sistani orders us, we obey. We will defeat and destroy the IS

We believe in the fatwas of our religious authorities, and we defend our holy sites.

As the singer recites each verse, the footage shows heavily armed Shia men posing in front of a tank. It also features live action footage from various battles against the IS, including advancing on key targets, firing machine guns and heavy artillery.

Mobilising young men

These videos serve as a unique archive of the war against the IS, demonstrating the ways in which these militias found novel ways to mobilise young men to fight by drawing on a rich catalogue of Shia religious symbolism as well as the fatwas of clerics like Sistani.

Slick popular music videos draw on a rich catalogue of historical motifs of suffering as well as the contemporary edicts of key clergymen, produced by different Shia militias and shared on YouTube and other social media platforms.

These evocative and poignant songs played an underappreciated and under-examined part in mobilising young men to fight back against the horrors of the IS, indicating the powerful role popular culture plays in contemporary warfare.

Benjamin Isakhan, Professor of International Politics, Deakin University and Ali Akbar, Sessional lecturer and researcher, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Human Rights Watch ) – Two Bahraini Shi’a men have been executed in Saudi Arabia following what Amnesty International described as a “grossly unfair trial” on terrorism-related charges.

Jaafar Sultan and Sadeq Thamer were arrested in May 2015 and held incommunicado for more than three months, according to Amnesty International. The charges were related to allegations of smuggling explosives inside Saudi Arabia and participating in protests in Bahrain.

The two Bahrainis were tried and sentenced to death in Saudi’s notorious Specialized Criminal Court in October 2021 following protest-related charges that fall within the Saudi counterterrorism law.

Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, as well as other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, continue to use overbroad provisions contained within terrorism laws to suppress dissent and target religious minorities.

Counterterrorism laws in the GCC typically include broad, vague charges and definitions of terrorism used as catch-all provisions to punish peaceful dissidents, political activists, and human rights defenders.

Saudi Arabia’s Shi’a Muslim minority has long suffered systemic discrimination and been targeted by state-funded hate speech. On March 12, 2022, Saudi Arabian authorities executed 81 men, 41 of whom are said to belong to the Shi’a Muslim minority, under its counterterrorism law, despite promises to curtail executions.

Bahrain’s Shi’a majority also suffers from discrimination. Bahraini authorities have systematically targeted Shia clerics and have violently arrested numerous human rights defenders with Shia backgrounds, including Abdulhadi al-Khawaja in April 2011, who they sentenced to life in prison in a mass trial under Bahrain’s terrorism law.

Overly broad terrorism charges have also been exploited by other Gulf states. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) sentenced Khalaf Abdul Rahman al-Romaithi to 15 years in prison on terrorism charges following a grossly unfair trial known as the “UAE94” mass trials of 94 critics of the Emirati government. Al-Romaithi was recently extradited from Jordan to the UAE.

Human Rights Watch has documented longstanding violations of due process and fair trial rights in Saudi Arabia’s criminal justice system, making it unlikely that Sultan and Thamer received a fair trial leading up to their execution. Human Rights Watch opposes the death penalty in all countries and under all circumstances as a cruel and inhumane punishment.

Via Human Rights Watch

The Amini family’s attorney, Saleh Nikbakht, told journalists that early on May 21, “individuals, known for such distasteful actions in the past, attacked and destroyed the tomb of Mahsa Amini.”

He then showed pictures of the damaged gravesite that he received from Amini’s parents. He said Amini’s father revealed that authorities had obstructed the installation of a protective canopy over the grave by threatening a welder that, if he carried out the work, his business would be closed. He did not show any evidence, however, that specifically linked any security officials to the damage.

Mojgan Eftekhari, Amini’s mother, had alerted the public to the desecration of her daughter’s grave and said she also was upset about the closure of the entrance and exit to the cemetery by officials.

“Please refrain from disturbing the people; their loved ones are here,” she wrote in a statement addressing government officials who she said were hindering access to the site.

Ashkan Amini, Mahsa Amini’s brother, shared a picture of his sister’s grave on Instagram, writing that “even the glass of your tombstone bothers them,” referring to Iranian officials whom the family and supporters blame for Amini’s death on September 16 in Tehran.

Amini’s brother said this was the second time his sister’s burial site was destroyed, defiantly stating: “No matter how many times they break it, we will fix it. Let’s see who gets tired first.”

Mahsa Amini, 22, from the western Iranian city of Saqez, died during her arrest by morality police on a family trip to the Iranian capital. The incident triggered a wave of protests that rapidly swept the nation.

In October 2022, Nikbakht, along with his colleague, Ali Rezaei, took charge of the Amini family’s security and filed a lawsuit on behalf of Mahsa’s parents against those implicated in her death. To date, the Islamic republic’s officials and the judiciary have yet to address the complaint.

The Norway-based Iran Human Rights group says the unrest has led to the deaths of at least 587 individuals, including dozens of children and teenagers.

Additionally, many have lost their sight due to the use of pellet guns by security forces, and at least seven arrested protesters have been executed by the Islamic republic’s judiciary.

Iranian government forces have been accused of attacking and destroying the resting places of killed and executed protesters, cultural figures, poets, writers, artists, critical political forces, and even Baha’i citizens, and in some instances, Christians.

In 2020, Amnesty International reported that officials, by concealing burial sites, inhibiting mourning ceremonies, and preventing families from installing tombstones or decorating their relatives’ graves with flowers, pictures, badges, or memorial messages, are violating these families’ rights and Article 15 of the International Covenant On Economic, Social And Cultural Rights.

Written by Ardeshir Tayebi based on an original story in Persian by RFE/RL’s Radio Farda

Via RFE/RL

Copyright (c)2022 RFE/RL, Inc. Used with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

Unlike President Obama, who saw the future of the United States as being in the Pacific Rim, Biden has pivoted instead to familiar territory, Russia and Eastern Europe. Obama’s vision was related to trade and innovation. Only a minor part of U.S. trade is with eastern Europe and now virtually none is with Russia. Biden’s pivot was not part of a long-term, thought-out grand stategy. It was reactive, addressing a lesser power’s attempt to alter the status quo by asserting itself as a regional hegemon.

In some ways, Putin’s play for grabbing some or all of Ukraine resembles Saddam Hussein’s attempt to annex Kuwait. George H. W. Bush likewise drew a line in the sand and put together an international coalition to push Saddam back into Iraq. Both the Gulf War and the current Ukraine effort by the U.S. and allies must be seen as attempts to restore a status quo. Bush senior had the advantage of fighting a non-nuclear state and so could simply deploy 500,000 U.S. troops and 250,000 allied troops, and overwhelm the Iraqi tank corps in Kuwait. Biden, in contrast, has had to resort to economic sanctions and the provision of weaponry to Ukrainians, who unlike Kuwaitis managed to survive the initial invasion and retain their independence.

Because Russia has 5,977 nuclear warheads, more than any other country in the world, the outcome of the Ukraine struggle is very difficult to predict. The war could grind on for a very long time. Russia’s gross domestic product fell at least 3.5% in 2022, and is predicted to fall similarly in 2023. It is not a body blow, but it can’t be making most Russians very happy. Still, authoritarian governments have levers of power that can help them survive such pressures. Iraq was thrown down to the level of a fourth-world country by the U.N. and U.S. sanctions in the 1990s, but the ruling Baath Party insulated itself from the oil embargo and had some $30 billion squirreled away to bribe key leaders into remaining loyal. Plus the Baath was brutal and would as soon kill you as look at you. If Russia’s elite hunkers down as the Iraqi did, we could be looking at a decade-long struggle.

Russia has picked up an important asset in the form of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which had made advances in unconventional drone warfare that the tank-and-jet- oriented Russian military had not. Iran’s provision of drones to Russia helped preserve Moscow’s momentum in the war when its own munitions stores ran low.

Israeli sources are saying that, based on Western intelligence assessments, Russia may reward Iran by allowing the ayatollahs to purchase 24 Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets. Because of the harsh U.S. sanctions on Iran, which from 2007 to 2016 were reinforced by United Nations sanctions, Iran’s air force has an old dilapidated fleet. So too, worryingly, do the Iranian civilian airlines. If the Israeli press reports are not just propaganda, the Russian fighter-jets would be a game-changer for Iranian air power. The Sukhoi jets helped win the Syrian civil war for dictator Bashar al-Assad, who was backed by Iran, as well. Some observers have even suggested that one reason for the Russian intervention in Syria was to advertise the virtues of the new generation of fighter jets in what Moscow calls its “Aerospace Forces,” so as to sell them in more global markets.

That Iran is becoming so close to Russia is entirely the fault of the U.S. Republican Party in general and Donald J. Trump in particular. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal could have integrated Iran into the Western, capitalist economy. Iran mothballed 80% of its civilian nuclear enrichment program in return for sanctions being lifted. The Republican-dominated Congress, however, refused to lift U.S. sanctions on Iran. The U.S. goes around threatening unrelated third parties if they don’t uphold American sanctions. So France’s Total couldn’t invest in Iran because the Treasury Department would have fined it billions of dollars. Hence, no sanctions relief for Iran, at all. The country was screwed over by the nuclear deal, giving up any deterrence that might have come from its enrichment program, and receiving nothing in return. Less than nothing.

Then in May 2018, Trump breached the treaty entirely and tried to crush the Iranian economy, even attempting to stop Iran from selling its petroleum. He did this even though Iran had scrupulously adhered to its obligations under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or nuclear deal. Only China successfully bucked these “maximum sanctions,” which were really a form of financial and trade blockade.

Now the same techniques of financial and trade blockade are being imposed on Russia by the Biden administration. Russia is interested in learning from Iran how to subvert them successfully, and interested in using Iran and China to jailbreak the U.S. sanctions.

The Republican Party and Trump, in other words, drove Iran into the arms of Russia, and thereby complicated the current Biden administration’s attempt to isolate Russia. Iran’s drones and purchase of Russian arms and other goods are helpful to Moscow’s war effort and attempt to tough out the U.S. efforts to put it in a box.

One of Iran’s obsessions is supporting the Lebanese party-militia, Hezbollah, against Israel. Iran’s ability to play among the Palestinians, as well, has been hampered by the preference of Hamas for a Muslim Brotherhood, Sunni alliance. The Egyptian and Syrian Muslim Brotherhood organizations, however, have been crushed by the officer corps’ vigorous counter-revolutions against the Arab Spring.

The new Netanyahu government in Israel has brought on board Religious Zionism and Jewish Power, which are the Israeli equivalents of the Iranian ayatollahs, only more aggressive. The Israeli fundamentalists are dedicated to expanding Israeli squatter-settlements and to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. They could well provoke a new wave of radicalism, what Palestinians call an Intifada or uprising. If it materializes, it will give Iran an opening to make itself central to Levantine politics in general.

The street protests in Iran this past fall, led by young women, have revealed a profound generational and gender divide in that country. That divide, however, is unlikely to pull down the government in the short to medium term. It is an element in Iranians’ making of Iran in the long term.

With Biden’s foreign policy team bogged down in Ukraine, such new challenges in the Middle East will be difficult to address. Not only could Iran cast an even larger shadow over the region but the extremist Israeli government could make all sorts of mischief for American interests. The Netanyahu government is already talking about reneging on a U.S.-brokered deal on dividing Mediterranean gas fields between Israel and Lebanon, which Mr. Netanyahu characterizes as a surrender to Hezbollah. Netanyahu also keeps talking about bombing Iran, which his military and intelligence officers have so far stopped him from doing, but such an action would spark a major Mideast conflict.

As Mr. Obama discovered, it is really hard for the U.S. to pivot away from the Middle East, given the emotional investment Americans have in Israel and in the gasoline that fuels their cars. Maybe if we do switch to EVs in this decade, some future government really will be able to pivot.

Barcelona (Special to Informed Comment) – During the last three months, Iran has been a main focus of international media attention due to the ongoing anti-government protests that erupted after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian. Amini was beaten with fatal consequences by Iran’s so-called ‘morality police’, who had detained her for allegedly not complying with the country’s hijab rules. The death of Mahsa Amini took place within a broader context marked by President Ebrahim Raisi’s decision to press ahead with “stiffening the compulsory hijab codes” after his election in June 2021.[1]

The popular protests that have spread across Iran laid bare the growing disenchantment with the Islamic Republic’s establishment among broad sectors of the country’s population. Women have been playing a leading role, and the protests have particularly resonated among the young and educated societal groups, as well as the members of ethnic minorities such as the Kurds.

In his latest book, Triumph and Despair: In Search of Iran’s Islamic Republic, Mehran Kamrava explores the more than four decades of history of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Contrary to recent additions to the literature on Iran such as Monshipouri’s In the Shadow of Mistrust: The Geopolitics and Diplomacy of US–Iran Relations and Banai, Byrne, and Tirman’s Republics of Myth: National Narratives and the US-Iran Conflict (the reviews of both books are available on Informed Comment), Kamrava mainly concerns himself with Iran’s internal dynamics, exploring issues such as the country’s political and economic evolution, its national and religious identity and the situation of minorities within Iran.

The author, a Professor of Government at Georgetown University in Qatar, has written a work that helps understand how the Islamic Republic has managed to survive several legitimacy crises in the past. These crises have normally erupted as a result of economic difficulties and constraints on political and social freedoms. Although the past is never a certain guide for the future and the current legitimacy crisis appears to be particularly acute, Kamrava intelligently notes that “born out of and into crises, the Islamic Republic is immeasurably better at crisis management than it is at just management under normal circumstances.”[2]

Mehran Kamrava, Triumph and Despair: In Search of Iran’s Islamic Republic (London: Hurst, 2022). Click Here.

He adds that when faced with crises, “for those running the state, especially the principlists on the right, the easy answer has been repression.”[3] This repressive behavior has negatively affected the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic, especially when combined with inconsistent economic policies that have failed to provide better livelihoods for the majority of the population. Although the damaging effects of international sanctions cannot be obviated, Kamrava remarks that one of the main explanations for Iran’s sub-optimal economic performance is that each new government discards its predecessor’s strategy and adopts a new one.

In his historical analysis of the Islamic Republic’s trajectory, the author notes that the origins of what was to happen in Iran in the following decades can already be observed in 1979. After his return to Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini outmaneuvered the more secular activists within the broad coalition that had deposed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Khomeini’s success in establishing a republic with theocratic features, Kamrava explains, can be ascribed to the Ayatollah’s determination, the cohesion of his inner circle and its ability for grassroots mobilization.

Even so, it is important to note that Khomeini’s followers started their quest for power from a comparatively advantageous position. Under the Shah, the treatment meted out to left-wing opponents of the regime was normally more severe than the one suffered by opposition clerics. As British historian Vanessa Martin has written, “the suppression of the left created an opportunity for Shi’i Islamism”.[4]

Over time, the Islamic Republic built “a highly robust institutional basis.”[5] The new institutional framework passed a key test in 1989, when it secured a smooth transition after Khomeini died, ensuring his succession as Supreme Leader by Ali Khamenei. Although the 1978-79 Revolution resulted in a complete turnover in the composition of Iran’s elites, the nature of state-society relations in the country remained authoritarian, explains Kamrava. The author describes the Islamic Republic’s political system as displaying “hybrid authoritarianism.”

The political system is capable of opening up to a certain degree, as it could be seen during the 1997-2005 presidency of Mohammad Khatami and, to a lesser extent, during the 2013-2021 presidency of Hassan Rouhani. Nevertheless, the unelected institutions of the country, with the Supreme Leader at the helm and the help of the Basij militia and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), impose stringent limits on the ideological diversity of the two elected institutions, the Presidency and the Parliament (Majles).

The constraints on free political representation are imposed both a priori and a posteriori of the elections. The Guardian Council, whose membership is controlled by Khamenei, has the power to disqualify potential candidates for the presidential and parliamentary elections and works as a gatekeeper to the elected institutions. But even when the unexpected happens, as was the case with the 1997 election of reformist Mohammad Khatami as President – he garnered 69% of the popular vote over the conservative Ali Akbar Nategh-Nouri – the Islamic Republic’s unelected institutions are prepared to push back.

Khatami saw his reformist initiatives stonewalled: the judiciary closed the newspapers that had benefited from the President’s efforts to promote freedom of expression, the IRGC issued veiled threats against the government, and the Guardian Council limited the powers of the Parliament, which after 2000 had a reformist majority that could have supported Khatami. The limits on Khatami’s reformism also extended to foreign affairs, particularly when it came to a possible rapprochement between Tehran and Washington.

Kamrava is harsh – probably excessively so – in his assessment of the reformists’ performance. He writes that “the superficiality of the values associated with the reformist current” weakened it, with the election of the hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President in 2005 ultimately proving that the reformist movement’s popularity had been “only skin deep.”[6] One could counter this argument by pointing out that four years afterwards, in the 2009 presidential election, massive electoral fraud was needed in order to secure Ahmadinejad’s victory over Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the candidate espoused by the reformist movement. Moussavi, according to the official results, garnered 34% of the vote despite the huge scale of vote rigging against him.

In 2013, the moderate Hassan Rouhani was elected President of Iran. He achieved an early success when his government reached an agreement with the international community to scale back Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. But the situation soon took a turn for the worse when the Trump administration abandoned  the nuclear deal in 2018 and re-imposed sanctions on Iran. Parallel to this, in the realm of domestic politics, “many of Rouhani’s initiatives were blocked by the conservative establishment.”[7] Despite the fact that Rouhani’s reformist drive was more modest, his presidency “turned out to have the same fate as that of Khatami.”[8]

On the topic of women’s rights in Iran, Kamrava highlights something worth keeping in mind: the discussion on the obligatoriness of the hijab is an important one, but the conversation needs to be broader than this. In the author’s own words, “Hijab, of course, may pose restrictions on appearance and physical mobility, but the institutional barriers to women’s political participation are much more substantive.”[9] The current Iranian Parliament, for instance, has less than 6% of its seats occupied by women.

Kamrava concludes his book by noting that “political systems come and go. But people endure.”[10] In Triumph and Despair, the reader will find an accessible but erudite account of how the Islamic Republic’s political system came into being and developed over the decades. At the same time, and reflecting Kamrava’s conviction belief in the centrality of the people in the country’s history, the author also offers a detailed portrait of how the Iranian people have shaped and been shaped by a political system that has survived for more than four decades but currently faces one of its more severe crises.

[1] Kourosh Ziabari, “Crisis in Iran: Raisi’s Hijab Hype Backfiring Badly,” Asia Times, September 29, 2022, https://asiatimes.com/2022/09/crisis-in-iran-raisis-hijab-hype-backfiring-badly/.

[2] Mehran Kamrava, Triumph and Despair: In Search of Iran’s Islamic Republic (London: Hurst and Co., 2022), p. 149.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Vanessa Martin, Creating an Islamic State: Khomeini and the Making of a New Iran (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003), p. 28.

[5] Kamrava, Triumph and Despair: In Search of Iran’s Islamic Republic, p. 49.

[6] Kamrava, Triumph and Despair: In Search of Iran’s Islamic Republic, pp. 116-117.

[7] Ibid., p. 146.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, p. 248.

[10] Ibid., p. 301.

If it is true, it is sort of like angry American crowds marching on Mount Vernon and setting fire to the home of George Washington. Social media videos from Iran, which has been embroiled in nationwide women- and youth-led protests since mid-September, often carry audio of demonstrators cursing Khomeini.

The protests were sparked by the death in the custody of the morals police of Mahsa Zhina Amini, a Kurdish young woman who had been arrested for being insufficiently veiled while on a visit to the capital, Tehran. Many more young women have since been killed by security forces charged with repressing the protests, most recently Aylar Haghi,a medical student in Tabriz, who was allegedly thrown from the roof of a building where she sought refuge by Iranian security forces. They say she accidentally fell into a construction site. There has been an epidemic of young Iranian women accidentally falling off buildings, if the Iranian authorities are to be believed.

The BBC tweeted about the fire at Khomeini’s home:

Protestors in the city of Khomein have burned down the childhood home of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the country's current theocracy. The symbolic significance of this move against the most revered figure in the Islamic Republic cannot be overstated.#MahsaAmini pic.twitter.com/vmoJfj3NAX

— Siavash Ardalan (@BBCArdalan) November 18, 2022

The Guardian also showed this footage:

The Guardian: “Iran protests: footage appears to show late ayatollah’s ancestral house on fire”

Iranian authorities denied the report, releasing photos of the front door of the museum showing no damage. Iranian authorities have often, however, photoshopped images.

Khomeini had been born in Khomein in 1902. Some of his ancestors had traveled in British India, and the regime of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, made the error in 1978 of having an op-ed published in a prominent newspaper accusing Khomeini of being a British spy.

Khomeini studied in the holy city of Qom in the 1920s. By the 1940s he was circulating writings critical of the government of Mohammad Reza Pahlevi. A deeply conservative man who represented the values of rural, small town, religious Shiite Iran, he complained endlessly about Western influence in Iran. In 1963 he joined in protests against the shah’s “White Revolution” modernization program and was arrested. He was exiled, first briefly to Turkey in 1964, and then to the Shiite seminary city of Najaf in Iraq. There, he produced his tract Islamic Government in which he argued that in the absence of the Prophet Muhammad and the line of his descendants or Imams, the Shiite clergy should head the government.

Although Khomeini represented this theory as traditional, it was a stark departure in Shiite thought. I have long believed that these ideas were influenced by the modern mass parties in Iraq of the Communists and the Baathists, who accepted from Vladimir Lenin the notion of the revolutionary vanguard of intellectuals. Lenin believed that where blue collar workers declined to take up their historic role as revolutionaries because they had had the wool pulled over their eyes by capitalists and industrialists, it was incumbent on clear-sighted intellectuals to take up this revolutionary role instead. Just as Lenin’s Soviet Union was to be ruled by intellectuals (including bureaucrats), so Khomeini’s Islamic Republic would be run by seminary-trained clergy, the Shiite “vanguard.” This is only a theory– I can’t prove it. But it makes historical sense.

The women and youth who have been protesting this fall have often gone beyond demanding a bit more personal autonomy and freedom to choose their own clothes to critiquing radically the entire notion of an Islamic state. Although romantics such as Khomeini thought they were bringing back a medieval institution that had lapsed with modernity, actually, in the medieval era Muslim societies were ruled by kings and conquerors who only sometimes cared what religious jurists thought about the character of Islamic law. Many of the kings liked a fine wine and a wild party. Muslim canon law was administered in urban areas by jurists appointed by kings. In rural areas most law was customary, based on custom, or decided by appointed governors. Only women of the urban upper classes veiled. Women of the pastoral nomads rode horses and camels and went unveiled. Peasant women working in the field were unveiled. Perhaps only 10 percent of people were urban, so jurists’ norms were unknown to most of the 90% who lived in small villages. Most people decided for themselves how pious to be, and clergymen were more counselors and pastors than commanders. Khomeini’s notion of a puritan Muslim society regulated by an ideal Islamic law administered by trained clerics is an illusion. His was a very modern project, and like the modern projects of Communism and Fascism, it has deteriorated into a dreary dictatorship.

Whether the young people managed to set fire to his house or not (and perhaps they only damaged a back wing of it), they were demonstrating in front of it, and rejecting Khomeini’s vanguard of the clergy in no uncertain terms.