The funeral procession on Monday for Montazeri, who was an architect of Iran's mullah-led system before he became one of its most outspoken dissidents, drew tens of thousands of mourners and protesters to the holy city of Qom, south of Tehran. Montazeri, 87 years old, apparently died of natural causes Sunday morning.
Demonstrators who made it to the streets of Qom are widely reported to have chanted "Death to the dictator," a level of invective against the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that would have been unthinkable just months ago. But anger at last June's election results, which many believe were skewed to keep President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in office, has intensified and spread with each new story of torture, mass arrests or outright killings by militiamen or security forces. And it was Montazeri, once the most senior cleric in Qom, who broke the taboo on criticism of Khamenei.
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Hundreds of thousands of mourners turned up in Qom on Monday for the funeral of dissident Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri.
A complete picture of what happened in Qom was difficult to get as Iran tightened an already sclerotic flow of information in and out of the country. The government appeared to be blocking or impeding Internet and cell phone service, as it has during past popular groundswells, and the BBC said its Persian-language television service had been jammed. Even Al Jazeera's report on the mourning featured only grainy footage and little evidence of the clashes between mourners and Basij militia depicted on the Web sites of reformist groups and human rights organizations.
The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said Ahmad Ghabel, a prominent student of Montazeri, was arrested while driving with his family to the ceremonies in Qom, and that Intelligence Ministry officials warned journalists and activists to stay away. Le Monde cites the reformist group Kaleme's report that the car of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, the first runner-up to Ahmadinejad last June, was attacked as it neared the funeral. Ayatollah Montazeri's son, Ahmad Montazeri, told The New York Times that 200 to 300 members of the Basij militia disrupted the ceremony and with security forces had occupied the city's grand mosque, preventing the mourning rites from taking place there. Footage distributed by the Agence France-Presse showed angry, tightly packed crowds chanting through Qom.
Reformists rallied to Montazeri's grave to capitalize on a nation's reverence for a politically active cleric who might have become the supreme leader had he not broken with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the 1980s to criticize where the revolution was heading. Montazeri had helped create the role of supreme leader, but he was put under house arrest for five years after criticizing Khomeini for abusing the power such a figure yields. Since the election this year, Montazeri has spoken out against Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, decried the violence against demonstrators, offered support for women's rights and criticized Iran's standoff with the West over its nuclear program. And he did so with the credibility of religious scholarship that Tehran could not dismiss as a U.S.- or British-backed conspiracy.
Now the reform movement has lost that voice, and among the many dissident clerics in Qom none comes close to matching Montazeri's stature. The reformists' goal has evolved from opposing Ahmadinejad to opposing the regime he fronts. Now the question is how much Montazeri's death can galvanize Iranians into taking on the governing mullahs. In the past two decades student protest movements and even the presidency of Mohammad Khatami in the 1990s appeared close to permanently changing the theocracy. But they all failed.
The answer may come by Dec. 27, the important seventh day of mourning for Montazeri, which is also Ashura, a holiday that commemorates the death of Shiite Islam's most important martyr. Despite repeated escalations of outrage in Iran and beyond since June, the government has stood its ground and dealt with the opposition with its habitual tools of intimidation. If the reformists don't manage to turn Montazeri into a martyr for their cause, Iran may simply not be ready yet for big change.
