Mick Hartley

It’s getting serious when even the Iranian mullahs are concerned about president Ahmadinejad’s increasingly deranged ravings:

Iran’s president has alarmed the nation’s conservative clerics with remarks suggesting he believes a mystical Shiite religious leader backs his government.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who came to power in 2005 with the votes of Iran’s religious poor, has in the past courted controversy for his public devotion to the return of the 12th Imam, a figure he regularly refers to in speeches.

According to Shiite Muslim teaching, Abul-Qassem Mohammad, the 12th leader whom Shiites consider descended from the prophet Muhammad, disappeared in the year 941 but will return at the end of time to lead an era of Islamic justice.

While this is a core Shiite belief, some critics say that Mr Ahmadinejad has encouraged “superstitious” practices surrounding it.

“If the president means that the 12th Imam is supporting the government, we should say that it is wrong,” Gholamreza Mesbahi-Moghaddam, a conservative cleric and member of parliament, was quoted as saying by the daily newspaper Etemad-e Melli yesterday.

“Surely the 12th Imam is not supporting the current 20 per cent inflation in Iran,” he added, referring to Mr Ahmadinejad’s failure to curb price rises.

He was responding to a speech Mr Ahmadinejad made a month ago at a Shiite shrine in Mashhad, in eastern Iran, and broadcast on state TV on Monday. The BBC monitored the address.

Ali Asgari, from Mashhad, another conservative cleric, said: “Ahmadinejad should think in a more worldly way. He should manage the country. People are not expecting (religious] advice from the president.”

In other words, leave the gobbledygook to us and get on with running the goddamn country.

This comes soon after Ahmadinejad suggested that martyrdom should be encouraged as a solution to Iran’s economic problems.

On the subject of martyrdom and the 12th Imam, it’s worth recalling something that Matthias Küntzel wrote, in an article on the Tehran Holocaust deniers’ conference:

It is precisely this suicidal outlook that distinguishes the Iranian nuclear weapons program from those of all other countries and makes it uniquely dangerous. As long ago as 1980, Khomeini put it this way: “We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”

Anyone inclined to dismiss the significance of such statements might want to consider the proclamation made by Mohammad Hassan Rahimian, representative of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who stands even higher in the Iranian hierarchy than Ahmadinejad. A few months ago, on November 16, 2006, Rahimian explained: “The Jew”– not the Zionist, note, but the Jew –“is the most obstinate enemy of the devout. And the main war will determine the destiny of mankind. . . . The reappearance of the Twelfth Imam will lead to a war between Israel and the Shia.” The country that has been the first to make Holocaust denial a principle of its foreign policy is likewise the first openly to threaten another U.N. member state with, not invasion or annexation, but annihilation.