Clerics In Custody (Part 1)
What happens when a mullah in the Islamic Republic has a different opinion from that of the Supreme Leader?
By Banafsheh Zand and Sophie Baron-AmirTeymour
Guardianship and Repression: The Totalitarian Theocratic Machinery of Iran’s Special Clerical Court
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, where theology and state power are fused, the voice of the Supreme Leader may well be the voice of God, and dissent from the Supreme Leader’s opinion by his clerical colleagues is not merely punished—it is anathematized. At the heart of this repression lies a powerful but little-understood institution: the Special Clerical Court, or Dadgah-e Vizheh-ye Ruhaniyat. Functioning entirely outside the normative judicial system, and accountable only to the Supreme Leader himself, the Special Clerical Court is the Islamic Republic’s internal inquisition—a tool used to silence clerics who deviate from the regime’s rigid dogma.
Beneath its religious pretext lies a far broader totalitarian mandate: to safeguard the theoretical and practical supremacy of Velayat-e Faqih—the absolute rule of the Islamic jurist. This doctrine, which did not exist in classical Shi’a jurisprudence and was only developed by Khomeini during the late 1960s, and the institutions created to enforce it, form a complete totalitarian structure where political authority, religious interpretation, and state violence are inseparable.
Khomeini’s concept of Velayat-e Faqih—the Guardianship of the Jurist—was radical in Shia history. Traditionally, Shiism was apolitical. It emphasized the limited nature of temporal rule in the era of the occultation of the twelfth Imam – seen as the only Divinely appointed sovereign, and thus, over time, a certain degree of separation between the state and the religious establishment developed. Khomeini, however, writing in exile in Iraq, envisioned a model in which a qualified Islamic jurist (faqih) – himself and a succession picked by a self-selected body outside of the previously established religious hierarchy - would assume supreme political and religious leadership in the Imam’s absence. From a traditional Shi’a cleric’s perspective, this solipsistic claim to absolute theological supremacy outside of the proscribed methods for educating and choosing hojatoleslams, ayatollahs, and marjas (roughly equivalent to a Christian Church’s bishops, archbishops and cardinals) – was seen as an insult and a threat. Some scholars went as far as declaring Khomeini a heretic.
As the French scholar Oliver Roy wrote in his book “The Failure of Political Islam:”
"The velayat-e faqih thesis was rejected by almost the entire dozen grand ayatollahs living in 1981: they either openly opposed Khomeini, as did Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei [1899-1992] and Shariat Madari [1906–1986], or they maintained a discreet distance, refusing official posts, as did Gulpaygani [1899–1993], al-Qummi [1912-2007], al-Shirazi and al-Najaf al-Mar'ashi. In fact the high clergy kept its distance from the revolution. Only one grand ayatollah, Muntazari [1922-2009], a former student and the designated successor of Khomeini before dissenting and being rejected in 1989, approved the concept. Moreover, Khomeini was not the most influential ayatollah at the moment of the Islamic revolution. The one who had the most developed network of disciples and former students was the very old Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei (born in 1899), an Iranian Azeri whose great influence reached from Lebanon (the spiritual leader of the Hizbullah, Sheikh Fadallah) ... to Afghanistan .... Al-Khoei did not leave Najaf during the war between Iran and Iraq and always rejected the concept of velayat-e faqih”
Also, Khomeini’s own credentials as an ayatollah were under suspicion (it was alleged that he was only given the rank of ayatollah to prevent his being executed after a failed uprising in June 1963), and the experience of the previous year of upheaval had shown that much of the established Shi’a clergy in Iran was lukewarm to the idea of an Islamic Republic and would have preferred the continuance of the monarchy. The first years of his regime thus saw Khomeini waging an unceasing struggle against his clerical opponents, against whom no method was off the table. Yet, while brute force sufficed to establish hegemonic control, for Khomeini to truly remake the Shi’a religious body in his own image would require a structure that was both institutionalised and that would outlast him.
Origins and Structure
Khomeini first created the Special Clerical Court almost immediately upon seizing power in 1979. Without any legal limits, ad-hoc tribunals set up by his followers began trying and defrocking “fake clerics” – their term for those who dissented. The Special Court was only given a legal foundation in 1987. As Amnesty International explains:
“The Special Court for the Clergy (Dadgah-e vizhe-ye Rouhaniyat) was established on the basis of a letter from Grand Ayatollah Khomeini dated 25 Khordad 1366 (15 June 1987) which appointed Ali Razini as Judge (Hakem-e Shar’) and Hojjatoleslam Ali Fallahian as the Prosecutor for the Special Court for the Clergy. The functions and scope of the new court were described by Hojjatoleslam Fallahian in a press interview published in several newspapers on 7 July 1987. He stated that the court would "investigate crimes such as counter-revolution, corruption, fornication, unlawful acts, accusations which are incompatible with the status of the clergy, and all crimes committed by ‘pseudo-clergy’, both in terms of the ugly acts they commit and the effect they have on the reputation of the clergy". The courts were to be set up in Tehran, Mashhad, Tabriz and Shiraz, and later in other cities as necessary.”
This court’s establishment occurred outside the framework of the Islamic Regime’s own legal system:
“When laws which have been considered in the Islamic Consultative Assembly (Majles), Iran’s parliament, are published in the Official Gazette, the date of approval in the Majles is stated. It is clear from the above, therefore, that this law was never considered by the Majles, an indication of the power the Leader has to pass legislation. This court also operated from June 1987 until October 1990 before becoming established in law, in violation of international standards for fair trial.”
Much like the mediaeval Spanish Inquisitorial Courts, the Special Clerical Court is not a part of Iran’s national court system operated by the Ministry of Justice. It has its own opaque rules, embodied in its internal code, exists outside of public scrutiny, and reports directly to the Supreme Leader.
“All the indications are that this court operates as a separate institution outside the normal judicial framework……… The personnel working for this part of the organization, which of course is not affiliated to the judiciary (emphasis added) but nonetheless constitutes an entity which has been established on the orders of the late Imam…”
The most important item of this code is perhaps Article 43, which allows this Court to defrock clerics and sentence them to prison if their behavior is deemed to “damage the dignity of the clergy.” In practice, this provision can be and is used to silence any cleric who criticizes the regime.
“Defendants before the Special Court for the Clergy are also limited to representation chosen from among "a number of competent clergymen" designated by the court. There also appears to be no requirement for the representative to be a legally qualified lawyer. Furthermore, there are persistent reports that, despite legislation and constitutional guarantees stipulating that all defendants should have the right to a lawyer, in practice people tried before the Special Court for the Clergy are rarely, if ever, granted access to a lawyer of their choice, further violating human rights standards. The Special Court for the Clergy can, in common with other courts in Iran, sentence people to cruel punishments such as flogging, or death.”
Methods of Suppression
In its praxis, the Special Clerical Court’s methods are again consistent with those of the Spanish Inquisition: arrest without due process, closed-door trials, forced disrobing, surveillance, harassment of families, and solitary confinement.
As Part Two will show, the Special Clerical Court’s true purpose quickly became apparent: to purge the clergy of political dissenters.
Unelected Instruments of Control
The Special Clerical Court is not an isolated institution—it is part of an interlocking constellation of mechanisms of totalitarian control rooted in the Islamic Republic’s 1979 constitution and expanded over subsequent years. If the primary aim of the constitution was to guarantee that the Supreme Leader would be able to exert power over all supposedly “elected” organs, later creations of more overlapping and rivalling committees resemble the ancient Chinese Legalist dictum of “organized chaos” - whereby an absolute ruler can maintain his absolute power by dividing his courtiers against each other, promoting first one and then another, scapegoating one when necessary to answer for failures, and keeping the state machinery complex and bloated so that it could never unite against its director. In the Islamic Republic, these bodies include:
Assembly of Experts: Officially the upper half of Iran’s bicameral legislature. Supposedly monitors the Supreme Leader, but functions as a rubber-stamp body. Not once in 35 years has it challenged Khamenei.
Guardian Council: Half appointed by the Supreme Leader, half by the Assembly of Experts, this Council of 12 has veto power over all laws and disqualifies electoral candidates deemed insufficiently loyal to the regime’s ideology. Reformists and independents are routinely barred from office.
Expediency Council: Created in 1988 to resolve legislative deadlocks between the lower half of Parliament (Islamic Majles) and the Assembly of Experts, it now acts as a legislative override in favor of hardliners.
Revolutionary Courts: Established after the revolution to try enemies of the state, these courts routinely hand down death sentences in sham trials. Many operate alongside the SPECIAL CLERICAL COURT in cases involving clergy with political charges.