Target: Iran’s Shia Clergy

Iranian historian Ahmad Kasravi famously said that, unlike Europe, which experienced clerical rule in the Middle Ages, “Iran owes a clerical regime to history,” meaning the country had to go through the perils of clerical rule to be inoculated against it. Forty years after the 1979 revolution and establishment of the Islamic Republic, Iran appears to have paid its debt to history. However, living conditions in Iran are far from ideal, and the Iranian public is now holding the Shia clergy responsible for the regime’s shortcomings. Anti-clericalism manifests in jokes and sarcasm, people throwing clerics’ turbans on the ground – a trend since the killing of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police in September 2022 – and, more recently, attempts on the lives of clerics.

• January 26: Hawzah News, a mouthpiece of the Theological Seminary in Qom, reported an attack against Hojjat al-Islam Ali Rana Rahbarkhah, a professor at the South Tehran branch of the Islamic Azad University. Quoting the brother of the victim, the news agency reported: “Dressed in clerical garb, my brother was standing on the escalator to reach the bus station. Someone attacked him with a knife from behind and dealt him several blows to his waist, head, and eyes. The blows were deep, and he is severely injured.”
• April 29: Colonel Amir Mokhtari, Qom’s police chief, said, as quoted by centrist Khabar Online: “In the wake of a traffic accident involving an automobile and two pedestrians on Shohada Avenue in Qom, the driver came out of the car and used a knife to stab one of the pedestrians, who was wearing a turban.” The driver of the car is in police custody, but his motives are not known, and the victims are hospitalized.
• May 7: Khabar Online reported a 21-year-old man carried out a knife attack against the Friday prayer leader of the village of Ahmad Abad in Markazi province. The province’s police chief called the assailant “mentally disturbed,” and he said the hospitalized cleric’s condition is improving.
• June 9: Reformist Entekhab News identified Hojjat al-Eslam Abouzar Hosseini, the Friday prayer leader at a mosque in the Hashemiyeh neighborhood of Mashhad, as the victim of an attack. The victim was hospitalized, and the assailant was arrested by the police.
• June 13: According to reformist daily Etemad, 41-year-old cleric Jaber Rezaei was attacked on June 12 by a man armed with a knife when exiting the Roudaki metro station in Tehran. The cleric was immediately brought to Imam Khomeini Hospital and survived the attack. An “informed source” told Etemad that the police are investigating the attack in the context of “serial attacks against clerics” in recent months.

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