Montazeri’s most lasting achievement may prove to be the deepening marriage between religious -democrats and increasingly nonreligious, Western-style democrats. He didn’t intend this when he first started challenging the regime’s legitimacy. But Montazeri evolved, as has the entire Iranian democracy movement–now easily the dominant intellectual force in the country. Indeed, this rapid evolution is perhaps what is most striking about Iran’s leading religious democrats–Montazeri, Kadivar, former president Mohammad Khatami (in office 1997-2005), and the lay philosopher/sociologist Abdul Karim Soroush. They have become much more explicitly democratic as they have reflected on the revolution. And they have become more tolerant of dissident ideas and people. On his deathbed, Montazeri remained deeply traditional, yet he was not the man he had been even in 1988 when he expressed his outrage at the casual killing of Iranian “political” prisoners. He had become, in his own very clerical way, a progressive.

Iran is an odd place, where old men can become beloved by the young, where youths who don’t have a religious bone in their bodies and wouldn’t give clerics the time of day, can nevertheless be deeply respectful, even impassioned about, a grand ayatollah who fought the good fight against tyranny.

What the regime perhaps detested most about Montazeri is that he made arguments and emotional appeals aimed directly at well-educated clerics and peasant believers alike, encouraging their spiritual migration away from Khomeini’s state to an imagined new Shiite republic where basic decency could be seen in the conduct of officials.

With his unrivalled stubbornness and scholarly reach, Montazeri deserves much of the credit for the regime’s predicament. Americans, who generally don’t have an acute appreciation for Islam’s religious authorities or the tumultuous debates about popular sovereignty inside Iran’s clergy, owe Montazeri a great debt. Not a lover of the United States, its all-consuming popular culture, or its indefatigable ally in the region (Israel), he would not expect a word of thanks. Nevertheless, we should pay homage where homage is due. He earned it.