MahSoltan Rabani, wife of the late dissident Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Montazeri was laid to rest today under strict security measures in Qom.

Their son Saeed Montazeri told Jaras website: “Security forces and forces in plain clothes created such a security atmosphere that we were basically unable to carry out the special prayers and mourning ceremony.”

He added: “Tens of government vehicles brought the body without allowing any access to it even by her family. They made a small stop at the shrine and quickly removed her form the premises.”

Saeed Montazeri maintained that the actions of the Islamic Republic reveal that “they are even scared of a corpse and its burial.”

He went on to say: “They not only did not allow us to hold the ceremony, they did not even let us bury her in the location that we had in mind.”

Ayatollah Montazeri was one of the most outspoken critics of the Islamic Republic and most recently, he pronounced the current Ahmadinejad government “illegitimate” because of “fraud” in the elections.

Last December, Ayatollah Montazeri was also laid to rest in Qom while hundreds of thousands of election protesters attended his funeral. Go to original article.

GVF — Despite Grand Ayatollah Montazeri’s sons’ announcement that they plan to hold their mother’s funeral procession on Sunday from their house to Qom’s holy shrine, security officials have opposed such a move.

Following the passing away of Gran Ayatollah Montazeri’s wife Ms Rabbani, the late Ayatollah’s website announced that a funeral procession would be held on Sunday at 10am local time. However, Ayatollah Montazeri’s son, Ahmad Montazeri has said that officials from the Iranian intelligence and the Special Clerical Court of Qom have asked the family to confine the funeral to the burial site.

“I told them not to create problems for the regime and yourselves,” Ahmad Montazeri told the BBC. “With the Nowrouz holidays, the funeral will not be so big [anyway], and with your actions, you are creating problems for the regime, the people, and us.”

“Unfortunately they didn’t accept it.”

According to Mr Montazeri, security officials have ordered the family to carry the body of their deceased mother to the cemetery by car and for mourners to pay their respects from a distance of 150 meters.

“This is abnormal, and we have not accepted. We plan to hold the ceremony as we had previously announced,” he said.

Ayatollah Montazeri, who died in December 2009, was considered as the spiritual leader of the Green Movement and his death sparked a new wave of protests in Iran. Authorities prevented mourners from to commemorate his death in many cities, fearing a further spread of demonstrations. Go to original article.

Wife of Ayatollah Hoseinali Montazeri, Hajeih Khanom Rabani passed away today in Qom less than four months after the dissident cleric was laid to rest.

Ayatollah Bayat Zanjani, another progressive Shiite cleric described Mrs. Rabani as a “friend and companion” of the late Muslim leader who “stood by him like a firm and resistant dam.”

Ayatollah Montazeri, who was one of the founders of the Islamic Republic and had been churned away for years by the Islamic Republic establishment for his continued criticism of their policies against dissidents and his disputes regarding the system, was basically under house arrest for years before his death last December at the age of 87.

Ayatollah Montazeri had officially pronounced the tenth presidential elections null and void and denied the legitimacy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s current government.

Hundreds of thousands of people attended his funeral in Qom and commemoration services planned for him in various Iranian cities were met with the resistance of security forces.

The funeral of Ayatollah Montazeri’s wife, Hajieh Khanom Rabani will take place tomorrow in Qom. Go to original article.

If 2010 turns out to be the beginning of the end of the Islamic Republic of Iran, it may well be because of the death of one of the regime’s founders, a man I met three decades ago in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison.

In 1977, I was a 27-year-old rebel arrested for being “detrimental to the security of the nation.” In those days nearly all critics of the shah’s regime were incarcerated under this category. Evin’s L-shaped brick prison blocks were packed with regime opponents, mostly Marxists, leftists, and university students. The facility was also home to a handful of the most famous future leaders of the Islamic Revolution, including future president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and future grand ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri.

It was a relatively good time to be in Evin, as the shah nervously attempted to placate his most fervent enemies by following Jimmy Carter’s human rights policies. Instead of being allowed only an hour of fresh air per day in a small outdoor area, we had free access to the grounds. We could play volleyball around the shaky poles and raggedy string that we had woven into a net. (Rafsanjani, I remember, was an enthusiastic but clumsy volleyballer.)

His legacy is not just a profile in courage, but also a set of pathbreaking ideas in the thousand-year history of Shiism. He was the first Shiite ayatollah, for example, to declare that members of the Bahai faith must enjoy equal rights. He called nuclear weapons not just immoral but against Islam. More than once, he said that all power in an Islamic state must emanate from the people. He showed how the words of a dedicated individual can morph into a mass movement of millions, and how a man once ridiculed and dismissed by the poisoned whispers of his enemies can become the enduring symbol of a democratic movement that is trying to bring Iran into the modern world at last. Go to Foreign Policy.

Saeed Montazeri, son of the leading Iranian dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, talks to SPIEGEL about who is responsible for his father’s recent death, reformists’ chances of success and why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not suited to be president.

Montazeri: The security forces only showed restraint for the first 24 hours after his death. Immediately after the funeral, they began rioting in front of my father’s house and insulting him with chants.

Montazeri: No, the men in uniform just stood by and watched. It was the Basij militias, who had clearly been sent by the regime, who became violent. For the first time in Qom, however, we also heard counter-demonstrators chanting their determined slogans. “Down with the dictator!” they shouted. It can’t go on like this for much longer.

Montazeri: Without a doubt. My father consistently condemned state brutality and stressed that there is a religious right, even a religious obligation, to rise up against rulers who abuse their power. His commitment to this cause took years off his life. Even though the cause of his death was heart failure, the regime is partly responsible for his death, and not only because of their harassment of him. My father was very distressed about what this regime did to people in recent months. Go to Spiegel.

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. Go to CBS News.

Alzahra University, an all female university, mourns Montazeri with anti-regime slogans.

In a SPIEGEL interview, Iranian Ayatollah Mohsen Kadivar, currently a visiting research professor at America’s Duke University, discusses the recent death of opposition leader Hossein Ali Montazeri, the frustrations Iranians have with their regime and the future of the green movement and the prospect of an escalation.

Kadivar: You are right that the Shiite theocracy in its present form has failed — a fact that few have expressed as clearly as my teacher in the last few months. Incidentally, when Grand Ayatollah Montazeri had his falling out with Khomeini, three months before the supreme religious leader’s death in 1989, he said: This state is so different from the one we dreamed of and worked to create. Still, it is not Islam which has failed, but rather a particular interpretation of Islam. IND:  It is the mixture of state with any form of Islam that has failed.  The Iranian people are not making these sacrifices to now experiment with mixing Mr. Kadivar’s interpretation of Islam with the state and possibly tolerate another 30 years of tyranny. I also want to express that there hasn’t been a revolution in Iran yet. The opposition is becoming increasingly clear in the formulation of its objectives and more daring. Still, we need to remain patient. I do not know when, exactly, but I am convinced that the regime will collapse. Go to Spiegel.

What concerned the authorities was that his criticisms could influence hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom may be inside the political machinery of the Islamic Republic, such as the Revolutionary Guards or the Bassij militia.

However, Montazeri died as an enemy of the regime he had helped to create. He also died as the main designer of Iran’s leadership structure, endowing all power to the supreme leader. And although he later said he had made a mistake, the opposition knows that it is this powerful post that has blocked reform over the past 30 years.

So, when hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators come out to mourn Ayatollah Montazeri, they do not necessarily mourn the loss of a leader for their particular movement but the loss of a powerful critic of the regime. They are well aware that Montazeri – even though highly respected – belongs to a page in the history of Iran that they are keen to turn. “Not an Islamic Republic but an Iranian Republic is what we want,” a new slogan said. Go to Guardian.

Mourners chanting anti-regime slogans get attacked by basiji.

AFP: Iranian police waded into a crowd of mourners at a memorial service for dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri in Isfahan Wednesday, beating women and children and firing tear gas, an opposition website reported.  The mourners were shouting slogans in support of Iran’s opposition Green Movement and several were arrested, Rahesabz.net reported.  “This morning before the ceremony began hundreds of police, security forces and plainclothes gathered around the mosque which led to severe clashes with people,” it said.  Police fired tear gas at people to disperse them, the website said.  “Security forces are beating people including women and children with batons, chains and stones,” it said.  The memorial in Isfahan’s Seyed mosque was to be led by prominent reformist cleric Ayatollah Jalaledin Taheri.

AP: More than 50 people were arrested Wednesday in Isfahan, including pro-opposition cleric Masoud Adib, who was expected to address the gathering at the mosque, the Salaamnews and Parlemannews Web sites said.

Mourners poured out in thousands into the streets leading to the mosque, although anti-riot police and plainclothes pro-government Basij militiamen had blocked the neighborhood, the Web sites said.

Parlemannews reported that Basij beat people, including women, and used tear gas and pepper spray to disperse the crowds. It said troops also surrounded the home of Ayatollah Ayatollah Jalaleddin Taheri, a senior reformist cleric who organized the memorial.

Farid Salavati, an Isfahan resident who tried to attend the memorial, said anti-riot police and militiamen surrounded the Seyed Mosque since early morning.

“They didn’t allow anybody to enter the mosque,” Salavati told The Associated Press. “Tens of thousands gathered outside for the memorial but were savagely attacked by security forces and the Basijis.”

Salavati said baton-wielding riot police clubbed people on the head and shoulders, and kicked men and women alike, injuring dozens. He said sporadic clashes were still going on by mid-day Wednesday. The memorial did not take place, he said.

“I saw at least two people with blood pouring down their face after being beaten by the Basijis,” Salavati added.

The reports could not be independently confirmed. The authorities have banned foreign media from covering gatherings in any way connected to the opposition movement.

Taheri, the cleric who organized the service, was quoted by the Web sites as saying that “treating people this way at a memorial service is deplorable.”

Taheri was the chief Friday prayer leader in Isfahan until he resigned in 2002 in protest against the establishment, which he said was paralyzing the country in the name of religion to maintain its hold on power.

Reuters: Referring to the city where Montazeri was born, Jaras said: “Sporadic clashes started from Tuesday night in Najafabad and still continued. The situation is tense in the city. People are chanting anti-government slogans.”

In nearby Isfahan, Jaras said plainclothes security agents surrounded the house of a leading pro-reform cleric, Ayatollah Jalaleddin Taheri.

BBC: Reformists say there has also been unrest in the ayatollah’s home city of Najafabad over the past two days.

BBC Tehran correspondent Jon Leyne says the confrontations are all part of a build-up to a big series of demonstrations expected at the weekend.

RFE: “What happened today in Isfahan is unprecedented regarding the turnout of the people and also the slogans that people chanted,” said the eyewitness who requested anonymity. “We haven’t had anything similar to this in previous gatherings.”

Guardian: Iran’s smouldering political unrest reignited today when pro-reform demonstrators mourning the death of a dissident cleric clashed with security forces in at least two cities.

Times UK: It said that around 1,000 members of Basij Islamic militia attacked Sanei’s offices in Qom on Monday night, breaking windows and beating up his staff. The attack followed speculation that Montazeri’s followers could adopt Grand Ayatollah Sanei as their new “source of emulation”.

LA Times: In the capital, 27 out of 30 members of the Academy of Arts have threatened to step down following the dismissal of Mousavi, who headed the school and cultural center since its 1998 founding and designed the building housing it.  President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has instead appointed loyalists from his inner circle to leadership posts at the academy.

The huge, nonviolent crowds, and their chants (”Dictator, this is your last message: The people of Iran are rising!”), proved that there is still plenty of life in the popular movement that Mr. Khamenei and his Revolutionary Guards provoked by engineering Mr. Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent reelection in June. Given the horrific extent of the repression against that movement, its continued energy is nothing short of inspiring.

But Mr. Montazeri had also linked the democratization of Iran to its peaceful coexistence with the West. Before his death, he apologized for the 1979 Iranian seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and — undoubtedly most irritating to Mr. Khamenei — opposed the regime’s nuclear ambitions.

The most momentous international event of 2009 was the uprising in Iran, and though the regime’s collapse is not imminent, it is hardly unthinkable. President Obama is prudent to pursue a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But in doing so, he must not diminish the prospect that Iran’s people might ultimately deliver both themselves and the world from the menace. Go to Washington Post.

A Rooz Online reporter on site reports that the number of mourners in the beginning of the ceremony was so large that all the streets leading to ayatollah Montazeri’s house were blocked off.

Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karoubi, Qom’s Friday prayer leader ayatollah Amini, Isfahan’s former Friday prayer leader ayatollah Taheri, the former head of Iran’s judiciary Mahmoud Hashemi Shahrudi, ayatollah Khomeini’s grandson Ali Khomeini, the Speaker of the sixth Majlis Mohammad Reza Khatami, former vice-president Abdollah Nouri, and ayatollah’s Khamenei’s reformist brother Hadi Khamenei, were among the prominent personalities who came to the funeral ceremony while Seyed Mohammad Khatami and Hashemi Rafsanjani had sent in their representatives. Go to Rooz Online.

Ironically, even though Montazeri will be held in high regard by religious and conservative segments of Iranian society, many in the Iranian opposition do not hold any cleric in high esteem. Mullahs may be hailed when they come out against the government crackdown, but they can hardly be seen as leaders capable of uniting Iranian society under one flag after 30 years of a failed theocracy. In that sense, Ayatollah Montazeri was a revered figurehead to be used to attack the clerical establishment, but not one to lead it. That argument may apply to some extent to other clerics and ex-officials, including Mousavi. These figures are favored by the educated, secular elite only because they share a common goal: ousting Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. But until the time comes when the opposition movement is capable of producing leaders of its own, religious figures and ex-officials, dead or alive, are a good base to build upon. Go to Tehran Bureau.

The funeral of a prominent dissident cleric in the holy Iranian city of Qum turned into a huge and furious antigovernment rally on Monday, raising the possibility that the cleric’s death could serve as a catalyst for an opposition movement that has been locked in a stalemate with the authorities.

As mourners carried the body of the cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, tens of thousands of his supporters surged through the streets of Qum, chanting denunciations of the leadership in Tehran that would have been unthinkable only months ago: “Our shame, our shame, our idiot leader!” and “Dictator, this is your last message: The people of Iran are rising!”

“His death has become a pretext for the movement to expand,” said Fatimeh Haghighhatjoo, a former member of Iran’s Parliament who is now a visiting scholar at Boston University. “He was the only cleric who gave up power and supported human rights, the characteristic that earned him respect from various political factions.” Go to NY Times.