On Jan. 12, Seyed Hasan Aghamirii, a popular Iranian cleric, posted on his Instagram account that he had been sentenced to two years in prison and defrocked. The latter is an unusual and rather modern form of punishment in the world of Shiite Islam that is exclusive to the Islamic Republic of Iran. “After 10, 15 years of arrests and taking over my work space and solitary confinement … eventually they issued their verdict: two years in prison, which they kindly reduced to a five-year suspended sentence and permanent defrocking,” Aghamirii posted on his Instagram account.

The case was not handled by a regular court, but by the Special Court of Clergy, a court independent of Iran’s judiciary, which traces its origins to 1980s post-revolutionary Iran. The founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran and former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, created the inspiration for a special court for clerics during a speech in 1979. “Not acting in accordance with Islam and betrayal of Islam from a turbaned person is worse than it being from someone who is not turbaned,” Khomeini said. His reasoning was that clerics under the previous government, who were using the clergy for personal power, were destroying the reputation of the clergy. “God knows that if there is a special court it is not for [our] defense,” he said. “It is because a handful of corrupt people want to destroy a respectable people [clerics].”

While active before that in various forms, the Special Court of Clergy (SCC) was formally established in 1987. It operates under the powers of the supreme leader, separately from the regular judiciary. The head of the SCC is Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, who also doubles as the prosecutor general of Iran. The head prosecutor of the SCC is Ebrahim Raisi, who is the Custodian of the Astan Quds Razavi, a powerful and wealthy foundation that manages the Imam Reza shrine in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad. Raisi is also rumored to be set to replace current head of the judiciary, Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani. 

The aim of the court, at least originally, in the words of Khomeini, was to weed out “corrupt clerics.” Yet, in practice, what it has done is far more obscure. Dissident cleric Mohsen Kadivar told Al-Monitor that “we don’t exactly know” what kinds of cases the SCC typically prosecutes. Kadivar, who now teaches at Duke University, has had his own run-ins with the SCC in Iran. The cases “are not published. Are they the same [punishment]? We don’t know,” he said. One thing is certain, according to Kadivar: “It is a tool for suppressing political clerics.” By “political” he means those who do not toe the government line — a government comprised of clerics who operate under a form of rule called the Guardianship of the Jurist, or velayat-e faqih.