The relationship between the state and the clerical establishment in Iran has been unsteady over the last four decades. The state has often criticized the Qom seminary for its lackluster support for the Islamic Revolution and for its lack of involvement in everyday matters of government, as it limits itself to religious issues. Against this backdrop, hard-liners have pushed the Qom seminary to engage more in everyday political and social problems. This effort has been going on since the 1979 revolution, as shown by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s condemnation of politically disengaged clerics as “sanctimonious and illiterate” who “cannot even run a bakery.”

To counter this threat, the Iranian state has tried a range of measures against nonrevolutionary clerics, from prosecution and imprisonment to house arrest and banishment. It has also attempted to address the problem more fundamentally by restructuring the seminaries to make them more dependent on the state, providing them with funding, housing, health care and pensions. Despite all this, the hard-liners are not satisfied, and this periodically causes an uproar between the two sides.

One of the latest attempts to sideline the Qom seminary — and promote the hard-liners' cause — is the Ammar Network. The network is one of several social and cultural initiatives with links to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), sharing a namesake with the Ammar International Popular Film Festival and the Ammar Cultural Base. Those projects aim to promote the hard-liners’ social and cultural agendas. The symbolism of the name Ammar is revealing: It refers to Ammar ibn Yasir, a companion of Prophet Muhammad who was one of the four main advocates of the first Shiite Imam, Ali ibn Abi Talib. The name Ammar is associated with unswerving devotion to the right leader when he is deserted by society.

The Ammar Network is composed of more than 200 hard-line orators organized in more than a dozen thematic groups. It functions as a hub for connecting speakers with event organizers. The preachers are mostly professionals with university degrees, but also include young clerics educated at seminaries in Tehran. In terms of scale, the Ammar Network is not comparable with Qom’s traditional networks, which annually dispatch more than 50,000 preachers to all corners of Iran. But simply comparing numbers is insufficient in this context.