It sounds like the days of Ayatollah Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah Yazdi leading Iran's hard-liners are coming to a close. At 83, he appears ready to step aside for a new ayatollah. It has recently been reported by local news agencies that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, plans to appoint Mohammad-Mahdi Mir-Baqeri, 57, as Tehran's Friday prayer leader. Remarkably, Mir-Baqeri has not denied the rumors. The hard-line media is laying the ground for his likely appointment and leadership, a big step for Mir-Baqeri, the current leader of the Academy of Islamic Science.
Seyyed Monir-e-din Hosseini al-Hashemi, a proponent of the Islamic Revolution, established the Academy of Islamic Science in 1979 after the revolution, influenced by his father's thinking on indigenous science versus Western science as well as by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's political views. According to “The Clergy and Modernity with a Focus on Intellectual and Political Currents” (2010), a book by Abdulvahab Farati, Seyyed Monir believed that the Islamic clerical system should be independent of foreigners, bazaar merchants and the political system. Hence, he sought to design a system of clerical independence. In this vein, before the revolution he established an appliance-manufacturing company called Zherf, which eventually failed. He founded the company based on his view that the people should avoid Western technology.
