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.
