IT'S ALWAYS SUNNI IN THE VELAYAT:

The origins of the Islamic Republic lie in the Ayatollah Khomeini's treatise "Hokumat-e Eslami," or "Islamic Government" in English. For Khomeini, legitimate government meant the rule of God, as embodied in divine law. The Prophet Muhammad had governed with supreme authority during his lifetime. After him came the 12 imams, whose legitimacy derived from their presumed perfect knowledge of law and justice. In the absence of the imams, this knowledge prevailed within the class of legal scholars and jurists known as "fuqaha" (or "faqih" in the singular). Thus, Khomeini reasoned that the only legitimate government was one led by a jurist. This concept Khomeini called "the guardianship of the jurist," or "velayat-e faqih" in Persian. It is the legal foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The velayat-e faqih is perhaps the slimmest theory of political order that has ever formed the basis of a constitution. It is also utopian, even naïve, in that Khomeini assumed religion would suffice to keep people virtuous and there would be no need for a judiciary, ministry of finance or even a civil service. In this regard, I agree with the historian Ervand Abrahamian that Khomeini is perhaps best seen as a populist radical, not a conservative ideologue.

Khomeini, moreover, made no provision for popular sovereignty. This was rightly seen as a serious deficiency for an Islamic Republic. The late Iranian jurist Mohammad Beheshti and other framers of the constitution drew on the work of the Iraqi Shiite scholar Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and applied a theory of popular sovereignty that they considered acceptable from an Islamic perspective. But this produced an irreconcilable tension. Though Iran ended up with a tripartite constitution with executive, legislative and judicial branches, supreme sovereignty was given both to God, ruling through the supreme jurist, and to the people, who elect the parliament and the president.

From the beginning, in 1979, the new constitution had many critics. The first president of the Islamic Republic, Abolhassan Banisadr, objected on the grounds that the constitution effectively made the supreme jurist an absolute ruler. Others denounced the contradiction between democratic sovereignty and the apparently unlimited power of the supreme jurist. The late Ayatollah Shariatmadari, who favored a quietist approach to politics and was a critic of Khomeini, criticized the clergy's involvement in politics altogether and argued velayat-e faqih would undermine popular sovereignty. Liberal parliamentarians, such as Ezzatollah Sahabi, argued that it would subject the clergy to the sort of criticism normally reserved for politicians, to the ultimate discredit of Islam itself. This argument was prescient, and the tension between popular sovereignty and the supremacy of Islam has not yet been resolved.

At the root of these critiques was the fact that velayat-e faqih is a religious and political aberration, not only in Iran, but in the entire Shiite Islamic tradition. Indeed, the Shiite clergy had never been political in the past. They had always accommodated the civil authority of the day, sometimes despite brutal persecution.

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