Daily Report for Monday, June 20, 2016
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Report for
Monday,
June 20, 2016 Khordad 31, 1395
Highlights, Page 2
News Briefs, Page 3
Other Stories, Page 3
Top secret committee plans successor for Supreme Leader, Page 5
Muslims should choose between radicalism and democratization, Page 9
Daily Report for Monday, June 20, 2016
2 Highlights
Key officials in Iran have put forth two potential successors for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — but the names of the selected candidates remain top secret. (See Page 5)
In a recent interview with Etemad reformist newspaper, Davoud Feyrahi, a professor of political sciences at the University of Tehran, discussed the Tunisian version of Muslim Brotherhood, the Ennahda Party. (See Page 9)
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News Briefs
* Around 48% of people in Iran between the ages 15 and 64 have a BMI (Body Mass Index) over 25, which means roughly a little less than half of the country’s adolescent and adult population is overweight or obese.
* Jomhouri Islami newspaper reports that Mashhad’s Friday prayers’ sermonizer Ahmad Allamolhoda warned about the
“fourth wave” of threats against Iran by the United States. “In the fourth phase of threat, they want to ‘mutate’
revolutionaries,” he said. He reminded the audience that Washington pursues the overthrow of the Islamic Republic thirty- seven years after it lost the country to revolutionaries. “The US is seeking to mutate revolutionaries particularly in influential institutions,” he added. Friday prayer leaders of each city are Supreme Leader’s representatives to the cities where they preach.
* Ebtekar newspaper reports that 90% of the notorious abusers of women in Tehran come from the provinces.
* Ebtekar newspaper reports that 10 people die due every day to poisoning and difficulties due to drugs, and also Iran suffers 100,000 billion rials of damages each year from this area.
* Etemad reformist newspaper reports that Tehran Governorate has issued a decree declaring that mayors of cities with population of less than 500,000 should provide part of expenses of the families who are dealing with drug addictions.
* Aftab News website reports that police have said that they have arrested 167 thugs and 421 individuals accused of insulting
‘honors’ of women in Tehran city in the past three months.
Other stories
Changes at the Foreign Ministry
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in a decree appointed Bahram Qassemi as new spokesman, head of public diplomacy and head of the media center of the ministry.
Qassemi previously served as Iran’s ambassador to Ireland, Italy and Spain, was head of the second bureau on political department, head of the first bureau of commonwealth states, director general for the Western Europe department and deputy head of the Strategic Research Centre for International Studies.
Hossein Jaberi Ansari became new Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab-African Affairs.
Former Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab-African Affairs Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in a decree was promoted to the advisor to Foreign Minister Zarif.
Bombing plots ‘foiled’
Intelligence Ministry said it has foiled a number of bombing and terrorist attack plots across the country.
According to state-owned Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), the ministry said on Monday that the operation was one of the biggest of the kind against Takfiri terrorists in Tehran and some other provinces.
It said the members of the Takfiri groups which aimed to plant bombs in Iran especially during the holy fasting days of Ramadan were arrested, bombs were detonated and their equipment were also seized.
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It said further information in this regard will be provided after more investigations and interrogation of the culprits.
Etemad reformist newspaper reports that Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani says authorities have apprehended several people suspected of planning bomb attacks in the capital Tehran.
He said that the arrested individuals were arrested in the past few days and were planning attacks during the month of Ramadan.
Iranian-designed robots to build structures in a day
A team led by Iranian professor Behrokh Khoshnevis is working on developing robots that will be able to construct buildings in a single day.
Behrokh Khoshnevis, an Iranian professor at USC Viterbi School of Engineering in California, US, told Mehr that he has been working on the Selective Separation Sintering (SSS) process for 20 years so that he can build structures in an automated way using 3-D printing.
According to him, SSS is the first process which will be able to work in zero gravity.
Compared to expensive technologies like lasers, SSS provides more speed, accuracy and independence and has high potential for space and interplanetary use, he added.
Khoshnevis, a two-time NASA competition winner, added that his project has been followed up by NASA to be implemented on other planets as well.
Kashani defends Shia in Bahrain and Pakistan
State-owned newspaper Iran reports that Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani criticized the Bahraini government’s
“crackdown” on Shia clerics and urged the Pakistani government to protect Shia civilians during his sermon on June 16.
He accused Bahrain of closing Shia mosques and torturing clerics and called for Muslims worldwide to “sympathize with the oppressed Muslims of Bahrain.”
Emami Kashani added that “they beat and kill Shias in Pakistan… Even Christian scholars support them, but the government is silent.”
Emami Kashani also called for Iranian youth to recognize the “magnitude” of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and stated, “Opinions regarding the Revolution other than his are wrong.”
Emami Kashani added that Ayatollah Khamenei is “the only one who can analyze what the Islamic Revolution is, what greatness it has, how it should be protected, how one must interact with the world, and what the enemies’ deceit is.”
Daily Report for Monday, June 20, 2016
5 Top secret committee plans
successor for Supreme Leader
IranWire opposition news website: Key officials in Iran have put forth two potential successors for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — but the names of the selected candidates remain top secret.
Former president and current chairman of the Expediency Council Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani announced that an Assembly of Experts secret committee had selected the two candidates on June 18. Because of the classified nature of the committee, their names will not be made public. Speaking to the newspaper Ghanoon, Rafsanjani said the decision had been reached after consultation with hundreds of people. He emphasized that the candidates had been selected as part of a contingency plan.
The work of the longstanding committee responsible for the plans is so secret that some of the Assembly’s most prominent figures do not know its inner workings. In summer 2015, Ali Shafiei, Khuzestan’s representative to the governing body, told Ghanoon that one of the Assembly’s key figures had said not even the chairman of the body was informed of its discussions. Citing Rafsanjani’s time as chairman of the Assembly, from July 2007 to March 2011, Shafiei said, “No matter how many times he insisted that he was the chairman of the Assembly of Experts and he must be told, they said that it was a secret, to be kept even from him.”
Rafsanjani, who currently sits on the Assembly as well as chairing the Expediency Council, emphasized that it was not his intention to create a leadership council to succeed the Supreme Leader — in contrast with previous statements he has made about the future of Iran’s governance. The recent comments were an attempt to defend himself against hardliners, who have attacked him for his ideas, and who have reiterated the importance of the Islamic Republic being led by a single supreme leader.
Given what Ali Shafiei said about Rafsanjani’s time as Assembly Leader, there is good reason to believe that Rafsanjani is not one of the two candidates to have been selected by the secret committee.
The Assembly of Experts’ key responsibility is the selection of the next leader. This body consists of six permanent committees. Each committee has 11 sitting members.
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The Assembly elects committee members to serve for two years. One of the six committees is called the 107-109 Committee, referring to articles 107 and 109 of the constitution of the Islamic Republic. The articles lay out the qualifications for the Supreme Leader.
The full Assembly of Experts meets rarely, so it has passed bylaws to create committees. These groups are tasked with carrying out the Assembly’s duties between meetings. In an interview given in summer 1998, Assembly member Ebrahim Amini said that the job of the 107-109 Committee was to keep the Assembly prepared for its key duties. “In the early years after the Assembly of Experts was formed, this committee met every fortnight,” he said. “Then things slowed down and it met only when there was a need, sometimes once a month, sometimes once every 15 days and perhaps once a week.”
Around the same time, Hasan Taheri Khoramabadi, another member of the Assembly, said that the committee was responsible for reviewing “the qualifications of all possible candidates for the leadership” and that it provided the secretariat with a
“confidential report” on the matter. “If the secretariat finds it necessary it can give the report to the Assembly members,” he said.
But contrary to Khoramabadi’s statement and according to a clause in Article 50 of the Assembly’s bylaws, any report by the 107-109 Committee is top secret. The full Assembly must approve it before the report is made accessible to any individual or group. The only exception to this is the supreme leader.
A more secret subcommittee
Another clause in Article 50 provides for a three-member special subcommittee, which is selected by the full committee from among its members. This group evaluates the qualifications of possible candidates and submits its reports to the chairman of the committee, who can submit it to the Assembly “at the appropriate time.”
The fact that such a subcommittee even exists was once also top secret. But, in the summer of 2006, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and other Assembly members revealed its existence. “A special group has been formed and of course it is top secret,”
Rafsanjani said in an interview. “They do not submit their reports to the
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Assembly…when necessary they submit their report to the committee’s governing board.”
But, according to Morteza Eghtedaei, a member of the Assembly, the report can only be submitted to the supreme leader. “The three members are elected by members of the 107-109 Committee in a secret ballot,” he said in an interview, also in summer 2006. “They are elected for two years but because their work is secret their term is usually renewed for another two years. They pledge not to talk to anybody, except among themselves and to God. Usually, the members do not change. They meet every week and often travel to various towns and districts, in an unofficial manner and quietly, to investigate and research. Their documents are classified and top secret.
This three-member subcommittee does not submit its findings and reports even to other members of the committee. Their documents are kept at the secretariat of the Assembly of Experts as classified documents and even the governing board has no access to them. Only the supreme leader can see them if he wants to, although up to now he has not asked for them.”
Secret evaluation of candidates
According to Eghtedaei, the subcommittee has its own lengthy bylaws. They include procedures to gather information about the qualifications of possible candidates by consulting with members of the clergy, and by reviewing candidates’ religious treatises and how they have interpreted sharia law. They also gather information about how these candidates argue on points of Islamic law, including by looking at their association with other key political and clerical figures, and at who they meet with privately in their own homes. They also take the lifestyles of the candidates into consideration, ensuring they live simply and appropriately. This and other information is gathered as a way of judging the potential candidate’s faith and piety — without the candidate being aware of such a process.
The subcommittee’s checklist includes: “knowledge, courage, quality of leadership, piety, political vision, positions taken in specific situations, and his stated views about the regime, as well as on domestic and foreign policies.”
Ahmad Jannati, the current chairman of the Assembly of Experts, confirmed the subcommittee existed. “Let’s say there are 10 individuals who are qualified,” he said.
The committee ranks and classifies them. Of course their discussions remain secret and even the members of the Assembly of Experts know nothing about them.”
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In 2014, Yousef Tabatabai, a member of the Assembly from Isfahan, provided more information about the process the committee follows. “Sometimes a couple of individuals are removed from the list of people under consideration,” he said. “For example, if they commit a political act deemed to be wrong, and it becomes clear that they are no good for the job.”
The members of the secret committee have never been named, and it unclear how often they meet. In late summer 2015, Ghorban Ali Dorri-Najafabadi, a member of the Assembly’s directorate, reported that the three-person 107-109 Committee had met nine times since 2006. In the newly formed Assembly of Experts, the committee members have recently been reinstated for another four years.
But whether or not the subcommittee’s meetings play an important role in choosing the next supreme leader remains unclear.
In his memoirs, influential cleric Mohammad Momen wrote that such a committee existed even before Ali Khamenei was chosen as the supreme leader. According to him, although the committee met in the afternoon of June 3, 1989, one day before the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, it did not choose the supreme leader’s successor on that day. This could be true for the current leader, but the fact remains that a secret committee does meet to discuss the matter — and very few figures at the very top of Iran’s political system know anything about the people involved, or the details of what they discuss and plan for the future of the country.
Daily Report for Monday, June 20, 2016
9 Muslim world should choose between
radicalism and democratization
In a recent interview with Etemad reformist newspaper, Davoud Feyrahi, a professor of political sciences at the University of Tehran, discussed the Tunisian version of Muslim Brotherhood, the Ennahda Party.
In his view, it is forming a powerful democratic system based on religious principles, while keeping its religious and political activities separate from one another.
This is the first part of the interview.
With the advent of the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa, many hoped for the beginning of democratization in such countries as Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and Bahrain. The Muslim Brotherhood, as an Islamist group and a pioneer in Sunni democratic beliefs, made great efforts to form a powerful movement in a bid to take the democratic leadership of these countries. However, the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt did not last longer than a year, and the group’s senior member Mohammed Morsi, the President of Egypt, was overthrown.
In Libya, domestic conflicts escalated so much that the country is still in critical and unstable condition after five years of crisis. Syria is gripped by a widespread civil war and an ongoing fight against ISIS terrorists, and Bahrain is still under the rule of a dictator. The only country that managed to succeed in democratization was Tunisia.
The Ennahda Movement of Tunisia, headed by Muslim Brotherhood affiliate Rached Ghannouchi, came to power after the Arab Spring and led the country for three years, and managed to guide Tunisia towards democratization by developing the country’s Constitution. In spite of various challenges, the Movement and Ghannouchi finally ceded power in a democratic way, which led Ennahda to be considered as an exception and as a role model in the Muslim world.
The 10th congress of the Ennahda party was held a few weeks ago. During the congress, Ghannouchi was re-elected as party leader; however, now in 2016, five years after the Arab Spring in Tunisia, he announced the choice of a different path for Ennahda. He chose Tunisia over the goals of the Muslim Brotherhood, and showed
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that Ennahda is not a party for the Arab world and Muslim Brotherhood; rather, it is a civil party for Tunisia alone. Back in April, he even wrote a letter to the Muslim Brotherhood Assembly in Istanbul, distancing himself from the central core of the Brotherhood.
Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of the Ennahda Party, who was re-elected in the Party’s 10th Congress a few weeks ago, announced that he was going to separate the Party’s socio-political and religious activities, and work in two distinct phases. Do you think this is a new move or something which continues Ennahda’s previous actions?
Ghannouchi’s remarks were reported in the media in slightly different ways. Actually, no considerable change has been made in Ghannouchi’s words; he had noted that his party will have three phases of activities: The first step was to search for identity before the overthrow of Bin Ali and the popular revolution. The second step was to build a consensus and achieve public demand for the toppling of the dictatorship, as well as the transition of power to democratic bodies. And the last step was democratic activities inside Tunisia.
He further made a very important point, noting that Ennahda is a political, national, and democratic party inspired by Islamic principles. He also announced that, thereafter, the party will only carry out its political duties, and not the religious ones.
The meaning of these remarks should be deeply investigated because they involve very important points.
In an interview made before the Ennahda Congress, he underlined that there was no room for activity after the Arab Spring. Isn’t that a change in his viewpoint compared with the past?
I don’t see any tangible change in his behaviour, because certain developments have occurred inside the Muslim Brotherhood movements, and hence the remarks made by Ghannouchi. Muslim Brotherhood movements have a number of main features: They work in different countries, but they always have supranational ideas and propagate unity among the Muslim world. It is also mentioned in Ennahda’s Constitution that the Movement is first looking for unity of African Arab states, then the entire Arab world, and finally the entire Muslim world. These are the basic ideas of Tunisia’s Ennahda Party.
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Muslim Brotherhood movements were national movements with supranational attitudes, and this was the first feature of the Brotherhood. Their second feature was that they operated beyond the scope of a party; they were considered a society rather than a party. Therefore, during and after the Arab Spring, when they talked about democracy, they faced the challenge of how it is possible to work at the national level and at the same time maintain supranational activities and religious invitations.
In Egypt, we saw how the Brotherhood maintained their framework and, as part of their political activities, once again formed a party, the Freedom and Justice Party, under the leadership of Mohamed Morsi.
Since the Brotherhood does not have a global network, it is traditionally said that Egypt’s Brotherhood is the mother of all Muslim Brotherhood movements. However, this was not the case in Tunisia. Ghannouchi was the one in Tunisia who could decide whether the Movement would operate as a society or a party. He stressed that they would operate as a Muslim political party, not as a Brotherhood movement anymore.
This was what Ghannouchi said in his remarks.
The same thing can be interpreted from the stances held by Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi. Essebsi said in the tenth Congress that Ennahda is an Islamic national democratic party, and is looking for a national government for the Muslim people of Tunisia. This was the idea proposed by Essebsi in his remarks.
That is why Ghannouchi’s words do not imply a change towards secularism. He never wants to secularize the Party. The entire Congress had a religious tone; even Essebsi as the President and leader of the Nidaa Tounes Party used religious words in his speech.
Now Ennahda should choose between its domestic and international activities and also between religious invitations and political activities. It seems to have already chosen domestic and political activities. It means that Ennahda is no longer a society inside the Brotherhood network; it is rather a national party in Tunisia with its own political base.
As Ghannouchi said, he intends to turn his party into a role model in the Muslim world. Can Ennahda become a role model?
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In the critical conditions of the Arab world, Tunisia is an exception. Not only did it manage to establish stability, it also created democracy. Before the Tunisian Revolution, stability was always accompanied by dictatorship; whenever people moved towards democracy, society became chaotic, and the transition was disrupted.
Tunisia, however, did not descend into domestic chaos in its transition to democracy;
it rather moved towards a coalition democracy. The coalition was made between Islamists and non-Islamists, and this put an end to the existing authoritarianism.
In fact, political Islam seeks to Islamize the government, but Ghannouchi wants a civil government. A civil government is not an extremely religious or extremely non- religious government; it is rather a government where religious values are maintained in spite of the civil agreement.
This is similar to what existed in Turkey until a couple of years ago. They looked for a democratic version of a religion-government relationship. This is what Ennahda Party wants now. [Remarks from] the sidelines of Ennahda’s 10th Congress indicated that the Party members are also satisfied with such conditions. However, it is not clear yet whether the model is feasible in all countries or not. It is not clear whether the Brotherhood is capable of entering the political phase in different countries. The question is whether the Brotherhood will change its nature by entering such a phase.
That is not clear yet, either. These are the doubts and paradoxes in modern Sunni and Brotherhood thoughts.
Through his words, Ghannouchi seeks to theorize what he has done practically. They have a democratic interpretation of Islam and believe that Islam as a religion is one thing, and the Muslim society as a political society is another thing, with its own special characteristics and a different logic. Ennahda is not only trying to maintain its religious base, but also wants to be active in politics and accept the logic of democracy.
