TEHRAN, Iran — The spiritual father of Iran’s reform movement died Sunday at the age of 87, prompting thousands of his followers to immediately head to the holy city where the dissident cleric is to be buried.
Opposition leaders called for a day of mourning today for Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, whose activists have for months defied a brutal crackdown, a mass trial and abuses in detention to denounce the country’s hard-line clerical rulers.
Montazeri was a key figure in the 1979 Islamic Revolution who later accused his fellow clerical leaders of imposing dictatorship in the name of Islam. His criticism persisted after June’s disputed presidential election ignited a new wave of anti-government protest.
Montazeri’s grandson, Nasser Montazeri, said he died in his sleep overnight. The Web site of Iranian state television quoted doctors as saying Montazeri had suffered from asthma and arteriosclerosis, a disease that thickens and hardens arteries.
Montazeri had once been designated to succeed Ayatollah Khomeini, the late founder of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, as the supreme leader. But the two men clashed a few monthsbefore Khomeini died of cancer in 1989.
Montazeri was one of the leaders of the revolution and he helped draft the nation’s new constitution, which was based on a concept called velayat-e faqih, or rule by Islamic jurists. That concept enshrined a political role for Islamic clerics in the new system.
But a deep ideological rift soon developed with Khomeini. Montazeri envisioned the Islamic experts as advisers to the government who should not have outright control to rule. He was also among those clerics who believed the power of the supreme leader comes from the people, not from God.
In the late 1980s, Montazeri was gradually stripped of his official duties and became the focus of a high-level campaign to undermine his credentials as a leader and theologian.
Police reinforcements were called out into the streets of Qom, the religious center south of the capital where today’s commemorations will take place, an opposition Web site reported, and a prominent government critic who was one of Montazeri’s students was arrested on his way to the city, a human-rights group said.
Authorities also banned foreign journalists from traveling there to cover the events.
In 1997, Montazeri was placed under house arrest in Qom, 80 miles south of Tehran, after saying Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wasn’t qualified to rule.
The penalty was lifted in 2003, but Montazeri remained defiant, saying the freedom that was supposed to follow the 1979 revolution never happened.
Information for this article was contributed by Nasser Karimi and Brian Murphy of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 12/21/2009