Why Shia clerics are turning on Iran’s theocracy

THE MURDER of an imam ought to provoke horror. But after a bodybuilder gunned down Mostafa Qassemi, a cleric in the western Iranian city of Hamedan, on April 27th over 100,000 people followed the killer on Instagram. Posts by his followers railed against Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “One less cleric,” women mutter on Tehran’s underground.

Such is the anger at Iran’s ruling clerics, who preside over a shrinking economy. American sanctions on oil exports have sent the currency crashing. Inflation is near 40%; wages are falling in real terms. Basics such as chicken and clothes are becoming luxuries. The IMF forecasts that GDP will contract by 6% this year. The theocrats offer no way out of the crisis. “We’re approaching a turning point,” says Sadegh Haghighat of Mofid University in the Shia holy city of Qom. Clerics there increasingly question the system of velayat-e faqih, or clerical rule.