Dissent
Kadivar is a prominent critic of the Islamic Republic system in Iran, and wrote a detailed criticism of the Ayatollah's Khomeini's theory of Islamic government as rule by Shia clerics, Government by Mandate (see below). As punishment for his criticism, Kadivar was sentenced to eighteen months in prison after being convicted by the Special Clerical Court in 1999, on charges of having spread false information about Iran's "sacred system of the Islamic Republic" and of helping enemies of the Islamic revolution, or as another observer put it, "for commenting on the contradiction between the revolution's aims to serve the people and the subsequent concentration of power in the hands of clerics." He spent virtually all of his imprisonment in solitary confinement and was released from Evin Prison, on July 17, 2000. Kadivar was unrepentant on his release and is currently active within the various reform movements of Iran.
In a 2004 interview, Kadivar told a journalist,
"Every member of society and every member of government is subject to the law. No one can be above it. Everyone has the same rights, yet the root of the faqih is inequality. He assumes he is above it. ... It is time for the supreme leader to be subject to the constitution too. After all, the Supreme Leader doesn't come from God!"
On the issue of clerics in government, he has said:
"Our job as religious people is not politics. ... They are taking Iran backward, not toward the future."
Read more about this topic: Mohsen Kadivar
Famous quotes containing the word dissent:
“We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder “censorship,” we call it “concern for commercial viability.””
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