Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s 'Fatwa' Against Nukes Has Grown Funky with Age
By
Bobby Ghosh
14 Feb 2021
As red
herrings go, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s “fatwa", or religious
ruling, against nukes has grown funky with age. But that hasn’t stopped
officials in Tehran from airing it when convenient, or kept their counterparts
in Washington from breathing it in.
First
floated in 2003, the fatwa surfaced again this week when Intelligence Minister
Mahmoud Alavi said Iran would develop a nuclear weapon if the US and other
Western nations kept up economic and political pressure on the regime. “The
supreme leader clearly said in his fatwa that producing nuclear weapons is
against religious law and the Islamic Republic will not pursue it and considers
it forbidden," Alavi said on Iranian state TV. “But [if] they push Iran in
that direction, it would not be Iran’s fault but the fault of those who pushed
Iran."
Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei
-----
This is
only the latest of Tehran’s attempts to pressure the Biden administration into
lifting the sanctions imposed by former President Donald Trump. It comes amid
speculation about how long it would take Iran to build a nuclear weapon—a
matter of weeks, six months or up to two years, depending on who’s speculating.
The Biden
administration has, rightly, expressed alarm at the intelligence minister’s
comments. Alavi’s threat represents a significant escalation in Iran’s rhetoric
around its nuclear programme. But he may also have done the US a service by
dispensing with the fiction that the programme was governed by religious
decree.
Until now,
the regime has maintained it could not and would not pursue nukes because
Khamenei has declared them un-Islamic. The supreme leader himself has repeated
that assertion, invoking the Arabic word “Haraam" or religiously
forbidden. In turn, American officials have taken comfort in Khamenei’s fatwa,
arguing that the religious decree demonstrated his real attitude toward nuclear
weapons. It was cited by former President Barack Obama and his Secretary of
State John Kerry in the lead up to the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and the
world powers. Administration officials briefing journalists at the time
suggested the fatwa would allow the government of President Hassan Rouhani to
sell the deal to hard-liners within the regime, who wanted Iran to build
nuclear weapons.
But the
Obama team imbued the fatwa with far more import than it merited. The decree
was always more political than religious—designed to provide cover for whatever
nuclear course was expedient for Tehran at any given time.
Khamenei
only issued the decree after Iran was caught in the act: Its clandestine
nuclear-weapons programme, developed with Russian assistance, was exposed in
2002. The US-led invasion of Iraq the following year brought home to Tehran the
risk of pursuing weapons of mass destruction. Rather than admit he was backing
down in fear, Khamenei used the fatwa as a fig leaf—a post facto justification
for suspending the programme.
Since then,
the fatwa has been deployed by Iranian officials to allay Western suspicions
that the nuclear programme may have been revived.
But not all
religious decrees are carved in stone, and Iran’s supreme leaders have a
history of making 180-degree turns on what is or is not un-Islamic. Sometimes,
this is to the good: The Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, dropped his objections to women’s suffrage after the 1979 revolution.
At other
times, the volte-face leads to tragedy. Khomeini frequently fulminated against
WMDs and especially chemical weapons—the kind that killed thousands of Iranians
during the 1980-1988 war with Iraq. But Iran continued to develop its own
chemical weapons capability, even after it ratified the Chemical Weapons
Convention in 1997. And it helped Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad develop the
chemical weapons he unleashed on his own people.
The
nuclear-weapons fatwa is similarly fungible. If religious considerations didn’t
prevent Iran from seeking a nuclear arsenal before 2003, they do not now and
will not in the future. In this, as in so much else, Iran’s behaviour has been
guided by how far it can go until international pressure becomes unbearable.
Alavi’s
comments suggest the regime is testing out a new rationale for its nuclear
policy: The US and its allies are forcing us to build the Bomb. This is
risible, of course, but no more so than the idea that the Islamic Republic has
until now been restrained by Islam. As it prepares to re-engage Iran in
diplomacy, the Biden team should cast off the Obama administration’s credulity
on this score. It can be grateful to the intelligence minister for dropping the
fatwa fig leaf.
------
Bobby
Ghosh is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist
Original
Headline: Iran has dropped the fig leaf of a fatwa on nuclear weapons
Source: The Livermint
URL: https://newageislam.com/islamic-society/iranian-supreme-leader-ali-khamenei’s/d/124315
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in
America, Muslim Women in
West, Islam Women and
Feminism