conservatives to limit the power of Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, issued a decree Monday that appeared on its surface to push Rafsanjani into a corner.
The decree, however, may just have been a palliative issued to get the rightwing off Khamenehi’s back.
At issue is control over Azad University, the country’s largest university by far with 1.4 million students spread over 357 campuses and schools. It is believed to be the third largest university in the world.
Rafsanjani was the chief sponsor of the university, helping to create it in 1982. It has been controlled by his friends and family ever since. Since taking office in 2005, President Ahmadi-nejad has tried to break the Rafsanjani hold on the university, which Ahmadi-nejad apparently sees as a major base of Rafsanjani’s influence over government and politics in Iran.
Since last year’s election, the Ahmadi-nejad camp has been even more eager to take over Azad. They say it was used as a base for campaigning by the reformist opposition. And many of the post-election protests came from Azad campuses when the rest of the university community was quiet.
The clash reached new intensity earlier this year when Ahmadi-nejad, acting in his role as chairman of the Supreme Council for the Cultural Revolution, sought to have the government take over Azad University. Rafsanjani countered by making the university a religious endowment or vaqf that cannot be touched by the government.
A massive clash between two major figures of the regime and their followers forced Khamenehi to get involved and restore peace. He issued two decrees July 5 that appeared to be balanced between the factions, but that actually gave Rafsanjani all he wanted.
One decree ordered Rafsan-jani not to convert Azad into an endowment. The other ordered Ahmadi-nejad to call back the charter he had issuing taking over Azad in the name of the state.
While that rebuffed both men, it left the university just where it had long been—firmly in Rafsanjani’s hands.
Many Rafsanjani-haters have been banging on Khamenehi’s door ever since, trying to get the Supreme Leader to skewer Rafsanjani.
On Monday, Khamenehi announced that he had two committees investigate the issue of making Azad a vaqf. In a letter to Rafsanjani and Ahmadi-nejad, Khamenehi wrote, “The endowment has basic and fundamental jurisprudential and legal problems in terms of both the legitimacy of the endowment and the authority of the honorable founding board in making the endowment.… Therefore, the endowment is not appropriate.”
Right-wingers gloated that Rafsanjani had been cut down to size. The Associated Press said the order “paves the way for a hardline takeover of the country’s largest private university, a crushing blow to the nation’s moderates.”
But is isn’t clear that is true. Another paragraph of the Khamenehi letter said flatly that Azad is “private and non-governmental” and told the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution it would have to amend its order naming Azad’s board members.
In other words, the new order from Khamenehi appears to say the same thing as the double decree of July—Rafsanjani cannot make the university into a vaqf and Ahmadi-nejad cannot nationalize it. In sum, the order appears to leave everything just where it has been with Rafsanjani in charge of Azad and Ahmadi-nejad foiled from taking it over.
However, if this is wrong and Rafsanjani has been batted down and defeated, then the order from Khamenehi would be a revolutionary event of immense proportions.
Khamenehi, like Ayatollah Khomeini before him, has always acted much like a referee among squabbling factions, never crushing any faction as long as it remained loyal to the fundamentals of the revolution and the state.
If Khamenehi were now taking sides against Rafsanjani, it would be a political earthquake measuring 10.0. It will take a few weeks for the dust from Kha-menehi’s Monday letter to settle and to see if there really is any change in the political landscape. But the odds are that Rafsanjani will remain where he is.
A core question is what comes next. Ahmadi-nejad cannot nationalize Azad, Khamenehi said. But if the latest letter really changes nothing, the rightwingers will soon figure that out and be back at Khamenehi’s door lobbying hard for something to be done about Raf-sanjani’s power.
Most of the Tehran media gave surprisingly little attention to the decree from the Supreme Leader, though the rightwing Kayhan played it up.
