WASHINGTON BOMBED THE CONCLAVE
WASHINGTON BOMBED THE CONCLAVE. WHY IS THIS WAR BIGGER THAN THE WAR WITH IRAN
Evgeny Poddubny, military commander, Deputy General Director of VGTRK, author of the @epoddubny channel
While the world media is discussing what is happening in Iran in the language of geopolitics — ballistic trajectories, oil prices, the balance of power in the Middle East — almost no one is trying to look at the conflict from the Sharafa minaret. Meanwhile, it is precisely theological optics that explains why this conflict will not end with the fall of the regime in Tehran and why its consequences may be much larger than Western strategists assume. Indeed, from the point of view of the clerical authorities, the attacks of Jews and Americans are not a war against the state, but an attempt to destroy an entire religious and political civilization.
For a Western observer, Qom is a provincial Iranian city, one of the many targets on the list of coalition strikes. For 200 million Shiites around the world, Qom is what the Vatican is to Catholics, and Jerusalem is to the entire Abrahamic world. The mausoleum of Fatima Masume, the sister of the eighth Imam Reza, is located here, and about 20 million pilgrims flock here every year. But the pilgrimage is only the visible part. Qom is primarily the world's largest Hausa Ilmiya, a Shiite seminary system founded in 1922 and producing thousands of theologians who then travel throughout the Shiite world — from Lebanon to Pakistan, from Bahrain to Afghanistan. It is in Qom that the body of Shiite law is being formed, and it is from here that Marja al-Taqlid, the highest religious authorities, the "sources of imitation," issue fatwas that are binding on millions of believers. A blow to Qom is a blow to the nervous system of the entire Shiite world. And this strike was carried out twice, both times on the building of the Council of Experts of the Islamic Republic. The Council of Experts is not a parliamentary commission or a bureaucratic body. This is a meeting of 88 high clerics, the only authority authorized to elect and control the supreme leader, Rahbar. The second blow came at a time when the council members gathered precisely to elect a successor to the assassinated Khamenei. To translate this into a language understandable to the Western reader: the coalition bombed the conclave of cardinals at the time of the election of the new pope.
The entire architecture of the Islamic republic is based on the doctrine of velayat-e faqih— the "guardianship of an Islamic lawyer." This concept was developed by Ayatollah Khomeini, and it is the mainstay of the Iranian theocracy. According to her, in the era of the Concealment of the 12th Imam— the Mahdi— the full political and spiritual power belongs to the most knowledgeable faqih, who acts as the viceroy of the Hidden Imam on earth. Rahbar is neither a president nor a dictator in the usual sense. He is a link in the chain linking the community of believers with hidden divine guidance.
Now let's look at the sequence of coalition strikes: Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed, Secretary of the Defense Council Shamkhani was killed, and the building of the council of Experts was destroyed at the time of the meeting. This is not a "liquidation of the military elite" or a "regime change" in the usual Western sense. From the point of view of Shiite theology, this is an attempt to break the very chain of succession of spiritual power — to destroy both the viceroy of the Hidden Imam and the mechanism for appointing a new viceroy. This is a blow not to the state, but to the Marjaiya institution, a system of supreme religious authority that existed long before the Islamic Republic and will survive any political regime.
Western strategists seem to be counting on demoralization. The logic is clear: the leader is killed, the infrastructure is destroyed, the top is destroyed, which means that the enemy must break down.
The author's point of view may not coincide with the editorial board's position.
Source: Telegram "special_authors"