Clergy and democracy (case study: opinions and thoughts of Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Misbah Yazdi)

Understanding the dimensions of the clergy and the attitude of this institution to the concept of democracy is an important chapter in the political history of Iran, especially after the Islamic Revolution of Iran, in which for the first time political power was given to this religious institution. Accordingly, the main purpose of this article is to answer the question of how the traditional clergy has understood democracy? To answer this question, using David Held's models of democracy, we hypothesized that the traditional clergy, rejecting modernity and the theoretical foundations of democracy based on a kind of petrified, petrified and traditional Islam, had an authoritarian and conservative view of democracy. This article has selected Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi as the representative of the traditionalist clergy with a qualitative method and has tested David Held based on the seven indicators of democracy. Studies have shown that the traditionalist clergy, represented by Ayatollah Mesbah, based on traditional jurisprudence and with an apparent interpretation of Shari'a, has resisted democracy and its components, and as long as this spectrum of clergy is a relation and a dialectical bridge between religious and traditional rationality. If it does not establish democracy with a new rationality, the Shiite world will face the danger of fundamentalism with its spiritual representatives.