We had important meetings and gatherings in Mashhad. Many university students and doctors participated in my lectures on the interpretation of the Quran. I wanted to go to Tehran with one of my young friends who was a knowledgeable university graduate. We were walking at the train station, waiting for the train, when a few young individuals—who might have had no education at all, as that day's European styles that had just become fashionable in Iran—mocked me in a way that embarrassed my friend. Such mocking had started to spread and was no longer only specific to a single class of the society.
This behavior was spread so that clerics would lose popularity. Because, by then [the enemy] knew the role of clerics and the role of following clerics. During the time of Modarres, and late Kashani, and before that during the time of the constitutional revolution, [when] Mirza Shirazi [issued a fatwa forbidding tobacco], they had known the significant role of clerics and had learned they had to reduce the popularity of this group among the people. They spent lots of money and used any possible means to achieve their goal.
Despite the enemies’ desires at that time, the clergy—by means of two virtues: knowledge and piety—managed to influence in various places and in universities—which used to be a place where the clergy were not welcome and was instead a center of anti-clergy propaganda.
In universities, students would their classes to attend lectures of a cleric—who had no money or power, or even visiting him could get them in trouble.
Nonetheless, nowadays instead of Britain, Reza Khan, and Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, there are individuals seen with a beard, clerical clothes and appearance of a clergyman, yet they commit crimes and destroy all the efforts [by real clergymen]. What such people do is much more effective than all the efforts by the enemy!
Consequently, if we assume that there is a political hand that invites the clergy to corruption, bribery, and the like, it is not a remote assumption.
Imam Khamenei, November 4, 1990
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