DAR AL ISLAM - IRAN: MONEY IS POWER & THEMULLAH'S CONTROL SOME GREAT MONEY MAKERS IN IRAN

Inside Iran's Holy Money Machine
By ANDREW HIGGINS

The Shrine of Imam Reza, a sumptuous parade of mosques, minarets and marble courtyards, is vaster than Vatican City. It draws more Muslim pilgrims than even Mecca, birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad in Saudi Arabia.

Each year, more than 12 million Iranians, Iraqis and other Shiite Muslims journey to the shrine here in northeast Iran to pay homage to Imam Reza, a revered ninth-century martyr. All come to pray before his tomb -- and many to stuff bank notes in a gold-and-silver cage that protects his ancient bones.

The shrine has for centuries intermingled faith and money, collecting donations of cash, land, jewelry and works of art from the devout. Today, it is not only Iran's most sacred religious site but also, by some reckonings, the Islamic republic's biggest and richest business empire.

Companies in its corporate portfolio make everything from city buses to pizza strudels to growth hormones for caviar-producing sturgeon. At the same time, it operates an Islamic-studies center and boasts a huge collection of Qurans. No-smoking signs at its sanctuary read, "This is the flight zone of angels. Don't pollute it with smoke."

"We are an Islamic conglomerate," says Mehdi Azizian, business adviser and brother-in-law of Ayatollah Abbas Vaez-Tabasi, the shrine's 73-year-old chief. "We don't expect anyone to understand everything we do, because it is so big."

The dual role of the Imam Reza Shrine helps explain how the power of Iran's aging clerical elite endures, nearly three decades after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. "Money is power, and the mullahs...dominate some important parts of the Iranian economy," says Thierry Coville, a French expert on Iran's economy and author of a recent book on Iran.

The Imam Reza Shrine is part of a cluster of bonyads, nominally charitable foundations with huge holdings acquired through generations of donations or confiscated after the revolution. They publish no accounts and, in most cases, answer only to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

This status gives bonyads an independent authority outside Iran's formal state bureaucracy and checks the power of elected officials, whether Western-minded reformers or populist zealots like the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

While Westerners often picture internal battles in Iran as pitting orthodox Muslims against secular-oriented liberals, some of the most significant conflicts pivot around cash, not ideology. Mr. Ahmadinejad has favored the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a paramilitary force with business interests that sometimes compete with the shrine foundations.

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Pertinent Links:

1) Inside Iran's Holy Money Machine