RFERL:

Only four months after his Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, the revolution's leader Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini took the first step to set up a "special clerical court" to deal with those whom he called "corrupt clerics."

He said the court was not there to defend the clerics. Instead, it is there "to defend Islam."

Corrupt clerics were those who did not submit to the newly established political system's ideology. There have always been dissenters among the ranks of Iranian clerics during the past 40 years, but it was hard to show any deviation from the regime’s strict line as the response was expected to be harsh, and it often was.

A cleric had to be the mouthpiece of the established system, obey the Supreme Leader and be demonstrably anti-secular and anti-Western.

Khomeini often talked about Ulam-i Su (bad scholars) in Iran and abroad. Even some eulogists, who are not exactly clerics were killed or treated otherwise violently during the first year after the revolution.

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