Iranian dissident cleric free to speak out again

Almost three years ago, through a wall but speaking on an inter-phone, the voice of Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri recalled a Persian expression.

"Rights are something you must seize," he said to me. "They're not given to you." But Ayatollah Montazeri's freedom has been given back to him – up to a point – and the rule of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, critically weakened. It might almost be said, with Ayatollah Montazeri's release from house arrest in Qom this week, that the heritage of the founder of the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, has been fatally undermined.

Ayatollah Montazeri might turn out, in retrospect, to be the greatest hero of the Iranian revolution, the man who stood by his word, the man who protested – in the greatest tradition of all humanitarians – against the ferocious executions of Khomeini's opponents and who refused, always, to bow to his oppressors.

"I was one of the mouthpieces of the revolution," he said to me on 20 February 2000. "But when they treat me like this, how must they be treating the others?" At 80, Ayatollah Montazeri was sick and frail and the government security men could not let him die in the prison of his own home. Even the most radical of clerics had urged Ayatollah Khamenei – the cleric who took the role of Supreme Leader instead of him – to free the old man. "The fruit of my life" is what he called Ayatollah Montazeri, before the latter dared to condemn the hangings that followed Iran's war with Iraq.

We tend to forget how terrible these were. Once forced to drink from the "cup of poison" – Khomeini's own words – of defeat in 1988, Khomeini agreed that thousands of opponents of his rule should be hanged, even those who had been judicially reprieved or given prison terms.

Men and women were hanged like thrushes on gallows that could take the strain of 20 bodies at a time. Some say that 20,000 died. Ayatollah Montazeri wrote a letter to Khomeini, expressing his revulsion – a letter intercepted by the leader's son Ahmed – and from that moment his role as successor to Ayatollah Khomeini was cancelled. Far from being the Supreme Leader, the velayat e-faqih of the Islamic Republic, he became the most reviled of clergymen.

Ayatollah Montazeri never faltered. He condemned the clergymen who "did not keep the promise of the revolution", he insisted that Ayatollah Khamenei should not hold political power and should not be able to hinder the reformist movement of the new President, Mohammad Khatami. Which is why his freedom is also a victory for Mr Khatami.

"Keeping me in prison is wrong," he told me three years ago. "I have a husseiniya [religious teaching school] next to my home where I have many Korans and books – and they took them from me ... Even if a person is convicted, they're not allowed to confiscate his belongings. Our revolution was Islamic and [came about] through the will of the people. And we asked for independence, for freedom and for an Islamic Republic. It seems that [the clerics] have forgotten freedom. They did not keep the promise of the revolution."

But this week, the "revolution" freed Ayatollah Montazeri. Hundreds of Iranians pleaded to visit his home – he has an almost iconic status among the young and the students who have demonstrated for freedom – and one of the most senior security officials in Tehran travelled the 90 miles to Qom to ensure he was released. At least 400 people turned up at his front door to congratulate him.

He had asked for no pardon and made no promises, his son Ahmed said. He has never ceased to issue demands for pluralism, political freedom, tolerance. Here is what he said to me before: "Violence brings negative results. But [the conservative clergy] have created what are called 'force groups' who used violence and attacked people when they wanted to speak publicly. And they attacked me too. These kind of actions make people hate religion. But you can never serve the interests of religion through violence."

So the freeing of Ayatollah Montazeri might be the first clear sign that the power of the almighty divines is waning. Student demonstrations could not touch Ayatollah Khamenei, nor the courage of Iranian journalists (so quickly to be incarcerated). But an old man in the holy city of Qom, with its blue-tiled minarets and snowy peaks, the very city in which Khomeini was taught, might just have pierced the cloak of supreme authority.

Ayatollah Montazeri also quoted an Arabic expression. "There's a limit to all things," he said, "and everything that passes its limit destroys itself."