If you pay much attention to the news, you would know that Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri passed away on Sunday. As an outspoken critic of the Khamenei regime and the dubious re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Montazeri had been getting a lot of favourable coverage from Western news outlets.
What's interesting is that no story that I have read or heard on the subject in print, online, or radio journalism has ever referred to Montazeri as an "Islamist." This is odd, given that Montazeri was himself one of the architects of the Islamic Revolution and very much one of Khomeini's fellow travellers. If Khomeini was the archetypal Islamist, then why not Montazeri?
The answer is that this week, we like Montazeri, and so he cannot, therefore, be an Islamist, no matter how religiously-motivated his political activism was.
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