Rory Stewart

Would we take that as a mini-series?

It's a really, really odd culture because he is a very, very senior learned cleric.

He's just not up at the top level, but you know, it's, I don't know, it's, it's, he's maybe he's a first division football and not a, not a premier league footballer.

Yeah.

Well, we have these weird phrases of grand Ayatollah, sources of emulation.

And one of the things that happened after Khomeini died is that they did two very odd things at the same time.

They broke the connection between the theological religious authority and the political by allowing grand Ayatollah Sistani, who's actually located in Iraq, to be the big theological source, separate

from the political, but they strengthened the notion of the , which is the government of the jurists.

They actually made the clergy stronger within the regime.

Shia Muslim.

My family have been Christians for generations.

I think for those of us who are not Muslims, who are Western Europeans, there's always something very attractive about Shia Islam because it's tended to have much more relationship to a Sufism

to mystical traditions, towards intellectualism.

It's got more clerical authority.

Traditionally, it was actually less radical, and it was always slightly on the back foot.

But one of the problems that we're dealing with here is that at the heart of it, going back to its foundation story, is the idea of martyrdom because the break was when the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad

was killed at Karbala, the Sunni tradition takes over.

And the Shia tradition is from this martyr tradition, which is why you see all these great images of Imam Ali, Imam Hussein dressed in martyrs' robes, and which is why you now have this situation where for the 10-20% who support the regime, Mujtaba Khamenei has now become something called a Shahid Zenday.

So he's a living Shahid, he's a living martyr.

because of the loss of his father, his mother, his wife, his child.