(Tony Blair Institute for Global Change) Saeid Golkar and Kasra Aarabi - Iran's new president, hardline Islamist cleric Ebrahim Raisi, is a student and loyal follower of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Raisi was groomed to become president to "purify" the Islamic Republic and create the ideal Islamic state. As well as cleansing the system of Western influences, one of the goals is to make the Islamic Republic more efficient by reversing decades of government mismanagement. To advance this goal, Iran's clerical regime requires ideologically devoted technocrats equipped with both modern knowledge and religious training who can implement the regime's policies. The supreme leader and his allies blame decades of mismanagement not on corruption and a lack of technical expertise but on Western-oriented and -educated technocrats not having undergone the ideological-religious training required to run an Islamic state. The emerging cohort are all alumni of the Imam Sadegh University (ISU), an elite institution designed to indoctrinate Iran's next generation of civil servants.
2021-12-02 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive