Rasa – Hujjat al-Islam Mojtaba Zonnour said that the clergy have been oppressed from before the Islamic Revolution to the present day. RNA – In an exclusive interview with Rasa News Agency, Hujjat al-Islam Mojtaba Zonnour, a member of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of the Islamic Consultative Assembly Agency, said that the clergy have been oppressed from before the Islamic Revolution to the present day and added, “Today, some people look at a number of clerics who are active in different [government and administrative] offices and think that the clerical body also enjoy these same facilities.”
The representative of the people of Qom in the Islamic Consultative Assembly continued, “Those clerics who have accepted various responsibilities in different offices have been driven by the sense of duty and need for the community. Today, it must be noted that most of the clergy don’t enjoy the minimum living standards as single students often don’t receive any special stipend and married students also have a hard time as they only receive a stipend between 300,000 and 800,000 [$21-57 US] a month.”
Hujjat al-Islam Mojtaba Zonnour said, “Today, the perspective of the Islamic Seminary that the seminaries must not use government facilities aggravates the situation and the seminarians are having a hard time supplying their basic needs.”
He said that most of the laypeople aren’t aware of the living conditions of the majority of seminarians and clerics and they suppose that the clergy don’t have to deal with welfare problems and added, “Misconceptions about seminarians, social complexes, counterrevolutionary lines, opposition to the principle of religion, the Islamic system of government, the Islamic Revolution and the clergy on one hand, and the pressure by foreign media and psychological operations via social media on the other hand, cause some laypeople to be affected by evildoers and the martyrdom of Hujjat al-Islam Mostafa Ghasemi is among such events.”
It should be mentioned that, on April 27th, Hujjat al-Islam Mostafa Ghasemi, a 46-year-old cleric, was shot dead in front of the Islamic Seminary of Hamadan. The murderer, after wounding two police officers, was shot dead on April 28th.
Rasa News Agency
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