Reza Aslan: belief

Transcript context

…The governing elite. — yes, is different. The elite there is what I would refer to as the mid-level clerics, the seminary students, et cetera. Iran is a country under clerical rules, so the clerics are the political leaders, but that is a very new, and frankly, a heretical idea in Shi’a Islam. There’s no history in 1400 years of Islamic and Shi’a thought about direct clerical rule. That just doesn’t exist. This was something that Khomeini thought up out of whole cloth. It’s a complete really new innovation. What people, I think, don’t understand is that it’s not a very popular theology in Shi’ism. For the most part, the upper echelon of the clerical regime — those in power, those enjoying the benefits of power — they’re entrenched in that ideology. But the younger clerics, the seminary students, the mid-level clerics, the soapbox preachers, the imams at your mosque — there is an enormous amount of frustration, and I would even say rejection of the theology behind clerical rule. And the generals?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.