In the post 9/11 world, the image of an Islamic cleric as a human rights champion doesn’t readily come to the Western mind. Yet that is exactly the legacy of Grand Ayatollah Montazeri who passed away on December 20 at the age of 87. He is being mourned by millions — both secular and religious — in Iran and beyond. The White House praised him as a figure “internationally respected for his unwavering commitment to universal rights” and the Shi’a faithful declared him a “legend of endeavour, jurisprudence and spirituality.” In life, as in death, he symbolizes the disillusionment of devout Muslims with an authoritarian theocracy that has cynically exploited religion as an instrument of self-preservation for the past 30 years. His struggle for justice explodes the myth that totalitarian ideologies that serve profane political interests are somehow authentic expressions of sublime Islamic beliefs.

Ayatollah Montazeri was one of the founders of the 1979 revolution that established the Islamic Republic of Iran. Such was his prominence that in 1985 he was selected as heir to the supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Just a few months before Khomeini’s death in June 1989, however, Montazeri’s fortunes dramatically changed as he became an outspoken critic of human rights violations. When an estimated 4,000 leftist political prisoners were executed at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, he condemned the abuses and was unceremoniously removed from the regime’s inner circle. Had he stayed silent, he would have assuredly become the supreme leader. He chose justice over the temptations of power.

This was the beginning of two decades of defiance that came to represent the failed promises of the 1979 revolution. In 1997, Montazeri was placed under house arrest after he brazenly questioned the dictatorial powers of the current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei whom he outranked in the Shi’a religious hierarchy. Despite his old age and frail health, after the disputed elections on June 12 that gave rise to unprecedented protests in Iran, Montazeri backed the opposition’s claims of electoral fraud and issued a fatwa declaring the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad government illegitimate. Just as it was said of the Holy Roman Empire that it was neither Holy nor Roman, Montazeri famously remarked that the Islamic Republic is neither “Islamic” nor a “Republic.”

The life of Montazeri is a rebuke to certain Western commentators who appear oblivious to the complexities of religion and politics in the Islamic world. Those on the political left tend to be apologists for human rights abuses in the name of “cultural relativism” arguing that we in the West should not impose our liberal values on others with different beliefs. Those on the political right tend to perceive Islam as the haven of fanatics and terrorists arguing in favour of Western hegemony to liberate people from backwardness and tyranny. Both views fail to grasp that the Islamic world is not a fossil in a museum; rather, it consists of a diverse range of dynamic and complex societies. The interrelationship between Islam, culture and politics, in a transition from tradition to modernity, is not fundamentally different from what European civilization experienced through centuries of revolution and war. Authoritarianism that invokes Islam as the basis of legitimacy is less a reflection of an authentic Islamic tradition and more an instrument of absolute power in modern states.

Since it was adopted as Iran’s official religion in 1501, the tradition of Shi’a Islam under successive monarchic dynasties was separation of state and religion. The merger of the two in the 1979 revolution was justified as a “return” to an imaginary tradition that never really existed. The nativist narrative and mythical claims of authenticity were appealing to a society in revolt against Western domination. The intellectuals that pioneered political Islam, however, were inspired as much by Marxism in the academies of Paris as they were by the study of Quranic scripture in the seminaries of Qom and other holy cities.

When I served with the United Nations in Cambodia, a member of the royal family explained that he had sent his son to study at Moscow University in the Soviet Union rather than the Sorbonne in Paris, to ensure he would never become a communist! Romantic ideologies are more appealing at a distance, which is perhaps why President Ahmadinejad’s anti-Western polemics are popular in the Arab street where people suffer under pro-Western despots but not in the Iranian street where people have experienced the reality of the Islamic Republic’s tyranny for 30 years. The anti-utopian ethos of liberalism was fully embraced in Europe in recent history only after the devastating impact of utopian ideologies disillusioned the masses. The contemporary grassroots democratic movement in Iran is similar in that it arises in opposition to the excesses of an absolutist ideology.

Amidst the misconceptions between the Western and Islamic worlds that threaten to transform the myth of a clash of civilizations into a catastrophic reality, unconventional human rights champions like Ayatollah Montazeri forcefully demonstrate that the transcendent human rights values that unite peoples’ aspirations are far more important than their differences.

Payam Akhavan is a professor of international law at McGill University, a former UN war crimes prosecutor, co-founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Centre and a director of Canada’s International Centre for Human Rights & Democracy.