Ayatollah Asadollah Bayat-Zanjani is a Shiite marja who resides in the holy city of Qom. Born in the city of Zanjan, where he began seminary studies as a teenager, he later moved to Qom and studied under notable Ayatollahs Allameh Tabatabei, Morteza Motahhari and Ruhollah Khomeini, the first supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Bayat-Zanjani held a number of positions in the newly formed Islamic Republic, serving three terms in parliament and acting as a member of the Council for Amending the Constitution in 1988. A critic of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's administration, he supported Reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi in the contested 2009 presidential elections. He condemned the crackdown that followed the 2009 elections, and his website was blocked in 2010 as a result.

This was Ayatollah Bayat-Zanjani’s first interview with an American publication. I emailed his office questions about the rise of sectarianism in the region, Iran’s cultural policies, his views on the Assembly of Experts (which is tasked with supervising and electing the supreme leader), the house arrest of Iran’s 2009 Green Movement leaders and his views on Hassan Rouhani’s administration.

When I asked him about regional events, such as the Islamic State (IS) and radical Sunni groups, he responded: “Although certain Sunni groups and Salafists might have cooperated with ISIL [an alternate acronym for IS], I do not consider the ideology of ISIL to be the same as the Sunni ideology. I believe that we need to come up with a new terminology for this problematic ideology that has some of its roots in certain Islamic sects. Pretending that it is a completely Sunni ideology is an attempt to present this problematic ideology as completely Islamic or in line with Islamic traditions and blurring it with the classical traditionalist movements in Islam.”