“Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has had quite a makeover of late, it would seem. He gives an fiery speech, spins it as a prayer, sits back and waits for his followers to adhere to his ‘enough is enough’ edict. Forgetting for a moment, that he totally misread the pulse of his own people, yes the minority opinion is part of the pulse as well, I believe the Ayatollah expected the protests to abate. As we know now, and he failed to predict, his words, far from alleviating the fire, only stoked it.

So now, he runs a ‘fearocracy’ and as the ‘Supreme Leaner’ sets out with his Revolutionary Guard and the Basij militia to pressure his own people into submitting with threats of fire and brimstone, so to speak.

Here is where, I suggest, the Ayatollah lost his way.Islam, as I understand it, is ‘Submission‘ to the will of Allah or God. And though I get the whole chain of command, the whole spiritual lineage assertion or the hand picked by God through succession line of thinking, in Iran and around the world, people are beginning to eighty-six the middle man. They are awakening to the understanding that submission to the Divinity, from Allah to Yahweh, is a private, personal deal; no mediator required. As the Ayatollah is learning first hand, when the self-appointed intermediary crosses the line in a power grab from the pulpit, it becomes the final straw in the minds of his now-former-flock.

Submission is never about violence, unless we’re talking ‘tapping out’ in mixed martial arts match. It’s more of a voluntary surrender. It’s not terribly different than my grandmother saying ‘God willing’, my Islamic friends saying ‘Insha ‘Allah’ (if Allah wills), or when Master Chen reminds me “that the Dao follows it’s own path” thus my favorite saying “it is what it is.”

What fundamentalists of all creeds fail to grasp is that the Divinity isn’t looking for us to throw in the towel under duress, the individuals that ‘get it‘ never need to wave a white flag.