The word 'clerics' is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to refer to members of the clergy or religious leaders, especially in Christian churches. Example: The conference was attended by several prominent clerics from various denominations, all discussing ways to promote interfaith cooperation.
Mr Rafsanjani, for instance, says the society, is an exceptional cleric with widespread popular appeal.Pushing the clerics out of electoral politics and back into their secluded seminaries is advocated by progressive religious intellectuals as a way of ensuring the long-term health of the Islamic system.
A carefully-managed Manama conference on the "dialogue of civilisations" included Christian and Jewish delegations but excluded mainstream Shia or opposition clerics.
No one benefits when he minimises the crisis, by low-balling estimates of child-molesting clerics".
The Iranian government as well as a number of its senior clerics and officials have strongly condemned the Paris attacks that led to the killings of Charlie Hebdo journalists but at the same time have abhorred its publications of many cartoons showing Prophet Muhammad.
(Teddy Kollek, a long-term mayor of Jerusalem, was reported in the 1980s to have told a group of clerics who were hectoring him about access to the holy sites: "Gentlemen, gentlemen! Spare me your sermons and I will fix your sewers!") The US government closed twice in the last several years, and few ordinary citizens even noticed.
The book also claims that senior Buenos Aires clerics were implicated in an attempt by the navy to hide political prisoners from human rights inspectors.
When the widow of Mohammad Ali Rajai, the prime minister assassinated in the early years of the revolution, went with others to seek the support of senior clerics in Qom, she was reportedly arrested.
Related: Uzbekistan's ruling family feud spills into open with Twitter row A Human Rights Watch report in September said Karimov's government had locked up thousands of critics, including activists, journalists, artists and clerics.
Mateeis blames false clerics, Arab TV stations and social networks.
Most clerics err on the side of caution, acutely aware of the consequences of bad timing.
In a telling response to Mousavi's plea to the senior clerics to oppose the election result, Ayatollah Sanei, one of the most senior clerics in Qom who was a close companion of Ayatollah Khomeini, noted that he felt his protest was unlikely to have any impact with the authorities.
