The clergy have begun to collect khums, the tax worth 20% of income which Shias are meant to give to their religious mentor.
In a report from Damascus in the Times last week, Neil MacFarquhar quoted Sayyid Abu Murtadah al-Yasiri, an Iraqi exile and cleric who fled Najaf twenty-three yeago afterafter his own religious mentor, the grand ayatollah, was murdered by Saddam's men.
The result — besides Mr. Obama's public break from Mr. Wright, who had been a religious mentor to him — was the reduction of Trinity's track record of decades of constructive accomplishments to a cartoon of sputtering militancy.
Mr Ahmadinejad's critics believe his public proclamations on the 12th imam go to the heart of a debate on the nature of Iran's Islamic republic system of government provoked by recent comments from his religious mentor, Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi.
People can spend a lifetime in mental flight from a harsh religious mentor, such as the Reverend Harris, Mr Mandela's headmaster, who "wore a forbidding expression and was not given to levity" but eventually bonded with his pupil over gardening.
Much of this was done with Abdullah Azzam, his religious mentor; later, the terror-work was directed by Ayman al-Zawahiri and others; but it was he who first recorded, in hundreds of individual files, the details of each eager recruit, the date of arrival, what he had done for the cause.
For that reason, Cohen says, the response has to go beyond law enforcement – to family members, friends, teachers, sports coaches, religious mentors and mental health professionals who all require training to spot what the secret service terms "stressors" – triggers that will turn violent words into action.
Her religious mentor, Pastor Kalnins, told followers they would go to hell if they supported Senator Kerry during the 2004 presidential election.
Although most judges have been educated and appointed under the current system, some of the older judges received the traditional qadi's training of years of instruction by a religious mentor in a mosque.
The Russian support (along with troops and equipment from the Lebanese terror group Hizb'allah and its political and religious mentor, Iran) during the past year has meant that Assad has been able to push back rebel groups in many locations.
