Papal infallibility
The most extreme form of this adoption of church-like behavior is found in the Islamic Republic of Iran where the state demand for obedience to the fatawa of supreme cleric Khomeini strongly resembled the doctrine of Papal infallibility of the Roman Catholic Church, and where the demotion of a rival of Khomeini, Ayatollah Muhammad Kazim Shari`atmadari (d. 1986), resembled "defrocking" and "excommunicating," despite the fact that "no machinery for this has ever existed in Islam."