Iran: tens of thousands gather to hear Rafsanjani speak

Iran’s opposition supporters have a way of turning things upside-down and back-to-front in the Islamic Republic.

Many of them are secular, yet they go onto their balconies every night to shout “Allah Akbar,” putting the Basij militia, the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution, into the invidious position of telling people to stop praising God.

That’s why, after all these years of telling everyone it’s their duty to turn up for Friday prayers, it would have been hard for the authorities in Iran to tell people NOT to show up. Yet today they were hoping that only a few would come to hear Hashemi Rafsanjani, the influential and senior cleric who has backed opposition presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

By all accounts, they didn’t get their wish. Tens of thousands filled the streets around the mosque at the University of Tehran, and the Basij have been using tear gas and batons and maybe even more violent methods to disperse them.

Press TV, the state channel broadcasting in English, has cast the sermon as a call for unity but that was scarcely the point.

Rafsanjani called for political prisoners to be released, suggested that the conduct of the election rendered the government “unIslamic” and demanded freedom of the media.

The scholar Massoumeh Torfeh points out that all the institutions Rafsanjani criticised come under the direct supervision of the Supreme Leader.

The journalist Baqer Moin told me that Rafsanjani cloaked his message for the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in parable. Towards the end of his life, he said, the Prophet asked the people to forgive him for any wrong he might have done.

Apparently, reading between the lines, this is an appeal to the Supreme Leader to go back to the people and apologise for siding with Ahmadinejad in the elections.

Well, that’s not very likely to happen. But Rafsanjani – one of the most powerful clerics in the Islamic Republic – showed today that he is not giving in, and accepting the re-election of Ahmadinejad.

Massoumeh Torfeh said: “There’s a great crack in the clerical establishment now, and they can neither seal it nor conceal it.”

– Read Lindsey’s previous Iranian election blogs here.