News

The public campaign to weaken President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and
heighten the authority of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei may have entered a
new stage today. In depicting Ayatollah Khameni's status as that of an
infallible Imam, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sadighi, leader of Tehran's Friday
Prayers, even took a swipe at the president's wife. "One of the cabinet
ministers told me, we believe that if his Excellency (Supreme Leader)
decrees the divorce of the president's wife, the president's wife will
become haram (religiously forbidden) for him and the president will no
longer be able to touch her," Sadighi said in his sermon.

As our political columnist Muhammad Sahimi explains:

Friday prayer sermons all over Iran today were dedicated to
the authority and power of Ayatollah Khamenei. The increasingly public rift
between the two principlist camps has forced supporters of the Supreme
Leader to rally around him and emphasize his power. In his sermon today
on the University of Tehran campus, where the Tehran's Friday prayer is
held, Sadighi said,

"I was meeting some of the cabinet ministers, and surely all of them
without exception are Shiites believing in Amir ol-Momenin [Imam Ali,
the first Imam of the Shiites, cousin of the Prophet, and also his
son-in-law] and emulators of Hazrat-e Ag... >>>