Word: cleric
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Sunday, Iran's state TV broadcast a wrenching and stunning 20-minute confession from a well-known public figure. But former Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformist cleric, was clearly not himself. For one, he was not allowed to wear his clerical robe, and he had lost visible weight. "I believe the reformists had prepared for two or three years for this election in order to limit the powers of the Supreme Leader," he declared, reading from a piece of paper. He went on to accuse three opposition leaders of forming an alliance in which they "promised to always...
Hard-line rhetoric heated up soon after the trials began. "Today's confession has opened the way to dealing with the leaders of the unrest," Hamid Resaee, a conservative lawmaker, told the state news agency IRNA. "There is no longer any reason to tolerate or compromise." Hard-line cleric Elias Naderan was even more explicit: "Those within the inner circle who managed the unrest must be put on trial. We shouldn't chase after weak, second-class figures with no influence...
...weeks after the contested results of Iran's presidential elections led to widespread street riots and demonstrations across the country, the Islamic republic pronounced its harshest threat yet to protesters. At the official ceremony for Friday prayers, Ayatullah Ahmad Khatami, a hard-line cleric who often delivers the sermon, said those who agitate on the streets were "waging war against God," a crime that carries the death sentence. (See TIME's photos of Iran protests around the world...
...alliance with Sufi Muhammad, the hard-line cleric it enlisted to broker peace in the Swat Valley earlier this year, proved equally disastrous. Muhammad's politics were well known: during the 1990s he had waged a campaign of violence for the imposition of an austere form of Islamic law in the Swat Valley, and in late 2001, he led hundreds of young men to fight the U.S. invaders in Afghanistan. He had been imprisoned upon his return, and released last year on the condition that he disavowed militancy...
According to Maloney, the election controversy provided considerable new insight into the cleric believed to hold absolute power, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. Everyone expected voting irregularities, she said, but not "this degree of blatant, in-your-face fraud." That Khamenei almost instantly certified the victory of his candidate, incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dashed a central assumption about his regime: that its survival and social stability are intertwined with the legitimacy of Iran's democratic institutions. "He was willing to jettison the democratic institutions and effectively cede whatever remaining legitimacy there was in a popular vote in favor of maintaining total control...