Protests Flare Outside Iran's U. of Tehran After Friday Sermon

Police officers clashed with protesters in the streets outside the University of Tehran today after the weekly prayer sermon was delivered there by the former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

In his first official public appearance since the disputed June 12 presidential election, the opposition figure Mir Hussein Moussavi was among those in the audience at the university, which is always the venue for the Friday sermon.

Mr. Rafsanjani, a senior cleric who supported Mr. Moussavi’s candidacy, regularly leads the Friday prayer, but had not done so since the election and the subsequent unrest. In his sermon, The New York Times reported, Mr. Rafsanjani called the election aftermath a “crisis” and urged that “restrictions on the press and on free speech be removed, in addition to the freeing of those detained since the election.”

Although he is a leading member of Iran’s ruling elite, Mr. Rafsanjani is also a bitter rival of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who defeated him in the 2005 election. Mr. Rafsanjani’s daughter was among those briefly detained after the election, and in an interview last year in Tehran, Mr. Rafsanjani’s son Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani noted that the family’s control of the quasi-private Islamic Azad University chain, which the younger Mr. Rafsanjani called “one of the biggest political powers in Iran,” had been a source of special frustration for the president. “We don’t represent one political view, but we can present ideas, and he is afraid that we will come against them,” Mr. Rafsanjani said.

University campuses have been a focal point of much of the recent opposition protests, and according to human-rights groups, the hundreds of people who have been detained since the election include dozens of students and academics. Many students remain in jail, according to sources in Iran, and only now are details emerging about some of those killed in the unrest — including an art student at the University of Tehran reportedly killed by Basij militiamen.

Officials at some universities have reportedly opened disciplinary proceedings against students for their participation in the protests. According to the Web site of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the state-run news agency reported that the president of the University of Technology in Isfahan, in central Iran, said that once the university’s investigations have been completed, “students who committed offenses in recent incidents will definitely be summoned to the university’s disciplinary committee to provide explanations.”

Although the scale and intensity of the opposition movement have in recent weeks been quelled by the government crackdown, and many aspects of life in Iran have reverted to normal on the surface, activist students say that they have not abandoned their protests. “Some students think the movement is just beginning, not ending, and they are planning on new protests when the academic year begins in September,” one student wrote by e-mail. “The movement will not stop, and protests will continue in new forms. The government cannot extinguish this fire.” —Aisha Labi