TEHRAN — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, ordered the death sentence of a popular reformist history professor reversed on Sunday, amid escalating demonstrations against the verdict at universities around the Islamic Republic capital.
As supreme leader, Khamenei has the final say on all matters of state and religion, but as of Sunday night, the judiciary had not publicly responded to his order. The nation’s chief jurist, Mahmud Hashemi-Sharudi, has requested a meeting with Khamenei to discuss the verdict against professor Hashem Aghajari, who was found guilty of apostasy, or abandoning Iran’s Shiite Muslim faith.
Khamenei’s order came in response to an appeal by a group of university professors, said Mehdi Karrubi, the speaker of the Majlis, the Iranian parliament. The Supreme Leader has repeatedly called on Iran’s judiciary to use caution in handing down death sentences “to avoid giving any pretext to either enemies or friendly critics for challenges” to the regime, state-run Iranian television reported on Sunday.
Besides ordering Aghajari’s execution on Nov. 6, a hard-line judge handed the disabled Iran-Iraq war veteran an eight-year prison sentence and 74 lashes with a leather whip, and banned him from teaching for 10 years, all of which would remain in effect if the death sentence were rescinded.
Aghajari was prosecuted for a speech he gave in the western Iranian city of Hamadan in August, in which he said Shiite Muslims were not “monkeys” to blindly follow the teachings of senior clerics.
Karrubi on Sunday urged Aghajari to appeal his sentence “immediately” to end the issue, which the professor until now has refused to do.
The death sentence has sparked a revival of a student-led movement for political and social reforms in the Islamic Republic. That movement has been dormant since 1999, when hardline militias crushed the previous wave of student uprisings, killing several protesters.
Students have become wiser since those days, learning to protest within the framework of Iranian law and not riot in the streets, said Saeed Razavifaghee, a Tabriz University philosophy professor and former editorial board member of the banned reformist newspaper, No-Ruz, or New Day.
He predicted that the pro-reform demonstrations on campuses that started 10 days ago would continue even if Aghajari’s death sentence were rescinded.