Khamenei backs down over hanging of academic

The biggest protests in three years against the hardliners who rule Iran appeared to have succeeded yesterday, after the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered a death sentence on a reformist academic to be reviewed.

Ayatollah Khamenei's ruling is evidence that, despite a seeming stalemate over the past few years, the edifice of the mullahs' rule in Iran is being chipped away by the reform process started by President Mohammad Khatami.

Hashem Aghajari, a history lecturer at Tehran University and a war veteran who lost a leg in the Iran-Iraq war, was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to hang for a speech in June in which he said each generation should re-interpret Islam for itself rather than blindly following the mullahs.

Incensed by the sentence, thousands of students have held peaceful rallies every day for the past week. Already facing a looming crisis after Mr Khatami presented two bills to parliament to curb the powers of the mullahs to overturn laws approved by parliament, Ayatollah Khamenei recently threatened that if the government could not resolve problems he would have to call on "the forces of the people".

But he backed down when he ordered yesterday's review, which is a serious setback for hardliners. The fact that he has ordered the sentence to be reviewed means it will probably be overturned.

There is no doubting the popular will for reform: Mr Khatami has been elected twice by landslide votes and parliament is dominated by reformers. But hardliners have used supervisory councils they control to overturn new laws of which they disapprove.

The judiciary, which they control, has been the most effective weapon of the mullahs. Pro-reform newspapers were closed by the courts and their editors jailed. Mr Khatami's leading political supporters were imprisoned.

Ayatollah Khamenei, the most powerful man in Iran in a post created for the Islamic Republic's founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, identifies with the hardliners. But this is not the first time he has backed down to prevent the power struggle getting out of hand.

The last time students protested like this, in Tehran in 1999, it ended in murder when police and vigilantes stormed a dormitory and attacked students with clubs and iron bars. The vigilantes were mobilised again yesterday when 200 burst into an auditorium, threw chairs and smashed tables. Police did not intervene.

But this time it did not work – and that could revitalise the student reform movement. The campuses were at the forefront of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and they have been at the forefront of the reform movement. But they have been heavily suppressed by the hardliners.

Student leaders said the protests would now be called off but they issued further demands, for the release of political prisoners and an end to the jailing of reformers.

Mr Khatami has threatened to resign if his bills limiting the power of the hardline Council of Guardians to overturn laws are not allowed to pass. Many are calling on him to carry out that threat if necessary.