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Former Iranian President Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is considered to be the second most important figure in the country's regime, is looking into different ways to end the political crisis in Iran, and is mulling the possibility of setting up a new religious body, Al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper reported on Monday.

According to the report, the former president and head of the cleric-run Assembly of Experts who is also one of defeated reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi's top supporters, has relocated from the flammable capital of Tehran, to the Shiite holy city of Qom, where the country's religious leaders sit.

Rafsanjani arrived in the city a few days ago and met with several religious leaders and members of the Assembly of Experts, which is responsible for monitoring Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.  

the accusations and the insults that Ahmadinejad directed at some of the most senior politicians such as Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammed Khatami and even Natiq Nouri – who is one of the most senior advisers to the Supreme Leader whose children Ahmadinejad accused of accumulating wealth illicitly – not only deepens divisions between different branches of the government but also brought these divisions into public view for the first time and in an unprecedented manner.

In the letter, Rafsanjani requested that Khamanei break his silence but what happened on Saturday morning, a few hours after the elections, and even before the final results were announced, was that Khamanei rushed to congratulate Ahmadinejad and endorsed the results. That was not normal at all because usually after elections the Council of Guardians and the Ministry of Interior await complaints that may be raised by parties taking part in the elections, expecting there to have been irregularities. Presidential candidates have the right to raise complaints before the results are verified but the Supreme Leader did not wait for this process to take place and he quickly congratulated Ahmadinejad who in turn called on his supporters to celebrate in Vali Asr in Tehran and Iranian state television began to broadcast messages of congratulations from various leaders and presidents to Ahmadinejad on his reelection.

if the results weren’t final and the candidates could raise their complaints how could the Supreme Leader declare his support for the results? The Supreme Leader’s behavior caused a lot of serious questions to be raised by the grand Ayatollahs in Iran and members of the Assembly of Experts headed by Rafsanjani, which has the right to dismiss the Supreme Leader according to the Constitution. It raised many questions about the Supreme Leader’s validity.

Originally the constitution allowed for the selection of either a single individual to the post of Supreme Leader or a council of appropriate individuals to run the post. The selection process of the Assembly of Experts would be done by continuously reviewing his/their performance (Articles 108 and 111). Later revisions to the constitution removed the potential for a council of individuals, making it so only a single individual could be elected by the Assembly as Supreme Leader.

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was elected the chairman of the Assembly of Experts during its morning session on 04 September 2007 [Shahrivar 13, 1386]. Rafsanjani’s election is significant because prior to the meeting of the Assembly of Experts, the conservative supporters of the president tried to advance their own candidates Mohammad Taghi, Mesbah Yazdi, and Ahmad Jannati for the head of the assembly with deliberate and sometimes hidden attacks on Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Despite these attempts and the positioning of Ahmad Jannati, chairman of the guardian council, as a rival candidate to Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the conservatives failed to achieve their goal.

Iran's top legislative body says it is investigating 646 complaints from the three defeated presidential candidates over last week's election.The powerful Guardian Council said it had invited Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai to a meeting on Saturday to discuss the complaints. Another key body has raised eyebrows by failing to endorse the election result.

Guardian Council spokesman Abbasali Khadkhodai said a "careful examination" of the 646 complaints from the three candidates had begun. "We decided to personally invite the esteemed candidates and those who have complaints regarding the election to take part in an extraordinary session of the Guardian Council on Saturday," he said.

The Guardian Council - made up of six clerics and six lawyers - is traditionally loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

A camp of pragmatic clerics and politicians led by Rafsanjani, while loyal to the revolution's principles, wants to build better ties with the West and a more friendly image of Iran."What is clear is that the leadership is far more polarized and splintered than has been clear in the past," said Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon analyst with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"Now that the leader has made clear he was supportive of Ahmadinejad and sharing the same vision of the future of the Islamic Republic, it can be taken as a major defeat for Rafsanjani and for the political options he promotes," said Frederic Tellier, an Iran expert in the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank.

Rafsanjani was president between 1989 and 1997, but failed to win a third term when in 2005, losing to Ahmadinejad in a runoff. He was a close follower of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, father of Iran's Islamic Revolution. He now heads the Expediency Council, a body that arbitrates disputes between parliament and the unelected Guardian Council, which can block legislation.He also is the head of the powerful Assembly of Experts, which comprises senior clerics who can elect and dismiss the country's supreme leader.

Despite new international criticism, the Iranian authorities showed no sign Friday of bending to domestic or foreign pressure, insisting that the disputed presidential vote on June 12 was the “healthiest” in three decades.

The uncompromising words emerged as the Group of Eight countries, including the United States, mounted a fresh broadside Friday saying they “deplored” the post-election violence and demanding that the “the will of the Iranian people is reflected in the electoral process.”

At Friday prayers at Tehran university, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami referred to the demonstrators as rioters and declared, “I want the judiciary to punish leading rioters firmly and without showing any mercy to teach everyone a lesson.” Reuters quoted him as saying demonstrators should be tried for waging war against God. The punishment for such offenses under Islamic law is death, Reuters said.

Kadivar: This Iranian form of theocracy has failed. The rights of the Iranian peoples are trampled upon and my homeland is heading towards a military dictatorship. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad behaves like an Iranian Taliban. The supreme leader, Mr. Ali Khamenei, has tied his fate to that of Ahmadinejad, a great moral, but also political mistake.

Kadivar: The people call "Allahu Akbar" from the rooftops. They carry signs asking "Where has my vote gone?" The protesters don't want to rebel against everything, but they do want justice and they do want fair elections. He who refuses those demands risks a civil war.

Kadivar: I admit that some young people are oriented towards the West. But one should not give too much weight to that. The majority of my compatriots would not want a complete separation of state and religion. Neither would I. Iran is a country with Islamic traditions and values. More than 90 percent of our citizens are Muslims.

"There are very interesting things that are taking place right now. Some of my sources in Iran have told me that Ayatollah Rafsanjani, who is the head of the Assembly of Experts -- the eighty-six member clerical body that decides who will be the next Supreme Leader, and is, by the way, the only group that is empowered to remove the Supreme Leader from power -- that they have issued an emergency meeting in Qom.

"I want the judiciary to ... punish leading rioters firmly and without showing any mercy to teach everyone a lesson," Ahmad Khatami told worshippers at Tehran University.

Khatami, a member of the Assembly of Experts, said the judiciary should charge the leading "rioters" as being "mohareb" or one who wages war against God. "They should be punished ruthlessly and savagely," he said. Under Iran's Islamic law, punishment for people convicted as mohareb is execution.

According to a report by the now-banned website Rooyeh.com, Hashemi Rafsanjani, the head of the Assembly of Experts, had meetings in the city of Qom, with some of the high ranking clerics including the plenipotentiary representative of Grand Ayatollah Sistani. The dates of the meetings are not specified

According to this report, an anonymous source claimed that Rafsanjani had reminded the Ayatollahs of how Ayatollah Khomeini managed such crises in the early days of the Islamic revolution. The source also claimed that half of the Assembly of Experts were supporting the idea of declaring a “leadership counsel” (instead of a one person leadership)

According to a well-placed source in the holy city of Qom, Rafsanjani is working furiously behind the scenes to call for an emergency meeting of the Khobregan, or Assembly of Experts--the elite all-cleric body that can unseat the Supreme Leader or dilute his prerogatives. The juridical case against Khamenei would involve several counts. First, he would be charged with countenancing a coup d'état--albeit a bloodless one--without consulting with the Khobregan. Second, he would stand accused of deceitfully plotting to oust Rafsanjani--who is the Khobregan chairman and nominally the country's third-most-important authority--from his positions of power. Third, he would be said to have threatened the very stability of the republic with his ambition and recklessness.

Rafsanjani's purported plan is to replace Khamenei's one-person dictatorship with a Leadership Council composed of three or more high-ranking clerics; this formula was proposed and then abandoned in 1989 by several prominent clerics. Rafsanjani will likely recommend giving a seat to Khamenei on the council to prevent a violent backlash by his fanatic loyalists. It is not clear if Rafsanjani will have the backing of the two-thirds of the chamber members needed for such a change, though the balance of forces within the Khobregan could be tipped by the events unfolding in the streets. As a symbolic gesture, Rafsanjani is said to favor holding the meeting in Qom--the nation's religious center, which Khamenei has diminished--rather than in Tehran, where it has been held before.

Estimates of police and Guards deployed range from 25,000 to 60,000 in Tehran alone. And the Basij were busy overnight, keeping the pressure on reformists by carrying off several high profile home invasions in richer neighborhoods while scouring hospitals for people injured during the clashes.

According to the source that asked to remain anonymous, during this meeting they recounted memories of the days of the Revolution. A reasonable purpose of these meetings, according to the source, is that Rafsanjani is looking for a majority to possibly call for Ahmadinejad's resignation.

Many of the Shiite clerics in Qom never embraced the idea of either a supreme leader or a central role for clerics in the new Islamic republic. Iran's revolution represented not just a political upheaval. It was also a revolution within Shiism, which for 14 centuries had prohibited a clerical role in politics. With clerics taking over government, many senior Shiite clerics feared that Islam would end up being tainted by the human flaws of the state.

“I see the country’s political elite more divided than anytime in the Islamic Republic’s 30-year history,” said Karim Sadjadpour, a political analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Rafsanjani, one of the republic’s founding fathers, the man who made Khameini Supreme Leader, is now in the opposition.”

“At a political level what’s taking place now, among many other things, is the 20-year rivalry between Khamenei and Rafsanjani coming to a head,” Mr. Sadjadpour said. “It’s an Iranian version of the Corleones and the Tattaglias; there are no good guys and bad guys, only bad and worse.”

It seems clear that the 75-year-old is at the center of a fight for the future of the Islamic Republic. Mr. Rafsanjani’s vision of the state, and his position in his nation’s history, is being challenged by a new political elite led by Mr. Ahmadinejad and younger radicals who fought Iraq during the eight-year war.

Sources close to reformist candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi and former Iranian President Mohamed Khatami have stated to Asharq Al-Awsat that Moussavi's team do not accept the election results or the statement issued on Monday by the Guardian Council and will therefore continue to address the election results and the "theft of the Iranian vote.

he leadership of the Reformist movement, Moussavi, [Mohamed] Khatami, and [Mehdi] Karrubi, along with Chairman of the Assembly of Experts, Hashemi Rafsanjani, are moving closer to the option of "open civil protests and the continuation of demonstrations" until "the removal of the illegitimate government."

The Iranian reformist camp is looking to limit Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's power amid the continued violence in the country over the disputed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranian sources told the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat.

In the report, published Thursday, one of the sources was quoted as saying that the "reformist alliance," including defeated presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, former presidents Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, as well as a number of religious leaders from the city of Qom, were leading a move aimed at "limiting the absolute power of the Supreme Leader."

According to the source, Rafsanjani, who currently heads the Assembly of Experts, returned to Tehran on Wednesday after consulting with religious leaders in the holy city of Qom on the possibility of limiting Khamenei's power by having him answer to the Assembly.

Although the president has the support of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC), the clerics still have considerable power over the country's charitable foundations (Bonyads). These multibillion dollar business organizations don't report their income or pay taxes. They report directly to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Their participation in the economy is crucial. They could make life difficult for Ahmadinejad's presidency by increasing their business clout in areas where the IRGC is trying to muscle in. These industries include energy, construction and the import/export sector. Last year, these clerics scored a major victory. Bonyade Mostazafin (Charity foundation for the dispossessed) was allowed to buy and sell oil, allowing them to compete directly with Iran's National Oil Company. This raised the fury of Ahmadinejad's supporters. As means of checking Ahmadinejad's power, they could expand further into this sector, or compete in the lucrative construction sector. These companies also have huge financial assets. These can be used to finance new businesses which compete directly with the IRGC.

They could also side with Ayatollah Rafsanjani. It is an accepted fact that Rafsanjani financed part of Mousavi's campaign. This obviously dented Ahmadinejad's popularity. So much so, apparently, that Ayatollah Khamenei felt compelled to assist the president by allowing fraud. Rafsanjani is already a millionaire many times over. Should the clergy start helping him financially, using his political muscle in the Assembly of Experts and the Expediency Council, he could further challenge Ahmadinejad politically.