http://www.iranexpert.com/2002/deathrowacademic4december.htm
4 December AFP
In an open letter to the press Wednesday, Iranian dissident
academic Hashim Aghajari took on his conservative opponents, mocking his death
sentence last month for blasphemy as a political verdict.
Aghajari, who drew the anger of the country's religious establishment when he
delivered a speech last July questioning clerics' right to rule in Iran,
dismissed his death sentence as "resembling a political communique rather than a
court decision."
Even as Iran's hardline judiciary said it would review his sentence on Monday,
Aghajari accused the judge who handed him his death sentence on November 6 of
"not respecting the principle of impartiality."
He said it was "certain" he would be acquitted in a public trial "where popular
feelings will be taken into account."
The judiciary's decision Monday to review his case after Aghajari's lawyer filed
an appeal ended a tense standoff between the courts and the disabled dissident
whose death sentence sparked two weeks of street protests by Iranian students
last month.
Eager to cool passions, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had on
November 17 ordered the judiciary to review the sentence widely seen by critics
as being politically motivated and part of a wider clash between reformists and
hardliners.
Meanwhile, the Organisation of Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution (OMIR), a
leftist-reformist group of which Aghajari is a member, hit out at British writer
Salman Rushdie who recently published an article in the New York Times, critical
of the Iranian regime.
The group said in a statement that Rushdie, who was subject to a death sentence
by the Islamic republic's late founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was looking
"to provoke fanaticism and sow discord".
The OMIR warned that the case of Aghajari "does not discredit the decree of Imam
Khomeini against the blasphemous writer and does not clear him of his guilt."
Rushdie, born in Bombay, India, to a Muslim family, spent some 10 years in
hiding in Britain after Khomeini issued his religious decree or fatwa against
him in 1989 for writing "The Satanic Verses."
The founder of the Islamic republic charged the book blasphemed the Muslim
prophet Mohamed.
However under President Mohammad Khatami, Iran withdrew its backing in 1999 for
the fatwa against Rushdie as it repaired its diplomatic relations with Britain.