An influential Iranian ayatollah is telling his students to spend more time praying and less time clicking through cyberspace.

Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi, a conservative Islamic cleric and chairman of the Imam Khomeini Research and Education Institute in Qom, said the Internet is rife with dangers and temptations that lead to family problems. He urged seminaries to be vigilant, according to the Mehr news agency.

"If a young student surfs the Internet until late in the night and is not looking for 'scientific subjects,' or if he watches movies and forgets his morning praying, he cannot become a pious man," the ayatollah said.

Mesbah-Yazdi's comments follow warnings last week by another important cleric, who said he worried about a "tremor of non-religiosity in Iranian society. ... The only way to stay safe is relying on the holy book, the Koran."

But Saeed Allahbedashti, an activist and son of a well-known reformist cleric, said: "Unfortunately, 32 years after the Islamic revolution, some top clergymen suppose there is conflict between prayers at night, remembering God and using the Internet. They do not want to realize that a new practicing Muslim generation has emerged in Iran and is using Facebook and other social networks."

He added: "This new generation remembers God at night and observes all Islamic rituals. The Islamic revolution occurred in the context of modernity in Iran, and any practicing Muslim can embrace all kinds of modern tools and technology while maintaining his or her faith in Islam."

-- Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran

Photo: An Iranian cleric in a courtyard of a holy shrine in Qom. Credit: Reuters 

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is keeping up his push to mend the divisions left by the nation's disputed and bloody 2009 presidential election, telling officials on all sides they should be “compatible and cooperative” with each other.

Khamenei, speaking Wednesday in a sermon for the Eid al Fitr holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, directly addressed the 2009 violence in lamenting that Iran seemed to have trouble holding  peaceful elections.

“In our country, elections are somehow challenge-ridden events," said Khamenei, Iran's top cleric. “People should be vigilant that these likely challenges in the elections in the country will not jeopardize the security of the country."

He also urged officials to try harder to get along, stressing, “This is very important advice to everybody."

In 2009,  opposition activists took to the streets to challenge what they said was the rigged reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Iranian rights groups say security forces killed at least 100 people in crushing the protests.
The makeup of the VIP audience for Khamenei’s sermon Wednesday also pushed the reconciliation message.

Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a key moderate figure, sat in the front row with a prime political opponent, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, whose state Guardian Council has disqualified numerous moderate candidates in past elections.

Khamenei’s soothing words Wednesday followed his pardon over the weekend of several dozen opposition activists jailed after the 2009 protests.

Iran’s supreme leader is trying to repair relations ahead of March parliamentary elections, the first national vote since the turbulent 2009 election.

Several moderate political figures say a boycott of that vote remains likely unless authorities unconditionally free all opposition figures.

Khamenei also praised what he called the “Islamic Awakening” -- known to the rest of the world as the Arab Spring revolutions.

He lauded the revolutionaries of Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Tunis and Egypt, but notably, not Syria, where Iranian-allied President Bashar Assad is using military force to try to crush a popular uprising.

Khamenei warned against allowing the United States to take control after the revolutions.  If that happened, he said, “The Muslim world will experience major problems for decades.”

-- Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran

Photo: Political moderate Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, center, listens to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's address in Tehran. Credit: Alef.ir

Iran says it’s no longer interested in talking with the West about swapping nuclear fuel rather than making its own.

Iran says it wants to make fuel to supply a reactor for medical purposes. Western nations, who accuse Iran of pursuing a nuclear-weapons program, offered in 2009 to trade low-enriched nuclear fuel for any high-enriched nuclear fuel produced in Iran.

"We will no longer negotiate a fuel swap and a halt to our production of fuel," Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization chief, Fereydoun Abbasi, told the official Islamic Republic News Agency on Monday. "The United States is not a safe country with which we can negotiate a fuel swap or any other issue."

The U.N. Security Council has ordered Tehran to halt all uranium enrichment until the International Atomic Energy Agency confirms that Iran’s nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Iran, which denies that it seeks nuclear weapons, has continued its enrichment work. Abbasi said earlier this month that the country was moving some of the centrifuges used in the enrichment process to an underground site near the holy city of Qom. The move is presumably to protect the equipment from any outside military attack aimed at wiping out Iran’s nuclear program.

Abbasi said Monday that Iran had produced “enough” uranium at the 20% enrichment level for its Tehran reactor, and would continue production. The 20% enrichment falls well short of the level needed to  make nuclear weapons.

"From a scientific and technical point of view, Iran has no problems to make fuel at 20%," he said, admitting, however, that there had been some delays linked to "the installation of some equipment."

Abbasi also said Iran had asked the international nuclear agency to clarify any new questions about Iran’s nuclear program. An official with the International Atomic Energy Agency toured Iranian nuclear sites earlier this month, including sites where uranium is enriched.

"We have asked them to give us their key allegations, with documents and proof, so that we could examine them, and told the IAEA that if we were to discuss these issues with them they would concern only a limited number" of claims, he said.

Additionally, the Iranian nuclear official confirmed that the country’s Bushehr nuclear power plant, being built with Russian help, had hit what officials described as some delays in testing. It would open at the end of autumn rather than in the now-ending Islamic holy month of Ramadan, as planned, he said.

 -- Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran

 Photo: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad touring an Iranian nuclear facility. Credit: Reuters 

Iran's ultra-hardliners have gone after a newspaper that acts as a mouthpiece for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after it published a supplement on the Islamic dress code for women in what is perceived as a battle for the loyalty of the country's middle class.

Police officers were reportedly assigned to protect the staff of the daily paper, Iran, on Sunday, a day after publication of the supplement titled Khatoun, Persian for lady.

A Tehran prosecutor was said to be drawing up charges against the paper.

The 259-page special section on the history of the dress code, or hijab, recalled practices in pre-Islamic times, cited anti-Islamic social theorists such as Bertrand Russell and Sigmund Freud and traced the headscarf's transformation throughout history.

Conservatives condemned the supplement and accused the paper of "promoting permissiveness and religious laxity" in an effort by Ahmadinejad's press advisor, Ali Akbar Javanfekr, to increase his boss' street cred among the middle classes who despise him.

Iran has decided to name a street in honor of Rachel Corrie, an American pro-Palestinian activist who was killed while protesting against the demolition of Palestinian homes in the Gaza strip eight years ago. It's the first time since Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979 that an Iranian street has been named after an American.

On Thursday, an article published in the Iranian newspaper Hamshari, a daily close to the Tehran city council and the mayor of the capital, said the council will name a street in Tehran after Corrie, a 23-year old Olympia, Wash., native who was killed by an Israeli military bulldozer in 2003 when she tried to prevent the Israeli Defense Forces from tearing down a Palestinian home.

The report said the street sign would be put up in central Tehran, but it was not immediately clear when that would happen. 

They were just looking to cool off and have a little fun in the middle of Tehran's scorching-hot summer.

Instead, a group of young Iranians got all tangled up with authorities in the Islamic Republic and paraded on Iranian state television for participating in a mass public water pistol fight in a Tehran park, Iranian media reports say.

On Wednesday night, state channel broadcast images of some youth who were arrested at the event on July 29, the Iranian daily Assre-Iran reported.

Some would consider it rather rich. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who got his post after a widely disputed election and serves under an unelected cleric whose powers are officially second only to God, encouraged Arab governments to heed their people's demands for reform.

"Today, the people of the region must enjoy equal rights, the right to vote, security and dignity, and no government can deprive them of freedom and justice or refuse their peoples' demands," Ahmadinejad said in a meeting with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Monday evening, according to the president's official website (in Persian).  "The Islamic Republic of Iran believes that all regional governments can run their countries by introducing reforms and realizing their peoples' demands." 

The commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard all but admitted Tuesday that his elite military branch is overseeing the country's domestic politics, shutting both the country's reformists and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's confidantes out of power. 

Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari also opined on the country's foreign policy objectives in an interview with the semi-official Mehr News Agency [link in Persian] and admitted that the Revolutionary Guard was heavily involved in Iran's energy sector. 

In the extraordinary interview conducted Monday, Jafari outlined the muscular role the ideologically driven Revolutionary Guard, or IRGC, sees for itself in policing Iran's political elite, especially after the arrests of key figures around Ahmadinejad, described contemptuously as "the deviant current" by Iranian hard-liners. 

"Since the IRGC serves as law officer of the judiciary and since the deviant current's case has special complications, the IRGC arrested and detained these people based on a recommendation by the judiciary," Jafari was quoted as saying. "These people have not committed security crimes; however, they have committed economic and moral offenses. The people that have been arrested had close ties with main figures of the current."

Iran plans to try 26 alleged American intelligence officials in absentia, raising the possibility that it will out U.S. spies who Tehran claims attempted to recruit Iranians as part of a sophisticated intelligence-gathering operation. 

Iranian lawmaker Esmail Kowsar (pictured) said Sunday that Parliament will discuss the matter when it reconvenes.

"The plan for arresting and punishing 26 American officials will be discussed in the Parliament's open session after the parliamentary recess and following the approval of parliamentarians," he was quoted as saying Sunday by the Tabnak news agency (link in Persian).

"Those American officials will be judged in absentia by Iranian courts and will be presented to the competent international courts."

Iranian officials frequently accuse foreign spies of attempting to infiltrate the nation's institutions, periodically bringing out some political prisoner from solitary confinement to confess publicly to collaborating with the enemy.

But the level of detail in the latest alleged plot, involving employment recruitment agencies based abroad, was unusual and appeared to jibe with generally understood Western tradecraft and policy goals, which include aggressively gathering intelligence on the country's nuclear research program.

Iranian officials claim to have the handles and descriptions of the Americans they say are involved in the alleged operation.

RELATED:
IRAN: Intelligence Ministry claims to arrest 30 alleged CIA spies 

-- Borzou Daragahi in Beirut

Photo: Esmail Kowsari. Credit: Press TV

Renowned filmmaker Mahnaz Mohammadi was taken from her Tehran home  Sunday by unidentified security forces for "unknown" reasons, reported the Iranian opposition website Kaleme.

According to the website of former premier Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the prominent women's rights activist may have been seized by intelligence services of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards. 

Her arrest, the second in three years, has not been reported by Iranian state media. 

The widely acclaimed filmmaker was also arrested in August 2009 at Beheshte Zahra cemetery as she was laying a wreath on the grave of Neda Ahga-Soltan, a 26-year-old woman who was fatally shot during security crackdowns on protests against the reelection of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. 

Mohammadi, director of the acclaimed short documentary "Women Without Shadows," also contributed to filmmaker Rakhsan Bani-Etemad's documentary about Iran's disputed presidential election in 2009. 

The new wave of arrests also included Maryam Majd, a passionate women's right campaigner. 

The rights activist, photojournalist and sports reporter was arrested Friday and is being held in Tehran's notorious Evin prison.

"Maryam was arrested on the eve of her flight to Germany to report a sports event," said a close friend who preferred to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. 

According to Kaleme.com, Majd is being held in  a section of the prison controlled by Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

Mohammadi's arrest came a day before a group of 18 political prisoners announced the end of their 9-day hunger strike on Monday, the opposition site reported. 

The inmates, 15 of whom are in Evin, went on a hunger strike to protest the sudden deaths of Haleh Sahani and Hoda Saber, which occurred only a few days apart. 

The recent purge of reform advocates comes amid preparations for parliamentary elections set to take place in March.

-- Roula Hajjar in Beirut and Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran

Photo: Mahnaz Mohammadi. Credit: Kaleme

Babylon & Beyond today is switching to a new commenting system.

The system requires commenters to sign in through their Facebook accounts. People without Facebook accounts will not be able to leave comments.

Readers will have the option of posting their Babylon & Beyond comments on their Facebook walls, but that's not required. Readers are welcome to express their opinions about the news -- and about how the new Facebook comments system is working.

Jimmy Orr, the Los Angeles Times managing editor in charge of latimes.com, discussed our online comments and the Facebook system in a March entry to the Readers' Representative Journal.

We hope to see your comments on Facebook.

-- The Foreign Staff of the Los Angeles Times

Two American hikers taken into custody in 2009 on charges of espionage for crossing into Iran from Iraqi Kurdistan are to stand trial July 31, the second anniversary of their arrest, their lawyer said Monday. 

"I've just received an official notification that says the next trial will be on July 31 in the morning, which is exactly the anniversary of their arrest in the Iran-Iraq border two years ago," Masoud Shafii, the lawyer, told Babylon & Beyond.