A 75-year-old Iranian cleric has emerged as an unlikely champion of a protest movement led by young men and women seeking to throw off the shackles of the country’s Islamic theocracy.
Abdolhamid Ismail-Zai, often referred to by the honorific Molavi by his supporters, is Iran’s top Sunni Muslim cleric as well as a spiritual and political leader for the country’s ethnic Baluch population. In the face of unrelenting regime violence targeting protesters in the country’s most Baluch southeast, he has grown increasingly fiery in his public statements against the regime.
