Young Iranians are filming themselves knocking the turbans off the heads of clerics, in brazen displays of contempt for the country’s religious establishment.

In one video from Mashhad, home to the Shiite pilgrimage site of the shrine of Imam Reza, a cleric waiting at a bus stop has his turban flicked casually off his head by a passing young man.

Amid nationwide protests over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini following her arrest by morality police in Tehran last month, the clerics who have run the country as a hardline theocracy since the 1979 revolution has become a lightning rod for public frustration.

In another video, a man in a red T-shirt brandishes his middle fingers in a cleric’s face as he attempts to walk through an angry crowd. The cleric’s turban is knocked to the ground and, as he bends to retrieve it, a young man kicks it away while another shouts: "Cleric get lost."

While such incidents would have been seen once as unthinkably disrespectful, they have become more common in recent years and seem to have increased since the death of Amini.

Some clerics avoid wearing turbans

In one widely shared video from the religious city of Qom last December, a woman kicked and knocked the turban from a cleric who had hit her with his cane after demanding she wears her hijab correctly. The woman was later arrested, according to Hawza News, the agency of Qom's Seminaries.

Fear of being accosted in public has forced some clerics to avoid wearing their turbans and cloaks in public, a member of the Assembly of the Qom Seminary Scholars and Researchers said in an interview earlier this year.

"Many clerics who want to go out to do something or go shopping... try not to go in their clerical clothes, because people swear or curse at them," said Mohammad Taghi Fazel Meybodi, according to the Saudi-funded Iran International.

The reformist cleric has previously said that enforcing mandatory hijab wearing with “threats, fear, and imprisonment” is not “pragmatic” and will “ultimately have [negative] consequences for society”.

Those negative consequences appear to be playing out now as anti-government protests show no sign of abating, more than 40 days after Amini’s death.

Iranian security forces fired at protesters Zahedan on Friday, rights groups said, a month after a “Bloody Friday” crackdown by security forces in the southeastern city which killed an estimated 66 people – the deadliest day of the recent protests so far – with several dozen more dying in the following days.

A Sunni-majority city, Zahedean is the regional capital of Sistan-Baluchestan, Iran’s poorest province, where the predominant Baluch minority complains of neglect and discrimination by the state. Anger there has been fueled by the reported rape of a teenage girl by a local police commander.

In a bid to quell the outrage, authorities announced the dismissal of Zahedan’s police chief and the head of a police station on Friday.

The Sistan-Baluchistan security council said it had concluded an investigation into the unrest at the request of President Ebrahim Raisi, conceding "negligence" by officers and the deaths of "innocent" civilians.

It said the "Bloody Friday" violence had been started by an attack on a police station by a group of people hurling stones and firing weapons. "Armed militants exploited this atmosphere to attack civilians" and vandalized public property, which required intervention by security forces.

"A number of armed individuals were killed and six members of the security forces were martyred" as a result, it said, including a Revolutionary Guards commander.

US sanctions group behind Salman Rushdie bounty

The United States on Friday imposed sanctions on the Iran-based foundation that issued a multi-million-dollar bounty on the life of acclaimed "Satanic Verses" author Salman Rushdie, who was brutally attacked in August.

The sanctions are aimed at the "15 Khordad Foundation", which the US Treasury Department says is affiliated with deceased Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who originally issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie's death in 1989.

The foundation "maintains a multi-million dollar bounty on Rushdie", the Treasury Department said, adding that as recently as 2012 the organization increased the bounty to $3.3 million.

Mr. Rushdie, 75, was stabbed several times in the neck and abdomen before he was due to give a talk in the state of New York.

He was airlifted to a nearby hospital for emergency surgery, and though his condition improved in subsequent weeks, his agent has said the writer lost his sight in one eye.

References:

telegraph.co.uk