When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, wanted to deliver a warning to the opposition that protests against the election result should stop, he delivered it at Friday prayers. Within 24 hours the crackdown by security forces had begun and the mass street protests that followed the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad subsided.

On Friday, former president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, a supporter of opposition leader Mir-Hossein Moussavi, is expected to use the same platform at Tehran university to express sympathy with those who say the election was fraudulent.