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- Sayyid Ahmad Khatami (Persian: احمد خاتمی, born 8 May 1960) is a senior Iranian Shia cleric, member of Guardian Council and a senior member of the Assembly of Experts. In December 2005, Ali Khamenei appointed him as Tehran’s substitute Friday prayer leader. He is also a conservative and principlist politician. He was born in the city of Semnan, Iran. He studied at seminaries in Qom and Semnan. In 2006, during the Pope Benedict XVI Islam controversy, Khatami asked the Pope to "fall on his knees in front of a senior Muslim cleric and try to understand Islam." In 2007, he addressed the death sentence issued by Imam Khomeini against Salman Rushdie, saying "In the Islamic Iran that revolutionary fatwa of Imam [Khomeini] is still alive and cannot be changed." In regard to the 2009 Iranian election protests, Khatami denounced demonstrators as rioters who wage war against God ("mohareb"), (a capital crime in Islamic law), and more recently accused reformist presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi of Mohareb as "leaders of sedition." (en)
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