TEHRAN, Iran (Reuters) - Iranian President Mohammad Khatami called Friday for a new religious thinking more in tune with modern developments after his reform policies came under fire from leading hard-line clerics.
"Our future lies with a new religious thinking. We must live in a world where we can understand new phenomena and have an answer for them," Khatami said in an election campaign speech.
"If we try to impose on a changing society issues which do not belong in our time, we will end up harming religion," he said on state television.
The president, who is standing for re-election in a June 8 poll, was referring to hard-line Islamic conservatives who have put up strong resistance to his efforts to open up and modernize the Islamic republic.
"We do not have much time. If we fail to meet the challenges of modern developments, religion itself will suffer," he said.
Since his landslide election in 1997, Khatami has fought to convince the powerful conservative establishment to give in to popular demands for more freedom.
The conservatives, who dominate the security forces and judiciary, have eased some social restrictions but do not tolerate challenges to traditional religious values and have closed dozens of pro-reform newspapers.
Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, an arch-conservative, raged against the quest in Iran for greater freedom in a speech during Friday prayers.
"If freedoms were desirable, why did we bother to get rid of the shah? He did give such freedoms," he said, referring to the pro-Western monarch toppled in the 1979 Islamic revolution.
"What did our martyrs die for? So that we can trample on all the sanctities and our youth can have more freedom?" said Yazdi, a member of the Guardian Council, a rightist body which oversees elections and legislation in Iran.
Khatami, who remains popular despite setbacks to his reforms, is standing against nine mainly conservative election candidates.
He has pledged to fight to restore citizens' constitutional and democratic rights in an Islamic theocracy centered on supreme clerical rule.
But Ayatollah Ali Movaheri-Kermani, a hard-line cleric in the Revolutionary Guards, said the constitution came a distant second to supreme clerical rule, the powerful office of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
"The whole legitimacy of the constitution revolves around supreme clerical rule. Without the endorsement of the leader, the constitution is not worth a jot," he said, quoted by Iranian students' news agency ISNA.
15:14 05-25-01
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