Ahmad Khatami

Who is Ahmad Khatami?

Ahmad Khatami is a senior Iranian Ayatollah, as well as a senior member of the Assembly of Experts. In December 2005, Ali Khamenei appointed him as Tehran’s substitute Friday prayer leader.

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, and more recently accused reformist presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi of Mohareb as "leaders of sedition."