Rouhani official visits synagogue, endorses pre-revolutionary flag
President Hassan Rouhani's minority affairs adviser has caused a stir by visiting a synagogue and suggesting reverting to Iran's flag from before the revolution, raising the ire of conservatives.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s senior adviser for ethnic and religious minority affairs, Ali Younesi, recently visited a synagogue in Shiraz and expressed his support for using Iran’s pre-revolution flag. Both his appearance in the synagogue and his words were harshly criticized by radical Principlists.
Younesi, who also served as the minister of intelligence under former President Mohammad Khatami, traveled to the historic city of Shiraz on May 4 and defended the pre-revolutionary “lion and sun” flag, saying, “Some people believed that the lion and sun in the middle of the Iranian flag was a monarchic symbol, but this is not the case. The lion represents Imam Ali [the first Shiite imam] and the sun represents Prophet Muhammad; only the crown was a symbol of monarchy.”
The lion and sun was Iran’s national symbol until the 1979 revolution. After the revolution, Islamists claimed the symbol represented the monarchy and removed it from the Iranian flag, replacing it with the Islamic crescent.
Younesi riled the conservatives by saying, “If it were up to me, I would replace the crescent with the lion and sun.”
