TEHRAN, Iran — A group of students in Iran and the United States has launched an initiative — with apparent backing from conservative Iranian lawmakers — to evaluate the originality of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s doctoral thesis. Rouhani submitted his thesis, titled “The Flexibility of Sharia With Reference to the Iranian Experience,” to Glasgow Caledonian University in 1998.

In 2013, following Rouhani’s election as president, a London-based Iranian writer claimed that parts of the thesis had been copied from a book by Afghan academic Mohammad Hashim Kamali.

The claim soon made its way into some foreign media outlets and led Glasgow Caledonian to release two abstracts from Rouhani’s master's and doctoral theses, though the Scottish university failed to publish the works as a whole.

Four years later, as Rouhani is running for a second term, a group of students is further pursuing the claims of plagiarism. The Rouhani Thesis campaign reports its findings on its website and on Twitter. The group says it has so far found that chapters 1 through 4 of Rouhani’s thesis have been respectively at least 39%, 43%, 40% and 82% plagiarized.