IN the less than two years since he became a member of the Leadership Council of Iran, Ayatullah Muhammad Husseini Shahroudi has witnessed one of the largest ever anti-government demonstrations in the country. The protests by tens of thousands at the end of 2017 first erupted in his birth place, the conservative city of Mashhad.

These demonstrations, which then spread to dozens of other cities, were originally triggered by the soaring prices of