Vahid Pour Ostad is a correspondent for RFE/RL's Radio Farda.
Popular preachers known as maddahs have large and devoted followings in Iran, where they play an important role in Shi'a Islam. But observers interviewed by RFE/RL's Radio Farda say that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has mobilized maddahs and their gatherings for political goals.
In 1986, Hooman Musavi was born in an Iranian jail, the child of political prisoners. By the age of 2 both his parents had been executed, leaving him an orphan. By 23, after years of surveillance by Iran's security forces, Musavi was back in jail -- a political prisoner himself, suffering the isolation and abuse of solitary confinement. But today, 26-year-old Musavi is free, having left jail and escaped from Iran.
