Iran's political power struggles have brought no shortage of cut-throat intrigue with careers ruined, government officials arrested and even accusations of black magic. And now this firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the voice of liberal dissent.
That's the latest twist in the showdown between Ahmadinejad and Iran's ruling clerics. Ahmadinejad reviled by the opposition as a figurehead of hard-line rule is now temporarily in the reformists' corner by opposing plans to segregate male and female students at Iranian universities.
"It is necessary to swiftly prevent these backward, shallow-minded actions," Ahmadinejad wrote in an order earlier this week addressed to members of his Cabinet.
It also nudged the political dramas further into territory that's surprising even by Iran's roughneck standards, where pot-shots and bitter quarrels are common fare in parliament and elsewhere. This time, the battle is Ahmadinejad versus the theocracy that once backed him.
For months, the ruling Islamic system has increasinglsident's allies have been detained since April, including four senior government officials last month. Some critics also accuse Ahmadinejad's chief aide, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, of leading a "deviant current" that seeks to undermine Islamic rule and even conjuring up magic spells to cloud the president's mind. But there is little he can do except rage. The battles have shown clearly that Iran's clerical rulers, headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have no intention of giving up any controls and will dictate the direction of the next presidential election in mid-2013 which Ahmadinejad cannot join because of term limits.
Ahmadinejad's expected choice as successor his ally Mashaei appears to be blackballed from even getting on the ballot. Although it appears the ruling system is happy to weaken Ahmadinejad, it doesn't want to press too far and bring an all-out political rupture. Lawmakers opposed to Ahmadinejad wanted to bring him for questioning last month, but abandoned the effort after worries it could show too much internal discord to the world.
"If there was any question about whether Khamenei and the ruling clerics still held absolute power, they have answered it loud and clear," said Sami Alfaraj, director of the Kuwait Center for Strategic Studies.
The campus ruckus is a test for one of the major initiatives by the ruling clerics after the large street protests over Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election in 2009 trying to weed out suspected "un-Islamic" elements from universities, which were considered hotbeds of dissent.
Islamic authorities have been tightening their grip on universities and schools as hard-liners expand an ideological "soft war" against Western influence. In recent years, Iran has imposed restrictions on 12 university programs, mainly humanities and social sciences, deemed too Western and incompatible with Islamic teachings.