Iranian police prevent Sunni prayers during Islamic unity conference

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iranian security forces prevented Sunnis from gathering for Friday prayers during an Islamic Unity Conference in Tehran attended by Sunni and Shiite leaders from around the world.

Iranian Internet websites reported that security forces blocked all roads to a small mosque where Mawlawi Abdulhamid, a prominent Sunni cleric, was scheduled to lead the Friday sermon.

Abdulhamid and hundreds of Sunni clerics and scholars from around the world were in Tehran for the Islamic Unity Conference, organized by Iranian authorities last week.

Pictures from the conference showed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaking with Abdulhamid.

Abdulhamid is the leading imam and preacher of Iran’s Sunni Baloch community in the eastern city of Zahidan.

Jalal Jalalizadeh, a Kurdish professor at Tehran University and former MP from Sanandaj (Sina), confirmed that he found all streets leading to the mosque blocked when he went there to pray on Friday.

Jalalizadeh told the baloch campaign website that security forces had warned the caretakers of the Sunni mosque a day earlier “that they did not have the right to hold Friday prayers this week.”

Reports of the Sunni prayers being stopped by the security forces came just two days after Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani called for religious coexistence in the country.

“We have to teach our children in the primary school books to acknowledge each other and see other faiths as branches of the same tree,” Rouhani said in a speech at the Islamic conference.

He said that authorities also should “disseminate these views in our universities and religious schools.”

This is not the first time that authorities in Shiite-majority Iran have prevented Sunnis from gathering for prayers.

Last October, dozens of uniformed and plain-clothes security agents surrounded the Sadeghiyeh Mosque in northwest Tehran, one of the largest and most important Sunni prayer sites in the capital, preventing Sunni worshipers from gathering for Eid-e Ghorban, or the Feast of Sacrifice.

New York-based Human Rights Watch has called on the Iranian government to lift restrictions on Sunni Muslims gathering and praying freely.

“Iran’s Sunnis should be allowed to practice their faith freely, as do their Shite counterparts,” the rights watchdog said in November. “Ending religious discrimination should be among President Rouhani’s top priorities,” it said.