MIDDLE EAST:Iran's reformist former president Mohammad Khatami has suffered a blow to his political standing by being pictured apparently shaking hands with women in breach of Islamic convention.
The image, taken during a visit to the Italian city of Udine in May, has triggered outrage among fundamentalists after being posted on conservative websites and YouTube. It showed Mr Khatami being greeted by a small group of women, none of whom wore Islamic head-covering, and appearing to shake the hand of one.
Mr Khatami, a mid-ranking cleric, dismissed the photo as a fake and insisted he had not shaken hands with any of the women who had approached him after he made a speech.
However, allies say he has been deeply wounded by the criticism, which they say has been calculated to damage his image as the reformist standard-bearer.
Last month, radical clerics in the holy city of Qom started a petition calling for Mr Khatami to be defrocked. In a letter to the Qom seminarians' society, the clerics described another picture from Mr Khatami's Udine visit, where he sat next to "the uncovered body of a female reporter in a very obscene way".Although Islam generally forbids handshakes between men and women who are not close relatives, some clerics say it is permitted in certain cases to avoid embarrassment.