The cool Ayatollahُ

Last week something extraordinary happened in the Persian blogging community. Mohammad Abtahi, a former vice-president of Iran and an enthusiastic blogger was visiting the eighty-something dissident Grand Ayatollah Montazeri in Qom, a religious city south of Tehran.

"How is Mr Abtahi's blog doing," the Grand Ayatollah jokingly asks during a pause in a small gathering, while sitting on his special teaching chair which is higher than usual chairs.

According to a post on Abtahi's blog, the Ayatollah later tells him that he reads his blogs and asks him about its readership and the time he spends on it everyday. Like many, the Ayatollah is also angry about his website being filtered and provides the blogger cleric with a new unblocked web address for his website.

Any time you have party-animal teenagers and dissident old Ayatollahs doing the same thing, you must know it's a popular thing.