In a stark Friday prayer sermon in Arak on April 11, 2025, Ghorbanali Dorri-Najafabadi, Friday prayer leader of Arak and former Intelligence Minister, issued an impassioned warning about what he called the “grave and urgent threat” posed by the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), accusing the group of being the regime’s most dangerous adversary since the 1979 revolution.
“The serious threat today to the Islamic society is the danger of hypocrisy and the hypocrites,” he declared, using the regime’s pejorative label for the PMOI. He warned the audience not to “fall in line behind them or become their tool,” insisting that recognizing and resisting their influence is “one of the most sacred and critical duties.”
Dorri-Najafabadi emphasized repeatedly that many of the regime’s greatest blows have come at the hands of the PMOI. “From the beginning of the revolution, many of the strikes we suffered were from these hypocrites,” he said.
Clerics Sound Alarm Over PMOI’s Influence in Iran and Growing Despair Among Regime Forces https://t.co/KGnha78SAN
— M. S. Khansari (@khansari_m) January 15, 2025
Referencing Khomeini-era events, Dorri-Najafabadi attempted to paint the PMOI as insidious and deceptive, but his own rhetoric betrayed the regime’s underlying concern: the opposition’s growing influence, particularly among the regime’s traditional base. “They infiltrate society with different appearances and forms… their external shows one thing, but their internal is a hundred times more dangerous,” he said, invoking verses from the Qur’an to frame the PMOI’s threat as both moral and political.
He lamented that even Islamic unity and solidarity were being undermined from within by these “forces of discord,” adding: “If we were a united front, the Islamic world would rise up against Israel, but instead, these elements distract and divide.”
Though delivered in the language of ideology, the sermon was as much a confession of weakness as a call to vigilance. Dorri-Najafabadi’s remarks—aimed squarely at the regime’s core supporters—suggest that concern over PMOI influence is no longer confined to the opposition. The regime appears to believe that even among loyalists, the opposition’s appeal is spreading.
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— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) May 23, 2023
By concluding that “identifying and resisting these elements is among the most sacred and essential acts,” Dorri-Najafabadi inadvertently signaled the depth of the crisis within the ruling clerical establishment. His invocation of Qur’anic verses and historical grievances underscored the fact that the regime is no longer confident in its ideological grip, neither over society at large nor even over its most trusted circles.
The sermon was less a show of strength than a warning cry from a regime that knows its time may be running short, increasingly rattled by an organized movement whose message resonates with a population exhausted by decades of repression, economic failure, and corruption.