In response to Dr Mazeni Alwi's letter entitled "President Khatami cited in the wrong context", I have a few views of my own:

1) If Dr Mazeni Alwi was to read my letter, she would have known that I did quote Khatami within the right context. I quoted Al Khatami as being an ulama. And despite Mr Khatami's expulsion from the ruling elite's group, he is still considered an ulama by people in Iran.

2) In spite of the claim made by Dr Mazeni Alwi's that there exists other reform movements in Iran, the one led and promoted by Khatami is the most 'popular'. This is because for most Iranians, the reform that they had wanted does not include the separation of Islam and the state.

The real 'secular' reformists in Iran do not command any significant base of support anywhere in Iran. Iranians are fully aware of the hypocrisy of the secularist and have decades of experience living under the lies of the secularists.

This also applies to all the secular regimes ruling the Muslim ummah throughout the world. In short, there is nothing that the so-called Muslim secularist/liberalist can offer the Muslims, and there is no model they can project to the Muslim world. All they can offer are more and more rhetoric, unconditional worshiping of the West, and repetition of the same lie that Islam is the source of the Muslim's stagnation and backwardness.

3) As for the resistance against the ruling religious elite, it is a normal process as even in America such a movement had existed and the last one is in 1960s where the Americans are tired and irked of the 'ruling elites' of the USA and they had gone to the streets to demand for more transparency at the end of Vietnam War.

The core of the demand for reform in Iran is the call for more market economy and less state controlled economy.

As for the so-called feminists and liberalists they are the fringe among the Iranians and their call is unpopular and hypocritical at times.