This man, Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, represented the leadership in the mullahs who have run Iran since the revolution in 1979. He lost, heavily, to an outsider in what amounted to a massive and free vote of censure against the running of the world's most famous Islamic Republic.
Islamic fundamentalism is a many-sided phenomenon.
George Joffe, a British scholar of Islamic fundamentalism, believes that its a much misunderstood phenomenon. You only hear about these movements when in fact they do something which catches the media eye. Therefore, perhaps, the image we have of the Islamist movements as being solely violent is in itself misleading. Joffe examines the roots of modern fundamentalism, stretching back to the writings of Mawlana Mawdoodi of Pakistan and Sayyid Qutb of Egypt in the 1960s. He draws a comparison with Christian fundamentalism in the West.