Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ordered a violent crackdown on Iranian pro-democracy protesters in 2009, claims to have encouraged the Egyptian demonstrators.
Iranian officials and clerics are insisting Egypt's insurrection, and similar popular revolts across the Arab world, are inspired by Islamist political ideology and have their origin in the 1979 Iranian revolution that overthrew the late Shah. But opposition leaders and independent analysts take a very different view. They say the common rallying cause is democracy, not Islamism – and that the Tehran regime is increasingly fearful of an Egypt-style uprising there.
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