Qalibaf Against the Purification Camp: The Speaker's Two-Front Defense of Negotiation and the Majlis

Majlis Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf has chosen to fight the hardline camp in public, and he has done so on two fronts within twelve days. The first is the legitimacy of negotiating with Washington. The second is the independence of the Majlis from both the government and the intelligence services. None of the three episodes required a public answer. His open letter to Kayhan’s Hossein Shariatmadari, his short video arguing that negotiation is a tool of struggle rather than surrender, and his televised rebuke of a Paydari-aligned deputy on 6 September were all his choice. His method is consistent across all three. He claims the revolutionary vocabulary for the negotiating camp and turns it against his critics, accusing them of the deviations they attribute to him. The contest is now institutional as well as personal. On the foreign-infiltration bill, Qalibaf is positioning parliament between the government and the security organs, and at least one pillar of institutional conservatism has lined up behind him. The open question is whether the Leader’s office weighs in, and for whom.

The Column: An Invitation to Accept Discipline Quietly

On 25 August, Hossein Shariatmadari used his Nokteh column in Kayhan to address the Speaker directly. The column praised Qalibaf’s record before delivering its warning. Westernizing currents, it argued, were working to transfer his social base to the reform camp, and he should restate his revolutionary positions with greater emphasis and clarity. Shariatmadari explained that he had chosen publication over a private note because the same stratagem was being used in other cases as well. In practice, the column was an invitation to absorb discipline quietly.

Iran Dossier recorded the column, and the coordinated defense of the Speaker that ran alongside it across the hardline titles, in the Iranian Press Monitor of 25 August. The exchange that followed was analyzed in The Internal Dispute over Ending the War, which placed it inside the wider argument over who writes the terms of any exit from the war.

The Letter: Negotiation Reclaimed as Resistance

Qalibaf answered on his official Telegram channel with a letter that was deferential in form and unyielding in substance. Negotiation, he wrote, has neither intrinsic value nor taboo status. It is neither absolutely good nor absolutely evil. When it advances national interests and consolidates the achievements of the resistance, it becomes a field of struggle in its own right, neither a substitute for resistance nor a sign of retreat. He described the negotiating mandate as a heavy examination and a perilous trust. He then turned the loyalty test back on his critics. Those who shirk the burden of negotiating with the enemy while lying in wait to label every achievement of the negotiating team a betrayal, he wrote, are practicing the very essence of comfort-seeking.

The letter drew a second boundary as well. Qalibaf rejected extremism, the politics of purification (khales-sazi), and what he called selective acceptance of velayat, and he placed them in the same breath as the Westernizing tendency his critic had warned about. He closed with the Quranic warning against internal dispute. Two days later, Qods, the daily of the Astan Quds Razavi foundation in Mashhad, gave the letter its lead. That choice signaled that institutional conservatism in Mashhad had taken his side, at least in this exchange.

The Video: The Argument Goes to the Street

The argument was then packaged for a mass audience. A two-minute strategic-communications video carried by Tasnim, and Qalibaf’s remarks to Hamas’s Basem Naim on 2 September as reported by Tabnak, made the same case without the deference. In this telling, negotiation does not amount to surrender, because it is a tool of struggle. Iran does not reject negotiation. What would count as defeat is abandoning the struggle against the United States and Israel. War, diplomacy, and the Strait of Hormuz are presented as a single strategy directed by the Leader rather than as competing choices. The video is the letter’s argument stripped of its courtesies and aimed at the street.

The Floor: The Majlis Between the Government and the Security Organs

The third episode moved the contest from personal standing to institutional authority. In the virtual open session of 6 September, the Majlis was debating the bill on Confronting Foreign Infiltration. Mohammad-Taqi Naqdali, the Paydari-aligned cleric who represents Khomeini Shahr, accused the presidium of amending the bill without debate. He called First Vice President Aref’s claim that Qalibaf had promised to withdraw the bill an improper lie for which Aref should apologize, and he asked whether the Majlis had become a second branch of the government, according to Mashregh.

Qalibaf’s reply was unusually sharp for the chair, and video of it circulated across the Iranian press within hours. He reminded the deputy that he chaired the session, knew the rules of procedure, and would run it. He then delivered the line that led every headline: “You cannot decide for me, and I will certainly not speak the way you do.”

On substance, Qalibaf defended the bill and referred it to the National Security Commission, but he also set its limits. He said he supported the infiltration bill while rejecting a version that would lock the country down and require everyone to seek permission from the state. The needs of the Intelligence Ministry and IRGC Intelligence would be met within a logical framework. Parliament, however, still had to settle whether those organs wanted to manage citizens’ applications or merely to be informed of them, and the law could not intrude on the personal security of individuals, according to Mehr and Shafaqna. The same morning’s front pages carried Kayhan’s unsigned demand that the security organs act against the reformist current as a whole, a campaign tracked in the Iranian Press Monitor of 6 September.

Assessment: Silence Costs More Than Confrontation

The three episodes describe a Speaker who has decided that silence costs more than confrontation. Shariatmadari’s column invited him to accept discipline quietly. The Paydari intervention invited him to defer to the security organs on a bill they want. Qalibaf declined both. He did so without leaving the revolutionary camp. He cites the Guards, the martyrs, and the Guardian Jurist, and he accuses his critics of the very deviations they attribute to him.

He is betting that the hardline camp cannot strip either the negotiating file or the Majlis from him while the Leader remains publicly absent. His ability to hold that line rests on assets the purification camp does not have. He holds the Speaker’s chair. His Guards career ran from the Iran-Iraq War to command of the IRGC Air Force, and it continued through the national police and the Tehran municipality. A figure with that record cannot be dismissed as a Westernizer, which is why Shariatmadari had to praise him before warning him.

The fight is therefore not between the revolutionary camp and its critics. It is a fight inside the conservative camp over who sets the terms on which the political and military campaign against the United States continues. One option is a negotiating track run by a man of the security establishment. The other is a pure-resistance line with no negotiating track at all. That reading extends the argument made in When Analytical Labels Become Strategic Liabilities, which used an earlier Shariatmadari editorial to show how little the moderate-hardliner distinction explains about factional conflict in Iran.

Key Points

We assess with high confidence that Qalibaf’s three public confrontations were deliberate choices rather than forced responses. None of them required a public answer, and each one raised the cost of the next exchange for his critics.
We assess with high confidence that his method is to claim the revolutionary vocabulary for the negotiating camp. Obedience to the Guardian Jurist, IRGC credentials, and Quranic authority are deployed against the critics rather than conceded to them, and the letter places purification politics and selective acceptance of velayat in the same category of deviation as Westernizing.
We assess with moderate to high confidence that the contest is now institutional as well as personal. On the infiltration bill, Qalibaf is positioning the Majlis between the government and the security organs, defending the bill in principle while limiting how far the intelligence services can reach into citizens’ affairs.
We assess with moderate confidence that part of the conservative establishment is lining up behind him. The evidence is the decision by Qods, the Astan Quds Razavi daily, to lead with his letter on 27 August. That is a single indicator, and it has not yet been matched by other institutional titles.
We assess with moderate confidence that Qalibaf’s position holds only while the Leader remains publicly absent. Whether the Leader’s office weighs in, and for whom, is the question the report leaves open, and neither exchange has yet drawn a statement from that office.

What to Watch

Whether Kayhan or the Paydari press escalate from questions about Qalibaf’s loyalty to attacks on the negotiating team’s concrete positions, which Shariatmadari has so far avoided.
Whether the National Security Commission returns the infiltration bill in the form Qalibaf described, or in the form the intelligence services asked for.
Any signal from the Leader’s office on either exchange, and which side it favors.
Whether other institutional conservative titles follow Qods in giving the Speaker’s argument prominent and favorable play.
Whether the dispute over Aref’s account of the bill’s withdrawal produces a public rift between the government and the Majlis presidium, or is quietly settled.

This post summarizes an Iran Dossier special report, Qalibaf Against the Purification Camp, dated 6 September 2026. The report draws on Qalibaf’s official Telegram channel, Kayhan, Qods, Tasnim, Tabnak, Mashregh, Khabar Online, Mehr, and Shafaqna. Quotations in the underlying report are translated from the Persian; this summary paraphrases them except where marked. The report’s own caveats are preserved. Accounts of the 6 September session are attributed to the outlets that carried them, and the assessment of the Leader’s position rests on his public silence. His office has not spoken to either exchange.