An Iranian academic has been sentenced to five years in prison for saying Muslims should not follow blindly like "monkeys" the teachings of senior clerics.
Two years of the sentence were suspended in view of the time history lecturer Hashem Aghajari has already spent in jail, his lawyer Mr Saleh Nikbakht told the ISNA students news agency.
Aghajari was originally sentenced to death for the 2002 speech, a verdict which sparked some of Iran's biggest student protests for years.