TEHRAN - An eerie stillness has settled over this normally frenetic city.

In less anxious times, the streets are clogged with honking cars and cranky commuters. But on Saturday, drives that normally last 45 minutes took just a third of the time, and shops were mainly empty. Even Tehran's beauty salons, normally hives of activity, had few customers; at one, bored workers fussed over one another's hair.

People who did venture out said they were dispirited by the upheaval that has shaken this country over the two weeks since the contested presidential election, and worried they would get caught up in the brutal government crackdown of dissent that has followed.

Even in areas of the city not known for liberal politics, the sense of frustration, and despair, was palpable. Those who accuse the government of stealing the election said they had lost the hope for change they had during the protests that drew tens of thousands of people into Tehran's streets. But others also confessed to feeling depressed.

One staunch supporter of the incumbent president, who the government says won in a landslide, said he was distressed by the street protests and the crackdown that, by official counts, claimed more than 20 lives.

"People have been hurt on both sides, and this is disappointing," said the man, who sells light bulbs in Imam Khomeini Square. "We need to build our country, not engage in these kinds of clashes."

By late last week, the country's leaders had succeeded in quelling the massive demonstrations that challenged their legitimacy. But the widespread feeling of discontent - even among those who had no part in the protests - was likely to pose a lingering challenge to leaders' attempts to move quickly past the vote and return life to normal.

There were further signs on Saturday that the opposition was running out of options in its attempts to nullify the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which has been confirmed by the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Expediency Council, headed by former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, issued a statement that called the supreme leader's decision the final word on the election, although it did say the government should investigate voting complaints "properly and thoroughly."

Mr. Rafsanjani has been one of Mr. Ahmadinejad's strongest critics and one of the most ardent supporters of Mir Hussein Moussavi, Mr. Ahmadinejad's chief rival in the election. But after the vote, the former president had been quiet, and many Iranians had hoped he would broker some compromise behind the scenes.

And although an opposition Web site carried a new message from Mr. Moussavi, the first in several days, he did not present any new plans for resistance. He instead reiterated demands for a new election, which the government has rejected.

At the same time, those in the opposition were increasingly fearful for the hundreds of government critics who have been jailed.

Amid rumors that the government was beginning to force confessions - a tactic leaders have used in the past to tarnish dissidents' reputations - the IRNA news agency reported that a jailed journalist had said reformist politicians were to blame for the recent protests.

The journalist, Amir-Hossein Mahdavi, was the editor of a reformist newspaper close to Mr. Moussavi that was shut down before the election.

Mr. Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, responded Saturday to statements by President Obama, who made his most critical remarks of the Iranian leadership on Friday, when he called the government's crackdown "outrageous" and said the prospects for a dialogue with Iran had been dampened.

Mr. Ahmadinejad suggested that Washington's stance could imperil Mr. Obama's aim of improving relations, according to the ISNA news agency.

"Didn't he say that he was after change?" Mr. Ahmadinejad asked. "Why did he interfere?"

On Saturday, security forces were still on the streets, but uniformed guards had replaced the most feared forces, the Basij paramilitary members, who were involved in many of the beatings and shootings of demonstrators, and the hard-line Revolutionary Guards in their camouflage outfits.

The shops on Baharestan Square, which was the scene of the latest clashes on Wednesday, and on Haft-e Tir Square, where the paramilitary forces attacked people a day earlier, were open Saturday. But shopkeepers said business was limping.

"We used to sell nearly $2,000 a day," said a woman at an Islamic coat shop on Haft-e Tir Square. "But since the election, our sales have dropped to $900 a day." She gave only her first name, Mahtab, citing fear of retribution.

Like many others who spoke, Mahtab said she was depressed by what she had seen since the election. She said that she was not a political person and had not even voted June 12, but that the repression on the streets was "beyond belief."

"I am disgusted, and wish I could leave this country," she said.

She said she had seen a paramilitary officer outside the shop hit a middle-aged woman in the head so hard that blood streamed down the woman's forehead.

When Mahtab and her colleagues tried to leave the shop to go home, she said, the forces began clubbing them while shouting the names of Shiite saints. "They do this under the name of religion," she said. "Which religion allows this?"

Daily life has also been affected.

Although people are still going to work, some parents have been reluctant to take their children to day care, fearing that unrest on the streets would prevent them from picking up their children. University exams have been postponed and many families have traded parties for small get-togethers, where the election is a constant topic of conversation.

"People are depressed, and they feel they have been lied to, robbed of their rights and now are being insulted," said Nassim, a 56-year-old hairdresser. "It is not just a lie; it's a huge one. And it doesn't end."

CAIRO - The most important group of religious leaders in Iran called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday, an act of defiance against the country's supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country's clerical establishment.

A statement by the group, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final. The government has tried to paint the opposition and its top presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, as criminals and traitors, a strategy that now becomes more difficult - if not impossible.

"This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic," said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. "Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei."

The announcement came on a day when Mr. Moussavi released documents detailing a campaign of fraud by the current president's supporters, and as a close associate of the supreme leader called Mr. Moussavi and former President Mohammad Khatami "foreign agents," saying they should be treated as criminals.

The documents, published on Mr. Moussavi's Web site, accused supporters of the president of printing more than 20 million extra ballots before the vote and handing out cash bonuses to voters.

Since the election, the bulk of the clerical establishment in the holy city of Qum, an important religious and political center of power, has remained largely silent, leaving many to wonder when, or if, the nation's most senior religious leaders would jump into the controversy that has posed the most significant challenge to the country's leadership since the Islamic Revolution.

With its statement Saturday, the association of clerics - formed under the leadership of the revolution's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - came down squarely on the side of the reform movement.

The association includes reformists, but Iranian political analysts describe it as independent, and it did not support any candidate in the recent election.

The group had earlier asked for the election to be nullified because so many Iranians objected to the results, but it never directly challenged the legitimacy of the government and, by extension, the supreme leader.

The earlier statement also came before the election was certified by the country's religious leaders, who have since said that opposition to the results must cease.

The clerics' decision to speak up again is not itself a turning point and could fizzle under pressure from the state, which has continued to threaten its critics. Some seminaries in Qum rely on the government for funds, and Ayatollah Khamenei and the man he has declared the winner of the election, incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have powerful backers there.

They also retain the support of the powerful security forces and the elite Revolutionary Guards. In addition, the country's highest-ranking clerics have yet to speak out individually against the election results.

But the association's latest statement does help Mr. Moussavi, Mr. Khatami and a former speaker of Parliament, Mehdi Karroubi, who have been the most vocal in calling the election illegitimate and who, in their attempts to force change, have been hindered by the jailing of influential backers.

"The significance is that even within the clergy, there are many who refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the election results as announced by the supreme leader," said an Iranian political analyst who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

While the government could continue vilifying the three opposition leaders, analysts say it was highly unlikely that the leadership would use the same tactic against the clerical establishment in Qum.

The backing also came at a sensitive time for Mr. Moussavi, because the accusations that he is a foreign agent ran in a newspaper, Kayhan, that has often been used to build cases against critics of the government.

The editorial was written by Hossein Shariatmadari, who was picked by the supreme leader to run the newspaper.

The clerics' statement chastised the leadership for failing to adequately study complaints of vote rigging and lashed out at the use of force in crushing huge public protests.

It even directly criticized the Guardian Council, the powerful group of clerics charged with certifying elections.

"Is it possible to consider the results of the election as legitimate by merely the validation of the Guardian Council?" the association said.

Perhaps more threatening to the supreme leader, the committee called on other clerics to join the fight against the government's refusal to adequately reconsider the charges of voter fraud. The committee invoked powerful imagery, comparing the 20 protesters killed during demonstrations with the martyrs who died in the early days of the revolution and the war with Iraq, asking other clerics to save what it called "the dignity that was earned with the blood of tens of thousands of martyrs."

The statement was posted on the association's Web site late Saturday and carried on many other sites, including the Persian BBC, but it was impossible to reach senior clerics in the group to independently confirm its veracity.

The statement was issued after a meeting Mr. Moussavi had with the committee 10 days ago and a decision by the Guardian Council to certify the election and declare that all matters concerning the vote were closed.

But the defiance has not ended.

With heavy security on the streets, there is a forced calm. But each day, slowly, another link falls from the chain of government control. Last week, in what appeared a coordinated thrust, Mr. Moussavi, Mr. Karroubi and Mr. Khatami all called the new government illegitimate. On Saturday, Mr. Milani of Stanford said, former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani met with families of those who had been arrested, another sign that he was working behind the scenes to keep the issue alive.

"I don't ever remember in the 20 years of Khamenei's rule where he was clearly and categorically on one side and so many clergy were on the other side," Mr. Milani said. "This might embolden other clergy to come forward."

The committee of clergy was formed in the 1960s. Mr. Milani said that for years, Ayatollah Khamenei also belonged to the group, and that it had developed some political clout by backing successful candidates for national office.

Many of the accusations of fraud posted on Mr. Moussavi's Web site Saturday had been published before, but the report did give some more specific charges.

For instance, although the government had announced that two of the losing presidential contenders had received relatively few votes in their hometowns, the documents stated that some ballot boxes in those towns contained no votes for the two men.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Iran's reformist former president Mohammad Khatami called Sunday for a referendum on the legitimacy of the government in the wake of last month's disputed presidential election, Iranian Web sites reported.

Hasan Sarbakhshian/Associated Press
Mohammad Khatami greeted supporters at a gathering in Tehran on May 23.

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Times Topics: Iran

Mr. Khatami's comments amounted to a bold challenge to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has dismissed the opposition's claims that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide victory on June 12 was rigged, and has ordered protesters to accept it.

It is unlikely that Iran's hard-line leaders will accept the referendum proposal. But the fact that Mr. Khatami proposed it at all suggests a renewed confidence within the opposition movement.

That movement received a powerful boost on Friday when an influential former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, told a gathering at Tehran that the government had lost the trust of many Iranians, and he called for the release of the protesters arrested since the election.

His speech at Tehran University brought vast crowds of opposition supporters into the streets of the capital, where they chanted antigovernment slogans and clashed with police officers in the largest demonstration in weeks.

Mr. Khatami on Sunday praised Mr. Rafsanjani's speech and said a referendum would help achieve Mr. Rafsanjani's goal of restoring trust, reformist Web sites and the BBC's Persian service reported. He said it should be carried out by an independent body, like the Expediency Council, an arbitration group that is headed by Mr. Rafsanjani.

"If the majority of people accept the situation, we also will accept it," Mr. Khatami said, Web sites reported.

The referendum proposal coincided with a possible sign that the government was willing to make some concessions. Mr. Khatami was visiting a group of family members of opposition figures who had been arrested since the election, and while there, the arrested men called their relatives from prison for the first time, in what appeared to be a coordinated gesture.

Mr. Rafsanjani traveled over the weekend to the northeastern city of Mashad to discuss the postelection political crisis with high-ranking Shiite clerics. The move was likely to fuel rumors that Mr. Rafsanjani is building clerical support for the opposition. Two of the clerics Mr. Rafsanjani was meeting have declined to congratulate Mr. Ahmadinejad on his victory and may already be sympathetic to the opposition's claims that the election was rigged for Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Mr. Rafsanjani's reception in Mashad contrasted strikingly with that of Mr. Ahmadinejad, who was snubbed by at least one top-ranking cleric during his own visit two days earlier.

On Saturday, the government released on bail an employee of the British Embassy in Tehran who was arrested last month and accused of fomenting postelection street protests, Iran's state-run Press TV reported. The employee, Hossein Rassam, was the head of the security and political division at the embassy, the station reported. Eight other embassy staff members who were arrested had been released.

Although some Iranian conservatives have criticized Mr. Rafsanjani for his speech on Friday, more have made stinging criticisms of Mr. Ahmadinejad over a controversial cabinet appointment made public on the same day. The president named as his first vice president Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, who angered hard-liners by saying in 2008 that Iranians are "friends of all people in the world - even Israelis." Mr. Mashaei, whose daughter is married to the president's son, also angered clerics in 2007 when he attended a ceremony in Turkey in which women performed a traditional dance.

On Saturday, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a prominent conservative, called the appointment of Mr. Mashaei "completely unbelievable" and said to promote him was to "ridicule the highest religious authorities." Other conservatives made similar comments, including figures in the Basij militia. Kayhan, a newspaper close to Ayatollah Khamenei, called the appointment a "mistake" that would "no doubt provoke strong opposition."

Although many conservatives criticized Mr. Ahmadinejad in the past, especially over his economic policies, most supported him during the protests of the past month. Only now, as he begins to name his new cabinet, have differences begun to emerge again.

Also on Sunday, Iran's Jahan News reported that Iranian security forces had foiled an effort to assassinate both Mir Hussein Moussavi, the main challenger to Mr. Ahmadinejad, and Mehdi Karroubi, another candidate in the presidential election, both of whom have called the June 12 vote fraudulent. The report attributed the information to unnamed sources and claimed the would-be assassins were from the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a militant group that seeks to overthrow the Iranian government.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - The Iranian authorities opened an extraordinary mass trial against more than 100 opposition figures on Saturday, accusing them of conspiring with foreign powers to stage a revolution through terrorism, subversion, and a media campaign to discredit last month's presidential election.

The trial, coming just days before President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to be sworn in for a second term, signaled an intensified government attack on the opposition movement, which maintains that the June 12 election was rigged and continues to muster widespread street protests.

The accusations read out in the courtroom were a broadside against virtually every major figure associated with reform in Iran, going well beyond those actually arrested. State television broadcast images of the defendants, who included a former vice president and a Newsweek reporter, as well as some of the reform movement's best-known spokesmen, clad in prison uniforms and listening as prosecutors outlined their accusations in a large marble-floored courtroom. Some were shackled.

Opposition leaders angrily disputed the accusations on Saturday and protested that the defendants had had no access to lawyers or to details of the charges against them.

The leading opposition presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, issued a call on his Web site, Ghalam News, for Iranians to resume their nightly protest chants of "God is great" more intensely than ever.

Those protests have infuriated the country's ruling ayatollahs, and Basij militiamen roam the streets in force in an effort to snuff out the chanting wherever it crops up.

Although the trial was expected, its scale took many Iranians by surprise, coming days after the government said there would be only 20 defendants.

As the trial started, just after 9 a.m., prosecutors named a long and wide-ranging list of conspirators, including the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi and the Stanford historian Abbas Milani, and echoed the Iranian government's longstanding claims that its internal critics are pawns of an international plot to undermine the Islamic republic through human rights groups and even terrorists. There was no indication that the authorities intended to arrest Mr. Moussavi or any others not yet charged, but prosecutors accused him of drawing crucial support from enemies of the state in Iran and abroad.

The only media organization allowed to cover the trial was the semiofficial Fars news agency, which has links to the country's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. That, in combination with recent revelations about the Guards' central role in holding detained protesters, bolstered a widespread view that the Guards were aggressively leading the effort to put down the opposition movement. Some have taken Mr. Ahmadinejad's dismissal last week of his intelligence minister, who had objected to the broadcasting of confessions by detainees, as yet another sign of the Guards' control.

On Saturday, prosecutors highlighted what they called a confession by Muhammad Ali Abtahi, a cleric who served as vice president under the reformist government of Mohammad Khatami. Mr. Abtahi, one of Iran's most widely read bloggers, was arrested shortly after the election, and word later emerged that he had appeared in a tearful videotaped confession. Such confessions, which have frequently been used before, are almost always obtained under duress, according to human rights groups and the defendants themselves.

"I believe the reformists had prepared for two or three years for this election, in order to limit the powers of the supreme leader," Mr. Abtahi said, according to a Fars transcript. "I want to tell all friends that there was no fraud in the election, it was just a lie to build the protests around."

In his confession, Mr. Abtahi began by praising the high election turnout. Later in the confession, he said the three leading opposition figures - Mr. Moussavi, Mr. Khatami and former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani - "promised to always back each other up" in distorting the election results.

Mr. Rafsanjani, a powerful insider who has shown support for the opposition, harshly criticized the trial on Saturday, saying that "the obtaining of confessions from those who have recently been imprisoned," which formed the basis of the indictment, had thrown the basis of the country's entire government into question, according to a statement posted on the semiofficial Mehr news agency.

In photographs, Mr. Abtahi could be seen sitting in a gray prison uniform in the front row at the trial clutching a white piece of paper, his cleric's turban gone and his face a grim mask. Seated near him was Muhammad Atrianfar, a prominent journalist who served as deputy interior minister.

There were other former high-ranking officials in the dock as well, including a former deputy Parliament speaker, Behzad Nabavi, and a former deputy economy minister, Mohsen Safai-Farahani. Also on trial was an Iranian-American scholar, Kian Tajbakhsh, who was seized last month by the police.

The deputy prosecutor in Tehran, Abdolreza Mohebati, also referred to what he called incriminating remarks by Maziar Bahari, a journalist who works for Newsweek, suggesting that there was a "policy of the Western media" to say the trial was rigged before it even took place. Later, Mr. Bahari was brought out to speak to journalists on the sidelines of the trial, where he delivered a short, chilling lecture on the media's alleged role in fomenting a "velvet revolution." He then asked forgiveness from the Iranian people and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Some senior government officials touted Mr. Abtahi's confession as proof of the opposition's malign intent. But the confession, which was disjointed and at times almost incoherent, seemed to be a kind of compromise with what his interrogators wanted him to say. At one point, Mr. Abtahi is quoted as saying, "I think there was the capacity for what the deputy prosecutor called a 'velvet revolution,' but I don't know if the intention was there or not."

Like the prosecutors' opening statement, the six-part indictment was wide-ranging but focused heavily on the role of the media, suggesting repeatedly that acts as simple as taking pictures of protests should be seen as criminal acts aimed at subverting the Islamic republic and its supreme leader. Its claims were based largely on the alleged confessions of Mr. Abtahi and others, and on the testimony of an unnamed alleged spy.

The indictment did not identify specific charges, but in past trials the government accused defendants of "acting against national security," which can carry the death penalty. In earlier cases, reformists were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms, which often were significantly reduced by appeals courts.

Omid Memarian, an Iran consultant at Human Rights Watch who was jailed in 2004 on accusations of jeopardizing national security, said the government now wants to justify its use of violence in putting down the demonstrations.

"It is part of their effort to say the results were not rigged," he said. "But it will backlash against them like other efforts."