The Guardian:Iranian president tweets World Cup chillout pic

World Cup 2014

Rare glimpse of an off-duty Hassan Rouhani cheering on his team against Nigeria, in a tracksuit with a cup of tea

Hassan Rouhani

Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani watching Iran v Nigeria at home in Tehran. Photograph: Twitter

It’s 11.30pm Tehran time and Hassan Rouhani is relaxing at home, watching the World Cup match between Iran and Nigeria.

His usual dark clerical robe (aba) is discarded, his white turban (ammameh) put aside, he sits in a tight-fitting Iranian team shirt (unbuttoned), bare arms on show, and tracksuit pants on his sofa watching a widescreen TV.

Hassan RouhaniThere’s no bottle of beer, but a cup of Persian tea and a plate of fruit in front of him. It’s clearly carefully posed – too good to be an spontaneous picture – but still, quite remarkable for a 65-year-old Iranian cleric.

“Proud of our boys who secured our first point – hopefully the first of many more to come,” the president tweeted, referring to the goalless draw in Curitiba, along with the photo – retweeted at least 3,000 times. Rouhani has 213,000 Twitter followers.

The ‘average Joe’ pictures are all part of Iran‘s soccer diplomacy. In Vienna, where senior Iranian and western diplomats were engaged in intense nuclear negotiations, talks were put on hold on Monday night too allow Iran’s foreign minister to watch the match.

Iranian nuclear negotiators watch world cup

Iranian nuclear negotiators glued to a big screen. Photograph: Twitter
A picture posted on Twitter by Iranian journalist Akram Sharifi, showed Mohammad Javad Zarif sat next to senior Iranian nuclear negotiators glued to a big screen showing the match, joined by a pool of Iranian journalists.Rouhani’s predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was an avid football fan but Rouhani’s picture is probably the first of its kind showing a president, who is also a cleric, off-duty at home. It is also remarkable because clerics in Iran have in the past criticised football as a western sport and are generally critical of men wearing short-sleeve clothing.

Very few photographs of the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have been published without a clerical robe. There is almost no picture of his wife available online.There is an unwritten law prohibiting Iranian cartoonists from depicting clerics.

Reza Haghighatnejad, an Iranian analyst with the website Iranwire, said Rouhani’s photo was “one of the few successful credits in the one-year balance sheet” of Rouhani’s media team.

Some have criticised Rouhani for not having his wife by his side as he watched the World Cup match Despite this, Rouhani’s wife, Sahebe Arabi, has engaged in a number of public appearances since her husband assumed power.

In his first year as president, Rouhani, has become an outspoken critic of dogmatism among his fellow clerics. “Some people still live in the stone age,” Rouhani complained last week.

Rouhani has locked horns with the Iran’s hardliners after saying “we can’t take people to heaven by force and with a whip.”

Female football fans cannot attend football matches at Iranian stadiums.

In their first match in Brazil, Iranian players wore kits highlighting the cause to preserve Iranian cheetahs.