“Yarsanis are not our brothers,” he told the congregation, adding, “Brotherhood is only possible in Islam.” After some protests by members of the Yarsani community, Faraji issued a retraction in which he said enemies of the Islamic Republic had distorted and misrepresented his statements in an attempt to sow division between Muslims and Yarsanis in the area.

The Yarsan religion, also known as Ahl-e Haqq, dates back to fourteenth-century Iran. The Yarsanis are mainly located in Loristan and the Kurdish regions in the west of Iran. Yarsanism shares some of the same beliefs as Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism and its holy tract is the Gore Divan. Although there is no official count of Yarsanis, some reports estimate the population to be as many as two million.