TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iranian hard-liners on Saturday accused one of the country's most powerful clerics of encouraging opposition supporters to continue their postelection protests, a day after he criticized the ruling system's response to the disputed election.

Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's Friday sermon was a direct challenge to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his hard-line supporters, who have said last month's election was fair and have called on opposition supporters to drop their claims of massive vote fraud.

The protest movement and the split it has caused within the highest reaches of Iran's clerical hierarchy have presented Khamenei with the country's greatest challenge since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Hard-liners like Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi struck back at Rafsanjani on Saturday, saying his speech would endanger the country by inciting supporters of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi to take to the streets as they did in June by the hundreds of thousands to protest President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election. Mousavi claims to have won the vote.

"The leader (Khamenei) removed the threat of riots, but Mr. Rafsanjani is again seeking to provoke the danger," Yazdi was quoted as saying by the semiofficial Fars news agency.