So far the mullahs — a potentially critical swing vote — have remained largely silent, with the notable exception of a few prominent grand ayatollahs, including one who has attacked the vote count as “a gross injustice.” And few religious leaders have joined the tens of thousands of Iranians expressing their fury by marching through the streets of Tehran and other cities.

“Some clergy have come onto the scene, but they are not in the leadership,” said Mohsen Sazegara, a former aide to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini now living in exile. Describing the protestors, he said, “They are not making religious or nationalistic demands, but just democratic demands.”

In the past when clerics weighed in, however, they tended to dominate, with the creation of the Islamic republic in 1979 the prime example.

One of the mysteries behind this week’s mass demonstrations is who is coordinating them. Some suspect that the hidden hand is the powerful political organization of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. His daughter Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former member of Parliament famous for opening sports to women, was spotted at a march for Mir Hussein Moussavi, who the Interior Ministry says came in second in a landslide for the country’s incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

One of the country’s most influential clerics, Mr. Rafsanjani has been notably silent since Mr. Ahmadinejad was declared the winner last week, and there has been speculation that Mr. Rafsanjani is in Qum trying to muster clerical opposition to the country’s leaders. But those reports are difficult to confirm with any authority.

Mr. Rafsanjani leads the 86-member Assembly of Experts, whose duties include endorsing the performance of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who on Saturday called the election’s outcome “a divine blessing.” In theory, the group has the power to remove him, but that has never been done and any attempt to do so would probably further inflame the situation, analysts said.

The analysts say about a third of the Assembly members are loyal to Mr. Rafsanjani. Of the other members, perhaps a quarter are considered loyal to Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, a mentor to Mr. Ahmadinejad and a staunchly conservative figure who has suggested that allowing the public a voice in elections serves only to sully God’s laws. The rest are viewed as independents who could vote either way.

Mr. Ahmadinejad, who defeated Mr. Rafsanjani in the 2005 presidential vote, accused Mr. Rafsanjani’s clan and at least one other prominent cleric during the campaign of being corrupt.

Those allegations prompted an open letter from 36 religious scholars, including some noted hard-liners, criticizing the incumbent for his attacks on senior mullahs, said Shahram Kholdi, a teaching fellow at the University of Manchester, in Britain. The way the government handles the public ire could be a further step toward alienating the clergy.

“If the clergy become Khamenei’s enemy, just think about it,” Mr. Kholdi said. “The shah made Qum his enemy, and they did not cease to plot against him until he was overthrown.”

The few voices that have emerged so far were already firmly fixed in the liberal camp. The news Web site Emrooz posted two letters on Wednesday that had been written two days earlier by Ayatollah Yousof Sanai and Ayatollah Asadollah Bayat Zanjani. Both were written in response to an open appeal from Mr. Moussavi, a moderate, for prominent religious figures to weigh in about the election results.

After saying he had wished that Mr. Moussavi had won, Ayatollah Sanai endorsed the idea of “protecting and ensuring the respect for the right of the people and the vote of the people and supporting their free choice.”

The letter from Ayatollah Zanjani went even further, calling the election outcome a “gross injustice” and decrying the fact that in recent years “the values of the revolution are so egregiously deformed.”

Those two letters followed scathing statements by the most prominent opposition ayatollah, Hossein Ali Montazeri, who was supplanted as Ayatollah Khomeini’s heir by the current supreme leader and who said “no one in their right mind” could believe last week’s election results.

Another statement issued from Qum, by the Society of the Scholars and the Researchers of the Howzeh — the name for the entire seminary system — condemned the violent attacks against students at Tehran University carried out by the government-organized Basij vigilantes, Mr. Kholdi said.

Of course, mullahs run the political gamut, from those who think Islam should get out of politics to those who think the rulers are divinely guided and should just eliminate elections altogether. The supreme leader has also gained the loyalty of thousands of seminary students by doling out generous government subsidies, so it is unclear what it might take for them to oppose him.

Analysts suspect that Mr. Rafsanjani’s message to the rest of the religious establishment is that it is about to be eclipsed by the military, which supports the government.

The risk for the supreme leader and Mr. Ahmadinejad if the mullahs shift away from them is that the idea that the government carries an Islamic stamp of approval will be undermined.

“The ranks of the government supporters will dwindle and the government claim that endorsing the results is a religious duty will collapse,” said Abbas Milani, author of the book “Eminent Persians” and chairman of Stanford University’s Iranian studies program.

Criticism from the mullahs would also make it nearly impossible to portray the demonstrations as some foreign plot.

“When they start coming out with such strong language, the idea that this is an American phenomenon, that this is a color revolution created by a bunch of liberal, anti-Islamic prostitutes who want to walk around half naked — well, that is not going to fly,” Mr. Milani said.