The police in Tehran said they had arrested fewer than 50 people that night. That was a small number given that dozens of over-zealous celebrants are normally arrested every Chahar Shambeh Souri.
The police said in advance that anyone arrested on Chahar Shambeh Souri would be kept in jail until after Sizdeh Bedar, April 2, the end of the long holiday season.
Some opposition websites reported scattered clashes between police and opposition supporters, but even those websites did not make it sound like any major confrontation had occurred.
Chahar Shambeh Souri is basically a neighborhood celebration or a block party repeated over and over again throughout the country. It is not unlikely that many celebrants jumping over thousands of bonfires shouted any regime chants after checking to see that there were police vehicles in sight. There would be no way of knowing he extent of such protests.
Late Tuesday night, the Tehran fire department reported that it had extinguished 90 bonfires that got out of hand. It didn’t report any major damages or injuries, however.
The police and Basij were out in forced before dusk, many of them patrolling on motorbikes on the hunt for any sign of disorder. The police banned private motorbikes from the streets, presumably out of fear that protesters would use them to go from bonfire to bonfire encouraging anti-regime chants.
Two days before the holiday, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi criticized the fire-jumping habit as un-Islamic. Contrary to many news reports in the West, he did not ban the fire jumping. He said that fire jumping was irreligious or against Islamic law, meaning it was a bad thing for people to do. But that does not make anyone subject to arrest. His wish was obviously ignored.
Neither Mehdi Karrubi nor Mir-Hossain Musavi, the two chief names in the opposition, called for any protests that night, but some opposition websites urged that protests should be held along with the fire jumping.
