Mr Maliki is also said to have promised some powerful ministries to a Shia group led by a populist anti-Western cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr.Another month of haggling has begun.
Now closed, at least temporarily, it was run by Abdel Meguid al-Zindani, a fiery anti-Western cleric, friend of Osama bin Laden and leader in Al Isla, an Islamic party that is the second-largest in Yemen.
In particular, the government in Tehran may have pressed Mr Maliki to include Muqtada al-Sadr, a populist anti-Western Shia cleric, in the new coalition.
A cleric in western Afghanistan offered a bounty of $300,000 on Wednesday to whoever kills the film's maker, just the latest of several Muslim religious leaders to offer such a reward.
The police investigation found that in the last quarter of 2009 Choudhry began downloading from the internet sermons and material from Anwar al-Awlaki, the Islamist cleric who western officials say is the spiritual leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.
Preaching a strict adherence to Shariah, the Islamic legal code based on the Koran, and urging a ban on music, dancing and imitations of Western behavior, a visiting cleric from Najaf, the Iraqi Shiite spiritual and political center 100 miles south of Baghdad, demanded on Friday that the United States leave Iraq.
Muqtada, though often labelled by the Western media as a "firebrand cleric", has always been a subtle and cautious politician, underestimated by the Americans during the occupation ("they never figured out that he was anti-Iranian", says one Iraqi observer).
Since the rout of the Taliban in Afghanistan, when many Yemenis worried that they might be the next target for Western forces, the fiery Muslim cleric, a prominent and long-tolerated political force in Yemen, has stayed uncharacteristically out of the limelight.
Rouhani could be seeking to mollify hard-liners, a departure for the moderate, soft-spoken cleric whose 2013 election Western leaders greeted as a welcome change after eight years of the combative arch-conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
But some concede that impressionable youths might be swayed by an impassioned cleric suggesting that an anti-Western jihad had religious merit.
