UPDATE: I’ve been waiting for Reuel Marc Gehrect’s thoughts on the events in Iran and they are here. He knows as much about the country as any American, having studied it as a CIA agent and visited, smuggling himself into the country at the risk of his life.
fI’m reading Amir Taheri’s book on the history of Persia and Shia Islam. It is amazing and reads like a novel. The first few chapters are about the origins of Islam and Shia Islam. For example, there was a religious conversion to monotheism prior to Muhammed and the Quran. The saying Allah Akbar! predates Muhammad and was an expression of the monotheism of Arabs who had adopted the basic tenets of Judaism living in Arabia. Muhammad’s father was such a monotheist. They believed that the God of the Jews was superior to the gods of the Arabs. I have long believed that the hostility to the Jews by Islam is due to the failure of Arabic Jews to adopt the new religion of Muhammad.
He describes the major differences between Sunni and Shia which are far greater than the belief that Ali should have been the fourth in line after Muhammad’s death. The Shia raise the role of imams to the level nearly of Muhammad, himself and have a number of beliefs that are clearly in conflict with Sunni Islam.
Thirdly, he points out that Ayatollah Khomeini established a fascist regime that has little to do with either Islam or Iran. The mullahs have grown rich and many of them, like Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president and “moderate,” began as middle class businessmen or other non-scholastic origins. They have made a good thing of their sudden conversion to mullahs in 1978.
Many believe Rafsanjani to be the richest man in Iran due to his deep involvement in various Iranian industries, including the oil industry, as well as his ownership of many properties throughout the country. There have also been allegations that some of his wealth has come from arms deals made after the Revolution. His wealth has earned him the nickname of Akbar Shah in Iran. Rafsanjani family own vast financial empires in Iran, including foreign trade, vast landholdings and the largest network of private universities in Iran which are Known as Azad and these have 300 campuses spread all over the country. They do not only have large financial resources but also an active cadre of student activists numbering around 3 million.
The American business magazine Forbes has included Rafsanjani in their list of richest people in the world. In 2003 Forbes described Rafsanjani as the real power behind the Iranian government, and asserted that he “has more or less run the Islamic Republic for the past 24 years.”
Doing well by doing good, some call it.
Taheri’s book also points out that the Khomeini regime has killed hundreds of thousands and many of their victims have been among the senior clerical class. These were the scholars of Islam who opposed Khomeini in his deviations from Islamic principles. The cult around the “holy city” of Qom is also discussed. Near Qom is a smaller city, Jamkaran, where the “12th Imam” is supposed to be “occulted.” This small city has recently become the beneficiary of President Ahmadinejad who has derived his legitimacy for the presidency from a supposed association with the 12th Imam.
One of the first acts of the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was to donate £10 million to the mosque, to fund plans to turn “the tiny Jamkaran mosque into a massive complex of prayer halls, minarets, car parks and ablutions.”[5] In recent years, overseers of the Jamkaran compound have become sensitive to its foreign images and have restricted foreign press from the main mosque and well.
He also goes into a number of interesting aspects of Iranian history and its relationship to Islam. Contrary to Khomeini assertions, Iran did not adopt Islam voluntarily and there were bloody battles for many years before the war-like Arabs subdued the Iranians. Once in control, they burned Iranian libraries and insisted that the only book that was necessary was the Quran. An Iranian poet commented that he did not see how a people with one book could rule another people with hundreds of libraries.
I am still reading and will add to this post but I strongly recommend this book.
The relationship between Iran and Islam is fascinating and immensely complex, as is the history of Islam in general. It wasn’t just years before the Arabs subdued the Persians, in a way it was more than a century. Militarily, they took western Persia and Christian Syria within a decade or so after the death of the Prophet (a staggering accomplishment for a bunch of nobodies rushing out of the armpit of the world). Religiously, not only did they not convert all of Iran to Islam at the same time, indeed they had little desire to do so as the Zoroastrians and Christians paid significant taxes, and the Muslims were learning to enjoy wealth. The tension between those who wanted to limit conversion and those who wanted to spread the faith was one of the early turning points in the history of the Caliphate.
Iran is of course Muslim today, and Shiite, but it is also intensely aware of the greatness of its past and its fantastic literary tradition.
I enjoy your blog, by the way.
Thanks, I’m now past the chapter on the Jews and he seems to agree with me that Islam really grew out of the Judaism in the Arabian peninsula at the time. It is very interesting although at times I am aware that he is writing a polemic, as well as history.