Friday
October 22, 1999
Intolerance
In respose to the letter, "Muslims
first":
You, as one who knows so much about Islam and Persia, should know that,
first of all, pre-Islamic Iran had a plethora of religions and was much
more tolerant of them than what is shown today. And I think I speak for
all Zoroastrians when I say that it is extraordinarily ignorant of you
to call their faith "pagan" when so many ideas in Islam are
derived from Zoroastrianism. If you were open-minded enough to do any
research about it you would have found that out. Zoroastrianism is monotheistic
and predated Islam, too.
And you can go around calling Islam tolerant and universal all you want,
but what it boils down to is that Islam came out of Arabia by an Arabian
by the name of Mohammad. And I certainly do not consider the indiscriminate
persecution of Bahais in Iran "religious freedom", nor the forced
exile of some one million able and smart Iranians from their country because
of their political beliefs.
I do not hold any animosity whatsoever against the Arabs, so get that
out of your head. But you seem to be forgetting that when the Arabs came,
they burned the religious and educational books of Iran, destroyed our
beautiful art, defaced our sculptures, burned our cities, raped our women,
and made us second class citizens under Islam. Mohammad himself had 400
wives. What kind of man would have the nerve to claim 400 women for himself?
Oh wait, people like you would. Your pathetic attempt to sugarcoat Islamic
Arab treatment of the Persians won't be bought by any person with half
a brain.
Iran is good at all areas of math and science because we as a culture
have developed the very studies we are tested on, algebra (riazi), chemistry
(chemia), and not because of Islam, which obviously has tried to suppress
it. Jews fled to Spain because of the great religious mix, and when you
call Spain Islamic, that is a gross generalization. The great scientific
and mathematical ideas put into practice in Spain were developed by Iranians
that happened to be Muslim. True, some Iranians did embrace Islam because
of the heavy handed religious and political rule by Yazdigird and his
Zoroastrian priests, but that was only a brief period of religious strife
that would've ended with the war with Byzantium.
I do not call a language that has so many glitches in its patterns and
order articulate and elaborate. Arabic has different letters for the
same sound, for God's sake. I don't call that complexity, only confusion
that has also worked its way into the Persian script. you think that everyone
outside of Islam is beneath you, but you are wrong. contrary to the plan
of your fellow hezbollahis, Iranians are starting to realize the truth
about what has been done to them. you are the product of a backwards,
senile, turban-wearing piece of you know what that couldn't even speak
proper Persian. You remember his name, right?
I am not here to bash Islam. I may not like the religion's impact or
its history, but I have no problem with anyone who chooses to follow the
belief, as long as they don't impose it on others, as you and your hezbollah
brothers do. You sit there and advertise Islam as some magical product
that changed everything for the better. Look at Iran today. Look at
all countries with Islam as their prominent religion. Most of them haven't
even reached the point where you could call them "developing,"
much less progressive. Many of their people wallow in poverty and ignorance,
and Iran, which before Islam was the greatest country on earth, not only
for itself but for the people it ruled, is plagued by poverty, oppression,
ignorance, and misery. Take your religious dogma and lies and crawl back
into the hole you came from.
Maziar Shirazi
