Letters

July 2005
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Using religion whenever it pleases them

On Mahmoud Ghaffari's "Beginning of the end":

Your article was typical of what the diaspora has been writing since 1979. For 26 years now, every year (if not every day), you have been saying the end of the Islamic Republic is near.

Now you claim the end of Islam in Iran is near. To deny the history of Islam in Iran the past 1,400 years is to cut a huge slice out of your own history and ignore it.

As Professor Hamid Algar of UC Berkeley states, "The Islam we know throughout the world today has come to them through a filter of a Persian lens" If you only knew your own history, you wouldn't write such things. It wasn't the Arabs that brought Islam to the world, it was the newly converted Persians 200 years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). That is why wherever you go, from East to West, North or South, they use Persian terminology to define Islamic terms.

For example, from Turkey to China, Russia to Bangladesh.....they say "Namaz" instead of "Salat" for prayer. They say Azan and Ramazan instead of "Athan" and " Ramadan". This is from the influence of the Persian accent throughout the Islamic world.. All Islamic Empires, from the Moorish Empire in Spain, to the Ottoman Empire...all required Persian to be taught alongside Arabic for Islamic studies.

All early Islamic texts are written in Persian rather than Arabic, because the original scholars of Islam were mostly Persian. For example, Sunni Islam has 4 schools of thought. (Maliki, Hanbali, Shaf'ei, Hanafi).

Did you know all 4 of them were Persian scholars? How about all the SUNNI books of Hadith (Abu Muslim, Bukhari, etc.). They were all Persian scholars that put together the books of hadith of the Prophet. Abu Muslim, Bukhari were all Persians. So how could you claim Iran had no Islamic history? That is laughable if not majorly ignorant.

And if you go to Iran, except for a VERY small minority in Tehran....even the most secularized youth concider themselves Muslim. Have you even been back to the country? How many people hate Islam? They might hate the Ulama in the major cities, but very few actually hate Islam.

Just come konkoor time, and the majority of the youth can be found at Imam-Zadeh Saleh's mosque in Tehran praying for good grades. They just use religion whenever it pleases them.

I myself am an Iranian, born and raised in both Iran and America, and concider Islam the only true religion. Are you going to claim I'm not Iranian and some sort of "arab parast"?

As the Prophet Muhammad said, "Arabs are the people of revelation, but the Persians will be the people of Interpretation". It is not wrong then that we have found in the past 1,400 years that the Persians were the scholars of Islam, and the source of all Islamic movements in the world. It wasn't Arabs that brought Islam to China and India. It was the Persians. That is why Pakistanis spoke farsi until 100 years ago (Before urdu was formed). Their Islam is the Islam of Persians, not the Islam of Arabs. And don't forget, Imam Hussein (the 3rd imam of Shi'a Islam) married a Persian Princess (Shahrbanu), and therefore 9 of the 12 Imams were of Persian heritage. The Prophet Muhamamd great grandchild (Imam Reza (a.s)) is buried in our territory, and is still greatly respected by almost everyone in Iran (even many non-Muslims).

So how could you say we have no Islamic Heritage in Iran?

Just go to Isfahan. Are you willing to destroy all those historic monuments we call "Mosques"? You do realize Shah Abbas created a mosque, right? You do realize our greatest architecture in Iran is Islamic Architecture right? The only great thing we have from pre-Islamic times is a ruin you call Persepolis (Takhteh Jamshid), and it wasn't the Arabs that destroyed it for you. So stop grieving.

Stop being reactionary and associating what the government does with Islam. As Ahmadenejad says, Islam stands for justice and a stand against the oppressors and those who are corrupt. As long as our leaders are tyrants and un-just, we don't have Islam in our government.

Dariush Abadi

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