“The Iranian state serves the revolution, not the other way around,” concluded Iran analysts at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (IGC) in a series of 2019 studies four decades after Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution. As this series has previously indicated, in the name of pursuing an Islamic new world order, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) has gone to extreme lengths to suppress any contrary indigenous, independent Iranian culture.
Iranian-Canadian political analyst Shahir Shahidsaless has noted that the IRI’s founding father and first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had “viewed the concept of nationalism as un-Islamic.” “Like many other pious Muslims,” for him nationalism meant “opposition to the concept of ummah (Muslim worldwide community), which fundamentally rejects borders that divide Muslim societies.” “Those who, in the name of nationalism, factionalism, etc., create schism and disunity among Muslims are armies of Satan, opponents of the Holy Quran, and helping agents of the superpowers,” Khomeini had stated. He believed that “nationalism is designed by the plotters to create discord among the Muslims and it is being propagated by the agents of imperialism.”
Shahidsaless contrasted the “secular rule of the Shah,” Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, overthrown in 1979, whose “vast propaganda empowered nationalist fervour.” “In a glaring move,” the shah eliminated in 1976 the Islamic calendar, which begins with the 622 migration (hijrah) of Islam’s prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. As replacement came the Iranian royal calendar based upon the 559 BCE coronation of Achaemenid king Cyrus the Great. From Najaf, Iraq, where Khomeini had fled from the shah into exile in 1963, Khomeini labeled the new calendar a “preamble to the elimination of Islam.”
Ascending to power in 1979, Khomeini presented a dramatic reversal with the statement “Islam in fact is an ideology, in which religion represents one aspect.” The IGC analysts have noted that the “constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran makes clear the expansionist and Islamist nature of the country’s 1979 revolution” with a “centrality of ideology.” “Iran’s Islamist ideology is therefore at the crux of the Islamic Republic and cannot be detached from the Iranian state” while “for Iran’s leaders, the creation of an Islamic state in Iran was a first step to establishing a broader pan-Islamic order.” “The revolution does not exist to perfect the state; the state—the republic—is simply a means to support and perfect the revolution. Where the two conflict, the revolution is prioritized,” the IGC experts have summarized.
“All of Iran’s leaders are Islamists and claim their mandate to implement an Islamic order on the nation derives from God,” the IGC analysts have detailed. The “supreme leader is the leader of the revolution, not of the republic,” and the “Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is sworn to defend the purity of the revolution from enemies both within and without.” In public addresses, Iranian leaders have typically “opened with a prayer in Arabic, something that was not a regular feature of Iranian political culture before 1979.”
The IGC reports have especially noted that the
Green Movement protests against the 2009 Iranian presidential election results were a rude awakening to many Iranians who had believed the revolution was about political emancipation, when it was abruptly announced that obedience to the supreme leader and his appointees was the equivalent of obedience to God. No modern Iranian monarch could have made such a claim.
As Israeli Iran expert Raz Zimmt has explained, the IRI has tried to inculcate such loyalty by purging Iranian culture of nonconforming elements from the shah’s ancien régime in an attempt to create a new Iranian homo Islamicus. The “Islamic regime sought to place religion at the center of Iranian national identity, as a reaction to the blatant secularism of the royalist regime, and its efforts to emphasize Iran’s pre-Islamic past.” The national security and Middle East analyst Sarah Katz has concurred that the IRI “spurned Iranian nationalism in favor of a world conquering Islamist vision; and dissociated itself from Iran’s pre-Islamic past.”
Katz has elaborated that,
in the wake of the 1979 revolution, the government in Tehran has smothered the country’s rich, diverse, and ancient culture beneath a theocratic dictatorship. The regime is openly contemptuous of Iran’s history, its ethnic and religious minorities, and its secular-minded citizens.
In this diversity’s place, the IRI has indoctrinated a monoculture reflecting the Arab-Islamic seventh-century conquest of Iran, as the Iranian-American expatriate Amil Imani has noted. Since 1979 a “proud people with an enviable heritage have been systematically purged of their sense of identity and forced to think and behave like barbaric and intolerant Muslims.” His fellow Iranian expatiate Sheda Vasseghi has observed that the “Islamic Republic’s political and social agenda is to dilute Iranian culture and heritage with Islam to facilitate its Arabization.”
Public place names have served as one reeducation means. Khomeini gave Khalid al-Islambouli, the jihadist leader of the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, martyr status and named a Tehran street after Islambouli after his 1982 Egyptian state execution. Katz particularly noted that the IRI has been “Arabizing many Tehran street names from their classical Persian.”
Much more egregious, a “concerted effort was made to demolish historical monuments,” Imani noted, including previously examined attempts to destroy remains of the ancient Achaemenid Empire such as Persepolis and Cyrus the Great’s tomb. “The Islamist zealots ruling Iran for the past 40 years have undertaken a systematic campaign of endangering and destroying the cultural sites of pre-Islamic Iran, ignoring the numerous petitions and pleas of the Iranian people.” Imani stated that:
History is repeating itself. When the original Arabs conquered Iran, the first thing they did was destroy Persian books, heritage and artifacts, as we have witnessed similar actions by ISIS [Islamic State in Iraq and Syria] in both Iraq and Syria. The Islamic Republic of Iran also despises anything and everything Iranian, and has been gradually obliterating Iranian antiquities while no one notices.
Yet Vasseghi found “no better evidence regarding the Islamic Republic’s cultural genocide of Iran than its own textbooks.” Imani elaborated that the
animosity toward Iranian pre-Islamic culture and history and became the hallmark of the Islamic Republic’s regime. De-Persianization and adulation of the Arabic tribal culture entered elementary school books. In schools, instead of teaching Persian history, culture and geography and history, they taught culture and geography of the Bedouins of another land. In schools, children were brainwashed by a type of ideological indoctrination no longer acceptable by modern society and taught a Persian language obliterated by unfamiliar jargon. Purging of our institutions of higher education of scholars, top professors and researchers caused lowering of educational standards relative to international standards and flight of the best and the brightest of our country.
The views of Imani and others, along with recent Iranian events, indicate that the IRI’s revolution is backfiring. Iranians naturally reject abandoning their national identity for the costly, cosmic claims of an Islamic ideology perceived by many Iranians as a foreign imposition. Rather than fomenting totalitarian religious zeal, the IRI has ultimately highlighted Iran’s conflicted history between native and Arab-Islamic elements, as the next part of this series will analyze.
Jake says
Of course! They are like the Bolsheviks. These are ideological states, not national states. Without the ideology, they have no reason to exist and they collapse. In the Soviet Union, gradually no one believed and the State simply collapsed. The question is how many believe in their Islam.
Quazgaa says
If Iranians perceive islam as foreign (arab) imposed, why don’t they quit that religion?
Westman says
Why don’t prisoners hurl vulgar epthets at their jailers? Many Iranians have quit Islam in their hearts yet, intelligently, prefer not to die in vain. When there are enough dissenters to provide confidence of a successful overthrow, the Mullahs will be swinging to music.
In effect, Persian lives are currently being spent for the less-intelligent Arab conquers of their ancestors and the primitive religion they forced upon them. This humiliation must stop.
SKA says
They are – look at all the reports of Muslims converting to Christianity in spite of the extreme danger of being charged with apostasy. Even the textbooks under this regime admit that Christianity was spreading in Iran before the advent of Islam there.
gravenimage says
I have the greatest respect for Muslim apostates.
Sadly, though, most Muslims don’t leave Islam–this is also true of Muslims in Iran.
Walter Sieruk says
With all this news and information about concerning the brutal and oppressive tyrannical Islamic regime of Iran in only this early year of the month of January of 2020 is likewise blatant reminder that last year on the date of 4/22/19 the US Secretary of State ,Michael Pompeo spoke of that brutal and oppressive tyranny which oppresses the people of Iran and said “We will not appease their oppressors as that last administration did .” Pompeo then stated “We will support the Iranian people.”
As far back as on Tuesday, 2/5/ 19 in his second State on the Union a speech President Trump spoke of that Islamic tyranny of Iran as well as those in total power and complete of that tyrannical rogue state. For the President declared “It is a radical regime, they do bad, bad things.”
Moreover, an author of an article on a Freedom Site, Dariush Afshar, had explained the reality of the situation well when he wrote that the “People of Iran who fight for freedom in Iran and abroad put a huge gap and draw a prominent line between Iran and the Islamic regime in Tehran.”
This is sadly and tragically the terrible reality of this Islamic tyrannical regime of Iran. This Islamic tyranny has been well nicknamed “the mullahs regime” in which them mullahs and ayatollahs as well as other fiendish and fanatical Muslims in power have a strong and awful control of the Islamic regime of Iran and through their band of Islamic state “police” , who are called the “Revolutionary Guards “come down hard human rights of the Iranian people .
Therefore, the Iranian people who are trapped and forced to exist in this Islamic tyranny live in terrible fear of the mullahs and others in power in Iran. This is a tragic and sad reminder of the wisdom that was printed in the periodical of Benjamin Franklin which is entitled POOR RICHARDS’ ALMANAC that reads “Those who are feared are also hated.”
It also should be added, to this that the actual word “Republic” has on origin the Latin meaning “Of the people” With the mullahs ayatollahs in so much power and even influencing the parliament of this Islamic regime is tyranny is hardly a real republic .Furthermore the ruthless gang of thugs who are the stooges of those Muslim clerics, called the “Revolutionary Guards,” those Islamic State “police” come down hard on the human rights and freedoms of the Iranian people. Therefore the people do have the right to overthrow a tyranny. This reality had even been expressed and described by men of great intelligence .For example the philosopher .John Locke. This is wisdom that mullahs and other villains in power in that Islamic tyranny don’t want the Iranian people to know about or understand
Walter Sieruk says
That cruel and tyrannical Islamic regime of Iran regime has severely limited to an extreme much knowledge and wisdom from the outside world . This is because that fiendish and murderous ayatollahs and mullahs in power in Iran are very much afraid the Iranian people might discover different ideas . As the idea’s and philosophy of John Locke
For example, Locke views the people living under any genuine government are people retaining their individual rights after a government has been established. In other words, the securing of their rights – the protection of the life, liberty and property of all – is the sole legitimate purpose of government. I If a government begins to abuse those rights it then becomes tyrannical and the governed [the people] retain the right to overthrow that government and replace it with one that does its job properly.
So that heinous ”mullah regime” of Iran , greatly fears such ideas and keeps the people under his hideous control of his tyranny in and the darkness of much limited information .
In addition , about this tyrannical Islamic regime of Iran which has the official title of “The Islamic Republic of Iran” and also about the chief and head Imam, Ayatollah Khomeini, who had a strong hand in establishing this so called “Republic “ The very actual essence of that Islamic tyranny ,Ayatollah Khomeini had made in known that “The Islamic Republic of Iran would be Islamic and nothing but .He declared ‘What the nation wants is an Islamic Republic . Not just a Republic, not a democratic Republic, not a democratic Islamic Republic. Do not use the word “democratic” to describe it. That is the Western style. ‘” [1]
[1]`THE HISTORY OF JIHAD by Robert Spencer, page 318.
gravenimage says
A Cause, Not a Country: Iran’s Islamic Republic
…………………….
It’s all about the Islam.
FYI says
The Iranian people deserve so much better than to be subjected to islamic Totalitarianism that is indeed a lot like a religious{and Political} Bolshevism.
Iranians may be forced to submit to islam through Terror but their hearts cannot be enslaved.Those who see the error of islam and still wish to believe in God should consider that authentic Christianity is better.
Consider these facts:
1}The koran confirms the Bible{torah+Gospel}as being TRUE
{so any Bible that existed in the World at the time of the writing down of the koran or before it MUST be TRUE:allah says so!}
koran 3:3
2}The koran says that if you are in any doubt,consult the Bible or those who are familiar with it{Street preachers etc…}
koran 10:94
3} The ‘holy’ men of islam may claim the Gospel was corrupted:That is a LIE.
They don’t want you to read the Gospel as the “Truth would set you free’ and they would lose their power.If the Bible was corrupted which allah confirms as TRUE and which he gave to Jesus koran 5:46-47 then that means that Christians somehow corrupted allah’s words BUT
koran 18:27 allah’s word cannot be corrupted
So follow alalh’s unwitting advice in koran 10:94.READ the BIBLE
{Note that there are things in the Bible like the Golden Rule,the Holy Spirit of God’s wisdom,2 chief LOVE commandments see Matthew 22 v 37-40}
Ask yourself WHY all these things are MISSING in islam/the koran?
If allah confirms the Bible as TRUE but the koran either teaches the contrary or denies/missed what is in the Bible[which alalh says is TRUE} can you see how that shows that it is the koran that is in error?
sidney penny says
“Katz has elaborated that,
in the wake of the 1979 revolution, the government in Tehran has smothered the country’s rich, diverse, and ancient culture beneath a theocratic dictatorship. The regime is openly contemptuous of Iran’s history, its ethnic and religious minorities, and its secular-minded citizens.”
Is this a bit like Pakistan? ( Since it became an Islamic republic )