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Iranian Nationalists Reject Arabia’s Islamic Yoke

Feb 7, 2020 11:00 am By Andrew Harrod

The “average Iranian, though he may sympathize with the Palestinians, cannot identify with the Arabs, whom he regards as an ancestral foe,” Iranian expatriate author Amir Taheri has written. As this occasional series has previously explored, such national historical memories underline Iran’s conflicted relationship with Arabs and the Islamic faith that their past imperialism imposed upon Iran and its ancient heritage.

“The early Islamic conquerors of the seventh century spread Islam and the Arabic language throughout the Persian Empire and attempted a wholesale replacement of the indigenous culture,” Middle East analyst Sarah Katz has noted. Iran scholars have observed that as the

conquest of most of Iran turned out to be permanent, Islam eventually spread among Iranians, and Arabic became the language of religion, literature, and science in Iran. In this respect the Muslim Arab conquest marks a major turning point in the history of Iran.

“Over time, most of the country’s population converted to Islam, but Persia’s historical and cultural legacy proved resilient,” Katz has noted, as at the aptly named Persians are not Arabs website. It has boasted that “Persians actually pride themselves that they fought to remain as Persians, not Arabs,” and “did everything to maintain their language when Egypt and other countries from north of Africa started to speak Arabic.” Iranian-American Amil Imani has concurred: “Unlike the Persians, the Egyptians became completely Arabized, and have little or no nostalgia for their ancient past. Islam has dominated the Egyptians’ lives.”

In contrast, “if you by accident call a Persian an Arab, there won’t be a good scene,” Imani has explained. “If you call the Iranian people ‘Arabs,’ it will most certainly annoy them,” agreed Persians are not Arabs. “Iranians are proud of their glorious ancestry, nationality and culture and are very touchy on this subject! This may have been amplified since Persians and Arabs have been rivals throughout the history.”

The American Enterprise Institute’s Iran analyst Michael Rubin has similarly stated:

Perhaps the only thing longer than Iran’s animosity toward the United States is its hatred of Saudi Arabia. The two are divided not only by the Persian Gulf, but also by a Shiite-Sunni sectarian split and a Persian-Arab divide that goes back centuries.

“Iranians remain nationalistic,” former Financial Times reporter Gareth Smyth has noted, based on his decades covering Iran and the Middle East. Iranians “effortlessly juggle the lunar Islamic calendar and a solar Iranian calendar, marking the festivals of both” and “commonly look down on Arabs, with some of those most critical of the country’s clerics resenting them as Arabs.” Iranian-Canadian political analyst Shahir Shahidsaless has likewise noted that

Iranian nationalists glorify Iran’s pre-Islamic civilisation and reject an Islamic system, though not necessarily Islam. They strongly feel that Iranians were humiliated as a result of the Arab-Muslim conquest of Iran, which led to the collapse of the Iranian Sassanid Empire in the 7th Century.

Katz has additionally observed that “nostalgia for the Persian Empire’s pre-Islamic past legacy is steadily rising, especially among Iranian exiles and their children in the United States.” Some “call for a complete return to the Persian language as it existed before the arrival of the Muslim conquerors.” For Iranian “radical nationalists, anti-Arab sentiments are particularly intense,” Shahidsaless has observed.

Perhaps Shahidsaless had Imani in mind, as the latter has written that Iranians “consider Islam responsible for 1400 years of atrocities committed against the Iranian people and much of the Islamic world.” He recalled his high school history teacher in Iran before the 1979 Islamic revolution overthrew Iran’s nationalist monarchy. He “explicitly said that the Islamic creed was imposed on an enlightened, tolerant and free Iranian people at the point of the sword.”

“Most Iranians consider Islam an invader,” Imani has concluded, brought by “savages hailing from the Arabian Peninsula.” They followed “promises of booty and women in this world and glorious eternal sensual rewards in the promised paradise of Allah in the next.” He has elaborated:

Originally, many Iranians and other minorities who lived in Iran were forced to accept Islam to save their lives from the Arab butchers, but deep within their hearts, they never surrendered to the Bedouin Arab culture. That period became the defining moment of 1400 years of resentment Persians kept in their hearts.

Imani has particularly critiqued claims of a medieval “Islamic Golden Age” in areas such as the arts. This

is like saying a group of savages storming into the world’s largest libraries, murdering all the librarians and then claimed to have written all the books there, gives credit to this myth. Islam’s much-vaunted ‘Golden Age’ was in fact just the twilight of conquered pre-Islamic cultures.

Perhaps Islam’s most vivid impressions for Imani have been the Shiite Ashura ceremonies that mark during the Islamic calendar’s first month (Muharram) the 680 Battle of Karbala in modern Iraq. Some devout Shiites on Ashura publicly perform flagellations and bodily cuttings to commemorate the death of Husayn ibn Ali, Shiite Islam’s third imam, at the hands of Sunni Muslims under Umayyad Caliph Yazid I in an intra-Muslim power struggle. “During my teens in Iran, I called Muharram the month of terror. For two days, I used to lock myself in the basement of the house to read my books or listen to my favorite music. I simply could not witness the savagery and ritual barbarism of Ashura,” Imani has recalled.

Karbala’s memory leaves Imani cold, as “Ashura was a day when two Arab terrorists went to war together over power” in “infighting” among “two enemies of Persians.” While before 1979 Iran’s ruling shah “semi-banned” Ashura, thereafter the Islamic Republic revived the observance. Now Iranians “are forced by the mullahs every year to beat themselves for an Arab man who was a killer of Iranian people.”

The Islamic Republic has presented a dramatic cultural caesura to Imani, who “was born into a non-practicing Shiite Muslim family.” In his “younger years in Iran, Islam was out of people’s life” and merely a “very private matter and to some very irrelevant.” Most Iranians “could not read the Quran in Arabic. And even if they did, they could not understand a word of it or its interpretation.”

Amidst this lax piety, Imani remembered a superficially benign, skewed understanding of Islam. “The type of Islam Iranians practiced during the time of the Shah did not even exist at all. It was only a fiction or a fantasy manufactured out of whole cloth.” In Iranian schools, students “were forced to memorize a few non-violent Surah (verses) from the Meccan period when prophet Muhammad’s beliefs and sayings were relatively innocuous.”

Iran’s subsequent Islamic Republic has been far less innocuous, and its bitter experience has only left powerful currents of Iranian nationalism and anti-Arab animus undiminished. Unsurprisingly, Islamic Republic leaders have often felt compelled to mix their theocratic message with discordant Iranian nationalist elements, as a forthcoming article will examine.

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Filed Under: Iran Tagged With: Amil Imani


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Comments

  1. mortimer says

    Feb 7, 2020 at 11:26 am

    Fine exposé of the Persian mindset by Andrew Harrod. The antipathy towards Arabs is a key part of the Persian culture, but rebellious independent thought is another thing that is totally non-Islamic. If Western countries can appeal to this rebellious attitude in the Persian psyche, they can possibly help to encourage Iran’s release from the Shi’ite conspiracy that grips it.

    As soon as there are several funerals of top rulers … the companions and cronies of Ayatollah Khomeini … there will be an opening for regime change.

    In the end, it may be the Iranian labor organizations that bring regime change in Iran as Solidarnosc did in Poland.

    • Carol the 1st says

      Feb 10, 2020 at 2:31 pm

      That hardly sounds non-violent Mortimer.

  2. mortimer says

    Feb 7, 2020 at 11:34 am

    (CNSNews.com) – Following President Trump’s tough criticism of the Iranian regime in his State of the Union address, its leaders are urging Iranians to turn out in huge numbers in rallies next week to show their support for the Islamic Republic.

    Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Wednesday the February 11 rallies – marking the 41st anniversary of the 1979 revolution that brought the mullahs to power – and parliamentary elections later in the month, were “two big tests facing the great Iranian people.”

    Addressing a gathering in Tehran, Khamenei said Iran’s enemies fear “popular support for the establishment” more than its military might.

    “Today, we need to stand together on February 11 more than ever and tell our enemies that we have stood by our revolution for 41 years and that we will be in the path of the revolution, Imam [Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic republic], and supreme leader until the day we are alive,” he told a cabinet meeting.

    “Allah willing, attending the February 11 rallies will be another strike on enemies.”

    https://www.cnsnews.com/index.php/article/international/patrick-goodenough/iranian-regime-calls-massive-rally-turnout-after-trumps

    • Carol the 1st says

      Feb 10, 2020 at 2:39 pm

      “until the day we are alive” ?? We would have worded a comparable sentiment “until the last day of our lives”. So is this an error of wording or are they such a “death cult” that only the big whorehouse in the sky lends vitality? Curious.

  3. FYI says

    Feb 7, 2020 at 11:56 am

    The Iranians deserve so much better than to be ruled by those fraudulently pious creepy old islamic fossils with their shite ARAB god al LAH,the god with Two Right Hands{sahih muslim 1827},the god who hates music and musical instruments,art and self-expression,a god who inconveniently for the Iranians is so linguistically challenged that he doesn’t speak Farsi.The Actual God speaks Farsi….

    All theocracies are appaling so separation of religion and state is imperative for any modern nation as you cannot have weirdy beardy ‘holy’ men controlling every aspect of your life as that is religious totalitarianism.

    The Iranians would be better off with a secular society if possible and if they want to believe in God ,well there is the Actual Judeo-Christian Biblical God not to be confused with allah the ARAB god of islam{the god who MISSED the Golden Rule,denies the Wisdom of God aka the Holy Spirit due to an EPIC theology fail in koran 5:116 where he tells us he thinks Christians believe MARY is in the Trinity.I mean what sort of god gets Theology wrong?}

    The funny thing about {al}Lah the ARAB is that he tells muslims who are in doubt {koran 10:94} to consult those who know the Bible {which he says is TRUE k3:3} :so WHY is the Bible banned in Iran?
    Because the mullahs are LYING to and deceiving you and they stay in power by preventing you from knowing the Truth.And it is not true that the Bible was ever corrupted:in fact allah insists his words cannot be changed{ koran 18:27}so to say the Bible was corrupted is to call alalh a liar!

    Do compare..it is worth while.

    1]The Judeo-Christian Biblical God versus the islamic koranic god al LAH

    2]The Bible vs the Koran
    {note that the Golden Rule,the 2 chief Commandments,the Spirit of God’s Wisdom,everything about Jesus is either denied or missing or contradicted in the koran.
    But allah says the Bible is TRUEk3;3 at the time the koran was written so why are all these things denied or missing in the koran?Note what is MISSING in the koran}

    3]Jesus Christ vs muhammed

    Iranian people deserve so much better then an idiot of an ARAB god and deserve to be free of religious tyranny.

    • Rarely says

      Feb 7, 2020 at 4:15 pm

      How inconsiderate of them to reject your religion. If only they prayed and thought like you do all will be well. Good luck with that.

      • gravenimage says

        Feb 7, 2020 at 11:58 pm

        Is Rarely all good with the horrors of Islam?

      • Alice says

        Feb 8, 2020 at 6:50 am

        Yes, actually, it would be good if they believed the God of the Bible who says you should love your neighbor as yourself, not consider him a kafir and less than a human being to be subjugated…

        • Rueben_Singh says

          Feb 8, 2020 at 4:37 pm

          They should go back to Zorastrianism.
          They don’t need to swap one form of lunacy for another..

      • Carol the 1st says

        Feb 10, 2020 at 2:45 pm

        Maybe Islam has a stern way of shaking them from their “rebellious ATTITUDE” ??

        • Carol the 1st says

          Feb 10, 2020 at 3:02 pm

          Rarely…I doubt those many citizens with Persian blood still flowing in their veins (despite the flooding of their country and leadership with Arabs over the centuries) have or would reject Christianity (given a “free” environment). Something at the core seems very similar:

          From the book ZARATHUSHTRA and his teachings by Dasturji Khurshed Sahpoorji Dabu

          · Religion should be a living force in our life, and should not be confined to a study of scriptural texts. In other words, our behaviour should indicate if religion is permeating (Spreading or spread throughout) it on all occasions.

          · Religion should be like a perfume spreading sweet influence through each thought word and deed.
          …..
          Those last three seem to be the main tenets of Zorastrianism. It is not a coin minted with two faces.

  4. WithPurpleAbandon says

    Feb 7, 2020 at 2:58 pm

    “Shiite-Sunni sectarian split and a Persian-Arab divide.”

    The first part is just putting it euphemistically, I believe. It’s a Wahhabist-Salafist vs. Shiite sectarian split, which makes the enmity between Iran and Saudi Arabia even more polarized.

  5. ntesdorf says

    Feb 7, 2020 at 5:01 pm

    One of the Saving Graces of Islam is that Muslims hate each other much more than they hate Kaffirs and kill other Muslims at a much higher rate than Kaffirs.

    • Mural says

      Feb 7, 2020 at 9:26 pm

      +1.

  6. gravenimage says

    Feb 8, 2020 at 12:01 am

    Iranian Nationalists Reject Arabia’s Islamic Yoke
    …………………….

    Now if only they’d reject Islam we might get somewhere…

    • Alice says

      Feb 8, 2020 at 6:56 am

      Some are turning to God and rejecting Islam, through dreams and visions and then thrown in prison and tortured! Why are mullahs so afraid of people who think differently than they do?

      • gravenimage says

        Feb 8, 2020 at 11:19 pm

        Yes, there are a few Muslims in Iran who are leaving Islam. I wish there were many more.

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