B a h r a m e r a d: Prince Reza Pahlavi and the Question of Religion

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Prince Reza Pahlavi and the Question of Religion
April 29, 2008 Iran va Jahan Reza Bayegan

Reza Pahlavi has by and large been reticent on the issue of religion. He mainly mentions it in order to reiterate his belief in an Iran where the separation of Mosque and state are absolute. In a part of the Middle East where religion runs deep roots within the collective consciousness of the population, playing the religious card seems to be a powerful temptation for a leader who wishes to unite the masses under his flag. Nevertheless Mr Pahlavi during his long and arduous campaign has consistently refused to give in to any such temptation.There are political experts who argue that if the Iranian prince would have sprinkled his speeches with Islamic catchwords or would have sent messages on the occasions sacred to the Shiites, he would have done marvels to arouse the pious-minded masses of his nation. Under the present circumstances where the clerical establishment has lost its moral credibility and has been exposed as destroyers of authentic Islamic values, it would have been easy for the Iranian crown prince to stir religious sentiments and pose as the defender and potential restorer of the nation’s Islamic faith.Not displaying any outward sign of religiosity, the son of the late Shah of Iran whose namesake Imam Reza is Iran’s most revered saint is nevertheless far from being indifferent to spiritual belief. He has named one of his daughters Iman (faith in Arabic) and although he never refers to it, he has performed the sacred duty required of devout Muslims of making a pilgrimage to Mecca. His refusal therefore to bring the religious factor into his campaign has been a matter of principle rather than apathy.This principle is rooted in an outlook that the Iranian prince considers as indispensable for the future of his country as a modern democracy and a just society. Although the most dominant sect in Iran is Shiite Islam, the country is a religious mosaic that includes Shiite and Sunni Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Baha’is, Sufis. For a statesman, public identification with one of the religious denominations of the county, albeit the most numerous one amounts to discrimination against the rights of others who adhere to a different faith. It undermines the impartiality and the inclusiveness of the office he is representing.Reza Pahlavi’s vision of a secular government is not unlike the dream of another modern, progressive statesman in a different era and different country. John F. Kennedy believed in an America where the head of state did not represent any particular religious group but stood up for the rights and freedoms of all citizens. In a speech delivered to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, the then democratic presidential candidate who was a Catholic insisted that his religious faith should be considered as a private matter and ought in no way interfere with his discharging of his responsibility as the president of the United States of America. In that address he highlighted his belief in an America which “… is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accept instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials, and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all”. Prince Reza Pahlavi’s dream of the separation of religion and state in his homeland, although totally at odds with Iran’s present system of government, is deeply embedded within the Iranian political tradition and in agreement with the country’s tolerant culture and society. Iranian monarchs have a long tradition of acting as a moderating force and a counterweight against the bulldozing power of dominant religion. The biblical story of King Darius and Daniel is a good example of this moderating influence. It reminds us that although King Darius was initially deceived by the country’s elders to sign the order for punishing Daniel for his apparent disregard of an arbitrary law restricting the freedom of worship, eventually he follows not the dictates of the religious leaders, but the voice of his own conscience. Finally he takes the side of one Jew against all his advisers and the country’s religious establishment. He proves that as a king his just authority extends over everyone regardless of what they worship privately. (Book of Daniel, Chapter 6)The crimes and atrocities committed by the clerical regime in the past twenty-nine years in the name of religion have played a crucial role in helping to bring home to the best minds of the Iranian nation the need for a total separation of the institutions of worship and governance. Less sensible minds however have been affected differently. There has been an extremist backlash amongst many Iranians against Islam itself. Books and articles have been written denouncing Islam as a backward and irredeemably violent religion incompatible with advancement and modernity. Some have suggested a return to Zoroastrianism or displayed their preference for some aspects of Christianity.A clear-eyed examination however proves to an impartial observer that all religions have their positive and negative aspects. For those bent on perpetration of violence it is not difficult to find verses in the Old or New Testament to justify their actions. As far as compatibility with advancement is concerned, one should remember that a great many mediaeval thinkers and scientists who helped to establish the foundation of modern science emerged from within the Islamic civilization.The Iranian proponents of ditching Islam in favour of a more stylish religion fall into the same trap as the fanatical mullahs, i.e. they confound religious faith with religious doctrine. They strip religion from all its poetic, emotional, cultural and civilisational values and point at its skeletal bareness and deformities. Reduced to their doctrinal bareness and judged on the basis of the misdeeds of their followers all religions fail, and to borrow from the words of St Paul, all ‘fall short of the glory of God’.As in the eyes of the Iranian regime it is an apostasy to publicly declare one’s lack of belief in Islam, amongst some circles of the Iranian opposition outside the country, it is considered an anathema to admit that one adheres to the Islamic faith of his or her forefathers or god forbid performs the ritual of prayer. There is no question that Islam bashing sells books in the West and to hurl insults at Moslems has become the best refuge of mediocre Iranian minds and third-rate Middle Eastern intellects. If the Iranian opposition hopes to make any substantial change for better in Iran, it needs to dramatically alter its intolerant attitude and leave religion alone as a matter of private conscience and personal preference.Reza Pahlavi’s stance regarding religion amounts to acknowledging its humanizing and ethical role in shaping the individual character and infusing society with a sense of greater purpose. He has never advocated freedom from religion but freedom of religion. He has astutely understood that the biggest enemy of spiritual Islam is political Islam. In his book Winds of Change he writes:“… a profound personal commitment to faith has been deeply rooted in Iranian culture and heritage. As one of the cradles of civilization, Iran has been a land of tolerance, a home to a multitude of ethnicities and religions. The respect for individual faith gained root and flourished in our land, and our forefathers were among the first to introduce the concept of a deity and of monotheism to mankind. In all these years, men of the cloth, regardless of which faith they represented, were respected members of our society.Since the advent of Islam, our clergymen have served as a moral compass. Spirituality has been an inseparable part of our culture. And our men of the cloth have been respected by the various sectors of our society.But the advent of an Islamic theocracy in 1979 introduced a totally different role for religion and clergy. For the first time, these revolutionary clerics stepped out of the mosques and entered the political arena. Rather than being moral advisers to society, they became the decision makers and attempted to manage the daily affairs of the country. Even worse, they attempted to rewrite our history, our culture and our traditions.Soon, the once revered clergy had to provide daily answers to the most difficult social, economic, and policy questions. When their answers fell short, so did reverence to them.Today, moral guidance has been replaced by clerical censorship and dictatorial fiat…The sad fact is that clerical policies have generated a great deal of animosity and resentment - an immense disservice to our religious heritage”. (Winds of Change pp. 26-28)What is evident in the above passage is that Prince Reza Pahlavi clearly understands that Iran’s religion, unlike its clerical rulers is part and parcel of its rich moral heritage. It was there long before the clerical dictators appeared on the scene and will endure long after they have departed. For the past twenty-nine years Iran’s national faith has paid the highest price for the hardest lesson it has learned in the long history of its evolution i.e. to stay within the parameter of private and individual conscience where it belongs and where it can earn the highest reverence and can produce the greatest impact.

Iran ( shahzade Prince Reza Pahlavi )From: shotsoldier

Score one for the Muslim Brotherhood
By CLARE M. LOPEZ (Middle East Times)- Published: April 28, 2008 - Print Story

SPECIAL REPORT: The Bush administration has decided that calling the enemy by his name is too risky, too politically incorrect, or oddly, somehow too laudatory. And so, henceforth federal agencies of the United States government are to refrain from identifying the Islamic jihad with words that in any way convey genuine understanding about the links between terrorism and religion in the war that has been launched against Western liberal democratic civilization.
The U.S. government seems to think that declaring such links don't exist will make it so. Score one for the Muslim Brotherhood.
As Walid Phares describes in his post-9/11 three-book series on the meaning, structure, and progress of the current jihad, words can be enormously influential in the war of ideas. So, when the White House announces that government employees both at home and abroad must employ euphemisms such as "violent extremists" or "South Asian youths" instead of "Muslim jihadis" because the latter somehow confers legitimacy on the enemy, the entire Islamic world understands that the U.S. leadership has been infiltrated and influenced to a state of almost unbelievable confusion about this war. This serves to encourage the enemies of the United States and dismay its friends and would-be friends within the Muslim world. It also leads the American public to a dangerous misunderstanding of theological motivations that drive jihadis to hate and seek to destroy Western civilization. That the U.S. administration could even suppose that its choice of vocabulary might influence the jihadi enemy betrays a woeful lack of understanding about what actually motivates him. Concern about offending non-jihadi Muslims must not deter the country from conducting a realistic assessment of the Islamic roots of jihadi terrorism. Non-jihadi Muslims are the target and victims of jihadis to a far greater extent than kufar (non-believers in Islam). They welcome the West's outreach and need the empowerment it could offer, but are weakened when political correctness replaces focus on defining and defeating the enemy that would dominate both societies. What motivates the international Islamic jihad movement is a literal textual interpretation of doctrinal Islam as laid out in the Koran, hadith, and Sunna plus centuries of Islamic scholarship and consensus on the concept of just war. Within this construct, it is true that words such as jihad, mujahedin, and Caliphate carry intensely positive and honorable connotations – for the Muslim jihadis – but hardly for the rest of us, their intended targets for subjugation within the totalitarian system that Sharia would impose. In any case, use or non-use by infidels of the very terms by which jihadis identify themselves, to the extent that it might even be noticed, cannot possibly confer any additional measure of legitimacy on what has been for the mujahedin a centuries-old campaign of duty to spread their faith. What Americans need to understand is that Islamic jihadis, whether part of a formal terrorist organization such as al-Qaida or the Muslim Brotherhood, or merely ideologically driven by the actions and proclamations of such groups, are internally motivated by what they believe is a divine mandate to fight and kill until the entire world comes under the sway of Dar al-Islam (where Sharia law prevails). The only relevance for this enemy that the choice of descriptive words may have is in the area of psychological operations. If the jihadi enemy can achieve such a state of muddled confusion among the top administrative, legislative, and military leadership of its primary enemy (the United States of America) that we no longer even permit ourselves to utter the name of those sworn to our destruction, then truly they are winning the "War of Ideas." From a series of excellent recent media pieces, as well as extensive documentation entered into evidence in last year's Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial, we now know the extent of Muslim Brotherhood activity throughout our society. Muslim Brotherhood organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), all three listed by the Department of Justice as unindicted co-conspirators, have achieved unprecedented access to the Department of Defense and even the White House.But aware now of the enemy's stealth and cunning in seeking to influence U.S. national security policy, the nation is obligated to reject his agenda — an agenda that prioritizes concealment until it is too late of the true nature of their campaign of conquest, whether by Dawa (persuasion, including by way of deception) or terrorist attack. Many millions of Muslims, the overwhelming majority of whom have no desire to associate with or support in any way the agenda of Islamic jihadis, are looking for American leadership. They need the commitment of the nation's enormous national resources to this long war because it is their war for existence, too. Millions of Muslims, both U.S. citizens and others, look to American courage of conviction and the will to defend our common belief in universal human dignity to encourage their own desire to speak out, stand up, and seize back the everyday practice of the Islamic faith from those who now control it — and them. Muslims who are humanists, who abhor the violence jihadis derive from Islamic doctrine, need an ally who will encourage them to set aside that doctrine but still remain faithful to a spirit of Islam that is tolerant, not bent on world conquest. When the world sees American resolve quail in the face of a resurgent, aggressive Islamism, because it refuses to admit it is attacked by an enemy who defines his assault in religious terms and quotes the revealed scripture of his faith to justify his murderous rage, the world loses not just respect but hope. Issuance of a misguided primer on U.S. government usage of those terms does nothing to confront or defeat that rage. Instead, it leaves federal employees and U.S. citizens alike only more confused about who and what they are fighting. Distracting American attention from the enemy's real identity, persuading the people that it is only some inchoate "extremists" with no connection to the doctrine of Islam who attacked the United States on 9/11, in Nairobi, and Dar Es Salaam, and Aden, and Dhahran must be recognized for what it is: a denial and deception tactic designed to deny the nation the ability to grasp clearly the reality of this menace. The way to win this confrontation with jihadism has less to do with word-smithing than with a candid assessment of the enemy's capabilities, ideology, motivations, intentions, and scope of operations. To be effective at this, national leadership must first assess the extent of Muslim Brotherhood penetration of the government and society, root it out, and then move forward with a vocabulary that is appropriate to defeating the jihadi enemy.
Clare Lopez is vice president of the Intelligence Summit, a professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CI Centre) in Alexandria, VA, USA, and a private consultant on issues related to the Middle East.

An Iranian's vision of Jesus' life stirs debate
The new film, based on the Islamic version of Jesus' life, depicts him as a prophet rather than the son of God. Its director says he wants to further understanding.
By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 29, 2008
TEHRAN -- A man wrapped in a shawl stood at the door. Read it here : http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-jesus29apr29,1,177430.story

"This is Jesus," said another man.
http://www.latimes.com/video/?autoStart=true&topVideoCatNo=default&clipId=2406908