Islam the Iranian Ayatollah style

Addressing a gathering of clerics in Tehran recently, the Iranian supreme religious leader Ayatollah Khamenei talked about what he described as the “suffering” of Muslims in Gaza, Myanmar, and India.

We will not directly comment on the Ayatollah’s views on Gaza and Myanmar. But we shall focus on India, which has the second-largest Muslim population in the world. It is roughly three times that of Iran. Incidentally, the Indian Muslim community is not only a mix of various factions and schools of thought but is also spread over many states of the Indian Union. Therefore, an unsavoury remark by a responsible leader, with the potential of damaging otherwise friendly relations between the two countries, needs to be set right. 

Earlier too, the Ayatollah had issued a statement on Kashmir hurting the interests of India and the MEA had to caution the Iranian mission in New Delhi. The impression that the Iranian leader creates by issuing loose statements like this is that Iran has taken upon its shoulders the responsibility of speaking for the oppressed Muslims anywhere on the globe. This is an indirect challenge to Türkiye and Saudi Arabia who claim to have the final say on matters pertaining to the Muslim ummah.

India is a secular democracy and not a Hindu Republic, unlike the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is a large multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual society. Muslims are not the only religious minority in India though calling the two hundred million-strong Indian Muslim community a minority is a misnomer. We have almost all religious denominations in our country, including Parsees — the offspring of an ancient Zoroastrian community of Iran —- hundreds of thousands of whom were forced to leave their country of origin as a result of religious persecution by the Muslim Arabs after the defeat of the last Zoroastrian King Yazdegerd III of the Sasanian dynasty. They came to Western India where the local rulers gave them shelter and the freedom to practice their religion and run their business. They were permitted to build their dakhmahs, the funeral places and also raise the fire-worshipping temples called ateshkadeh. One of these immigrant Parsees founded the Tata Group of Companies, jokingly called one-half of the Government of India. It is a practical example of India’s religious tolerance.

Indians demonstrated the same liberalism towards the communities of diverse faiths that came and settled down here throughout history.  Long back when the world did not know the word democracy India had spoken of vasudhaiva kutumbkam meaning international fraternity. So did Sa’adi, the great Iranian poet and thinker, say nearly a thousand years ago: bani adam a’zayeh yak paikarand – humans are the limbs of one body).

Today, India has perhaps the most comprehensive constitution in the world, that helps enable a country characterised by bewildering diversity to treat all Indian citizens equally.. 

It sounds strange that a country run according to Sharia (Islamic law) and that too of Shia orientation expresses concern for the Indian Muslims who are governed by a secular and democratic dispensation. May we request the Iranian supreme religious leader to name a single Islamic country where laws and rules apply to all citizens based on equality before the law?  In which Muslim country do we find the income from the mosques and endowments used to support the performance of non-Muslim religious rites? In India, under the Indian Constitutional provision, part of the enormous income from Hindu temples and shrine properties, running into billions of dollars, is handed over to Muslim Trusts to fund the Hajj pilgrimage by Indian Muslims to Mecca. This practice has been ongoing ever since the dawn of freedom in 1947.

If the Iranian supreme religious leader is really concerned about the Muslims in India, he should not have opposed the application of India for the membership of the OIC. If an Islamic organisation like the OIC rejects the admission of a country with the world’s largest Muslim population, is it doing justice to its mission? If the Iranian religious leader is really concerned about the oppressive elements meting out a heavy-handed treatment to the Muslims in different parts of the world, he should have raised his voice for the Baluch, the Pushtun, the Gilgatis and Baltistanis, the Kalash and the Chitralis. He should have highlighted the case of nearly two and a half million Uyghurs of Xinjiang. Will any of the Ayatollahs explain why nearly 400 young Iranian girls and women were massacred by gun-wielding Pasdaran forces even as they were peacefully demonstrating against the kidnapping and killing of a Kurdish girl named Ahsa? Thousands of Iranians protesting against authoritarian theocracy are lingering in the dreaded prison houses of Iran like Evin.

Iran’s problem is to be searched in her history as well as her psyche. Ancient Iran was famed for her great empire ruled by dynasties such as those of the Achaemenians and Sassanians. Under the long rule of staunch nationalist monarchies, Iran built a magnificent civilization admired all over the world. After Iran was conquered by Arab generals, the famed monarchical grandeur and cultural splendour gradually declined. The Iranian nation up to the present day has not come out of that trauma. 

We would like to let these happenings slip off our memory but we need to tell the world what India stands for.