Iran and Islam

I have been asked in several emails why I am so sympathetic to Iran when I am so concerned, more generally, about the threat posed by Islam. Well, many of my answers may be read in earlier posts. But it more than bears repetition that Shi'ism does not believe in the Caliphate, and that the attempt to create in Iran something comparable thereto is already on the way out, just as such attempts will not last in Southern Iraq, or in Lebanon.

Iranian Shi'ism in any case contains many very obvious continuations both of Zorastrianism and of Hellenism, whereas the Iraqi and Lebanese versions are of course culturally Arab: austere, ferocious, and, in the Iraqi case (the form found in an arc around the Gulf, and including most of both the Saudi and the Iranian oil-producing regions), not much marked by any great pre-Islamic culture, other than so very long ago as to make little difference; Lebanon, being in the Levant, is of course a completely different story. Being Levantine is an important mitigating factor. Being Persian is even more so.

And what of Sufism, I have been asked? Well, there are very obvious continuations of Judaism, of Christianity and (at least through Christianity, and possibly also through Judaism) of Hellenism in Sufism. As with Sh'ism, Wahhabi, Salafi, Deobandi and the rest who argue that Sufism is largely un-Islamic have a very good point, or, rather, a series of very good points. But the Chechens are Sufi, and Sufism is hugely influential both in Turkey and on the "village Islam" of the Indian Subcontinent, two enormous sources of danger. Furthermore, there exists a Sufi Council of Britain which, in a classic neocon-Islamic alliance, supports the conditions of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and supported the full extent of the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon.

Finally, when the Wahhabi, Salafi, Deobandi and the rest say that theirs is the true, pure, original Islam, then, although they are wrong in detail, they are fundamentally correct. And that is the problem: Islam, simply as such. Which, in those terms, Iranian Shi'ism is not, making it far less of a problem, if necessarily a problem at all.