The Guardian does a nice job debunking Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Jewish roots claim. Rumours that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s family converted to Islam from Judaism are false. In fact, they are proud Shias. About Ahmadinejad’s mother:
“Moreover, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mother is a Seyyede. This is a title given to women whose family are believed to be direct bloodline descendants of Prophet Muhammad. Male members are given the title of Seyyed, and include prominent figures such as Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei. In Judaism, this is equivalent to the Cohens, who are direct descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses. One has to be born into a Seyyed family: the title is never given to Muslims by birth, let alone converts. This makes it impossible for Ahmadinejad’s mother to have been a Jew. In fact, she was so proud of her lineage that everyone in her native village of Aradan referred to her by her Islamic title, Seyyede.”
The analogy to the descendants of King David would have been more appropriate. This reminds me about Christopher Hitchens’ quote posted by Devin Coldewey:
“Nothing is more human and fallible than the dynastic or hereditary principle, and Islam has been racked from its birth by squabbles between princelings and pretenders, all claiming the relevant drop of original blood. If the total of those claiming descent from the founder was added up, it would probably exceed the number of holy nails and splinters that went to make up the thousand-foot cross on which, judging by the number of splinter-shaped relics, Jesus was evidently martyred.”
by Ben Atlas on 08.17.2009.2:54pm · 1 comment
Mark Vernon published his concluding article about Plato in the Guardian – Plato’s Dialogues, part 3: Philosophy as a way of life. Mark argues that:
“…it is entirely wrong to see Plato as some kind of totalitarian, an association that became fixed in the 20th century when Karl Popper made Plato the chief enemy of the “open society”, not least for the political philosophy of the Republic – with its ban on poets and the like. It’s worth remembering that it is only relatively recently that scholars have read the Republic in such a programmatic way. Before the 19th century, it was treated as a kind of fantasy politics, an experiment much like Thomas More’s Utopia; it was not a set of policies but a myth that sought to illuminate various features of the human condition. To put it another way, reading the Republic as if it were a manifesto is like reading the Timaeus as if it were a route map to the lost city of Atlantis…”
What ultimately matters is not how Mark Vernon or Karl Popper spun the Republic but that Ayatullah Khomeini indeed took it as a manifesto and fashioned the Iranian Republic AKA Veleyat-e Faqih on Plato. And this brings me to the point that Plato opened the gates to the recording of human conversations and although the temptation is understandable, the result inevitably is not what was intended by the people who are recorded in the dialogues. This is true for Plato, Talmud and countless similar edifices. Just serves to highlight my previous post on How Books Killed Everything. I believe even Mark Vernon acknowledges this point:
“Today, scholars try to place the Dialogues in chronological order, and thereby discern something of Plato’s development. However, the ancient world made no such attempt. Instead, they were read according to their content and the aptitude of the reader. This is, perhaps, closer to Plato’s own intention.”
As a Jew I am jealous about the uprising in Iran. It’s inevitable; they are going to take down the mullahs, if not now than in four years. They will do what Catholics learned form the Protestants, how to shove the oppressive hypocrisy into the irrelevant corner of society (with luck, before they manage to rape all the boys). Alas Iran is a closed system; they never developed the “letting off steam” mechanism perfected by the Jews throughout history. Jews have this down pat; the natural attrition is allowed and often encouraged, if not from the outside then from the inside. They want you to leave. If you still stubbornly insist on the internal change, don’t like indoctrination in lieu of education and challenge the hierarchy, the tribal culture makes sure you life is unbearable. Just ask Uriel Da Costa and thousands like him. Hey, you are suffocating and want to split into a new movement, no problem, chose as you like – the conservative, reform, modern, postmodern, whatever. You are on your way out, unrecognized by the world governed by the black robed fundamentalism. Hey Jew, you want to die for the Russian or any other revolution – have lots of mazal! The tradition is pervasive, and if you don’t like the Zionist experiment – b’seder. No wonder I can’t get a cup of coffee in Brookline without hearing Ivrit. And so it goes, on the same week that Teheran youth is fighting for the Persian civilization, Jerusalem is shut down because of a parking lot fight. It’s hopeless for the Jews.
There is interesting article in the Economist that gets it right (if you don’t count the lip service to the MSM). On the first night of the Iran revolution Twitter was superb and comprehensible, then it quickly disintegrated into unmanageable volume of repetitive low value messages. The old media had been reduced to the pathetic reporting about YouTube videos. And the clear winners are the blogs that can curate and filter the river of news. Economist – Twitter 1, CNN 0:
“Meanwhile the much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do. Even at its best the site gave a partial, one-sided view of events. Both Twitter and YouTube are hobbled as sources of news by their clumsy search engines.
Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English. The winner of the Iranian protests was neither old media nor new media, but a hybrid of the two.”
Guardian – Iran elections: Khamenei warns protesters to stay off streets:
“The Islamic republic will never manipulate votes and commit treason,” he said. “The legal structure in this country does not allow vote-rigging.” He said that the margin of Ahmadinejad’s victory – by 11m votes over Mousavi – proved that the election could not have been fixed. He added: “If some people have doubts and evidence it should be dealt with through legal ways – only through legal ways. I will never accept illegal innovations.”
A religious leader normally tells lies for living. The only difference is motivations. There are roughly three categories:
- A leader is deliberate, scheming manipulator who believes (this is his only real belief) that to control the human beasts he must protect them from the truth, for their own benefit. He is The Grand Inquisitor.
- A leader indoctrinated into lies (brain washed), lying all his life and no longer can tell the difference or be honest with himself.
- A Leader that is a natural born moron, he can’t process and can only regurgitate back the pack of lies the fate sold him at the bazaar of life.
Finally, it is unlikely that anyone but the No.1 type leader would be able to ascend to real power.
You want to know how it all started in Iran. Here is how.
Shah of Iran, Mohamed Reza, posing w. son Prince Reza & wife Farah wearing crown jewels & embroidered robes during coronation. Location: Tehran, Iran. Date taken: 1967. Photographer: Dmitri Kessel
►►►read more
Christopher Hitchens is a great man! He is the voice of clarity. He writes in Slate – Don’t Call What Happened in Iran Last Week an Election. The quotes are timeless:
“Iran and its citizens are considered by the Shiite theocracy to be the private property of the anointed mullahs. This totalitarian idea was originally based on a piece of religious quackery promulgated by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and known as velayat-e faqui. Under the terms of this edict—which originally placed the clerics in charge of the lives and property of orphans, the indigent, and the insane—the entire population is now declared to be a childlike ward of the black-robed state. Thus any voting exercise is, by definition, over before it has begun, because the all-powerful Islamic Guardian Council determines well in advance who may or may not “run.” Any newspaper referring to the subsequent proceedings as an election, sometimes complete with rallies, polls, counts, and all the rest of it, is the cause of helpless laughter among the ayatollahs. (“They fell for it? But it’s too easy!”) Shame on all those media outlets that have been complicit in this dirty lie all last week. And shame also on our pathetic secretary of state, who said that she hoped that “the genuine will and desire” of the people of Iran would be reflected in the outcome. Surely she knows that any such contingency was deliberately forestalled to begin with.”
(the chart via Andrew Sullivan) Notice how every branch of the government, even mullahs got their own army. Christopher Hitchens concludes:
“Mention of the Lebanese elections impels me to pass on what I saw with my own eyes at a recent Hezbollah rally in south Beirut, Lebanon. In a large hall that featured the official attendance of a delegation from the Iranian Embassy, the most luridly displayed poster of the pro-Iranian party was a nuclear mushroom cloud! Underneath this telling symbol was a caption warning the “Zionists” of what lay in store. We sometimes forget that Iran still officially denies any intention of acquiring nuclear weapons. Yet Ahmadinejad recently hailed an Iranian missile launch as a counterpart to Iran’s success with nuclear centrifuges, and Hezbollah has certainly been allowed to form the idea that the Iranian reactors may have nonpeaceful applications. This means, among other things, that the vicious manipulation by which the mullahs control Iran can no longer be considered their “internal affair.” Fascism at home sooner or later means fascism abroad. Face it now or fight it later. Meanwhile, give it its right name.”
About the political ideas of Plato influence on Khomeini. Time Magazine – The Unknown Ayatullah Khomeini:
“It was during these years that Ruhollah [Khomeini] embraced mysticism, studying Man, which is the conceptual foundation of mysticism, and a kind of Islamic existentialism taught by the scholar Mohsin Faiz. He also became fascinated with Aristotle and Plato, whose Republic provided the model for Khomeini’s concept of the Islamic republic, with the philosopher-king replaced by the Islamic theologian.”
There is also a quote from the book by Kenneth M. Pollack – The Persian Puzzle in Agonist:
“The core of Khomeini’s political philosophy was a concept known as veleyat-e faqih, which means “rule of the jurisprudent.” Khomeini was a devotee of Plato (a rarity among mullahs), and in his utopian Islamic society, the state would be ruled over by a theocratic philosopher-king–a man so learned in Islamic law that all of his peers and all of his countrymen would recognize that only he could provide “right-minded” guidance. Michael Fischer notes that Khomeini was never able to cite textual bases for the concept of velyat-e faqih, largely because it was derived essentially from The Republic rather than from the Quran.”
Khomeini in Bursa port in Turkey in 1964 with his son. It's (was?) prohibited to wear turban in Turkey.
Any totalitarian system has elements of The Republic. To say that Khomeini was specifically influenced by The Republic is a different matter. As I wrote many times Shia to Islam is what Chassidim are to Judaism. Specifically the textual is downplayed and personalities of the leaders are overplayed. The references to the “theocratic king” is the traditional role of the Marja Taqlid as described by the Usuli teaching:
“An important tenet of Usuli doctrine is Taqlid or “imitation”, i.e. the acceptance of a religious ruling in matters of worship and personal affairs from someone regarded as a higher religious authority without necessarily asking for the technical proof…However, his verdicts are not to be taken as the only source of religious information and he can be always corrected by other muqalladeen (the plural of muqallad) which come after him. Obeying a deceased taqlid is forbidden in Usuli.”
Here is the list of the recent Marjas (they all got web sites!). Grand Inquisitors Unite!
via Gene Expression and Joshua Trevino
