printThe Iranian government is angry about the depiction of ancient, Zoroastrian Persia in the film “300.” The Greek accounts of the Greco-Persian wars are certainly replete with description of despotic, luxuriating and effeminate Persians, versus tough, freedom-loving European. But, “Herodotus, the most important Greek chronicler of the Persian empire,” writes Christopher de Bellaigue in The New York Review of Books, found “much in the Persians to praise.” So did Reza Shah and son; they hated Arab culture and identified themselves completely with pre-Islamic Persia.
Not so the clerics who came to power after the Islamic revolution in 1979; they endeavored to expunge the Achaemenids, the Sassanids, and Zoroastrianism from Iran’s historical memory. To Islamists, history begins with Mohammad and his exploits; all that went before doesn’t count.
Shortly after the revolution, Islamic mobs in Iran tried to Talibanize Cyrus’s tomb. Persian names were changed to Islamic names, and references to the Achaemenid kings were banned on the state broadcaster. In post-revolutionary Iran, children were no longer named Darius or Cyrus (but Mo and Hussein, like one presidential candidate).
All in all the muslim multitudes are generally ignorant of the current world as well as history. [A lot like…Americans] Â They have been conditioned from birth to believe the fevered rantings of their various ayatollahs, muftis and other leaders. All things can be explained by blaming Israel and the United States for everything including bad weather. If the vocal leadership of Iran or any other muslim community want to change history or even current events to fit their twisted view of the world all they have to do is spout the accepted party line and the people simply accept. Then the people become enraged and take to the streets where idiot western journalists actually take them seriously and report the latest lunacy as if it were important. Now that I think of it, I just described contemporary American society too. [Great minds…]
Ilana,
Have you ever rented the scary movie (arguably a horror film) “Not Without My Daughter”? It chronicles the escape of American Betty Mahmoody and her daughter from post-Islamic revolution Iran, at a time before Islam began to take hold within modern Western societies. [Can’t recall, but I did write about such stupid women in Women Who Wed the Wrong Wahhabi, The Hudson Institute]
Helping Betty escape is an Iranian man who appreciates his country’s history, and who believes that the Islamic revolution is slashing that heritage to bits. It seems that whenever, and wherever Islam comes to town, history is erased and things change for the worse. Witness our own official groveling to Islamists, producing results that lower the status of American Christianity. (For example: placing Islamic holidays in equal position to traditional Christian holidays on many official calendars.)
As to Muslims here: it’s my God-given task to try and exhibit the love of Christ. But that becomes increasingly difficult when I look at a woman in Islamic dress and try to smile while simultaneously realizing that if I were in her country of origin, dressed conservatively but without head-to-toe covering, I’d be beaten, raped, and perhaps chopped up and dismembered by her co-religionists, and no one would be around to help me.
Yet another parallel between Islam and modern liberalism (leftism). As with Iran’s pre-Mohammed history in the hands of the mullahs who rule Iran, pre-1965 American history is either ignored, erased or denounced as unrelenting evil and darkness by western leftists (including those who call themselves conservatives).
Note also that it’s not typically Muslims, either here or in Europe, who loudly call for the abolition of Christmas, all historical Christian symbols, etc. in the name of multicultural tolerance, it’s nearly always one faction or another of the western left. Muslims, naturally, take full advantage of this. The latest thing I read from the UK was about a leftist at some nominally Christian organization calling for the banning of the nursery tale “The Three Little Pigs.” (It might offend the precious “other”, you see.)
A quick note: I began my college studies in the mid-1970s, when the Shah of Iran, seeking to modernize that country, sent many students to the West to study engineering and science. The Iranian students I remember readily socialized with Americans, and in no way appeared to be adherents of strict Islamic practice (the women were interested in fashion, for example, and both women and men drank alcohol.) I recall no indication that Iran was on the verge of being busted back into the Stone Age.
As a result, I have great sympathy for American women such as Betty Mahmoody and others, who married Iranian men pre-Islamic revolution, and who could not have reasonably suspected that their husbands would turn into strict Islamic adherents upon return to their home country after 1979.
Regardless of how the Iranians feel it’s still the top grossing movie in the West. I heard on the radio that it had the biggest opening of all time in Greece.
Every time I see a western woman in Islamic dress I cringe. For it is one thing to be born into slavery, and quite another to choose it willingly.