My Early Life
While I was born into a non-practicing Shiite Muslim family in Iran, as children, no one within the family forced Islam down our throats. In other words, in my younger days in Iran, I had never been exposed to Islam at all, except by observation. I think I speak for many Iranians as well.
Most Iranians truly did not know what ‘real’ Islam was until after the invasion of 1979, the Islamic Revolution. To be exact, until Ayatollah Khomeini set foot in Iran and took the genie out of the bottle for everyone to see the ‘true’ Islam.
The type of Islam Iranians practiced during the time of the Shah did not even exist at all. It was only a fiction or a fantasy manufactured out of whole cloth. Some people in Iran, however, are still in disbelief and refuse to accept that true Islam is not what Ayatollah Khomeini introduced in 1979.
As humans, we know religion casts a huge shadow on everything in life. Like other humans, I, too, had to deal with this enigma and couldn’t simply just set it aside. And Islam, the Shiite Islam was the most pervasive religion around. I wanted to know more about this ‘religion,’ beyond the textbooks. In our schools, we were forced to memorize a few non-violent Surah (verses) from the Meccan period when prophet Muhammad’s beliefs and sayings were relatively innocuous.
Short Reminder
To polish Islam’s image, Muslim apologists usually quote verses from the Quran that were written in the early days of the Islamic movement while Muhammad lived in Mecca. Those passages make Islam appear loving and harmless because they call for love, peace and patience. This is a deception. The apologists fail to tell the gullible masses that such verses, though still in the Quran, were nullified, abrogated and rendered void by later passages that incite killing, decapitations, maiming, terrorism and religious intolerance. The latter verses were penned while Muhammad’s headquarters were based in Medina.
I still recall what my high school history teacher told us in our class. He explicitly said that the Islamic creed was imposed on an enlightened, tolerant and free Iranian people at the point of the sword. For me, that was the defining moment to start to find out for myself. READ MORE
