khalijefars News, Blogs, Art and Community
Jamshid Chalangi:
In tonight’s program of Behind the Headlines we discuss with our guest, the historian and researcher Mr. Nasser Shahinpar, why Iran’s intellectuals never followed the religious leaders in the Constitutional Revolution of 1905, but did so and supported Khomeini in1979?
Nasser Shahinpar:
If we put the historical aspect of this event to one side, we must say that the present regime in Iran is not a republic. It is an Islamic state and for the last 40 years the definition of nation state in Iran has been completely changed and we now have an Islamic government and an Umma (Islamic nation) under its rule. It is no wonder that the regime spends Iran’s wealth and facilities in other Muslim countries.
The Iranian regime’s attention is towards the Islamic world and as such ignores the interests of Iran and the Iranians in the process.
When they say, “we have a president, a parliament, a judiciary and so on”, all these are window dressing for deceiving the people.
For the regime there is no difference between the Iranian people and other Muslims of the world, wherever they might be. As such the Iranian people’s funds and wealth must be spent on people in other Muslim countries.
Jamshid Chalangi:
But the regime can say the majority of the Iranian people voted for such system of governance.
Nasser Shahinpar:
Some people did not vote for this type of regime. It means that the majority of our intellectuals and the educated elite made a gross error in voting for the establishment of this regime.
Even today, the so-called reformists who work with this clerical regime are repeating the same error and never ask themselves if this system is capable of being reformed.
Have they ever asked the president how much power and money he has in his possession to look after the interests of the Iranian people?
Jamshid Chalangi:
The writer Jalal Al-Ahmad had once said that the future prosperity of Iran mustcome from an alliance of the intellectuals and the clergy. But this has ended now in a calamity for our country.
Nasser Shahinpar:
This revolution came out of the nation of Iran who had a belief in Islam and it had to happen so we would learn from its disastrous consequences.
Sadly we do not have a common conscious and understanding about our history and we are condemned to repeat our past mistakes every so many centuries.
About a thousand years ago the people of Mazandaran and Astarabad fought against the Alawites as the children of Mohammad, who had murdered our ancestors, and forced them out of Iran.
If we had learnt from that historical event we would not have accepted this Islamic culture, which has brought nothing but murder and pillaging to Iran.
It must also be said that our people had not practiced democracy under the rules of Reza Shah and Mohammad Reza Shah as political and press freedoms did notexist and our educated elite decided to follow the mullahs.
