____________________________________________ 2 IICC Perspectives the hated and oppressed Shi’ite minority in Islam. Ayatollah Khomeini, in his first speech as ruler of the Islamic Republic, declared that he had come to correct the injustices committed 1400 years ago [the death of Muhammad], that Shi’a had to overcome Sunnah and take its rightful place in Islam. He declared a jihad, whose objective was to export the revolution to the world in general and to the Islamic world in particular. They hate Arabs, and feel a sense of superiority over them. National character: traditional – "Sunnti” Iranian society is not monolithic and has various religious denominations. However, religion and the demand for spirituality have greatly strengthened since 1979, leading to the flourishing of groups that believe in the return, after the war of Gog and Magog, of the Hidden Imam who will excise evil from the world and return the Sunnis to the correct path, to true Islam, to Shi’a. In 2010, the Iranian army’s chief of staff sent an open letter to the Mahdi (the messiah in Islam), in which he pleaded for him to hasten his return to solve the problems of the world and help the Iranian people overcome evil. Every session of the Majlis, the Iranian Parliament, opens with a prayer of hope for the imminent appearance of the 12th Imam, the true Caliph who will redeem the true believers. Iranian society is completely religious and traditional. The mosque is the social and communal center, everything comes there and everything leaves from there. The preachers in the mosques are political figures who sense the needs of the worshippers and know how to give them the feeling of self-respect that is so lacking among the lower classes. Tradition is no less important than religion. Even the lives of educated secular individuals are imbued with religion. The Village Wise Men, 1970 (Courtesy of the painter Itzik Barzilai)
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