In the past few days we have all been treated to a back and forth apparently from the the Canadian Post and Amir Taheri about Iran and the badges for non muslims.
Alexandra has a really thing Beautiful with regard to this, but the incontrovertible history of both Islam and Iran are that such actions are the fact of both.
For instance from Bostom to whom we owe much:
Eight Years in Asia and Africa-From 1846-1855 (Hanover, l859), pp.
211-13:
Item 4: "Under the pretext of their being unclean, they are treated with the greatest severity, and should they enter a street, inhabited by Mussulmans, they are pelted by the boys and mob with stones and dirt."; Item 5: "For the same reason they are forbidden to go out when it rains; for it is said the rain would
wash dirt off them, which would sully the feet of the Mussulmans."
Also see item 1 of Hamadan's 1892 regulations, twenty-two in total, for its Jews, from a letter by S. Somekh, published in The Alliance Ismelite Universale, October, 27, 1892, translated and reproduced in D. G. Littman, "Jews under Muslim Rule: The Case of Persia," Weiner Libraiy Bulletin 32 (1979): 7-8:
The Jews are forbidden to leave their houses when it rains or snows [to prevent
the impurity of the Jews being transmitted to the Shiite Muslims].
Regarding this condition, as well as the other twenty-one conditions, Somekh writes, The latter [i.e., the Jews] have a choice between automatic acceptance, conversion to Islam, or their annihilation. Some who live from hand to mouth have consented to these humiliating and cruel conditions through fear, without offering resistance; thirty of the most prominent members of the community were surprised in the telegraph office, where they had gone to telegraph their grievances to Teheran. They were compelled to embrace the Muslim faith to escape from certain death. But the majority is in hiding and does not dare to venture into the streets.', [p. 71]
We see here the conditions making the existance of the badge a convienience for muslims.
No comments:
Post a Comment