Wrong. They did not choose it in Iran.
Huh? I beg to differ. They chose it after decades of the Shah's corruption and cronism. These are Shiites......the most conservative of Islam. They were deeply offended by the Shah's behavior. The Ayatollah was brought back from Paris to rule them.
"But while the mountains outside Mashhad today remain much as they have for twenty-five centuries, the moon now casts its glow over the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s most notable experiment in theocracy and a country with which the United States has had turbulent relations for the last two decades. These same two decades have been tumultuous inside Iran as well. The Islamic Revolution brought Ayatollah Khomeini and conservative religious leaders to power in 1979 and ushered in an era of strict observance of Islamic law (known as Sharia), where alcohol is forbidden, women must cover themselves from head to foot, men and woman sit in different sections of the bus, and brutal punishments such as stoning, flogging and amputation are carried out – all wrenching changes in a country that from 1920 until 1979 worked hard to adopt modern western ideas and fashions. These two decades also witnessed Iran’s bloody eight-year war with Iraq, complete with human wave attacks by fanatical Iranian “martyrs” against Iraq’s use of poison gas. Iraqi missiles rained down on Iranian cities and by the end, 750,000 Iranians were dead. Although peace with Iraq was finally restored in 1988, inner turmoil continued as a debate simmered within Iran between the “reformers,” seeking to relax the clergy’s control over day-to-day government, and the “hard-liners,” seeking to preserve that control while resisting “outside” – primarily western – ideas. These debates often erupted into street demonstrations and even violence."
on-the-matrix.com |
