Iran and its lack of respect for other religions

The nation of Iran erupted with predictable shrillness last month over the Danish Muhammad cartoons. Through the ugliness, one of the messages being sent by Iranian protesters was that the West--the non-Muslim West--needed to respect Islam.

In Iran, converting from Islam to another religion is a capital offense.

However, as Amnesty International mentions here:

Conversion to another religion is an internationally recognized right, laid down in Article 18 of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a State Party

Then there is the sad story of the Baha'i faith. Founded in Iran in the 1840s, the ruling mullahs or Iran consider the Baha'is dangerous heretics. Since Muslims consider Muhammad the last prophet, the Baha'i faith is especially troubling to the Islamic republic, sinceBaha'iss believe in a post-Muhammad message.

Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran is essential reading for anyone interested in Iran's 1979 revolution and the repression that followed. Nafisi writes movingly of a character she dubbed "The Kid," who was denied entrance into an Iranian medical school because he of his faith.

He passed the entrance exam with a first, only to be denied a place because he was a Baha'i. During the Shah's reign, the Baha'is were protected and flourished--one sin for which the Shah was never forgiven. After the revolution, their property was confiscated and their leaders were murdered. Bahai's had no civil rights under the new Islamic constitution and were barred from schools, universities, and workplaces.

Nafisi then writes about the death of The Kid's grandmother:

There were no burial places for Baha'is; the regime had destroyed the Baha'i cemetery in the first years of the revolution, demolishing the graves with a bulldozer. There were rumors that the cemetery had been turned into a park or a playground. Later, I found out it had become a cultural center, called Bakhtaran. What were you supposed to do when your grandmother died and there was no cemetery?

Bad as that was, it could have been worse for that cemetery, as Nafisi tells the reader in the next paragraph.

It's amazing, this obsession with taking possession of not just the living, but the dead. At the start of the revolution, the revolutionary prosecutor bulldozed Reza Shah's grave, destroying the monument and creating a public toilet in its place--which he inaugurated by pissing in it.

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