I was just saying this to someone this morning. Iran’s theocracy was the only one that has withstood the Middle East political wars in Jordan, Syria, Afghanistan, etc.
To rephrase it… if The Middle East was the UK, Iran would be British. If the Middle East was the US. Iran would be California.
Scotland is almost certainly innocent, though the Scottish people may not be.
Anyhow, the worst crimes of colonialism/genocide were mainly conducted by the English (including invading/killing plenty of Scottish, Welsh and Irish people).
Jordan political system is much older than Iran, as well as the Saudis and others. Iran theocracy is a new phenomena in the Middle East, ushering the implementation era of political Islam, later continued by ISIS, Hamas and the milder Qatar and current Turkey
Not debating who came first. I’m also not debating that Saudi’s are equivalent to the French to the Iranians (if they were England in my UK analogy, or Texas for the US one).
I also don’t think that, in general, there’s any animosity there just talking size and influence over the region. Iran and Saudi are/were it. It’s a really interesting dynamic of faith, tradition, authoritarianism, and manipulation.
That's what the French and the a Swedes thought when they had a Muslim population under 10 or 20 percent. Look at any area - any, your choice - where Muslims represent 50 or more or the population and tell me how tolerant they are.
Don't let your values and your tolerance blind you to believe that your values and tolerance are universal or axiomic.
> Modern Western Christians are centuries removed from experiencing religion-as-politics.
That's news for those of us that are living through the decades-long effort by christian dominionists to take over the US.
> Western atheists, who share Christian values
It's the other way around: Christians share basic morality with people operating on morality from first principles. Plenty of western christian values are orthogonal to morality.
> Muslims who move to Christian-majority lands do not assimilate or convert.
This is false and flat-out defamatory. It's also the type of statement that gets used before bad people do a bunch of bad things.
The Catholic Church exerted strong influence in Quebec until the 1950s. Of course since then Quebec has become the most secular region in North America.
Another good analogy would be, said theocracy is (was?) like a very bad piece of legacy code, impossible to refactor, until the entire feature gets thrown in the trash.
To rephrase it… if The Middle East was the UK, Iran would be British. If the Middle East was the US. Iran would be California.