“So this way,” I continued, “instead of getting one convert, you get an alliance made up of two billion people.”
My interlocutor, who looked like an airline stewardess in her navy blue uniform and hijab, was unimpressed.
“You’re a very clever trader,” she said and walked off. She might have said “traitor,” but I suspect that what she meant to say was “salesman.” I was more puzzled than offended by her outburst. What American, after all, could be offended by being called a clever salesman? Isn’t that our national ideal?
It was dark by the time we reached Fasa, the provincial capital of Fars province roughly 100 miles southeast of Shiraz. Shiraz is hotter than Tehran, which nestles at the foot of mountains to the north, but Fasa is hotter than Shiraz because it is farther south and east. Traveling to Fasa by car meant traveling through one hundred miles of desert, past a huge salt lake that first looked like a mirage, and sporadic plantations of what looked like olive trees but were in fact lemon groves. The deserts are red in Iran and full of mountains that glow with an intense light when the sun goes down. Mejid Mejidi used this light to spectacular effect in his forthcoming movie on the prophet, peace be upon him. The dying light is naturally conducive to meditation, which is probably why civilization began in deserts, or better, in arid climates on the edge of deserts where there was enough water to survive but not enough to create forests, which obscure the sky at night. The Greeks, the Hebrews, the Egyptians, and the Iranians, who sent Magi to present gifts and worship Christ at his birth, could contemplate the heavens at night and see visible evidence of God’s plan, the Logos that preceded everything else, including Christ’s arrival on earth. The Jews who rejected Christ need to be reintroduced to the order of the universe which the Hebrews who were waiting for the Messiah discovered before His birth.
Shakespeare understood this in the intuitive way that makes his writings such an unfathomable marvel. That is why he has Lorenzo instruct Jessica, his formerly Jewish wife, by explaining the order of the universe in the night sky:
Sit, Jessica, Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
(Merchant of Venice, Act V, scene 1)
Lorenzo explains here that Logos is apparent in God’s creation. As St. Paul says in his Epistle to the Romans, “Ever since God created the world his everlasting power and deity — however invisible — have been there for the mind to see in the things he has made” (1:20). Taken together, all of the motions of God’s providence create harmony. Shylock the Jew rejected the harmony of the universe. He hath no music in him. He is therefore a representative of the Jewish revolutionary spirit:
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
The Iranians never fell into this trap. They never rebelled against the Logos, as the Jews did when they rejected Christ. Nor did they turn against reason by turning Islam into an irrationalist vehicle for Arab nationalism, the fate it suffered under the Caliphate in Baghdad. When the Logos was made flesh, the Iranians were the first non-Hebraic people who came to worship him. “From Persia, whence the Magi are supposed to have come, to Jerusalem was a journey of between 1000 and 1200 miles” (Catholic Encyclopedia). The Catholic Encyclopedia tells us that:
The philosophy of the Magi, erroneous though it was, led them to the journey by which they were to find Christ. Magian astrology postulated a heavenly counterpart to complement man’s earthly self and make up the complete human personality. His “double” (the fravashi of the Parsi) developed together with every good man until death united the two. The sudden appearance of a new and brilliant star suggested to the Magi the birth of an important person. They came to adore him — i.e., to acknowledge the Divinity of this newborn King (vv. 2, 8, 11).
The Messianic expectations of the Persian Magi weren’t simply a function of Magian astronomy. There was a significant Hebrew population in both Babylon and Persia at the time of Christ’s birth, and this community created a sense of “general unrest and expectation of the imminent arrival of a Golden Age ushered in by a great deliverer throughout the Roman Empire,” but St. Leo the Great insists that the Persian Magi were lead to Christ by “his star,” which is to say by their understanding of the Logos that was apparent in nature.
Wise men, we know from the bumper sticker, still seek him. The Iranians have never given up their quest for the Logos. Their culture was over a thousand years old when Islam arrived in Persia. Some bemoaned its arrival. When the Arab conquerors reached Ctesiphon, the luxurious capital of the Sassanian Persian Empire in 638, they discovered a 90 foot square silk carpet with rubies, pearls, and diamonds sown into it depicting a garden which symbolized Persia’s cultural patrimony and the empire’s wealth. The Arab looters cut that carpet into pieces and each commander took a fragment of it home with him. Three hundred years later, the Persians were still complaining. “Curse this world, curse this time,” wrote the Persian poet Ferdowski in the tenth century, “The uncivilized Arabs have come to force me to be a Muslim” (Kinzer).
What followed was an accommodation. The Persians became Muslims, but they became Muslims on their own terms. Over the course of centuries, the Iranians
fashioned an interpretation of Islam quite different from that of their Arab conquerors. This interpretation, called Shiism, is based on a particular reading of Islamic history, and it has the ingenious effect of using Islam to reinforce long-standing Iranian beliefs (Kinzer).
The intra-Islamic conflict between Arabs and Iranians continues to this day. It is currently being fought in Syria as an actual war between Hezbollah, the Shi’a defenders of Hafez Assad, the Syrian President, and the Takfiri, the liver-eating Saudi/American proxies whose solution to every theological dispute is a bullet in the back of the head. The issue is what it was when the Iranian magi brought gifts to the Christ, namely, Logos.
In some sense, the Iranians have never stopped following in the footsteps of the Magi. During my stay in Iran, the Iranian tradition of wise men seeking the Logos came out in a speech commemorating the death of Imam Khomeini by the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s current Supreme Leader. Hamed and I attended that talk on the fourth day of my stay in Iran, along with an audience which included current President Rouhani and former President Rafsanjani as well as ambassadors from around the world, including Saudi Arabia, their foes in the current Islamic civil war. In a speech that was part funeral oration and part state of the union address, Khamenei urged Iranians to reject violence and extremism and use their “God-given reasoning ability” (al-’aql) to solve the problems facing the Middle East and the world today. Khamenei identified the true Islam (as opposed to what the Ayatollah Khomeini referred to as American Islam) with the Logos, as the mean between two extremes. On the one hand, Khamenei rejected the Islam of the Takfiri (the rejecters or excommunicators) and Boko Haram in Nigeria, who practice “violence in the name of Islam,” but on the other hand, he also rejected the opposite extreme, namely, the American Zionist Imperium which seeks to undermine Logos through the systematic “propagation of public sexuality in the mass media.” The crucial issue is not the correct position of the hijab on the head of Iran’s women, nor is it the give and take of nuclear negotiation; the crucial issue is birth control, because in order to negotiate the change in policy he envisions the Supreme Leader will have to mobilize the entire country, something that is only possible if he uses Logos to dis
tinguish between the custom, which is negotiable, and the moral law, which is not.
The already mentioned New York Times article came on the heels of Khamenei’s speech. As some indication that life issues are intertwined with every other issue, economics has become the subtext for the birth control question. The critical factor, according to Mohammad Jalal Abbasi-Shavazi, head of the demographics department at Tehran University, is the economy. Missing from the New York Times account was any mention of the fact that the main thing crippling the Iranian economy is American sanctions. Deprived of oil revenue, the Iranian government decided to maintain an economy at pre-sanction levels by printing more money. The result has been inflation. A bank in Iran will pay you 40 percent interest, but to make a deposit, you have to convert your dollars to rialls which are losing value at the rate of 30 percent per month. Mr. Erdbrink of the New York Times is now using that U.S. inflicted hardship as an excuse for the practice of birth control.
The real issue is not whether the Iranians are smart enough to see through what is happening to them. The Iranians are nothing if not intelligent. One issue is whether they have the cultural weapons to fight this battle in a campaign of covert warfare which stretches back to 1953, when the CIA overthrew Mossadegh. The other issue is whether they have the will to engage in one more battle. Compromise is in the air. After twenty five years of government sanctioned birth control, many Iranian women identify birth control with freedom, when in fact the main psychological result of ingesting birth control pills is fear on the part of the ingester. Acceptance of birth control means acceptance of the Malthusian ideology, which sees endemic famine as the result of a universe without God. In that universe, where Divine Providence has no role to play in the lives of people who have children, the food supply, which increases arithmetically, is condemned to lag behind populations, which always increase geometrically. Acceptance of the birth control pill means acceptance of a universe in which God’s providence has been replaced by the self-regulating mechanism of English Capitalism, a system created by the alchemist Newton and perfected by his intellectual offspring, Adam Smith, Parson Malthus, and Charles Darwin. In this system, “science,” which is a cover for Capitalism, always trumps religion. Science is part of Nature; Religion, banned from the universe by Newton and Locke, is a figment of the mind of clerics like the Supreme Leader. Erdbrink poses the alternatives in his article. On the one hand, we have Dr. Ahmadi’s birth control clinic. On the other, we have the mullah, Mojtaba Takhitpour, on the “quest for a perfect society.” According to the schema Erdbrink proposes in his article, Iran now must choose between the Scottish Enlightenment, as manifested in Rockefeller-inspired birth control campaigns, or religious darkness, of the sort proposed by Mr. Takhitpour, who tells Erdbrink: “We do believe that ultimately God will provide our daily bread. So go out and have kids and have faith, is what I always say” (New York Times, June 8, 2014).
The ultimate question is whether Divine Providence is reasonable or not. Father Garrigou-Lagrange says that Providence flows from motion, properly understood, Providence (1932), which is another way of saying that it does not flow from the Newtonian idea of “violent motion” which became the philosophical underpinning of English Capitalism and the Anglo-American Empire which sought to impose that system on the world via, among other things, population control. Mullahs like Mr. Takhitpour understand Garrigou-Lagrange’s point, at least intuitively. The real question is whether the mullahs will be able to understand it explicitly enough to convince the Iranian people before demographic winter sets in and it’s too late. The issue is purely an issue of consciousness. The overwhelming majority of Iranians are now in their childbearing years. If they changed their minds, the demographic crisis would be over in a minute — at least for the Iranians — but it would only be the beginning for the world elites who worry about the fertility of inferior races, hence Mr. Erdbrink’s article in the New York Times.
That, in fact, is precisely what I said in my talks in Tehran, Shiraz, and Fasa. It is also the main thrust of the talk I was supposed to give, which appeared as the article on “Riba vs. Mercy in The Merchant of Venice” in the June 2014 issue of Culture Wars. After one such talk, my translator says that she has never heard a white man say such things. Actually she said Christian. But the novelty of hearing an American telling Iranians to have more children never wore off. I’m not sure of the propriety of telling young Iranian mothers to go home and conceive another child, but I did it, and no one complained to the Basij.
At times like this, I felt like a latter day version of Howard Baskerville, an earnest young American school teacher who is revered as “the American Lafayette” because he “was killed in 1909 while fighting alongside his Iranian friends in the Constitutional Revolution” (Kinzer). Unlike the English during that period, “Americans were regarded with nearly universal admiration and affection” because “Without attempting to force their way of life on people or convert us to their religion, they had learned Persian and started schools, hospitals, and medical dispensaries all over Iran.” By the mid-1920s an American envoy in Tehran was able to report that “Persians of all classes still have unbounded confidence in America.”
Until the outbreak of World War II, the United States had no active policy toward Iran. After the war, everything changed. The Soviet Union, which had been the ally of the United States, became its main foe in 1946, the same year that Winston Churchill gave his Iron Curtain speech. In January 1950 the National Security Council prepared a seminal document, known as NSC-68, which asserted the need for the United States to confront communist movements not only in regions of vital security interest but wherever they appeared (Kinzer).
Confronted with what it termed a “world-wide ... assault on free institutions,” the United States needed the support of Great Britain, which, as of 1951, was engaged in an ugly dispute with Iran. The main bone of contention between England and Iran was the Anglo-Iranian oil Company. The British had concluded an incredibly lucrative deal to exploit Iran’s oil deposits, and exploit them they did in just about every sense of the word. In return for those rights, the Iranian government got next to nothing, and the Iranian workers were paid 50 cents a day, with “no vacation pay, no sick leave, no disability compensation.” The workers lived in a shanty town called Kaghazabad, or Paper City, “without running water or electricity” (Kinzer). England had bankrupted itself by fighting two world wars in the 20th century, and now with unrest spreading throughout the British Empire, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company seemed the only bulwark against total ruin. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin claimed that without oil from Iran, there would be “no hope of our being able to achieve the standard of living at which we were aiming in Great Britain” (Kinzer).
On May 1, 1951, Mohammed Reza Shah, at the urging of Iran’s charismatic president Mohammed Mossadegh and the Iranian parliament, nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and created the National Iranian Oil to take its place. The English government under Winston Churchill took this as an act of war and immediately set about to overthrow the new government. Great Britain’s ambassador to Iran blamed the vote to nationalize Anglo-Iranian on the Americans:
specifically on Aramco, the Arabian-American Oil Company. Aramco’s announcement that it would begin splitting its profits with the Saudi Arabian government on a 50-50 basis, Shepherd complained, had “thrown a wrench” into Britain’s negotiating position. But the English found no sympathy for a coup from either President Truman or his secretary of state Dean Acheson (Kinzer).
That situation changed dramatically when Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president in November of 1952. After taking office in 1953, Eisenhower installed his campaign manager C. D. Jackson as head of staff in the White House, John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State, and Allen Dulles as head of the newly created Central Intelligence Agency:
Mossadegh’s challenge to the British was unfolding at a time of unusual turbulence in the world. The Soviet Union has just conducted its second atom
ic bomb test, making clear that the threat of annihilation would shape history for generations to come. War was raging in Korea (Kinzer).
The Dulles brothers were obsessed with the Communist threat and felt that Iran was in imminent danger of becoming “a second China” (Kinzer). Soon after President Eisenhower took office on January 20, 1953, John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles told their British counterparts that they were ready to move against Mossadegh. The CIA plan to remove Mossadegh was known as Operation Ajax, and Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, was sent to Tehran to carry it out. Operation Ajax involved “an intense psychological campaign against Prime Minister Mossadegh, which the CIA had already launched, followed by an announcement that the Shah had dismissed him from office” (Kinzer). It was in fact America’s first foray into the realm of covert, psychological warfare, and the outcome of the playbook established in Tehran in 1953 would have far-reaching consequences, the coup d’etat in Ukraine in 2014 being the most recent and therefore most significant. What happened in the Ukraine in 2014 was the result of what happened in Tehran in 1953.
In 1953 the Soviet Union had just conducted its second atomic bomb test. The bomb had created a stalemate in conventional warfare that led the Dulles brothers to turn to covert warfare as the means of spreading the American Empire. The CIA began waging what it called “doctrinal warfare” against the Catholics in 1953 after Eisenhower won the presidential election. The Catholics were unaware of what was going on because “doctrinal warfare” was also covert warfare. The Catholics thought they were part of the anti-communist crusade when in fact the CIA had targeted them as much as it had targeted the Soviet Union. It all began in Iran.
When we finally arrived in Fasa, I noticed a vaguely familiar face on a billboard, namely, my own. My mug towered over the parking lot of the hotel where we are staying. As I enter the lobby, I am greeted by another delegation of strangers.
Islam and Logos Page 11