THE
ISLAMIC REPUBLIC AND RELIGIOUS SUPERSTITION
The gloomy history of the Islamic Republic is a history of abusing people’s
religious beliefs and sentiments in order to deceive and suppress them. Throughout
all these years, resorting to religious superstition has always been a vital
means in the hands of the ruling cliques for consolidating their reactionary
control. In a country where its deceitful officials claim to have been
appointed by God to implement “the Koran’s decrees” on earth and where its
so-called leader calls it “the land” of “the holy one” (the Shiites messiah),
then it is of no surprise to witness the thriving market of those con artists
who, counting on people’s unawareness, prey on their meagre earnings and make
them invest hope in supernatural forces that will solve none of their countless
earthly agonies.
A story recently printed in the regime’s newspapers of a “weeping dog”
taking refuge in “Imam Reza’s mausoleum” (the eight Imam of the Shiites) in
Mash-had (a city in North East of Iran) is a lucid example which once again
puts on display the attempts made by the ruling regime to spread superstitious
ideas among the masses playing with their religious beliefs and sentiments.
As it was exposed and delivered in the government run press, however, the
fact of the matter was that some “devotees of the holy Imam” had taken a dog
with teary eyes into the mausoleum (of course under the watchful eyes of the
patrolling guards) and filming the alleged “weeping dog” giving full coverage
to this bizarre trickery thereby planting this illusive idea in people’s minds
that the Imam hearing and answering their prayers are so real that now even a
dog has taken refuge to his holiness for its misfortunes.
The story of the so-called “weeping dog”, which was given a holy glaze and
hoisted as a sign of God’s might and of the Imam’s righteousness by the
regime’s media, of course did not hold water and due to the quarrels amongst
the “servants” of God in a hell created by the Islamic Republic named as “the
land of the holy one”, a few days later the regime’s official newspaper wrote:
“the conspiracy of bringing a dog to the holy mausoleum of Imam Reza and
addressing it in the media which spread a lot of rumours in the past two weeks,
was countered after discovering a gang of fraudulent con artists and arresting
its members”. According to this report, “the members of the gang were a conman
and two of the janitors of the mausoleum.” … Interestingly enough, however, the
identity of the conman who had such authority and influence as well as
considerable means to pull off such a grand scheme was never revealed while
copies of the video CD made of the event are still widely circulating and being
sold out there.
….
Under the circumstances where the government officials claim that
Ahmadinejad’s coming to power is the will of “the holy one”, then the forged
story of a dog taking refuge to the mausoleum should not come as any surprise.
When trickery comes to the point that the president of “the land of the holy
one” claims that during his speech at the UN a halo embraced him which made him
deliver his talk without blinking once and which made all the heads of states
to be infatuated by his words, then why shouldn’t such
fraudulent stories be manufactured!
The fact is that religion and superstition are primarily the outcome of
humankind’s ignorance and unawareness which have been invested in since the
emergence of class society to serve the continuity of domination and oppression
of the exploitative classes. Therefore, in order to overcome this problem, one
must put effort to essentially destroy class oppression while trying to bring
awareness to the oppressed masses. Of course, under no other state are people’s
religious sentiments manipulated so shamelessly as under a religious state. The
Islamic Republic is a living example of it; a regime which from the very outset
of its reign, counting on people’s unawareness, has tried to deceive them and
provide the conditions for their suppression and the furtherance of
exploitation and dependency.