Ruhollah Khomeini Quotes
These issues that exist among people that we are Iranian and what we need to do for Iran are not correct; these issues are not correct. This issue, which is perhaps being discussed everywhere, regarding paying attention to nation and nationality is nonsense in Islam and is against Islam. One of the things that the designers of Imperialism and their agents have promoted is the idea of nation and nationality.
Khomeini, Ruhollah. Speech to the people of Qom, 1980. Sahifeh-ye Imam, vol. 13, The Institute for Compilation and Publication of Imam Khomeini's Works, 2001, p. 87.
For most Muslims, their religious identity supersedes their nationalistic identity. Sukarno’s quotation is famous because many ultraorthodox Muslims castigated him for putting nationalism before Islam. There is an orthodox Islamic concept of the Ulma—the community of all Muslims in the world, and this takes precedence over any nation or set of nations. In that sense, extreme Islamic fundamentalists have always opposed Sukarno claiming he was an enemy of Islam.
After Independence, the original credo of the Indonesian hero and leader was slowly ignored. The Muslim majority established Islam as the dominant religion and began to create laws that discriminated against Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Jews. The ethnic Chinese had been very successful in business and commerce and soon they were discriminated against and even physically attacked in Pogroms.
The writer was born and brought up a Muslim and because he criticizes Islam, he has had a death fatwa issued against him much like Salman Rushdie.
He was born in the Azerbaijan province of the Soviet Union and did most of his academic work in the United States. He is an example of a globalized scientist.
In the rest of the Islamic world, the call to prayer was said in Arabic regardless of the national language. This reform was castigated by throughout the Islamic world who wanted Arabic to be the only language for Muslim religious communications. This was not unlike the insistence that they Catholic Church had maintained that all scripture was read in Latin and would not allow Bibles or mass to be said in any other language.
After the WWI Turkish massacre of Armenians and the casualties of WWII, large numbers of Armenians were outside of Armenia which was a part of the Soviet Union and many ethnic Russians were moved into Armenia thus dominating the country. The ethnic Armenians found themselves a minority in their own homeland,
Even in modern times many politicians the world over agree with Davis’s point that for a government to function well, the nation must have a homogenous citizenship. This is especially true of dictatorships where control of a uniform culture and populous is easier than if it is diverse nation. In modern times, the three greatest economic and scientific powers, the United States, The Soviet Union, and China were and are multicultural societies with different ethnicities, races, religions, and cultures among their sitizenry.
This has been a classic dilemma for all large multi ethnic states—trying to develop a sense of unity of citizenship in the face of populations who think of themselves foremost differently. Attempts like this of banning the names of the peoples from official use, banning languages, changing people’s names, requiring common dress and other such methods have failed in most cases (Ataturk’s Turkey being the notable exception). America, Great Britain and the Soviet Union showed the world that it was possible to have a strong sense of national unity and at the same time allow peoples, cultures, and ethnicities to maintain their own ethnic identities. However, many modern governments see their situation as so unique that ethnic repression of one kind or another is required. Modern China, in particular, while not as extreme as Sun Yat-Sen still makes it very difficult for certain cultures to thrive such as the Tibetans. Note that even in the United States we have many who argue that non English language usage should be discouraged and disapprove of the concept of hyphenated Americans. For example, see Theodore Roosevelt {631377}.
Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, also known in the Western world as Ayatollah Khomeini, was an Iranian political and religious leader. He was the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which saw the overthrow of the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the end of the 2,500-year-old Persian monarchy. Following the revolution, Khomeini became the country's Supreme Leader, a position created in the constitution of the Islamic Republic as the highest-ranking political and religious authority of the nation, which he held until his death. Most of his reign was taken up by the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–1988. He was succeeded by Ali Khamenei on 4 June 1989.
