“Iran,” wrote the exiled Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi on November 19, 2024, “was once a bastion of religious liberty. But that changed with the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Alongside Jews and Baha’is, Iranian Christians immediately began to face widespread and rampant persecution.”
Pahlavi explained that “Christian and Catholic leaders were killed, detained, or forced to flee the country, including the Chaldean Archbishop of Tehran. Today the persecution continues and Iranian Christians, especially Christian converts, are deprived of even the most basic rights including access to churches. Christians are routinely imprisoned for their beliefs, facing absurd charges of ‘acts against national security’ and ‘collaboration and espionage for enemy states.’ Others face execution.”
Those who uncritically accept the Western political and media establishment’s view of Islam, which is still the prevailing view of the religion in the U.S. and Europe, may assume that the Islamic Republic of Iran’s treatment of Christians is an anomaly, a violation of its stated principles. A true Islamic polity would presumably treat Christians and other religious minorities with something approximating the tolerance and respect that, according to the standard myth, Muslims in Islamic al-Andalus and elsewhere accorded to Christians during the Islamic Golden Age.
This is, however, the fantasy of multiculturalism-besotted Western academics and other leftists, based on a naïve love for anything non-Christian and non-Western, and a near-total ignorance of Islam. The unpleasant reality is that the Islamic Republic of Iran, in persecuting Christians, is simply implementing the words of the Qur’an, which states that the righteous Muslims will receive “the reward of this world” as well as “the good reward of the hereafter” (3:148), and that unbelievers’ “works have failed both in this world and the hereafter.” (2:217) Persecuting Christians in Iran is no aberration; it is an expression of the essence and guiding principles of Iran’s Islamic regime.
The rulers and supporters of that regime think of it as acting upon the absolute highest possible authority. The Islamic Republic of Iran is established upon a principle that its foremost founding figure, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, most fully enunciated: velayat e faqih, the rule of the cleric. The regime’s guiding principle is that it is imitating the first Muslim cleric, Muhammad himself, in wielding political power.
This is because Muhammad, whom his followers recognized as a prophet, became the leader of the first Islamic state, which is still the ideal Islamic state for all those that have followed it. Based on that fact, Khomeini insisted, the sole legitimate rulers of Islamic states after Muhammad were the spiritual leaders of the community, that is, Muslim clerics.
A crucial result of this idea is the total identification of the regime with the supreme being himself. The rule of the Islamic Republic, at least according to its own rulers, is essentially the rule of Allah himself. Therefore, to rebel against the Islamic Republic is to do nothing less than go to war against the creator of the universe. The Qur’an is to some degree responsible for this identification, for it states: “The only reward for those who make war upon Allah and his messenger and struggle to sow corruption on earth will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet cut off on opposite sides, or be expelled from the land. Such will be their degradation in this world, and in the hereafter, theirs will be an awful doom.” (5:33)
How can one possibly make war against Allah, or, at least since the traditional seventh-century date for his demise, against the messenger of Allah (that is, Muhammad)? By waging war against the regime that was faithfully implementing his perfect and eternal law, and thus governing in accord with his will. In June 2025, according to USCIRF, in line with that assumption, “Iran’s top judiciary official instructed prosecutors throughout the country to expedite trials and impose harsher punishments for individuals arraigned on religiously grounded charges of moharabeh (waging war against God) and esfad-fil-arz (corruption on Earth).” Both charges were rooted in Qur’an 5:33, where they both carried the extreme penalty.
Accordingly, Global Christian Relief notes that “Religious freedom is severely curtailed for everyone other than Farsi-speaking Shi’a.” In many cases this takes the form of ostensible efforts to ensure national unity and cultural integrity rather than of outright persecution of people who are not Shi’ite Muslims: “For Armenian and Assyrian Christians, restrictions on ethnic languages are limiting, as is the state-imposed obligation to ensure that only people of the ‘right’ ethnicity participate in worship.”
Armenian and Assyrian Christians face bureaucratic difficulties when simply attempting to worship God in their own language. The Qur’an, after all, states: “O prophet, wage jihad against the unbelievers and the hypocrites. Be harsh with them.” (9:73) This is a long way from the “interfaith dialogue” in which Western non-Muslim religious leaders place so much hope. But those leaders take little notice. They don’t after all, want to harm their “dialogue.”
Article posted with permission from Robert Spencer
