Joyless, Dog-Slaughtering Islam
Thomas Erdbrink writes in The New York Times about a veterinarian in Iran who has the deluded notion that winning an election for a City Council seat in Tehran can stop clerics from seeing that dogs there are confiscated and slaughtered:
TEHRAN -- With his campaign posters displayed all across Tehran, Payam Mohebi, the city's star veterinarian, figures he is either on his way to victory in Friday's local elections or, possibly, on the way to receive 60 lashes. In Iran these days, it is often hard to predict.Dr. Mohebi, who is running for one of the 21 seats on Tehran's City Council, is shown on the posters posing with a stray dog. In most countries, that would hardly turn a head. But in Iran, where the ruling clerics consider dogs impure, taking one for a walk risks the arrest of the owner and the seizure, and possible extermination, of the animal.
The doctor says he knows about all that, but is willing to take the risk. "I'm doing this so that one seat in the City Council will be for the animals," he said. "They live with us, we love them, they have rights too."
...Tehran has changed over the past 15 years, Dr. Mohebi said. There is more money, more freedom and more attention to social rights, he said. But that did not stop Parliament three years ago, when it was still dominated by hard-liners, from passing a law that increased the fines for dog owners to the equivalent of $2,500, as well as killing the animal and 60 lashes for the owner.
"We have one million pets in this city -- what are they thinking?" Dr. Mohebi said. "There is a massive gap between our politicians and us."
If he is elected, Dr. Mohebi said, there will be no more killings. "We should have special parks for dogs instead, like we have special women-only parks for women who want to go running without their Islamic scarves," he said.
On Telegram, a social media service, thousands of people follow his channel, Supporters of Dr. Mohebi. Some of his followers wrote that they wished him success. "I love Payam, because when he gets elected I can walk safely with my dog," one supporter, Behnaz Mehdikhani, wrote. Another posted a cartoon of a cat waking up his sleeping owner. "Are you asleep?" a text balloon read. "Wake up and vote for us #DrMohebi."
Hugh Fitzgerald speculates on why dogs are seen this way:
Ibn Warraq once told me that while both Jews and Muslims do not eat pork, Jews are completely relaxed about it. No Jew would run rushing out of a restaurant screaming if he happened to discover that pork was on the menu. But Muslims would, and do. And it is the same with dogs. The hatred of dogs is not rational. It is simply based on the slavish acceptance of Muhammad's strictures, in a well-known Hadith, in which he is reported to have said: "I will not enter a house in which there are pictures and dogs."This is a strange, and even mysterious coupling of two items deemed haram: "pictures and dogs." Why, one may ask? I think I know the reason. Statues, of course, were to be found in homes of Christians, and if those statues are clearly declared to be haram, and if Muslims are told that Muhammad, the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil) will not enter a house with pictures (and by extension, statues), then no Muslim would do so either. That would be one bright line to distinguish Muslims from the Christians whose lands they conquered, and it would be one way to impose on those Muslims the duty not to become too friendly with Christians, not to enter their houses where there might still be statuary. And if Christians, in order to allow the members of the ruling Muslim class, to enter their houses, which might for those Christians be a desirable thing (they would need to curry favor with the Muslims who now ruled over them) they might find themselves more willing to themselves do away with statues and icons of every kind.
But why the warning against dogs? It is likely, I have suggested before at Jihad Watch and am suggesting again right now, that because dogs were prized by Zoroastrians, and treated with great affection and reverence, Muslims would want especially to distance themselves from the same practice, even to hold up dogs as objects of hysterical hatred. In so doing, they would again, as with Christians and statuary, clearly distinguish the superior Muslims and their practices from those of the inferior non-Muslims, in this case represented by Zoroastrians.
...It was recently reported that in the heavily Islamic municipalities in Turkey, stray dogs are being hunted, tortured, and killed by the hundreds, and that "at least two of the dogs had been sexually abused." Western newspapers reported that "there is a myth among pious Muslims that dogs are unclean." But this is nonsense. There is no "myth." There is simply the Hadith of Muhammad saying he would not enter a house with dogs, and another that says that one's prayer is invalidated if a dog or a woman passes in front of the man doing the praying. And that means that dogs are haram, forbidden, and that must mean, to most Muslims, that they are "najis" or "unclean." Why call it a "myth" and not a teaching derived from the Sunna (that is, from the Hadith that form much of the written record of the Sunna)?
... Hatred of dogs as "unclean" is standard in Islam. And it comes in part from a Hadith that, at the same time, has led to the banning, in Islam, of all statuary. Hence that Hadith not only spells trouble for all dogs, and dog-owners, in the Infidel world, beginning but not ending with the blind and their seeing-eye dogs, but it also spells trouble for the statuary all over Western Europe. For what happened to the Bamiyan Buddhas, and hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of other statues destroyed over 1350 years of Muslim rule?
And all because someone somewhere along the isnad-chain decided that Muhammad had denounced dogs and pictures, and that of course was done in order to distinguish Muslims from, and to encourage their hatred for, statue-loving Christians and dog-loving Zoroastrians.
Would that those in power began to study Islam, began to ponder what the ideology of Islam, its politics and geopolitics, its Muslim and Arab supremacism, really means for the world's Infidels, their art, their science, their freedoms, their statues -- and even their dogs.
Wonder if the college "snowflakes" that support BDS know this. It is probably considered to be "islamophobia" to bring it up. Now if only those gays could stop being so clumsy on rooftops.
Bob in Texas at May 18, 2017 5:23 AM
I see BDS as a way to plausibly-deniable, cleaned-up Jew-hating.
Amy Alkon at May 18, 2017 5:46 AM
It might be an uphill battle, but best of luck to the good doctor.
Jay Hall at May 18, 2017 8:17 AM
How did Islam won the hearts of Radical Feminists? By telling them that it's okay to own cats.
Sixclaws at May 18, 2017 8:34 AM
1) What's BDS?
2) You'll find plenty of radfems criticizing Islam on the gender critical boards
3) Good luck Mr. Vet!
NicoleK at May 18, 2017 9:48 AM
"If he is elected, Dr. Mohebi said, there will be no more killings. "We should have special parks for dogs instead, like we have special women-only parks for women who want to go running without their Islamic scarves," he said."
Just like those parks for women!
Radwaste at May 18, 2017 10:00 AM
"If he is elected, Dr. Mohebi said, there will be no more killings. "We should have special parks for dogs instead, like we have special women-only parks for women who want to go running without their Islamic scarves," he said."
They could call it The Handmaid's Tail.
Kevin at May 18, 2017 12:16 PM
Alternate headline:
Dogless Joy-Slaughtering Islam
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at May 18, 2017 2:38 PM
What's BDS?
Boycot
Divest
Sanction
All aimed a Israel, Israeli citizens and businesses. They claim that Israel is an "apartheid country" and that they persecute Arabs. It allows otherwise socially unacceptable anti-semitism to become palatable.
I R A Darth Aggie at May 18, 2017 6:09 PM
We need to have an air-drop of propaganda leaflets over Tehran: lovely bikini-clad ladies, preferably of Middle Eastern or West Asian extraction, walking or holding dogs. Full-color shots on 8.5x11 glossies. Thousands of them.
Grey Ghost at May 19, 2017 6:38 AM
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