One wonders how many intelligent people in Iran, or among the Iranians in intelligent exile, wish that Islam had never arrived, that “gift” from far more primitive people, the gift that for the Iranians keeps on giving — giving trouble, pain, anguish, mental desarroi. How many secretly would wish they could tow their own country out to sea somewhere, away from the Arabs and the other Muslims, adopt Zoroastrianism or Christianity or nothing at all but the cult of poesy (Sa’adi, Hafiz, Firdowsi, Omar Khayyam) and let Persians, as they see it, be Persians?
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