Iran is focused on making Islam great again.
One consequence of these very different goals is that the U.S. is blind to many of Iran's actions on the world stage and the implications. Time and again, this blindness has worked to Iran's advantage, even to the point that many U.S. actions inadvertently help the Iranian leadership. And they're aware of this; Iran is fully apprised of how the U.S. leadership views them whereas the opposite is not true.
Given that Islam has about a billion adherents, how much greater do Iran's leaders want the religion to be? It's not about the numbers, which contain highly fragmented and conflicting views of Islam as well as the dominant view of Islam promulgated by Sunni Gulf Arabs and in particular the Saudis. These Arabs have used their combined oil wealth to impose on other Muslims their own view of the religion.
It is this view that Iranian leaders believe has been enormously destructive to the ummah, greatly weakening it and making it susceptible to machinations that constantly set Muslims against each other.
Thus, the Iranians don't anymore view the issue as Shiite versus Sunni to the extent they ever did; they see the issue as that of a false view of Islam imposed by men who control the Two Holy Mosques. The Iranian idea is that once freed from this false view and the divisiveness it fosters, Islam will regain its true greatness and guide all of humanity to a Golden Age.
I think this view has grown over time since the Islamic Revolution and that many causes and conditions moved it along. I also think one of the causes has arisen from Iranian involvement in the Syrian War. In Syria, devout Shiite Iranians found themselves fighting alongside pro-Syrian government Sunni Arabs, and Alawites and other minority religious sects including Christians.
These Iranian militias saw up close the horrors inflicted on Syrians by hordes of Muslim mercenaries from countries around the world who were bought and paid for by the Saudis and their fellow travelers and backed by Westerners from NATO countries. And of course, the Iranian militias also dealt with Islamic State in Iraq as well as Syria.
But in Syria, it must have seemed to the Iranians that the gates of Hell had opened, and yet the demon hordes were Muslim even though they spoke in many tongues.
And more -- as a minority sect in the Middle East, and one that been overtly oppressed in Saudi Arabia, the Iranians were particularly sensitive to how other minority sects were treated by the Saudis.
Add to this what Youssef Bodansky calls the "growing dominance of heritage-based dynamics throughout the developing world."(1) John Batchelor and a roster of Central Asian guests discussed those heritage-based dynamics, as they pertain to the Caucasus and Central Asia, during John's broadcasts last week from Tashkent, Uzbekistan. (2)
The Iranians are now reaching back to their Persian history and emphasizing more and more that they are a Central Asian country, not a 'Middle Eastern' one. I think this view is having a marked effect on how they see themselves and Islam.
1) See Seffy's June 17 report at Oil Price, Declassified: The Sino-Russian Masterplan To End U.S. Dominance In Middle East. Plus you'll get to see a pix of Xi and Putin making pancakes: Important question: Are these blinis or Chinese pancakes?
2) John posted several podcast segments at Audioboom on last week's Tashkent broadcasts but you might start with this jaw-dropper, "On the Road to Tashkent: Reawakening the major civilization of Central Asia: Part 1 of 2: or, the city-state supremacy long before the Silk Road" with S. Frederick Starr, Central Asia-Caucasus Institute. Starr is the author of the audiobook Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane.
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