The Minorities Question in Iran

Abstract

In the Middle East as in the West, the concept of a “minority”, covering both religious and ethnic minorities within a state, is a modern one. Today, ethnic minorities are important in much of the Middle East. In the pre-twentieth-century Middle East, however, as in the pre-eighteenth-century West, the only minorities generally considered important were religious ones, who might be either unbelievers (in the Muslim world divided into protected “People of the Book” — monotheists with scriptures — and unprotected polytheists) or heretics, whose beliefs related to the dominant religion but were judged to diverge so seriously and dangerously as to merit punishment, sometimes death. The only religious minority sometimes tolerated in the West were the Jews, who were, however, increasingly expelled and forced to move to Eastern Europe or to Morocco and the Ottoman Empire. Peaceful coexistence between Catholics and Protestants as well as tolerance and legal emancipation for Western Jews are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century phenomena. The twentieth-century Holocaust, the continuation of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslims prejudices in the West (where Muslim populations are now significant — for example, about 3 million in the United States), and revived intra-Christian tensions in parts of the West should warn Westerners against thinking that religious prejudices and persecutions happen only elsewhere.