The paper, which is the basis of this talk, is rather long, and I've just been told that I have 40 minutes, and to make matters worse, I didn't even bring a watch. So I will have to turn around every now and then to see how am I doing. By mentioning the, I was going to mention the issue of apartheid at the very end, but since you have brought it up, I'm not the first person to use that term to characterize the situation of different religious groups in Iran. The first one, to the best of my knowledge, was the human rights lawyer, Abdul Karim al-Lawheeji, who used it in an article on the legal situation of Iranians, of Iranian religious minorities as early as 2001. And my contention is that just as the South African state, before democratization, divided the population into four different groups, whites, coloreds, Indians, and blacks, with decreasing sets of rights, the Iranian legal system and the constitution does the same, with more or less 12 Ashiites as the whites, Muslim Sunnis as the coloreds, the three recognized minorities of Zoroastrian Jews and Christians as the Indians, and all the rest as people with relatively few rights, namely the blacks. But I think this will become much clearer as I go on in this presentation. My discussion here is limited to constitutional arrangements, to the legal system, and to some aspects of state policy. Not being a scholar of Islam or of Islamic law, I simply have nothing to say about the question as to whether the legal regime under which those citizens who do not adhere to Iran's official religion live, whether this legal regime is in fact a correct, plausible, questionable, or an incorrect application of the precepts of Islam. I'm not talking about Islam. I'm talking of a specific case, the Islam Republic of Iran. Nor will I say much about the state of interfaith or interworld view relations in Iranian society. Iranian society obviously is different from the legal system that governs it, and that's the subject of my talk. The former, i.e. Iranian society, evolves at a much faster rate, but this evolution is difficult to document. And in the absence of survey data or even qualitative studies of intercommunal relations in contemporary Iran, one is left with little more than anecdotes, and of course, a series of anecdotes don't constitute data. So my first point is something that I call the paradox of religious diversity in Iran. The religious makeup of Iran's population is in fact marked by a paradox, because while a great many religions and sects are present, the overall picture is one of homogeneity. As over 99% of Iranians are officially classified as Muslims, and of these somewhere between 75% and 90% adhere to 12-Asheism, the official state religion for five centuries. And the reason I say 75% to 90% is that Iranian censuses don't ask Muslims about their masjids. So in fact, nobody knows exactly how many Sunnis live in Iran. The census data allowed for only four religions, namely Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism, the latter three constituting the so-called recognized minorities. This classification was enshrined in the Constitution of 1906 and is enshrined in the current Constitution of 1979, and it of course derives from the Islamic legal notion of the people of the book. However, it does not adequately reflect social reality as it overlooks not only those non-Muslims who belong to none of the recognized faiths, but also certain sectarian divisions among Muslims. Not all Iranian Muslims are Shi'is, not all Shi'is are 12-Asheis, and not all 12-Asheis follow the official Usuli school of Iran. Let me now give you a sort of very short anthropological introduction to Iran's religious diversity. If you care to take this handout, I have plotted Iran religious groups along two groups, recognized, unrecognized Muslim and non-Muslim. The recognized Muslims, according to the current constitutions, are six groups, 12-Asheis, the official state religion. Then the constitution actually mentions the four Sunni Mazhabs. And in Iran, Hanafi Muslims can be found in Kurdistan, sorry, no, in Baluchistan, in the southeast of the country, and among the Turkmens in the northeast of the country. To the best of my knowledge, there are no Hanbali Sunnis in Iran. Shafi'is are found among the Kurds. And Maliki's constitute a tiny group on the Iranian island of Qashm. The Iranian constitution also mentions Zaidis, which is strange, because there haven't been any Zaidis in Iran for about five centuries. But we'll come to that later. Zaidis are the Shia of Yemen. The unrecognized Muslims in Iran are a group that is commonly called Ahl-e-Haq, now more commonly referred to as Yarsan. Numerous in Kurdistan, perhaps up to one million. Ismailis of the Nizari variety, which can be found in Khorasan and Karaman. Sheikhis, who are a non-Ossouli branch of 12 Ashi'ism that can be found in various places in Iran, but mostly in Karaman. Sufis are, of course, difficult to classify, because one can be any of these groups, and a Sufi at the same time. And then there are tiny groups of Zikris left in Baluchistan, even though the Sunnis of Baluchistan declared a jihad against them in the 1930s, where upon most of them fled to British India and can now be found in Pakistan. When we come to the non-Muslims, the three recognized groups are Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians. And I mentioned Mandians, because in 1996, the current leader of Iran, using his powers under the absolute jurisdiction of the jurisprudence, Velayat-e-Mutlarefari, ruled that Mandians are a people of the book. Then among the unrecognized non-Muslims, we have, of course, most importantly, Baha'is, a religion that originated in Iran. We have Christian converts. We have perhaps 20,000 or so Yazidis in Khorasan and in Kurdistan. We have Sikhs. And the Sikh neighborhood in Tehran is located around Tupraneh. We have non-believers, of course, although very few people in Iran would actually proclaim themselves to be non-believers. And we have Azalees. And for Azalees, I put a question mark, because it isn't clear that Azalees still exist. Azalees refers to those Barbies who did not follow the call of Baha'u'llah and remained Barbies. In my childhood, I still knew Azalees and Iran, but I don't think they have any organized presence in Iran at this point. So this basically, I think, plots the religious diversity of Iran. The proportion of Iran's religious minorities in the total population has declined over the centuries. Within the Muslim majority, the centralization and strengthening of the Usuli clerical establishment within 12 Ashi'ism in the 18th and 19th centuries led to a certain homogenization as illustrated by the disappearance of the Akhbari current and the weakening of Sheikhism. Akhbari's, at this point, can only be found on the other side of the Persian Gulf, essentially, and a little bit in South Asia. Some communities, such as the Ismailis and the Ahl'haq, practiced taqiyyah to the point where some believers, especially in an urban milieu, actually forgot about their original religious identity and joined the 12 Ashi'i mainstream. The demographic weight of non-Muslims has declined for various reasons. There's, of course, conversion. It paid to become a Muslim. Massacres, like the massacre of the Assyrian Christians in 1915, one of the unrecognized genocides in world history, actually the Iranian state had nothing to do with it. The area was under Russian and Ottoman occupation at the time, and so the massacre of Christians in the northwest of Iran was an extension of the massacres taking place in the Ottoman Empire. So we have conversion, massacres, and, of course, also emigration, beginning with the emigration of Iranians or Assyrians to India, the Parsis, and so on. Conversions were sometimes voluntary, like the conversion of the Georgians in the area around Isfahan. One of the interesting things is that of the Caucasian groups that came to Iran, Armenians kept their religion, but Georgians became Muslims. And sometimes forced, like the forced conversion of the Jews of Mashhad in 1839, who, after some inter-communal violence, were given the alternative either to convert or to die by the local clerics. And I also mentioned the case of the Zikris of Baluchistan who were driven out as a result of the jihad declared against them by the Sunni authorities of Baluchistan. Conversions have been very few, and American missionary activities took place mostly among Iranian Christians and Jews, and of those who converted many, then later, relocated to America. Jews have emigrated from Iran. Zionism initially attracted about half of Iran's Jewish population to Israel in the 1940s and 1950s. And the main impetus in recent times for the emigration of non-Muslims was, of course, the revolution of 1978, 1979. In 1978, Iran had 80,000 Jews. Today, it has 10,000. Armenians are now living in a very organized movement organized by evangelical Christians in the United States. And of course, the pressure on Baha'is, no jobs, no education, et cetera, such that many of them are living as well. Now, many non-Muslims leave Iran for the same reasons that Muslims leave, namely just the difficulty of living in Iran and the attempt to build a better life for themselves outside. There's a different cyber, which is that religious minorities in Iran are already very small. And if too many of them emigrate, the critical mass that remains may be so small that actually the community disappears. And at one of our previous conferences of the International Society for Iranian Studies, I had a paper that predicted that by the end of the 21st century there will be no Zoroastrians left in Iran, for instance, just because of emigration, assimilation, and so on and so forth. There is the case of conversions. But again, nobody knows exactly how many people are converting to Christianity. Many people, of course, it's not my place to judge the sincerity of conversions. But I can at least imagine that some people would convert to Christianity in order to facilitate getting an asylum in the West. So the government seems to be worried about it. But again, in the absence of real data, I'm not going to say much more about it. As for Sunnis, their weight in the country's overall population is actually going up. The reason is that Sunnis live in the periphery of Iran. And the periphery is economically less developed. If you look at the differential growth rates of the population, of course, you all know that one of the interesting developments in the last 20 years has been the declining birth rates in Iran. And birth rates, of course, everywhere in the world, coincide or correlate with economic prosperity. And since Balochistan, Kurdistan, are two of the poorest areas of Iran, families there regularly have five or six children. Where in the Persian-speaking heartland, family sizes have come down. And it's for that reason that the percentage of Sunnis in Iran's population is actually going up. And I'll talk about this a little bit later on. So this is a very basic sort of anthropological introduction to where the various groups are and so on. Let me now come to the first part of this presentation, which is about constitutional provisions. The Constitution of 1906 declared true 12-a-sheism, true 12-a-sheism, to be the official religion of the state. The Shah had to profess and propagate it. And the Constitution also gave certain rights to the three recognized minorities. They were given a deputy after a while. This didn't come immediately. But they were given members of parliament. And some of them were actually quite active. And it's interesting to compare the situation of non-Muslims in Iran in the first decade of the 20th century with the present situation now. I mean, let us not forget that the head of the armed, the constitutionalist armies, one of the heads was an Armenian, Yebrem Khan. A Zoroastrian Shah Rukh was a very active member of parliament. And there was just a much greater social presence of non-Muslims in the political sphere in Iran in the first decade of the 20th century than today, which is a very interesting change, actually. The Armenians in particular were very active during the constitutional revolution. Now, the constitutional revolution again had a somewhat paradoxical effect. On the one hand, it unambiguously granted citizenship rights to all Muslims, regardless of religion. So Zoroastrians, Christians, and Jews become citizens. Later on, they were allowed to develop their own family law. And this was enshrined in the 1930s into the legal system of the country, and so on. So their situation actually improved. The Jews moved out of the ghettos. There was no residential segregation anymore. And since the educational system of the country improved, many of them who had previously had their own schools, missionary schools, for the Jews' schools founded by the Alliance Israélique universelle for the Zoroastrian schools formed, established by the parties of India and so on. Young people started going to the same schools. Non-Muslims and Muslims started rubbing shoulders. Social barriers fell to some extent. And basically, the integration of non-Muslims and Iranian society increased from the 1940s to the 1970s. So much so that by the 1970s, there were even mixed marriages between Jews and Muslims, Christians and Muslims, et cetera, et cetera. But the downside of all of this was that one now had a religion that was assigned to one by the state. And this meant that certain position became of limits to non-Muslims. In a despotic system like the Ghadjar rule of Nasser-e-Deen Shah, the Shah could do as he wished, more or less. So for instance, we have the situation like that in the 19th century, many Iranian ambassadors to Western countries were actually Christians. I just recently read about an Iranian ambassador to Paris who in the French press is lauded for going regularly to mass. He was a Caldean. Now, after 1906, 12-Asheism becomes the official religion of the state. And once it becomes the official religion of a state, there's a glass ceiling for how far non-Muslims can rise. After that, we no longer have any non-Muslims as ambassadors of Iran. Or take the case of the most prominent Zoroastrian in pre-revolutionary Iran, Dr. Farhang Meh, who was in fact minister of finance for a few years, but couldn't in fact be minister of finance because he was not a Muslim. So the ministry of finance came under the auspices of the prime minister, and he was in fact administering it. So this is the paradoxical result. Once a Shah can no longer do as much as he wants, then of course he can no longer name anybody he wants to whatever position he wants to. And of course the fact remains that the 1906 revolution was silent on many groups in Iran, beginning with the Sunnis, but also groups like the Ahl-e-Haq, Baha'is, and so on and so forth. So let me now come to the Constitution of 1979. The final text of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran was elaborated on the basis of an earlier draft, which I will henceforth call draft, by an elected assembly, the Majlis-e-Hebregan. And Zoroastrians, Jews, Armenians, and Assyrians were represented in this assembly by one deputy each, and two Sunnis were actually elected from Sistan al-Baluchistan. The most outspoken defender of Sunni interest here was somebody called Abdul-Ali's Mullah Zadeh, a Sunni Baluchi cleric whose father, Mullah Abdullah, had actually started the jihad against the Zikris that I had mentioned. So in fact, we have an interesting case of religious tolerance being good if it benefits my group but can be dispensed with if it affects other groups. The preamble of this Constitution ascribes a, quote, common faith, unquote, to, quote, the people, implying that 12 Asshiais are actually Iran's, as Germans would call it, Staatsfolk, the people that carry the state. Now, while this has been sociologically the case for a few centuries, its inclusion in the Constitution provides a legal basis for the othering of all other citizens. Because if the people of Iran have a common faith, then what about those who don't share this common faith? Like its predecessor of 1906, the Constitution of 1979 proclaims 12 Asshiaism to be the official religion of the state. But after much debate, the epithet true that had qualified the faith in the previous Constitution was omitted and it was quite explicit that they omitted the word true in order to placate the Sunnis in Iran. The 1979 document innovates in that it grants recognition to five other Muslim Mas'abs in its article 12, namely the four Sunni Mas'abs that I just mentioned and the Zadis, Zadishis. Ismailis had approached the assembly, but the deputy speaker, Mahmat Hossein Behesti, dismissed their request during the assembly's deliberations by arguing that it was not possible to mention every single group. Now, the question arises, of course, if it's not possible to mention every single group, why do you mention a group that doesn't even exist in Iran, namely the Zadis? And this was really an enigma for me until a Mujtahid friend of mine enlightened me. This goes back to the Taqrib literature of the 1960s. In the 1960s, ecumenical dialogue was established between various Islamic sects. The Sheikh of Al-Assar was part of it. Certain Mujtahids in Iran were part of it. And their six Mas'abs were mentioned, including the Zadis who are present in Yemen. And so this is a carryover to the Iranian constitution. Now, followers of these five Mas'abs are, I quote, free to act in accordance with their own jurisprudence in performing their religious rights, and where they form a regional majority, quote, local regulations within the bounds of the jurisdiction of local councils are to be in accordance with the respective school of Fib, which in theory would mean that on the island of Qesh you can eat calamari and octopus, because Maliki's don't forbid that. But I'm not sure to what extent that is actually applied. Nonetheless, full citizenship rights elude non-12 Ashiites since the very structure of the theocratic political system established in 1979 is designed so as to exclude them from positions of real power. And the Republic is Islamic only to the extent that for the Shi'ite clergy, 12 Ashiism of the Usuli variety is, in fact, genuine Islam. The principles on which the Islamic Republic is based, as enumerated in Article 2, include belief in, quote, the continuous leadership and recourse to continuous Ijtihad of the Foraha, exercised on the basis of the Qur'an, the Sunnah, and the Masumun, i.e. the prophet and the Imams. Now, this is clearly Shi'ite. Moreover, many of the state's leadership positions are reserved for the Shi'ite clergy, most importantly, of course, that of head of state, the Rahbar, who is in turn elected by an assembly of experts composed only of Shi'ite much to heads. The head of the judiciary has to be a Shi'ite and so on. So while Sunnis and other minorities can vote in the elections to this assembly, Majlis-e-Hebrugan-e-Rahbari, they are not represented in it. The new constitution's provisions for non-Muslims essentially retain those of the 1906-1907 constitution. The assembly restricted the wording of the draft in two ways. First, it specified that Zoroastrian Jews and Christians were the only recognized minorities. And second, it added the words within the limits of the law. And of course, we know it's a well-known fact that in the Iranian constitution, many of the liberties that are given to citizens are immediately followed by the restriction within the limits of the law. And so these communities are free to perform religious rights, manage their personal law, and teach religion on the basis of their own faiths. It is not noteworthy, however, that in order that the order in which the recognized minorities are named Zoroastrian Jews-Christians reflects lingering Iranian nationalism because the traditional order would have placed Zoroastrians last. Why? Because there has always been some debate as to whether Zoroastrians are actually the people of the book or not. And so when you read traditional treatises, it's always Christians, Jews and Christians, and Zoroastrians by implication. Whereas the Constitution mentions actually Zoroastrians first. And this issue was addressed in the debates of the Assembly of Experts. And 15 years later, when the World Congress of Zoroastrians was held in Iran in the summer of 1995, Ali Khamenei actually said, quote, the birth of the creed of Zoroastra in Iran is a matter of pride for our people. Lingering Iranian nationalism. The Mendean's efforts to gain official recognition failed. After a group of assembly members who had looked into the matter reported that the religion, the Mendean religion, was a mix of Judaism and Christianity, where four Mendeans were asked to register either as Jews or as Christians. I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Mendeans. They're a Gnostic group living in southwestern Iran. And since the Islamic view of religion implies that there must be a prophet, a few centuries ago the Mendeans decided that the prophet would be John the Baptist. And on that basis, they have now become a people of the book. So basically in 1979, they went to the Assembly and said, what about us? They were told, you're either Jew or Christian. You have to decide. Then in 1996, Ali Khamenei decided that they were indeed a people of the book, but they were not given their own deputy. Then the issue of Baha'is comes up. Unsurprisingly, the adherence of the Baha'i faith received no recognition. I mean, if they didn't receive any recognition in 1906, they were very unlikely to receive any recognition in 1979. However, the issue was briefly discussed in the Assembly of Experts. What happened was that of the two Sunnis who were present, one was a secular Sunni from Baluchistan. And he got up and said a number of Baha'is in his district in Baluchistan had approached him and asked him to state their case in the parliament in light of the Quranic verse, quote, there is no compulsion in religion. And in light of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Then he sat down again. He received no answer, but it is perhaps not a coincidence that when the next speaker got up and he was a cleric, he began his totally unrelated remarks with the invocation, I seek refuge with God against the cursed devil. A'udha billah minal shaitanir rajim. So I leave it to your imagination whether this is a coincidence or not. As a nod to non-Muslim minorities, not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, the Assembly added Article 14 to the Constitution, which proclaims that non-Muslims must be treated kindly by the government and by Muslims in general, in accordance with the verse, quote, God does not forbid you to deal kindly and justly with those who have not fought against you because of your religion and to have not expelled you from your homes, 68. So in the deliberations on this particular article, be nice to non-Muslims. Mandeans were mentioned explicitly. Be nice to Mandeans, even though we don't recognize them as a religion, but Baha'is only by implication. The Constitution maintained the level of parliamentary representation granted non-Muslims before the revolution, namely two deputies for Armenians, one for Assyrians and Kaldayans, and one each for Zoroastrians and Jews in Article 64. Now, to its credit, the Constitution of 1979 is honest enough not to pretend that it does not discriminate on the basis of religion because Article 19 grants all Iranian citizens equal rights, whatever their ethnic group, tribe, color, race, and language, but not whatever their religion. Nor does the Constitution explicitly grant citizens freedom of conscience to choose their religion or to be without one altogether. Although Article 23 states that people may not be taken to task for their beliefs, apostasy from Islam, while not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, has legal consequences that nullify the effect of this article, as we shall see later on. So to sum up, the Constitution of the Islamic Republic divides Iran's citizens into four categories, namely 12 Ashiites at the top, Sunnis one step below, the three recognized minorities further down, and finally, everybody else. Now, the major difference, of course, with the South African system is the proportions. I mean, in South Africa, whites were a minority and blacks were a majority. In Iran, the ruling hegemonic group, which has the highest number of rights, is also a vast majority. I'm not gifted enough in matters of political philosophy to say whether this makes a difference or not. Now, let's come to the next point, which is the legal order and state policy. Constitutions set only the basic framework for the citizenry's rights and duties. The legal status of individuals is further affected by a variety of legal codes. In addition, in a country like Iran, where a true state of law, Rechtsstaat, has never obtained the actual policies of successful governments, whether they are in compliance with the Constitution or not, have played at least as important a role as legal codes in determining to what extent the rights of citizens of different religions approximate those enjoyed by the adherents of the official state religion. I will skip what I have to say on the Pahlavi period and come straight to the Islamic Republic. The ascendancy of the religious movement over the secular one that became manifest in the course of the year 1978, worried Iran's non-Muslims. They jumped on the revolutionary bandwagon and participated in demonstrations, proclaiming their loyalty to Iran and to Khomeini. Armenians, for instance, demonstrated chanting mazahabema armani rahbalema Khomeini. Our religion is Armenian, our leader is Khomeini. And in one of the more curious episodes of the Islamic Revolution, the Jewish hospital in Iran for a while became the headquarters of the revolutionary movement. Because first of all, the Jewish hospital was located very close to Jaleh Square. And after the Jaleh Square massacre in early September 1978, many of the wounded were taken there and cared for by Jewish doctors and Jewish nurses, which established a certain rapport. And then some people, especially around Ayatollah Tolerani, decided that the Jewish hospital was the least likely place to be infested with Sabaq bugs. And that therefore conversations between the revolutionaries were less likely to be overheard there. And so many of the activities took place there, spearheaded by a group of leftist Jews who were sympathetic to the goals of the revolution. Of course, this was a development that later on became embarrassing to both Muslims and Jews. And so little is known about it, except that recently a student of mine who is an Israeli has written a paper which is going to be published in Iranian studies very soon. So this then, this was a general situation, but this of course did not save many Armenian-owned delicatessen shops in Iran, which were smashed and looted on November 4, 1978, for allegedly serving alcohol and pork. However, in Paris, Khomeini repeatedly asserted in response to journalists that in the future Islamic state, the rights of religious minorities would be safeguarded. Now in the chaos and lawlessness that followed the revolutionary takeover, the ethnic Christians, i.e. Armenians, Assyrians, Caldeans, and Zoroastrians were largely left alone. But Jews, Baha'is, and Christian converts came under attack. A number of Jews, including the industrialist Hajj Habibullah El-Ranian, were executed by the state on charges of collaboration with Zionism. He had indeed invested in Israel, but of course that was not illegal. All nine members of the National Spiritual Assembly of Iranian Baha'is were arrested and later killed. And when a new NSA was constituted and introduced itself to the authorities, all nine members were again arrested and killed. In total, over 250 Baha'is have been murdered by the state in Iran. Baha'is also lost their state pensions on the assumption that an infidel cannot be paid out of the Bait-ul-Mal of the Muslims. And the rule was made retroactive in the sense that some Baha'is had their assets and homes seized to compensate the state for having been paid salaries before the revolution. Minorities also suffered unofficial persecution by elements not acting in the name of the state. And on these occasions, the authorities did very little to find the culprits. Iran's tiny Anglican church came under attack. The vicar of the Shiraz Church and the son of the Archbishop of Iran, the Hrani Tafti, were killed. And no effort was made to apprehend the murderers. In a similar vein, the head of the Sheikh community of Karaman, Abul Ghassim Khan, known universally as Sa'a-Karara, was killed in Karaman, but the police investigation was halted by order from Tehran. The residents of the Sa'a-Karara were seized and turned it over to the Sazamana Tablighat-e-Islami, the organization of Islamic propaganda. The Hazirat-ul-Ghot, the spiritual center of Baha'is in Iran, was given also to the same organization, Sazamana Tablighat-e-Islami. And the Sheikh's printing press in Karaman was expropriated along with most of their property. Now, after the consolidation of the Islamic regime in 1981, legal codes were gradually put in place to bring the country's legal system in line with the constitutional provision that all laws had to conform to the Sharia. And the most controversial of these was the Islamic Penal Code, the Iranune Mojazzate-Islami. This code was introduced gradually and in stages until the so far final version was put into place in 1991. It has five parts, generalities, obligatory punishments, retaliation, blood money, and discretionary punishments. I'm going to talk mostly about the second part, the hudud, the obligatory punishments, because here the law distinguishes very clearly between Muslims and non-Muslims in four areas. Adultery, zinah, male-male sodomy, levat, tribalism, mosahere, lesbian sex in other words, and alcohol consumption, moskevat. According to Article 82, and here I have to become a bit graphic and I beg you to excuse me, but I'm only reporting what's in the official legal codes of the country. According to Article 82, a non-Muslim man who commits adultery with a Muslim woman gets the death penalty, but a Muslim man is put to death only if the adultery takes place with a close blood relative, the father's wife, or is characterized by rape. In other cases, in other words, if a Muslim man commits adultery, which involves a strange woman, a non-related woman, the punishment is lapidation, stoning, which one can in theory survive, because in theory one can lift oneself out, out of the ground, run away, and prove one's innocence. A sodomy, LeVart, is punishable by death, Articles 109-110, but a sexual act between two men that involves not anal penetration, but penetration between the thighs, called tafris, is punishable by 100 whiplashes, except if the active partner is a non-Muslim and the passive one, a Muslim, in which case the active non-Muslim partner gets the death penalty. While religion matters when it comes to male sex, in matters of lesbian sex, Article 130 explicitly states that there is no difference between Muslims and non-Muslims. Non-Muslims finally get favorable treatment compared to Muslims where alcohol is concerned, while the punishment for drinking alcoholic beverages is 80 whiplashes for Muslims, this applies to non-Muslims only if they drink alcohol in public. And one of the reasons, of course, is that non-Muslims are encouraged to adhere to their faith, and you need wine, for instance, for mass. Therefore, Armenians and Assyrians and Caldeans must be able to produce wine for mass, and this, then, they can also consume at home. If the section on hudud, on punishment, divides Iran's citizenry into two groups, namely Muslims and non-Muslims, for the purpose of Bessas, namely the law of the Italian, an I for an I and so on, Iranians are divided into three groups. Dimmis, i.e. the recognized minorities, Muslims and non-believers. The differential treatment of citizens according to religion based on the principle of, quote, equality in religious status, unquote, between perpetrator and victim is spelled out obliquely in article 207. The article reads, if a Muslim is killed, the killer is subject to Rassas. The killer is subject to retaliation. Now, in theory, this could be interpreted as meaning that if a non-Muslim is killed, there's no punishment. But what the article says is, if a non-Muslim is killed, there will be no likewise retaliation. This does not mean that the killing of a non-Muslim by a Muslim goes unpunished. But the retribution can take the form of the payment of blood money or a jail sentence for the killer. Now, the blood money of a woman being half of that of a man in 12 Ashesim, a male Muslim killer of a female Muslim is subject to Rassas, but his family has to be paid half the blood money of the man to equalize the exchange. So if a man kills a woman, the family of the woman can ask for the life of the murderer because he's a man, but they have to pay half the blood money to the family of the murderer. Now, there are two sets of inequalities here. Muslim non-Muslim is one, male-female is the other one. And this, strangely enough, is extended to Dimmis in Article 210, which lays down that if a Dimmie kills another Dimmie, even if they be of two different religions, Rassas applies. Namely, that if a Jew kills a Christian, the family of the Christian victim can ask for the Jew to be killed, which, of course, makes no sense given that Christians at least don't have the lex talionis. A Muslim cannot be subjected to Rassas for having killed a non-Muslim. So the rule of Rassas applies to two non-Muslims, applying to two non-Muslims, is suspended if after the act the killer converts to Islam. And this is not a theoretical case. I know, I mean, there has been a commentary which showed that somewhere in Kurdistan, an Ahle Haq, a member of the Ahle Haq, killed another member of the Ahle Haq. So, you know, equality in terms of religious status. And then the murderer said he was a 12-ashiite, whereupon the court said Rassas no longer applies because it's not clear that Ahle Haq are actually Muslims. The problem is that while the penal code sets down the blood money for a Muslim man's life, this is quite clear, article 297 sets down the deer for the killing of a male Muslim, allowing the killer to choose from the following six options, a hundred healthy camels, 200 healthy cows, 1,000 healthy sheep, 200 sets of Yemeni robes, 1,000 minted dinars, or 10,000 minted dinars, a dirhams, or 12.6 nochad of silver. This is what the law says is the blood money for a Muslim male. And a Muslim woman would be half of that, obviously. It does not specify what the dimmi's blood money is. It doesn't say how much say the family of an Armenian would have to pay the Muslim murderer. No, how much the family of a Muslim murderer would have to pay the family of an Armenian victim of a murder. And until 2003, courts would actually make ad hoc decisions on this. I know of a case, for instance, where a Jewish woman was killed in the early 1980s and the judge set her blood money at 24,002 months, which was then the equivalent of $800. But in 2003, the Iranian parliament passed a measure equalizing the blood money of the recognized minorities and that of Muslims. So at this point, the blood money of the recognized minorities and of Muslims is the same. This goes against the classical Sharia and this was pointed out by the council of guardians, which tried to do away with this provision. But then it was upheld in the expedient's council. So at this point, recognized minorities and Muslims have the same blood money. The third category of people, those who are neither Muslims nor members of one of the by now four peoples of the book is not directly mentioned in the penal code. But article 226 is relevant. It states that a killing, a murder in other words, a murder, occasion sessas, retaliation, if the victim was not religiously worthy of being killed. And if he was, the killer has to prove in court that the victim deserved to be killed. In other words, if a non-believer, somebody who has proclaimed that he is irreligious, is killed and the murderer is a Muslim, if the Muslim murderer can prove in court that his victim had said he was not a Muslim and that he had been a Muslim at his family, he's from a Muslim background and so on, no punishment can occur. And the category of people deserving to be killed includes apostate.  But this means that there is a legal limbo for those non-Muslims who are not apostates. And this is not merely a theoretical possibility. But the case arises and I have another example. In 2003, there was an altercation between an Iranian Sikh, Eskult Aran Singh and a Muslim and in broad daylight, during the fight, the Sikh was killed by a blow of the other Iranian's knife and the state at first did not want to prosecute the murderer, arguing that the victim was neither a Muslim nor a person of the book because Sikhs are not recognized as the people of the book in Iran. Then the Indian Embassy intervened and there was an outcry in India and since the Iranian government at the time was eager to maintain good relations with India, the murderer was finally tried and was condemned to a 10-year jail sentence, his crime having been to break public order. He was sentenced to 10 years for breaking public order because presumably when a murder takes place, a fear overcomes society, people fear that they are not living in a secure country and this has to be punished. And this was an application of Article 612 of the Penal Code which specifies that if for whatever reason, Bessas does not apply but if the killing has disrupted public order, the killer may be condemned from three to 10 years in prison. Now, I come to civil law and I must confess that I haven't done a comprehensive study of civil law yet but I just want to mention one fact which is that when the civil code was elaborated in the Pahlavi state of Anun-e-Madani, a traditional provision that when a member of a family becomes a member of a non-Muslim family becomes a Muslim, he or she inherits all the father's wealth that had been deleted. That's of course, as always in Iranian history, being incentive for people to convert. Imagine a rich Zoroastrian merchant who has four sons. There is dispute among the four sons as to who should inherit the wealth. One of them becomes a Muslim and the Muslim by definition gets all the wealth. That's the law. And this had been abolished under the Pahlavis but it was reintroduced under the Islam Republic which establishes that Muslim gets all of a car fair's inheritance. And this is an article 881, 881, which is in fact an incitement to convert to Islam for pecuniary reasons. Finally, a few other measures that I want to mention. While the provisions of the Islamic penal code and of the civil code are there for all to see, other measures that affect the lives of Iran's different religious communities cannot be easily documented. Relevance are for instance, bachshanamez directives that are sent directly to administrations in the provinces and that are not necessarily published officially. A directive that I am aware of ordered state administrations in Karaman not to employ Sunnis, dervishes, i.e. members of Sufi orders, quite widespread in Karaman, Baha'is, Zoroastrians, and even Sheikhs, Sheikhs being 12 Ashiites of course. In Isfahan, the municipality forbade the employment of Armenians in municipal government. One glaring act of discrimination is the state's refusal to allow Sunnis to have a mosque of their own in Tehran. This is not a general prohibition. Elsewhere in Iran, Sunnis do indeed have mosques. Sunnis have lots of madrasas in Iran in places like Kurdistan and Balochistan. But in Tehran, with its population of perhaps one million Sunnis, there's not a single Sunni mosque. And in the 1990s, when I used to go to Iran, for instance, in Sunni diplomats stationed in Iran, Pakistanis, Arabs, Indonesians, et cetera, used to come together in the basement of the Pakistani school in Tehran on Fridays to pray. And of course, you know that the Friday congregational prayer is much more important than Sunnism than in Shiaism. Now, why is that if you ask the official reason which is given to you unofficially, sort of, Oche, is that this is a measure to protect Sunnis in Tehran from the wrath of very fanatical Shi'is who might go and attack the Sunni mosque because they're too ignorant not to do so. But I was recently told by somebody who's very well connected in the regime that the real reason is that since precisely Sunnis take Friday congregational prayers so seriously, if they wear a Sunni mosque in Tehran, it would be far more visited by Sunni believers than Shi'i mosques in Tehran are visited by Shi'is because Shi'i mosques are very often empty in Tehran and this would reflect badly on the official religion of the state. Sufis were deprived of many of their khan-e-ghas after the revolution and some of them took pre-emptive action by renaming their lodges, the khan-e-ghas, Hosseiniyes, places where the martyr Imam Hossein is annually commemorated. In Karaman, Shi'is have been given back their mosque but not their publishing house and at this point there's very little over discrimination against Shi'is. In fact, many Shi'is have prospered because many of them had pistachio plantations. Finally, the Ismaili community of Tehran has not been allowed to renovate even its Jama'at Khana which is I understand and dire need of repairs. Now, since the mid 1990s, the state treatment of religious diversity has reflected the changing tides of Iranian politics. At his inauguration in 1997, President Khartami officially embraced clerics of the three recognized minorities and during his tenure, even the situation of the Baha'is improved somewhat. Conversions to Christianity were quietly tolerated and Khartami named three Sunnis as his personal representatives to Iran Sunnis and they acted as ombudsmen for their co-religionists. Let me give you one anecdote that I was told that there was a competitive exam, a concourse for a particular position in the National Iranian Oil Company and this concourse was won by a Sunni Iranian whereupon the job went to the person who had come number two. Then the ombudsman complained about this and what the NISC did, it created two jobs for both of them. Now, matters changed with the advent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The first group that was targeted were the Sufis and in February 2006, thousands of them were arrested in Rome on which occasion two houses of worship in that city and a number of private residences of Sufis were demolished. One of my students was an eyewitness account of that and he said that there were a number of talabis of seminarians who were actually cheering as the houses were demolished. Although Jews have not been particularly targeted, Ahmadinejad's views on the Holocaust aired during a conference attended by far-right Holocaust deniers from the West, led some of them to leave Iran. But all these measures pale in comparison to the daily humiliations and chicanery visited upon Baha'is. They are attacked on a daily basis in the press and while state employment was close to them in the early 1980s, the state is now trying to deprive them of employment in the private sector even. To give a few examples, the Swedish company that employed two Baha'is in Mashhad was closed down. The land of some Baha'i farmers were seized and transferred to the office of the leader and I personally know of a Baha'i shop owner who found his shop locked by the authorities when he tried to open it one morning in 2010. Now, Iranian society, and here I'm going to backtrack a little bit, has obviously developed considerably in the last three decades and measures that target minorities are now perceived by more progressive Iranians as part and parcel of repression generally. Unlike the 1980s, because let's not forget that in the 1980s, the serial murders of Baha'is received very little attention from regime opponents who were of Muslim heritage. I myself started denouncing the discrimination against Jews and Baha'is in 1986 and I would routinely be asked whether I was a Baha'i or a Jew. The idea was that if you speak up for minorities, you must belong to the minority yourself. And just in case somebody is wondering here, I'm neither a Baha'i nor a Jew. Even 12 Ashi'i clerics themselves have in their own way taken up the cause of religious diversity. Grand Ayatollah Yusuf Sane'i cast new light and apostasy when he declared that just as one must become a Muslim on the basis of rational considerations, one must also be allowed to leave the religion on the basis of rational considerations. And furthermore, in a momentous break with clerical tradition, Ayatollah Hossein Ali-Montaziri, who was until his death in 2009, Iran's most senior dissident cleric, declared that although Baha'is were not a people of the book, they had a right to citizenship and to living in Iran. And of course in 2009, the defense of the rights of religious minorities was very much part of the opposition movement. So there is one more aspect, but I don't have to go into that. So I end my discussion of legal measures right here and conclude that the Iranian constitution and legal system in fact divide Iran's citizenry into two, three, or four different categories depending on which code we are talking about and that in every regime, a legal regime, people have not only different, but blatantly unequal rights. And I have argued that this is analogous to the separation of the people of South Africa into different categories as practiced by the apartheid regime. Now, this analogy can be criticized from two angles. The first one I already mentioned, the proportions are very different. Second, it's of course the fact that one can escape discrimination in Iran by becoming a Muslim. I think the unspoken ideal of many leaders of the Islam Republic is to preside of a religiously homogeneous state in which everybody is a 12er Shiite. But even that only goes so far because it is difficult to escape one's origins. You may remember that President Ahmadinejad was rumored to be of Jewish origin. I'm sure that those who spread this rumor didn't mean it as a compliment. So even to be a recent convert from another religion is not always a very good thing. And besides, even under apartheid, many people were reclassified. I mean, if you read the official records of the Institute for Racial Studies in South Africa, you can see every year some colors become white, some blacks become colored, et cetera. Although the Islam Republic can survive in spite of these legally entrenched inequalities, the current system is likely to beget upheaval and low-level endemic violence at least in one area, and that is the periphery. Now, the Dimmis in Iran are slowly disappearing. If the current numbers continue within 20 or 30 years, there'll be no Christian Jews and Syrians left in Iran. But Sunnis are not disappearing. In fact, as I said, their numbers are growing.  And all Iran's Sunni populations have cousins on the other side of the border. I mean, Kurds live in many different areas. Baluchi spill over into Pakistan. Turkmen spill over into Turkmenistan. Sunni Arabs are found also in the Arab countries of the area. Talashi Sunnis can be found in Azerbaijan. Persian, the Persian Sunnis of Khurasan are closely related to the Tajikas of Afghanistan, and so on. And the coincidence of ethnic and sectarian cleavages in Iran's Sunni periphery means that resentment against discrimination among Sunnis becomes easily couched in terms of ethnic nationalism. It can be couched in terms of Baluchi nationalism, Kurdish nationalism, et cetera, which is far more difficult to diffuse than religious resentment. Because religious resentment, you can remedy by giving people religious equality. But once ethnic separatism appears on the scene, it is very difficult to stamp it out. Because every positive gesture by the government is interpreted by the separatists as an admission of weakness, which emboldens them even further. And since all of these ethnic groups straddle Iran's borders, this confers a geopolitical dimension to ethnic sectarian questions. And in particular, the Sunnis and Shi'is have traditionally lived in harmony in Iran. But the ethnic, the religious friction between Sunnis and Shi'is has gone through the roof in the last decade. One reason is, again, demographic, which is Iranians are mobile people. So there are areas near Bandar Abbas, near Khurasan, and so on, which used to be homogeneously Sunni, which are now being not invaded, I don't like that word, but where Shi'is from Azerbaijan and from Tehran and from Islam are now settling. And so friction arises when in an area that has been 95% Sunni, suddenly you get a huge Shi'i mosque, you get a Hosseinye, you get black flags on the 10th of Muharram, and so on. The Sunnis feel that they're being invaded by a religious sensibility that is not the Iran. And finally, the sectarian clashes in Iraq have had a tremendous impact on Iran because the past Iran have been involved in helping the Shi'is of Iraq. And since the Shi'is of Iraq have been massacred, many of them by Sunnis, bomb goes off in a mosque almost every day, the past Iran have turned very anti-Sunni. And this affects the situation in Iran. Finally, and this is my final point, the current system also works against one of the major motivations behind the establishment of the Islamic Republic, which was to create a more moral society. The presupposition that a good citizen is a 12-ish believer encourages hypocrisy and duplicity and generates a mode of behavior that is opposite to what traditional Iranian culture valued, namely that an individual's Zahir and Baten coincide, that an individual's outer reality and inner truth coincide. Because even if you're not a believer, you will have better chances in life if you pretend that you are. In other words, you're being punished for being honest about your disbelief. But such legal inconsistencies, of course, not unique to Iran, criticizing the English practice in the 19th century of not accepting the testimony of non-believers in courts. John Stuart Mill wrote, and I quote John Stuart Mill, under pretense that atheists must be liars, it admits the testimony of all atheists who are willing to lie. No, sorry, if it admits the testimony of all atheists who are willing to lie and reject not only those who are brave enough to publicly confess a detested creed rather than affirm a falsehood. In other words, you're better off if you lie. And that goes against what the Islamic Republic was all about, which is to create a memorial society. And Mill's conclusion rings true for contemporary Iran, where he writes, quote, a rule thus self-convicted of absurdity can be kept in force only as a badge of hatred, a relic of persecution. Thank you.


I am Dr. Vitesh Shetty, I head department of medical genetics at Manipal Hospital, Bangalore. This month, October, is Down syndrome awareness month. So Down syndrome is a genetic condition where you have an extra chromosome 21. Normally we have around 46 chromosomes in each of our cells, but in Down syndrome there is extra chromosome 21, that's the reason it's also called as a trisomy 21. So Down syndrome was first described by Dr. John Landon Down in 1866. So the incidence of Downs in India is around 1 in 813 and around 37,000 babies with Down syndrome are born every year in India. So Down syndrome incidence is associated with the advanced maternal age, but we see around 80% of the Downs babies are born to the mother with less than 35 years of age. The weakness of muscle and broad and short hand with single palm up crease and low satyrs, they are also at increased risk of developing a congenital heart defect, thyroid disorder, respiratory insufficiency and leukemia and Alzheimer's disease. Treatment in Down syndrome, so you have to understand that extra chromosome what is there, we cannot remove that, but we can take care of the complication associated with this condition. If we detect or identify Down syndrome early, they tend to lead a better life. So there are various interventional methods can be used to help the Down child, interventional neurodevelopment therapy, speech therapy, behavioral therapy and apart from all these things, they can always try other things also which are shown in good results like music therapy, aqua therapy and yoga. So Down syndrome, their life expectancy is changing drastically as the medicine is advancing and we are able to pick up Downs early. Most Down syndrome born have been born talent of creativity. The parents have advised to identify those unique features and encourage a child to take up that as a career to be more independent. They are the treasured members of the society and the source of inspiration. Down syndrome faces lot of unique challenges. We as a society have to be more inclusive and need to empower them to achieve their full potential. Down syndrome knives, they are worth living in and deserve to be loved. More than two decades, Manipal Hospital is trying to create awareness about Down syndrome, helping the family with the Down syndrome and importantly learning from the families. For more information or to book an appointment for genetic counseling, please visit Manipal Hospital website or call the toll tree number.