As Iranians, we like to believe in our country as the land of flowers and nightingales, گل و بلبل, equivalent to the land of milk and honey. However, the observation of dry riverbeds filled with rubbish, water shortages, air pollution and the insidious advance of the silent killers says otherwise.
Our beliefs and chauvinistic views on our country are in contrast to the realities; our Islamic laws fall short of cleaning the environment.
Today, as the image of Iran as an environmentally wrecked country emerges, the bells toll.
The slogans repeated ad nauseam by the Iranian officials glorifying the Islamic Revolution values are deceiving. They promise a lot but deliver little. On one account, the Islamic laws fall short of cleaning the environment and the beliefs contradict the facts.
The ayatollahs are running out of religious metaphors for the evolution of Iranian society as it is today. The protection of nature was unheard of in AD 622. There is no Koranic verse, no narrative (Hadith) from the Prophet Mohammed, and no anecdote from the Twelve Imams on PET littering, asbestos use, the depletion of water resources, and … the disposal of radioactive waste.
The meagre alibi actions to preserve the environment are best represented in this picture.
Pretence and Environment
In this photo, one can see the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei in a green private garden, lonely.
He is reported to have planted two lonely saplings to save 1.6 Mio m2 (4 times the size of France) of polluted and dried environment.
Two lonely saplings planted would not be enough to awaken the consciences. When the theocracy spends billions on military developments and religious ceremonies in Iran, Syria and Iraq, the sapling’s price is reduced to a fraction of one cent.
In Iran our environment is lost, our environmentalists are jailed and killed. But planting two lonely saplings is the most that the Eminent Iranian Hypocrite can do to save the environment.
