Islam Degraded

The scourge of the opium trade has done irreparable harm all over the world; the accessibility to opioids and their destructive effects on human health, on families, on societies, has been incalculable. Afghanistan, now acknowledged as being the world's foremost grower of poppy fields, is a Muslim country where alcohol and drug use is forbidden, and where religious devotion and customs stemming from interpretations of Islam, result in a stern view of life and a repudiation of anything stemming from Western culture.

The Taliban, led by ignorant mullahs who hold themselves regardless -- knowledgeable in Koranic values, and whose administration of the country prior to being dislodged through a NATO/UN/US invasion to capture al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden, sheltered by the Taliban -- draw huge profits from encouraging and intimidating Afghan farmers to grow opium poppies. Entreaties by the occupying forces to desist, augmented by payments to farmers to grow edible grain crops instead, and destroy the poppy crops, led to failure.

Now that the last of the Western forces are leaving the country -- and the Afghan government of Prime Minister Hamid Karzai is prepared to launch serious peace talks with the Taliban, his self-declared Pashtun 'brothers', offering them a share in the government, as though the Taliban have any intention of sharing anything whatever -- the UN through its Afghanistan Opium Survey for 2013 has stated that more opium fields are in production now than at any other previous time. Enriching members of the current government (former war lords) and the Taliban alike.

The end of British efforts to stamp out opium-production in Helmand province has led to an increase in planting. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

 In Iran, another theocratic Islamist government, while the nation is groaning under sanctions imposed by the UN, the EU and the US in a futile attempt to turn Tehran away from its sacrosanct nuclear program ostensibly for the purpose of medical isotope and energy production -- covertly for the end-game of becoming another nuclear weapons producer, joining the very Security Council members themselves who hold that distinction (along with India and Pakistan and North Korea) -- the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei controls a business empire valued at $95-billion.

A Reuters investigation revealed just recently that the Supreme Leader owes his power and prestige, his prominence and security as leader to the fact that he, along with the Republican Guard Corps elite, control more wealth through real estate, industry, finance, oil, telecommunications and even farming, than the value of the country's annual petroleum exports. The country is in financial duress because of the sanctions constricting their international trade and financial transactions and the freezing of its assets abroad.

By using the immense wealth that they have amassed in the most egregiously corrupt manner to benefit themselves and their hold in power, the Ayatollah et al have the means of drawing their country out of its dilemma of financial shortages. Heaven forfend that they should consider withdrawing from the immense wealth amassed to benefit themselves, however. They insist they are entitled to pursue their nuclear goal, and that all sanctions must be removed.

A national program instituted by Khamenei's predecessor who initiated the Iranian Revolution at the removal of the Shah of Iran when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in France to head the country, was meant to be a temporary construct, to manage and sell properties abandoned during the Islamic Revolution. Since his death, however, Ayatollah Khamenei and his cohorts have used the Setad Ejraiye Farmane Hazrate Emam for their own purposes.

Which is to build an empire for themselves based on the systematic seizure of thousands of properties originally in the possession of Iranians who were members of religious minorities, business people, and Iranians living outside the country. A huge portfolio of real estate was amassed by claiming in the country's courts of law that the properties were abandoned by their owners, and thus became the property of the 'State'.

That condition allowed the Ayatollah and his inner circle, inclusive of the elite officers of the Republican Guard, an unrestricted monopoly on absorbing property in the name of the supreme leader. Its original purpose, on the other hand, was clearly otherwise. Setad's creation was meant to aid the poor of the country and war veterans, and its life-span was considered to be two years.

So much then, for the piety, honesty and honourable intentions of these great religious leaders of Islam.

Their criticism of, and hatred for the West and its scorned supposedly corrupt values reflects their own benightedly scurrilous version of wholesale corruption and the furtherance of a personal agenda, beyond the political one of Islamism triumphant.