Iran & skiing

Apparently some of Iran's more hardline Muslim's have invaded the space of the skiers north of Tehran. MAny of whom enjoyed the skiing partly because ot offered headspace and social space away from the thought police. Very interesting reading, especially this: "'It is wrong that someone died 1,400 years ago and here we have to worship not just him, but his grandchildren as well,' said Parsa, 27, a computer engineer." Admittedly English is not his first language and so it is hard to know what weight to give to the word 'worship' but it is an interesting insight into Islam as practiced by many [a majority of?] Muslims where the prophet of Islam is creditted with mediating intercessory powers and as a result gains a status in popular piety that looks to a Christian outsider rather like that Christ enjoys in Christianity. It's as if a Christ-figure is necesssary and if one isn't there it has to be invented. Perhaps that tells us something about the way that God has made humanity -there really is a 'Christ-shaped hole' which other religions have to deal with, maybe that's going a bit too far but maybe there is somehing in it. It certainly belies the official Muslim presentation on the subject of shirk [idolatry] and is probably handled in rather the same way a catholics handle veneration of saints and the Orthodox handle venration of icons [note to self: check this out]. The 'protestants' in Islam are the Saudi-based Wahhabi's who don't like this intermediary stuff.

I don't know how many others he would be speaking for when he says this:
"We are born Muslims because our parents and grandparents are Muslims. But if you gave a choice to most young people here today, I think they would choose to be Christians or Zoroastrians.'" Later someone is quoted as saying that in 10 years time Iran will be like the west. So I wonder whether this is not so much a religious statement as a political statement: here 'Christian' means 'free' or 'western'. Even so it is an interesting comment, and judging by the way that students have been agitating in Iran over the last few years [and note Iran has a big proportion of its population under 25 years of age], it may reflect something of the way things are going. Another Iranian revolution? Who knows?

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Religious mourning casts pall on Iran's once carefree ski slopes: