Iran's media watches Shia clampdown in M'sia

The recent clampdown on Shia ( also spelt as Shi'ite ) in Malaysia has drwan the attention of the mass media in Iran. The school of Islamic tradition is the official faith of the Persian-speaking Islamic republic. Besides being a fairly influential player in the regional politics of the Middle East after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, Iran also has a very strong and unique civilisational identity in the region as, among other historical and also geographicl factors, Iran was not part of the Ottoman Empire, which disintegrated at the outset of the 20th century as the results of European pressure and domestic decay. However, Iran is not the first and only source of republicanism in the Islamic world as the proclamation of republican polities in, inter alia, Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan predated the 1979 revolution in Iran. Muslims in these three conutries are predomnantly Sunni, not Shi'ite. Another notable Sunni-majority republic in the Islamic world is Egypt.

Shifting Muslim perception of Iran in Malaysia