Another religious ruling against pet dogs issued in Iran
Senior conservative cleric Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi has issued a religious ruling this week decreeing that dogs should not be kept as pets. Asked to clarify the position of Islamic religious law on the growing number of dogs kept as pets in Iran's big cities, the senior cleric ruled that keeping pet dogs was a blind imitation of the West, where many people love their dogs more than their wives and children. In his ruling, Makarem Shirazi claimed that there are many references to dogs being unclean in Islam, even though the Quran itself does not explicitly address that matter (ISNA, June 16).
Keeping pet dogs, considered to be unclean (najes) in Shi'ite law, is viewed as an expression of the corrupting influence of the West and has been problematic since the Islamic revolution. In 1999, the then chief of judiciary Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi ruled that dogs must not be taken to public places as it is offensive to Muslim sentiments. Yazdi did allow pets to be kept in people's homes, saying, however, that taking them to the street was an offense to the public and called for police intervention.
In 2002, the Friday prayer leader in the city of Orumiyeh (northwestern Tehran) also ruled that keeping pet dogs was tantamount to moral corruption, and issued a call to detain pet dogs and their owners. Several months prior to that, the authorities banned the sale of dogs while police forces fined those who dared to walk their dogs in public places. Despite the restrictions, there has been an increase in the number of dog owners in Iran in recent years, particularly evident among the wealthier sectors of society in the big cities.
As part of the campaign waged by the authorities in recent years to enforce the Islamic code of conduct, dogs have been rounded up to keep them from being in public places. At least in some cases, dogs were rounded up while being walked by their owners. Rounding up the dogs was justified as an attempt to get rid of "Western influence". In August 2007, the reformist daily E'temad-e Melli reported the arrest of a young man from Tehran who posted ads on his street asking for help in finding his lost dog. The police reported that the man was arrested for posting ads that "spread moral corruption", since they could encourage more people to keep dogs as pets.
Dogs being rounded up by internal security forces
(from the blog http://kamangir.net, September 12, 2007)
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