TEHRAN, Iran — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran deems nuclear weapons to be prohibited under Islam and isn’t seeking to build them. He made the comments after the International Atomic Energy Agency said earlier this week that Iran may have been working on a nuclear warhead.
"Our religious beliefs consider such weapons forbidden as symbols of destruction," Ayatollah Khamenei said Friday after he presided at a ceremony where Iran’s first domestically made guided-missile destroyer was put into service from a base in the Persian Gulf. "We don’t believe in atomic bombs and we do not seek one."
Speaking to military commanders and staff, Ayatollah Khamenei said comments in recent days by Western officials that Iran has a nuclear weapons program were "outdated and nonsensical," the state-run Mehr news agency reported.
The various forms of Islamic "fundamentalism" [Wahhabism, Jihadi SalafisSayyid Qutb, etc.] arose in the Sunni tradition in Saudi Arabia. Iran is a Shia country – a different tradition. I’ll never be able to sort through the crevices of Islam – the tangled complexities complicating the simplest of religions – one God, one Prophet. The confusion seems to hinge on Islamic Law, not the religion itself. And the gist of things for the fundamentalists is that "western culture" is contaminating Islam [probably true].
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