Aryan Nation

I was toward the end of my work week last Friday and as usual the last patient of the week was late. He called to say he was lost so I couldn't leave and was forced to wait for him. Finally, he arrived and I had the intention of spending little time with him since he was delaying the onset of my weekend. As it turned out, I spent a long time with him as he had a very interesting story. It was not his medical condition that intrigued me but his bio. Lets call him Abdul.

Abdul was born in Iran and lived there for the first 17 years of his life. He moved to the US with his family in the late 1970s at the time of the Islamic revolution. He was schooled here, became an engineer and went to work for the State of NJ where he had a solid job as an engineer. Sometime in his 30s he decided to go back to Iran because he thought he could do better there but ultimately returned to the US. He described the situation in Iran but concluded that only by living there can one sense the oppression of the people by the government. He pointed out the growing resistance of the people to the mandatory Islamic laws.

He was going to Iran that evening with a stop in Frankfurt to visit family who moved to Germany from Iran and just had a child. He mentioned to me that these Iranian expat relatives are shying away from giving their kids Islamic names, rejecting the forced dictates of Islam and attempting to be more Western. He went on to say that instead of a Muslim name they were naming their son Aryan and had named their daughter Arya. This blew me away. Here they were rejecting the oppressive forces of Islam only to glorify another oppressive ideology, Nazism. Of course, the common thread of the ideologies is the hatred and annihilation of the Jews. It amazes how intense are peoples passions towards Jew hatred.

The name Iran comes from the word Aryan in Farsi and was changed from Persia to Iran in 1935. This was done to emphasize their connection to Aryan principles (ie. Jew hatred). I wanted to confront Abdul about changing one hateful, antisemitic ideology for another one but I bit my tongue and kept my mouth shut. If he only knew in just a few short hours I would be in a synagogue singing about the arrival of the holy Jewish Shabbat. Of course, I also wanted to finish a long and hard week of work and get the weekend started.