In a recent social media post, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said, “We cannot consider ourselves to be Muslims if we are oblivious to the suffering that a Muslim is enduring in. India or any other place.” One finds his comment is hardly surprising. After all, Khamenei is just a successor of Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, who had to be followed by whosever is in power in the post-Shah landscape in Iran.

It may be recalled that Khomeini had a strong connection to the Shia faith he inherited from his grandfather, Syed Ahmad Musavi Hindi. Hindi happened to be a Shia cleric, born in Kintoor, near Barabanki in India’s Uttar Pradesh. He migrated to Iran in 1830. Hindi was drawn to the idea of an Islamic revival and the belief that Muslims needed to reclaim their “rightful” place in society. He left India for a pilgrimage to the Tomb of Ali in Iraq’s Najaf in 1830. Four years later, he landed in the Iranian city of Khomeyn. Hindi died in Karbala in 1969.

History bears out that Hindi’s teachings have played a crucial role in shaping the course of Iran’s history after his grandson Khomeini founded the Islamic Republic of Iran, became its first Supreme Leader and made Islamic laws the guiding principle for the country. Since the fall of the Shah in Iran in 1979, the successive dispensations in the country have advanced the cause of revolutionary Shiite Islamism at home and abroad.

Given this ideological inclination, Khamenei could not have been expected to appreciate India’s pluralist culture. Unlike Iran, India is a constitutionally pluralist democracy. Herein there is no space for any monopolistic religious........

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