ICC Note:

“Ayatollah Sobhani invited the Christian leaders of Iran to a debate,” Mohabat News reports.

9/9/2011 Iran (Mohabat News) – Subsequent to all the warnings and concerns that Islamic republic officials expressed about growth of Christianity, especially home churches in Iran, Ayatollah Sobhani invited Christian leaders to a debate.

According to the Iranian Christian News Agency “Mohabat News”, the government’s official news agency, ISNA, reported that “Ayatollah Sobhani” recently commented in one of his Quran interpretation classes, in Hojatieh Seminary in Qom, that : ” If Christians are ready; we are ready to have discussions with them.”

Ayatollah Sobhani is one of the Marja-e-Taghlid in Qom (literally meaning a source guidance and reference) that recently warned about the rapid growth of Christianity among the Iranian youth and said that 600 people in the city of Neishaboor alone had converted to Christianity.

Sobhani did not mention how and where these debates should take place and which group of Christians would be allowed to participate.

This Shiite Grand Ayatollah, who has exceeded his rivals in delusionary thoughts, has claimed that Christians have written a lot of books about Imam Ali, the first Imam of Shiites, that demonstrates that if people attempt extinguish the sun, symbolically speaking, they will not succeed. However, he did not mention any book names and not that he did not indicate where those books have been published.

Before this, in March of 2011, the website “Alef”, affiliated with the Islamic republic, had published an article by “Soroush Shahriari”, an Iranians in Canada who claimed to be a professor at Carleton University, and had invited Iranian Christians to a debate in the State-run television in Iran. He said this proposal was a way to deal with growth of Christianity in Iran.

In that article, this so called professor has used ugly words to describe growth of Christianity like “sedition” and “calamity”. Some solutions was also proposed by him. In his opinion, one of the best ways to combat Christianity, as in the case of Ayatollah Sobhani, is to invite Christian clerics to debates on State-run Media and to discuss Christianity and examine its legitimacy. The Iranian professor in Canada also claimed that the Islamic government can get rid of Christianity in Iran within a week!

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