When I was asked to address a conference on the theme of,

does politics need God?

I knew the answer right away.

Yes.

The answer is yes.

Now, if you know anything about my background and the father alluded to it,

you might think that that's startling, even terrifying,

that an Iranian would say in politics is a godly realm and that God belongs in politics properly understood.

So I'll tell you, if you don't know about that, background I'll tell you a little bit about it.

I was born in Tehran, Iran, six years to the day that the Ayatollah Khomeini returned from his Parisian exile

to topple the former regime of the Shah

and herald the new Islamic Republic of Iran.

So I'm a child, in other words, of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Under Khomeini's regime, who celebrated its 40th anniversary last month, God and

politics were inextricable.

Politics was God and God was politics.

And oh, how I and most of my family detested that.

When I was a boy, my birthday, February 1st, which, as I said, was exactly six years to the day that Khomeini returned and brought the

new regime with him, was the subject of a long-running joke in our family. One of our

relatives, an old police colonel who not only hated the new regime but hated Islam himself

because he was your typical Iranian secularist, a very much a product of the Shah's regime, detested Muhammad,

would always ask me, at every family get together,

...