TEHRAN -- One of the privileges of the Islamic Republic, which is derived from the Shia mode of thought, is that it lacks the extremist thinking which has sprung up in today’s world in the form of Takfiri movements, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said in an exclusive interview with the Jomhouri Eslami newspaper published on Sunday.
He said, "What goes on in the Islamic world today is the mode of thought that belongs to Daesh (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant or shortly ISIL), the Nusra Front, and the Takfiri in general. But the Iranian Sunnis are in no way like that. An official was telling me that over 90 percent of Sunnis are with us and come with this mode of thought.”
He also said, "If we had not controlled our country’s extremists, some of them would have come nothing less of Takfiris. Since we claimed a global government, some people had thought that they had a mission to carry out extremist acts. God was kind to us that that the war (Iraq’s war against Iran in the 1980s) ended. After the war, we set the country’s policy on moderation and normalized our relations with the world and built our country.”