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Seminary schools and students
During the Pahlavi era, only three seminary schools were exclusively teaching Sunnis in the Iranian southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchestan.
Now, the figure has almost multiplied by ten, thanks to the Islamic Republic. There are about 130 Sunni seminary schools for men, and 450 Sunni seminary schools for women in Iran.
The number of Sunni seminary students has been estimated to be around 14,000. These students receive monthly salaries just like Shia seminary students. But unlike Shia seminary students, who would later be drafted to serve in the military should they decide not to teach religious studies as their occupation, Sunni seminary students are entirely exempt from military service.
While 1,000 Sunni mosques were built before the Islamic Revolution, the number has now reached 12,000. Be they Sunni or Shia, mosques are almost exempt from paying water, electricity, and gas bills in Iran; they are required to pay only one percent of those bills.
Overall, there are 15 grand seminary schools and mosques in Iran, 10 of which date back to the ancient eras and are considered Iran’s historical heritage. Out of the remaining five buildings, three belong to Iranian Sunnis: the Jameh (Grand) Mosque of Shafei in the city of Kermanshah, Baharan’s Mosque in the province of Kurdestan, and the Makki Grand Mosque in the city of Zahedan.
The teaching style in Sunni seminary schools is based on the four major schools of Islamic jurisprudence within Sunni Islam.
In the legal realm as well, Iranian Sunnis have their exclusive courtrooms wherein the rulings are issued according to one of their four major schools and upheld by Iran’s Judiciary branch.
The right of Iranian citizens of the Sunni Muslim faith to publish books in Iran is preserved. Sunni publications such as Ehsan, Imam Rabbani, and Kurdistan annually participate in the Tehran International Book Fair (TIBF) and present their religious and non-religious books to the masses.
Sunnis in office
Apart from the Iranian Parliament, Sunnis are represented in the Assembly of Experts for Leadership. Faeq Rostami, Adel Qaderi, and Nazir Ahmad Salami are the Sunni members of the current assembly. Former Sunni member of the assembly, Mamosta Mohammad Sheikholeslam was assassinated by a Takfiri terrorist group in 2009.
Contrary to the claims of the smear campaign, Sunnis have even occupied higher ranks of Iran’s military. For instance, Rear Admiral Shahram Irani is the current Commander of the Iranian Navy. Some military commanders stationed in Sunni cities are adherents of Sunni Islam, too.
Iran’s top Sunni scholars also enjoy a unique position and are regularly invited to hold talks with the authorities in Tehran on behalf of their communities. Molavi Abdolhamid Ismaeelzahi and Mamosta Mollah Qader Qaderi are two Sunni Muslim clerics that fulfill such a role for the communities of Zahedan and Paveh, respectively. Moreover, more than 10,000 university professors throughout Iran are Sunnis.
What is more, two of Iran’s current ambassadors to other countries as well as Iran’s cultural attaché in Egypt are of Sunni faith.
Head of the Sunni fraction in the Iranian Parliament, Jalal Mahmoudzadeh, has stated that Iranian Sunnis have sacrificed more than 11,000 martyrs for their homeland during the Iraqi-imposed war (1980-1988).
What has been listed is but a fraction of the various areas wherein the presence of Iranian Sunni Muslims commingling with their countrymen of other religious faiths, including the Shia majority, is felt.
 

Brazil has airlifted 16 starving Yanomami tribal people to receive urgent treatment, after the government declared a medical emergency.
The indigenous people live in a reserve in Brazil’s northern state of Roraima, BBC reported.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has accused his predecessor, far-right Jair Bolsonaro, of committing genocide against the rainforest tribe.
The government declared a medical emergency after hundreds of Yanomami children died from malnutrition.
The deaths are linked to water pollution caused by mining and logging in the densely forested area, where food insecurity is rife.
President Lula recently visited Roraima, which borders Venezuela and Guyana, following reports of severe malnutrition among Yanomami children and said he was “shocked” by what he found.
“More than a humanitarian crisis, what I saw in Roraima was genocide: a premeditated crime against the Yanomami, committed by a government insensitive to suffering,” he said later. “I came here to say we are going to treat our indigenous people as human beings.”
An estimated 28,000 indigenous people live in the Yanomami reserve. They hunt, practice small-scale slash-and-burn agriculture and live in small, scattered, semi-permanent villages.
In his four years in power, Bolsonaro often criticized the size of the indigenous reserves and promised to open some of them to agriculture and mining. His government weakened environmental protections, and critics said his rhetoric emboldened illegal activity in the region.
 

Tanzanian cargo ship overturned in Pars Service Port

MEHR – A cargo ship belonging to Tanzania has overturned at Pars Service Port in southern Iran, media sources announced on Tuesday.
According to the head of the crisis management of Pars Service Port, a Tanzanian cargo ship was overturned due to the wrong arrangement of containers.
Ebrahim Gharibi said that the incident took place on Tuesday morning at Pars Service Port in Bushehr Province of Iran.
He also said that rescue and firefighting teams were immediately dispatched to the scene, adding, “All the crew members of the Tanzanian ship are in perfect health condition.”

Iran ranks 4th in world in knowledge production of herbal medicine

IRNA – Iranian Minister of Health Bahram Einollahi said on Tuesday that Iran ranks fourth in the world after China, USA and India in production of knowledge of medicinal plants.
Einollahi made the remarks at the closing ceremony of the third Iranian Medicine Festival at the Ghalb (heart) Hotel in Tehran.
He added that currently, medical science is based on medical diagnosis and treatment, and medicine is the biggest business in the world after oil.
“Through adapting the right approach towards and direction in research and science, there is a possibility of producing effective traditional Iranian medicine,” he said.
Tehran Ghalb Hotel is one of the main heart hospitals of Asia. This hotel was built in 2016 with the help of benefactors and medical assistants to accommodate heart patients and their companions.