Last week, I wrote:

[T]he Middle East would be much better off if there were more countries like Israel, the region’s only stable, functioning democracy where Jews and Muslims are even allowed to serve side-by-side in the legislature.

A reader responded to point out that the Iranian parliament sets aside one seat for a Jew, who represents the approximately 25,000 Jewish residents of Iran. (Before the Islamic revolution in 1979, some 100,000 Jews lived in Iran.)

As blogger/law professor Eugene Volokh notes:

Naturally, this doesn’t mean that Jews in Iran have equal rights, or are treated well by the government or by fellow citizens — the presence of a non-set-aside Jewish politician would be much better evidence of social tolerance than the presence of a set-aside one — but only that Iran’s Islamic legal system sometimes yields things that are unexpected to the uninitiated.

True indeed.

And while this doesn’t invalidate my original assertion—I don’t think Iran can be rightly called a “stable, functioning democracy“—it was worth noting.