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Known to the West as Persia until 1935, Iran is a desert nation of unyielding religious doctrine. A constitutional monarchy governed modern Iran from 1906 to 1979, when Islamic leaders led a popular uprising that made it a republic. Iran is known for its oil wealth and for caviar that is considered among the world's best.
Aryan tribes settled the Iranian plateau in 1500 B.C. The most important were the Medes, who dominated the northwest, and Persians from Parsua (a region west of Lake Urmia), who named the southern territory Parsamash. Warrior chief Hakhamanish, or Achemaenes, was the most powerful of the Persian rulers, but he was felled by the Medians in the seventh century B.C. Cyrus the Great overthrew Median rulers in 558 B.C., conquered the kingdom of Lydia in 546 B.C., won Babylonia seven years later, and made Persia the greatest power in the world. His son and successor, Cambyses II, expanded the kingdom in 525 B.C. by seizing Egypt. Darius the Great later constructed a canal from the Nile River to the Red Sea and crushed a revolt during 499-493 B.C. by Ionian Greeks who lived under Persian rule in Asia. However, his forces were annihilated by European Greeks in the historic Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. Several successive land and sea battles with the Greeks marked the decline of the Persian Empire.
A Persian vassal king, Ardashir I, defeated the Parthians in the Battle of Hormuz in 226 B.C. and established the long-reigning Sassanid dynasty. Yazdegerd I was the first to allow Christians freedom of worship in A.D. 399, but he later reenacted the official Persian religion (Zoroastrianism) and persecuted Christians. Romans gained power and established religious tolerance in 422 but succumbed to the barbaric "White Huns," who wielded power over several successive Sassanid kings. Arabs invaded Persia in 641 and made it an Islamic caliphate.
The Muslim conquest changed Iran for all time. Only a few thousand Zoroastrian adherents, whose ancestors persist even today, survived Muslim indoctrination. Muslim caliphs were, however, entranced by Persian traditions and gave up modest Arab ways for the luxurious palace life and even adopted Persian court etiquette. Turks arrived in the mid-11th century, followed by the Mongols under Genghis Khan. Shah Ismail, a descendant of the fourth Muslim caliph, became Iran's Safavid Empire's first shah in 1502 and installed Shiite Islam as the official religion. Afghans invaded in 1722, which allowed Russia and the Ottoman Empire to divide Iran into separate territories. An Iranian warrior chief drove out foreign occupiers around 1736 and assumed the title Nadir Shah. In 1794, the potent tribal leader Fath Ali Shah asserted clear dominance over Iran and established the Qajar dynasty, which ruled Iran until 1921. Despite immense wealth, the Qajars were never as powerful as the Safavids had been because they could not claim the same religious authority or divine guidance. That lack of religious authority was a decisive factor for the direction of Iranian politics under their rule, for it alienated large segments of the Muslim clergy and never gave them the symbolic power over the disparate Iranian population, which made strong centralized rule impossible to achieve.
The inability of the Qajar shahs to assert full control over Iranian state and society opened the country up to foreign influence, particularly economic exploitation. Throughout the 19th century, Great Britain and Russia were the primary rival powers battling for control over Iran's vast mineral resources, as well as concessions for such cash crops as tobacco. The Qajars granted large financial concessions to those countries in exchange for bribes to the royal family, even as the majority of Iranians lived in dire poverty. That corruption did not go unnoticed, however, and there were several cases of public protest, the most famous being the Tobacco Protest of 1891. In an effort to destroy foreign profiteering and disarm the Qajars, the Iranian clergy announced that smoking was un-Islamic, and the population of Iran stopped using tobacco. As a result of dwindling profits and public demonstrations, the shah cancelled tobacco concessions to English companies in 1892.
At the turn of the 20th century, oil was discovered in Iran, which led to a new battle between Great Britain and Russia. Great Britain won a 60-year oil concession in the Persian Gulf in 1901. Rising foreign influence and corrupt leadership gave way to public demands for constitutional government. The first Majles (legislature) drafted a liberal constitution in 1906, but Russia assumed control of Iran in around 1913.
Although neutral during World War I, Iran was the site of several battles between Russian and British forces over oil fields. The British presence came to an end in around 1923 when Iranian Cossack commander Reza Khan established an independent government with himself as prime minister. The legislature elected him shah two years later, and he began a broad program of Westernization and infrastructural improvements. The Sunni Muslim population was forced to wear Western-style hats instead of traditional fezzes, which caused violent riots by the clergy. Reza Shah's wife and daughters appeared in public without veils, and soon after, most women abandoned theirs.
In 1936, Iran signed a treaty of nonaggression with Iraq, Turkey, and Afghanistan. Iran adopted a pro-Axis stance but refused to align itself with Germany, Turkey, Great Britain, or the Soviet Union when World War II erupted. British and Soviet forces soon after occupied Iran, and the shah abdicated. His son and successor, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, followed a pro-Allied policy and was rewarded with Anglo-Soviet economic and military aid in 1942 as well as the withdrawal of foreign troops. In November 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin signed the Declaration on Iran, which ensured Iran's sovereignty and territorial integrity. Iran became one of the original members of the United Nations in 1945 and encouraged foreign oil concessions. The Majles nationalized the oil industry in 1951, which caused a long period of foreign and domestic strife that saw the ouster of nationalist dictator Mohammad Mossadegh. In 1958, American oil companies granted an unprecedented 75% share of profits to Iran. In 1962, newly reinstalled Reza Shah enacted a land reform program known as the White Revolution, which transferred 2 million acres of land from large estates to peasant farmers.
Income from the petroleum industry fueled rapid growth across Iran in the 1960s and 1970s. However, foreign investment slowed amid political turmoil caused by Reza Shah's formation of a single-party system. The conservative Shiite clergy fanned widespread opposition to Reza Shah, who used his secret police, the Savak, to quell dissent. Exiled and revered cleric Ayatollah Khomeini mobilized his followers to revolt, and in January 1979, Reza Shah was forced to flee abroad, which ended his 37-year reign. Khomeini returned to Iran in triumph after 16 years in exile and proclaimed Iran an Islamic republic. Militant Iranians stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and took 66 Americans hostage to punish Washington, D.C. for welcoming the ousted Reza Shah into the United States for medical treatment. The hostages were finally let go in 1981 (13 were released early).
Meanwhile, Iran's newly empowered Shiite clergy demanded the return of a strict Islamic code of behavior, under which women were ordered to resume traditional roles and wear the traditional chador (a long black cloth that covers the head and the entire body). Movie theaters were closed, and radio stations were banned from broadcasting music. The segregation of men and women at social functions was also enforced. Political disputes ensued between the clergy-dominated Parliament and Western-educated prime minister Abolhassan Bani-Sadr until Sadr was exiled in 1981 and replaced by Ayatollah Ali Khamenai.
The devastating Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) shackled the Iranian economy. Austerity measures, though harsh on the Iranian people, won favor from the West. President Khamenai became Iran's supreme leader in June 1989 after Khomeini's death. One month later, former parliamentary speaker Hashemi Rafsanjani was elected president. Iran renewed relations with Iraq in 1990 but remained officially neutral during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and supported Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq in their uprising against Baghdad. Iran's relations with the West improved under Rafsanjani's leadership largely because of Rafsanjani's role in freeing Western hostages held by Shiite rebels in Lebanon.
Rafsanjani supporters won a legislative majority in 1992 elections, but the president's popularity dwindled as he failed to lift Iran out of its economic doldrums. In January 1993, Rafsanjani stunned the West by renewing a death sentence, or fatwa, against Indian-born writer Salman Rushdie for his book Satanic Verses, which Iran claimed was highly offensive to Islam. Rafsanjani was reelected in the summer of 1993 but faced accusations from Egypt and Algeria that Iran sponsored terrorism in their countries. In early 1995, the United States announced plans to cut off all trade and investment with Iran in response to Tehran's alleged program to build weapons of mass destruction. Japan and Iran's European trading partners rejected the boycott. In an unprecedented landslide victory in May 1997, moderate cleric Mohammed Khatami won the poll with the overwhelming support of an electorate that sought economic reform, an easing of Islamic repression, and an end to the country's international isolation.
Iran, formerly the ancient nation of Persia, is located in the Middle East between the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, bordering on Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, and Turkmenistan. Its terrain is mostly dry desert, consisting of a high central plateau rimmed by rugged mountains, with a few subtropical areas in the coastal plains. Several languages are spoken, including Persian, Turkish dialects, Kurdish, Luri, Gilaki, and Arabic. The population of almost 70 million is extremely diverse, reflecting the distinct waves of migration into the country, as well as its conquest by numerous powers through the ages. Ethnic Persians make up about half the population, Azerbaijainis about a quarter, while the remaining 25% is composed of Kurds, Arabs, Turkomans, and members of the Gilaki, Mazandarani, Lur, Baloch, and other tribes. The official state religion is Shiite Islam, practiced by 95% of the population; almost all the remainder are Sunni Muslims. The capital of Iran is Tehran.
Iran's modern history, much as its ancient past, has been a turbulent string of occupations (by the British and the Soviets), Coups and counter-coups (by the Shas of the Pahlavi regime and their opponents), and war (including the devastating 1980-88 war with neighboring Iraq, and more recently, a kind of "cold war" with most of the Western world). The Islamic Revolution of 1979 ousted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and established a militant theocracy in Iran that still holds power under the country's supreme religious leader. The 1979 revolution also triggered the Iran hostage crisis, in which radical Muslims held more than 50 Americans as hostages for more than a year. Shari'a is the law of the land; and capital and other corporal punishment is meted out liberally. After Iran's disastrous war with Iraq (during which each side lost millions of people to guns, bombs, and chemical weapons, while neither made any territorial gains), Iran turned its attention to exporting its Islamic revolution. Since the 1980s it has attempted to obtain nuclear weapons and it has been isolated from most of the West because of its sponsorship of Islamic terrorism around the world. The surprise victory of moderate candidate Mohammad Khatami in May 1997 presidential elections prompted speculation about prospects for an improved relationship between Iran and the West, although few breakthroughs have been made. Khatami was reelected to a second term in June 2001. Regardless of Khatami's reforms, in 2002 U.S. President George W. Bush included Iran in a three-nation "Axis of Evil" (along with Iraq and North Korea), a characterization that angered the Iranian people. Bush's harsh labeling of Iran was one of the reasons for the country's stauch opposition to Bush's 2003 war on Iraq.
Prior to the revolution, Iran's economy was one of the Middle East's healthiest, enjoying rapid growth based on oil revenues (Iran possesses the world's third largest petroleum reserves). Following the Islamic takeover, however, the economy suffered due to several factors, including a steep drop in oil prices, the debilitating effects of the war with Iraq, fiscal mismanagement of industries (including petroleum, transportation, and mining) nationalized by the Islamic government, and an international trade embargo led by the United States. Compounding the country's economic problems, an influx of an estimated 2 million refugees from Afghanistan and Iraq has placed a considerable strain on domestic resources. In 1997 newly elected President Khatami identified the country's primary economic infirmities as its continued dependence on petroleum revenues, high inflation and unemployment rates, and broad income disparities among Iranian citizens. Although Khatami has achieved some success in his endeavors to attract increased foreign investment in Iran's economy, lasting improvements will undoubtedly require the support of the conservative Islamic regime which remains vehemently opposed to any measure of Western-inspired reform. Today Iran conducts most of its foreign trade with Germany, Italy, and Japan.
| Calendar Name | Today's Time | Gregorian equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Official Calendar (since 1925 in Iran, and 1957 in Afghanistan) | ||
| Zarathushtrian (Zoroastrian) Religious Calendar | ||
| Imperial Calendar of Persia | ||
| Kurdish Calendar (since 612 BC, Median Empire) |
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