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Professor Tarek Masoud joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about the history of Iran. Is Iran an Arab country? Why did the Iranian revolution happen? Is Iran the only middle eastern country whose modern borders were not created by colonial powers? Answers to these questions and many more await on Iran History Support.
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00:00The first thing to note about the Iranian Revolution is that nobody saw it coming.
00:03I'm Professor Tarek Massoud from Harvard University.
00:06Let's answer your questions from the internet.
00:08This is Tech Support Iran.
00:14Here's a question from Quora.
00:16Is Iran an Arab country?
00:18If an Arab country is a country where the majority of people speak Arabic, then the
00:23answer is no.
00:25In Iran, people don't speak Arabic, they speak Persian.
00:28And Persian, even though it's written with the Arabic script, and so it would look like
00:33Arabic to somebody who doesn't know the language, it's actually an Indo-European language.
00:38And so there's lots of words in Persian that might sound familiar to a Western ear, like
00:43the word for name is nam, the word for cow is gav, the word for mother is madar, father
00:48is pedar, brother is baradar.
00:50Arabic is a Semitic language.
00:52It's much more closely related to Hebrew, which is spoken in Israel, or Amharic, which
00:57is one of the languages spoken in Ethiopia.
01:00So Iranians aren't Arabs.
01:02That said, there's obviously a lot of traffic between the Arab world and the Persian world.
01:09After all, they practice Islam.
01:11Islam was brought to them by the Arabs.
01:14The brand of Islam that they practice, Shia Islam, one of its core features is veneration
01:22of the Prophet Muhammad and the belief that descendants of the Prophet Muhammad have infallible religious
01:28authority.
01:29They're all Arabs.
01:31Many of the senior clerics, like Khamenei or Khomeini, you notice that they all wear black
01:37turbans.
01:38Those black turbans signal descent, direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad.
01:43And so, again, they are basically saying, we're descended from Arabs.
01:48And yet, Persians tend to view Arabs as unsophisticated, as Bedouins.
01:54They have slurs for Arabs.
01:57They call them lizard eaters.
01:58My tie has grasshoppers.
02:00They also call them grasshopper eaters.
02:03Arabs also have their negative stereotypes of Persians.
02:06But here's the thing.
02:07Many of the historical personages that Arabs will point to as examples of Arab contributions
02:14to human civilization actually are Persians.
02:17So for example, there was a medieval mathematician named Al-Khawarizmi who invented algebra.
02:24The word for algorithm comes from his name.
02:26And you'll often hear Arabs say, we invented algebra.
02:29We invented the algorithm.
02:30He was a Persian.
02:31The founder of modern medicine, Avicenna, also a Persian.
02:35In fact, the greatest Arab grammarian was a guy named Sebaway.
02:41This is a guy who codifies Arab grammar.
02:43In the 8th century, also a Persian.
02:45So Iran is not an Arab country, but it has definitely experienced serious Arab influences,
02:51just like the Arabs have experienced serious Iranian Persian influences.
02:57OK Sandwich 7208 asks, how did Iran become an Islamic country in the first place?
03:02If the question is, when did Iran become a Muslim country that practices Islam?
03:06Well, that really starts with the Arab conquests of Persia in the 7th century AD.
03:12Before the Islamic conquest, Iran was a Zoroastrian country.
03:16They practiced a kind of monotheistic religion in which fire and the sun appear as very central
03:22elements in their rituals.
03:24And they ultimately converted to Islam over the following centuries, but they still retain
03:30a lot of Zoroastrian traditions.
03:32For example, one of the biggest holidays in Iran is No Ruz, which is the start of spring,
03:37which is absolutely something that comes from Zoroastrianism.
03:40Right before that, they have a celebration called Shahar Shambes Zureh, where they leap over
03:45fire in the hope of extracting the strength from the fire and giving to the fire their ailments,
03:51infirmities, and weaknesses.
03:53In fact, there are still Zoroastrians today.
03:56They're called Parsis.
03:57Many of them live in South Asia.
03:59The most famous Parsi, by the way, was Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of Queen.
04:03If your question is, when did Iran become the Islamic Republic?
04:09Well, that happened in 1979 with a revolution against the king of Iran at that time, an American
04:15client, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and that was a revolution that was ultimately led by
04:21this man, Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini.
04:24And he basically was the man who came up with the entirety of the political system that governs
04:30Iran today.
04:31And it's a political system that has at its top a senior religious leader.
04:36Some would call it a theocracy.
04:38Senior positions are held by Islamic clerics.
04:42Day-to-day life on the streets is mandated to conform to a particularly conservative understanding
04:49of Islam.
04:49So if you're a woman in Iran, you have to dress Islamically.
04:53If you like to party, well, you're out of luck in Iran.
04:57You have to conform to what are considered to be Islamic standards of behavior.
05:02Aggravating Hour 131 asks, what's going on with Iran's flag?
05:07So this is Iran's current flag, three colors.
05:11The green represents Islam, the religion.
05:14White represents purity.
05:16Red represents the blood of the martyrs.
05:19And this is the pre-revolutionary Iranian flag.
05:23Same colors, but you have this device in the middle, which is the lion with the sword and
05:28the sun behind it.
05:29And that's really a symbol of Persian identity, of royal power.
05:34The sun represents Zoroastrianism.
05:36The Iranian flag, after 1978, was adapted.
05:40They got rid of the lion and the sun.
05:43And they replaced it with this kind of stylized tulip, which in Persian culture is very important.
05:49It kind of represents martyrdom.
05:51You have the sword that represents the nation.
05:54It also looks like a stylized form of the name of God, Allah.
06:00The other difference is that you have here the words, Allahu Akbar, God is great.
06:06There's 22 of them.
06:08And that symbolizes the date of the revolution, which is the 22nd day of the month of Bahman,
06:14which is a month in the Persian calendar.
06:17Now today, you'll often see people waving this pre-revolutionary flag.
06:22It's kind of like an act of rebellion against the Islamic Republic.
06:27Jedi Blight asks, just how liberal slash progressive was Iran prior to the 1979 revolution?
06:35Prior to the 1979 revolution, Iran was run by a king who was trying to make Iran, which
06:43was at that time a conservative society, more liberal and more Western.
06:48Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was the second Shah or king in the so-called Pahlavi dynasty.
06:55The first was his father, who did a military coup against the previous Shah in the 1920s.
07:01He got a little too cozy with the Nazis, so the British overthrew him and installed his
07:07son in his place in 1941.
07:09And his son engaged in all kinds of reforms, particularly as they related to the rights
07:15of women, the role of Islam in society.
07:17He was trying to make the society more secular and more Western.
07:22You'll often see photographs of women before the revolution dressed in mini skirts or looking
07:28the way that very modern Western women look.
07:31And that certainly was the case for a certain segment of the Iranian population.
07:37But again, the vast majority of the people in that country were conservative.
07:41Some people tend to present the Shah as a modern and progressive leader.
07:45And there certainly were elements of progressiveness in his program.
07:49But you've also got to remember, this was a leader who was authoritarian.
07:53Iran was not a place where there was freedom of speech.
07:56Iran was not a place where there was democracy or respect for human rights.
08:01And that, of course, generated some of the backlash that ultimately led to the Iranian
08:06Revolution of 1979.
08:08Yogurt Closet Open 3567 asks, is Iran the only Middle Eastern country whose modern borders
08:15were not created by colonial powers?
08:18Great question, Yogurt Closet Open.
08:20Let's look at a map.
08:21This is a map of the Middle East and some of South Asia.
08:26And the first thing that you notice when you look at Middle Eastern countries like Iraq,
08:30Syria, and Jordan, the borders between them are very straight.
08:36That's because these are countries that emerged after the end of World War I, after the Ottoman
08:41Empire was dissolved and the British and the French took over.
08:45And basically, they're the ones who drew these borders essentially with rulers and pens.
08:50Iran was never part of the Ottoman Empire.
08:52The way that Iran's borders were worked out was basically through fighting wars.
08:57Iran fought a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire that determined its western border.
09:03It fought wars with the Russian Empire that essentially determined its northern border.
09:08Its eastern borders were also mainly but not totally determined in wars with British India
09:14and with Herat in Afghanistan.
09:17These borders here are a little straighter because they actually were drawn by British mediators
09:23in the 19th century.
09:25But essentially, because Iran was an independent state, in fact, it's one of the founding states
09:31of the League of Nations, its borders came about in a different way from the standard
09:36Middle Eastern country where the colonial powers drew all the borders.
09:40This is from the No Stupid Questions subreddit from F-A-R-Andy Leahy.
09:47Why did the Iranian Revolution happen?
09:50Well the first thing to note about the Iranian Revolution is that nobody saw it coming.
09:53The American president at the time, Jimmy Carter, actually visited Iran in 1977 and toasted
10:00it as an island of stability in a troubled region of the world.
10:04But they say hindsight is 20-20.
10:06And today, there are a lot of factors that people point to as having led to the Iranian
10:11Revolution.
10:12The first is that the regime of the Shah was pretty repressive.
10:16He relied on his secret police to keep order, dissent was not tolerated, people were sent
10:21into exile and tortured.
10:23In fact, the person who ends up leading the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Rouhullah Khomeini,
10:27was a guy who was exiled because of his opposition to the Shah in the 1960s.
10:32Another factor is that people felt that the Shah was extremely wasteful with the country's
10:38resources.
10:39In 1971, he threw a lavish party that by some accounts cost almost $20 million.
10:46The Guinness Book of World Records said that the banquet for that celebration was the longest
10:52banquet ever in recorded history.
10:55And so, Iranians looked at something like that and they felt that their country's wealth
10:58was being squandered.
10:59And then, the Shah's reforms, the liberalizing reforms, had really made him a lot of enemies
11:06in his country.
11:08He was also, by the end of this, very sick.
11:10He had cancer.
11:11His son was not yet of age.
11:14And his wife, the Shah Banu, was not terribly popular.
11:18Another reason for some of the discontent that bubbled up and caused the Iranian Revolution
11:22was a decline in oil prices that was caused by Saudi overproduction.
11:27And that caused some serious economic distress in Iran.
11:31All of these factors made it possible for protesters to see some weaknesses in the regime and to
11:38take to the streets in the hope of bringing it down.
11:40And the conditions ultimately ended up being ripe for a charismatic leader like Khomeini to
11:46take over and ride it into power and establish the Islamic Republic.
11:58So, this is the pretender to the Iranian throne, a man named Reza Pahlavi.
12:05And he is the son of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was overthrown in 1979.
12:12Now, today, in some of the protests that are happening on the streets in Iran, or at least
12:17that were happening before the bombing campaign, people absolutely were chanting his name, saying
12:22Pahlavi will return.
12:24But it's an open question as to whether that means they really want this guy back or they
12:29just want to taunt the regime by saying that hated dynasty that we overthrew is preferable
12:35to us than you are.
12:37He hasn't been in the country for 47 years.
12:40So, there's a serious question as to whether Reza Shah actually has the wherewithal to govern
12:46Iran should the regime fall.
12:49Iran is made up of 40 percent ethnic minorities, people like Azeris, who speak Turkish, Kurds.
12:57There's a small Arab minority in Iran.
12:59And those people don't look fondly on the time of the Shah.
13:04They think of the Shah as having been a kind of Persian supremacist who suppressed their
13:08expression of their non-Persian identities.
13:11So, they're not really yearning for a restoration of the so-called peacock throne.
13:18So, those are all the questions we have for today.
13:22Tech support Iran.
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