Iran: Empire of the Mind (2 page)

Pico della Mirandola,
Oration on the Dignity of Man
(translated by Richard Hooker)

THE REMARKABLE RESILIENCE OF
THE IDEA OF IRAN

Har kas ke bedanad va bedanad ke bedanad
Asb-e kherad az gombad-e gardun bejahanad
Har kas ke nadanad va bedanad ke nadanad
Langan kharak-e khish be manzel beresanad
Har kas ke nadanad va nadanad ke nadanad
Dar jahl-e morakkab ‘abad od-dahr bemanad

Anyone who knows, and knows that he knows,
Makes the steed of intelligence leap over the vault of heaven.
Anyone who does not know, but knows that he does not know,
Can bring his lame little donkey to the destination nonetheless.
Anyone who does not know, and does not know that he does not know
Is stuck for ever in double ignorance

(Anonymous, attributed to Naser od-Din Tusi (1201-74); anticipating Donald Rumsfeld by perhaps seven centuries.)

Iranian history is full of violence and drama: invasions, conquerors, battles and revolutions. Because Iran has a longer history than most countries, and is bigger than many, there is more of this drama. But there is more to Iranian history than that—there are religions, there are influences, intellectual movements and ideas that have changed things within Iran but also outside Iran and around the world. Today Iran demands attention again, and the new situation poses questions—is Iran an aggressive power,
or a victim? Is Iran traditionally expansionist, or traditionally passive and defensive? Is the Shi‘ism of Iran quietist, or violent, revolutionary, millenarian? Only history can suggest answers to those questions. Iran is one of the world’s oldest civilisations, and has been one of the world’s most thoughtful and complex civilisations from the very beginning. There are aspects of Iranian civilisation that, in one way or another, have touched almost every human being in the world. But the way that happened, and the full significance of those influences, is often unknown and forgotten.

Iran is replete with many paradoxes, contradictions and exceptions. Most non-Iranians think of it as a country of hot deserts, but it is ringed with high, cold mountains, has rich agricultural provinces, others full of lush sub-tropical forest, and reflecting the climatic variations, a diverse and colourful range of flora and fauna. Between Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia and the Persian Gulf, the Iranians speak an Indo-European language in the midst of the Arabic-speaking Middle East. Iran is commonly thought of as a homogeneous nation, with a strong national culture, but minorities like the Azeris, Kurds, Gilakis, Baluchis, Turkmen and others make up nearly half of the population. Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian women are subject to one of the most restrictive dress codes in the Islamic world, yet partly in consequence Iranian families have released their daughters to study and work in unprecedented numbers, such that over 60 per cent of university students now are female and many women (even married women) have professional jobs. Iran has preserved some of the most stunning Islamic architecture in the world, as well as traditions of artisan metalworking, rug-making, and bazaar trading; a complex and sophisticated urban culture—yet its capital, Tehran, has slowly smothered itself in concrete, traffic congestion and pollution. Iranians glory in their literary heritage and above all in their poetry, to a degree one finds in few other countries, with the possible exception of Russia. Many ordinary Iranians can recite from memory lengthy passages from their favourite poems, and phrases from the great poets are common in everyday speech. It is poetry that insistently dwells on the joys of life—themes of wine, beauty, flowers and sexual love, yet Iran has also an intense popular tradition of Shi‘ism which in the mourning month of Moharram emerges in
religious processions dominated by a mood of gloom, and a powerful sense of betrayal and injustice (within which the oral delivery of religious poetry also plays an important part); and Iran’s religious culture also encompasses the most forbidding, censorious and dogmatic Shi‘a Muslim clerics. It is a country with an ancient tradition of monarchical splendour, now an Islamic republic; but one where only 1.4 per cent of the population attend Friday prayers.

One thing is best explained at the start—another apparent paradox. Iran and Persia are the same country. The image conjured up by Persia is one of romance: roses and nightingales in elegant gardens, fast horses, mysterious, flirtatious women, sharp sabres, carpets with colours glowing like jewels, poetry and melodious music. In the cliché of western media presentation Iran has a rather different image: frowning mullahs, black oil, women’s blanched faces peering, not to their best advantage, from under black chadors; grim crowds burning flags, chanting ‘death to…’

In the south of Iran there is a province called Fars. Its capital is Shiraz and it contains Iran’s most ancient and impressive archaeological sites: Persepolis and Pasargadae (along with Susa, in neighbouring Khuzestan). In ancient times the province was called Pars, after the people who had settled there—the Persians. When those people created an empire that dominated the whole region, the Greeks called it the Persian empire, and the term ‘Persia’ was applied by them, the Romans and other Europeans subsequently to all the dynastic states that followed that empire in the territory that is Iran today—Sassanid Persia in the centuries before the Islamic conquest, Safavid Persia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Qajar Persia in the nineteenth century. But all through that time the people of those empires called themselves Iranians, and called their land Iran. The word derives from the very earliest times, apparently meaning ‘noble’. It is cognate both with a similar word in Sanskrit, and with the term ‘Aryan,’ that was used and abused in the racial ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
¹
. In 1935 Reza Shah, wanting to distance his state from the decadent, ineffectual Qajar government he had displaced, instructed his embassies overseas to require foreign governments henceforth to call the country Iran in official communications.
But many people, including some Iranians outside Iran writing in English, still prefer the term Persia, because it retains the ancient, often happier, connotations. It is not unusual for foreigners to have a name for a country that is different from the one used by its inhabitants: what the English call Germany is called
Allemagne
by the French and
Deutschland
by Germans. The Persian word for Britain is
Inglistan
, which some Scots might resent. Iranians themselves call their language
Farsi
, because it originated in the Iranian dialect spoken in Fars province (the language is now spoken not just in Iran but also extensively in Tajikistan; as the Dari dialect, in Afghanistan; and has had a strong influence on the Urdu spoken in Pakistan and northern India). My practice is to use both terms, but with a preference for Iran when dealing with the period after 1935, and for Persia for the preceding centuries, when it was the normal word used for the country by English-speakers. In the earlier chapters the term Iranian is used also to cover the non-Persian peoples and languages of the wider region, like the Parthians, Sogdians, and Medes.

There are many books available on contemporary Iran, and on earlier periods of Iranian history, and several that cover the whole history of Iran from the earliest times—notably the monumental seven volume
Cambridge History of Iran
, and the huge project of the
Encyclopedia Iranica
, incomplete but nonetheless incomparable for the range and depth of knowledge of Iranian history it pulls together (and much more than history). This book does not attempt to compete with those, but tries rather to present an introduction to the history of Iran for a general readership, assuming little or no prior knowledge. In addition it aims to explain some of the paradoxes and contradictions through the history—probably the only way that they can be properly understood. And beyond that—especially in
Chapter 3
, which explores some of the treasury of classical Persian poetry—it attempts to give the beginnings of an insight into the way in which the intellectual and literary culture of Iran developed, and has had a wider influence, not just in the Middle East, Central Asia and India, but throughout the world.

1

ORIGINS: ZOROASTER, THE ACHAEMENIDS,
AND THE GREEKS

O Cyrus…Your subjects, the Persians, are a poor people with a proud spirit

(King Croesus of Lydia, according to Herodotus)

The history of Iran starts with a question. Who are the Iranians? Where did they come from? The question concerns not just the origins of Iran, but recurs in the history of the country and its people down to the present day, in one form or another.

The classic answer was that the Iranians were one branch of the Indo-European family of peoples that moved out of what are today the Russian steppes to settle in Europe, Iran, Central Asia and northern India in a series of migrations and invasions in the latter part of the second millennium
BCE
.

This answer at the same time explains the close relationship between the Persian language and the other Indo-European languages: particularly Sanskrit and Latin for example, but modern languages like Hindi, German and English too. Any speaker of a European language learning Persian soon encounters a series of familiar words, like distant friends, just a few of which include
pedar
(father, Latin
pater
),
dokhtar
(daughter, girl, German
tochter
),
mordan
(to die, Latin
mortuus,
French
mourir, le mort
),
nam
(name)
dar
(door),
moush
(mouse),
robudan
(to rob)
setare
(star),
tarik
(dark),
tondar
(thunder), and perhaps the most basic of all, the first person present singular of the verb to be, in Persian the suffix –
am
(I am—as in
the sentence ‘I am an Iranian’—
Irani-am
). An English-speaker who has attempted to learn German will find Persian grammar both familiar and blessedly simple by comparison (no genders or grammatical cases for nouns, for example). Persian (like English) has evolved since ancient times into a simplified form, dropping the previous, heavily inflected grammar of old Persian. It has no structural relationship with Arabic or the other Semitic languages of the ancient Middle East, like Aramaic (though it took in many Arab words after the Arab conquest).

Long before the migrants speaking Iranian languages arrived from the north, there were other people living in what later became the land of Iran (
Iran zamin
). There were human beings living on the Iranian plateau as early as 100,000
BCE
, in what is called the Old Stone Age, and by 6-5,000
BCE
agricultural settlements were flourishing in and around the Zagros mountains, in the area to the east of the great Sumerian civilisation of Mesopotamia. Excavation of one of these settlements (at Hajji Feroz Tepe) has produced the remains of the world’s oldest wine jar, complete with grape residue and traces of resin (used as a flavouring and preservative), indicating that the wine would have tasted something like Greek retsina
¹
. Peoples like the Gutians and the Mannaeans are mainly known from their contacts with Mesopotamia. Before and during the period of the Iranian migrations, an empire flourished in the area that later became Khuzestan and Fars—the empire of Elam, based on the cities of Susa and Anshan. The Elamites spoke a language that was neither Mesopotamian nor Iranian, though they were influenced (and sometimes conquered) by the Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians, and transmitted elements of their culture on to the later Iranian dynasties. Elamite influence spread beyond the area usually associated with their empire, an example being Tepe Sialk (just south of modern Kashan), which with its ziggurat and other characteristics shows all the forms of an Elamite settlement. The ziggurat at Tepe Sialk has been dated to around 2900
BCE
.

DNA-based research in other countries in recent years has tended to emphasise the relative stability of the genetic pool over time, despite conquests, migrations and what look from historical accounts to be mass settlements or even genocides. It is likely that the Iranian settlers or
conquerors were relatively few in number compared to the pre-existing peoples who later adopted their language and intermarried with them. And probably ever since that time, down to the present day, the rulers of Iran have ruled over at least some non-Iranian peoples. So from the very beginning the Idea of Iran was as much about culture and language, in complex patterns, as about race or territory.

From the very beginning there was always a division (albeit a fuzzy one) between nomadic or semi-nomadic, pastoralist inhabitants and the settled, crop-growing agriculturalists. Iran is a land of great contrasts in climate and geography, from the dense, humid forests of Mazanderan in the north to the arid, hot Persian Gulf coast; from the high, cold mountains of the Alborz, the Zagros and the Caucasus to the deserts of the Dasht-e Lut and the Dasht-e Kavir; and in addition to areas of productive agricultural land (expanded by ingenious use of irrigation from groundwater) there have always been more extensive areas of rugged mountain and semi-desert, worthless for crops but suitable for grazing, albeit perhaps only for a limited period each year. Over these lands the nomads moved their herds. The early Iranians seem to have herded cattle in particular.

In the pre-modern world pastoralist nomads had many advantages over settled peasant farmers. Their wealth was their livestock, which meant their wealth was movable and they could escape from threats of violence with little loss. Other nomads might attack them but they could raid peasant settlements with relative impunity. Peasant farmers were always much more vulnerable: if threatened with violence at harvest-time they stood to lose the accumulated value of a full year’s work and be rendered destitute. In peaceful times nomads would be happy to trade meat and wool with the peasants in exchange for grain and other crops, but the nomads always had the option to add direct coercion to purely economic bargaining. The nomads tended to have the upper hand and this remained the case from when the Indo-European pastoralist Iranians entered the Iranian plateau for the first time, right down to the twentieth century.