Harvard Professor Answers Iranian History Questions

The first thing to note about the Iranian Revolution

is that nobody saw it coming.

I'm Professor Tarek Masoud from Harvard University.

Let's answer your questions from the internet.

This is Tech Support Iran.

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Here's a question from Quora.

Is Iran an Arab country?

If an Arab country is a country

where the majority of people speak Arabic,

then the answer is no.

In Iran, people don't speak Arabic, they speak Persian.

And Persian, even though it's written

with the Arabic script,

and so it would look like Arabic

to somebody who doesn't know the language,

it's actually an Indo-European language.

And so there's lots of words in Persian

that might sound familiar to a Western ear,

like the word for name is nam,

the word for cow is gav,

the word for mother is madar,

father is pedar, brother is baradar.

Arabic is a Semitic language.

It's much more closely related to Hebrew,

which is spoken in Israel,

or Amharic, which is one of the languages

spoken in Ethiopia.

So Iranians aren't Arabs.

That said, there's obviously a lot of traffic

between the Arab world and the Persian world.

After all, they practice Islam.

Islam was brought to them by the Arabs.

The brand of Islam that they practice, Shia Islam,

one of its core features is veneration

of the Prophet Muhammad and the belief

that descendants of the Prophet Muhammad

have infallible religious authority.

They're all Arabs.

Many of the senior clerics, like Khameneim or Khomeini,

you notice that they all wear black turbans.

Those black turbans signal descent,

direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad.

And so, again, they are basically saying,

We're descended from Arabs.

And yet Persians tend to view Arabs

as unsophisticated as Bedouins.

They have slurs for Arabs.

They call them lizard eaters.

My tie has grasshoppers.

They also call them grasshopper eaters.

Arabs also have their negative stereotypes of Persians.

But here's the thing, many of the historical personages

the Arabs will point to as examples of Arab contributions

to human civilization actually are Persians.

So, for example, there was a medieval mathematician

named Al-Khwarizmi who invented algebra.

The word for algorithm comes from his name.

And you'll often hear Arabs say,

We invented algebra, we invented the algorithm.

He was a Persian.

The founder of modern medicine, Avicenna, also a Persian.

In fact, the greatest Arab grammarian

was a guy named Sibawayh.

This is a guy who codifies Arab grammar

in the eighth century, also a Persian.

So Iran is not an Arab country,

but it has definitely experienced serious Arab influences,

just like the Arabs

have experienced serious Iranian-Persian influences.

OK-Sandwich7208 asks,

How did Iran become an Islamic country in the first place?

If the question is when did Iran become a Muslim country

that practices Islam,

well, that really starts with the Arab conquest of Persia

in the seventh century AD.

Before the Islamic conquest, Iran was a Zoroastrian country.

They practiced a kind of monotheistic religion

in which fire and the sun

appear as very central elements in their rituals.

And they ultimately converted to Islam

over the following centuries,

but they still retain a lot of Zoroastrian traditions.

For example, one of the biggest holidays in Iran is Nowruz,

which is the start of spring,

which is absolutely something

that comes from Zoroastrianism.

Right before that,

they have a celebration called Chaharshanbe Suri,

where they leap over fire

in the hope of extracting the strength from the fire

and giving to the fire their ailment,

infirmities, and weaknesses.

In fact, there are still Zoroastrians.

Today they're called Parsis.

Many of them live in South Asia.

The most famous Parsi, by the way, was Freddie Mercury,

the lead singer of Queen.

If your question is when did Iran

become the Islamic Republic,

well, that happened in 1979

with a revolution against the king of Iran at that time,

an American client, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

And that was a revolution

that was ultimately led by this man,

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

And he basically was the man who came up

with the entirety of the political system

that governs Iran today.

And it's a political system

that has at its top a senior religious leader.

Some would call it a theocracy.

Senior positions are held by Islamic clerics.

Day-to-day life on the streets is mandated to conform

to a particularly conservative understanding of Islam.

So if you're a woman in Iran, you have to dress Islamically.

If you like to party, well, you're out of luck in Iran.

You have to conform

to what are considered to be Islamic standards of behavior.

Aggravating-Hour-131 asks,

What's going on with Iran's flag?

So this is Iran's current flag, three colors.

The green represents Islam the religion.

White represents purity.

Red represents the blood of the martyrs.

And this is the pre-revolutionary Iranian flag.

Same colors, but you have this device in the middle,

which is the lion with the sword and the sun behind it.

And that's really a symbol of Persian identity,

of royal power.

The sun represents Zoroastrianism.

The Iranian flag, after 1978, was adapted.

They got rid of the lion and the sun

and they replaced it with this kind of stylized tulip,

which in Persian culture is very important.

It kind of represents martyrdom.

You have the sword that represents the nation.

It also looks like a stylized form

of the name of God, Allah.

The other differences that you have here,

the words Allahu Akbar, God is Great, there's 22 of them.

And that symbolizes the date of the revolution,

which is the 22nd day of the month of Bahman,

which is a month in the Persian calendar.

Now, today, you'll often see people

waving this pre-revolutionary flag.

It's kind of like an act of rebellion

against the Islamic Republic.

JediBlight asks, Just how liberal/progressive

was Iran prior to the 1979 revolution?

Prior to the 1979 revolution,

Iran was run by a king

who was trying to make Iran,

which was at that time a conservative society,

more liberal and more Western.

Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was the second Shah, or king,

in the so-called Pahlavi Dynasty.

The first was his father who did a military coup

against the previous Shah in the 1920s.

He got a little too cozy with the Nazis,

so the British overthrew him

and installed his son in his place in 1941.

And his son engaged in all kinds of reforms,

particularly as they related to the rights of women,

the role of Islam in society.

He was trying to make the society

more secular and more Western.

You'll often see photographs of women before the revolution

dressed in miniskirts or looking the way

that very modern Western women look.

And that certainly was the case

for a certain segment of the Iranian population.

But again, the vast majority of the people in that country

were conservative.

Some people tend to present the Shah

as a modern and progressive leader.

And there certainly were elements

of progressiveness in his program.

But you've also gotta remember,

this was a leader who was authoritarian.

Iran was not a place where there was freedom of speech.

Iran was not a place where there was democracy

or respect for human right.

And that of course generated some of the backlash

that ultimately led to the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

YogurtclosetOpen3567 asks,

Is Iran the only Middle Eastern country

whose modern borders were not created by colonial powers?

Great question, YogurtclosetOpen.

Let's look at a map.

This is a map of the Middle East and some of South Asia.

And the first thing that you notice

when you look at Middle Eastern countries

like Iraq, Syria, and Jordan,

the borders between them are very straight.

That's because these are countries that emerged

after the end of World War I,

after the Ottoman Empire was dissolved

and the British and the French took over.

And basically they're the ones who drew these borders

essentially with rulers and pens.

Iran was never part of the Ottoman Empire.

The way that Iran's borders were worked out

was basically through fighting wars.

Iran fought a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire

that determined its western border.

It fought wars with the Russian Empire

that essentially determined its northern border.

Its Eastern borders were also mainly

but not totally determined

in wars with British India and with Herat in Afghanistan.

These borders here are a little straighter

because they actually were drawn

by British mediators in the 19th century.

But essentially, because Iran was an independent state,

in fact, it's one of the founding states

of the League of Nations,

its borders came about in a different way

from the standard Middle Eastern country

where the colonial powers drew all the borders.

This is from the No Stupid Question subreddit,

from FArandylahey.

Why did the Iranian revolution happen?

Well, the first thing to note about the Iranian Revolution

is that nobody saw it coming.

The American president at the time, Jimmy Carter,

actually visited Iran in 1977

and toasted it as an island of stability

in a troubled region of the world.

But they say hindsight is 20/20.

And today, there are a lot of factors that people point to

as having led to the Iranian Revolution.

The first is that the regime of the Shah

was pretty repressive.

He relied on his secret police to keep order,

dissent was not tolerated,

people were sent into exile and tortured.

In fact, the person who ends up

leading the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,

was a guy who was exiled

because of his opposition to the Shah in the 1960s.

Another factor is that people felt that the Shah

was extremely wasteful with the country's resources.

In 1971, he threw a lavish party

that by some accounts cost almost $20 million.

The Guinness Book of World Records

said that the banquet for that celebration

was the longest banquet ever in recorded history.

And so Iranians looked at something like that

and they felt that their country's wealth

was being squandered.

And then the Shah's reforms, the liberalizing reforms,

had really made him a lot of enemies in his country.

He was also, by the end of this, very sick, he had cancer.

His son was not yet of age.

And his wife, the Shahbanu, was not terribly popular.

Another reason for some of the discontent that bubbled up

and caused the Iranian Revolution

was a decline in oil prices

that was caused by Saudi overproduction.

And that caused some serious economic distress in Iran.

All of these factors made it possible for protestors

to see some weaknesses in the regime

and to take to the streets in the hope of bringing it down.

And the conditions ultimately ended up being ripe

for a charismatic leader like Khomeini

to take over and ride it into power

and establish the Islamic republic.

Currymvp2 asks, The son of Iran's last Shah

is rallying protesters.

But do Iranians really want another king?

So this is the pretender to the Iranian throne,

a man named Reza Pahlavi.

And he is the son of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi,

who was overthrown in 1979.

Now, today, in some of the protests

that are happening on the streets in Iran,

or at least that were happening before the bombing campaign,

people absolutely were chanting his name,

saying Pahlavi will return.

But it's an open question

as to whether that means they really want this guy back

or they just wanna taunt the regime by saying,

That hated dynasty that we overthrew

is preferable to us than you are.

He hasn't been in the country for 47 years,

so there's a serious question as to whether Reza Shah

actually has the wherewithal to govern Iran

should the regime fall.

Iran is made up of 40% ethnic minorities.

Think people like Azeris who speak Turkish,

Kurds, there's a small Arab minority in Iran.

And those people don't look fondly on the time of the Shah.

They think of the Shah

as having been a kind of Persian supremacist

who suppressed their expression

of their non-Persian identities.

So they're not really yearning

for a restoration of the so-called peacock throne.

So those are all the questions we have for today.

Thank you for watching Tech Support Iran.

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