Iran is a conundrum. Few who know the Middle East would disagree that it is the home of the most sophisticated people in the region. It has a very long history that goes back to the beginning of the 1st Millennium BC when the Medes occupied the Iranian plateau; and it was consolidated as a state when Cyrus the Great united Medes with Persians to found the Persian Empire. Even after the empire was conquered by Alexander, it soon arose again, first as the Parthian Empire, and then as the Sassanian Empire, both of which were thorns in the side of the Romans and later the Byzantines.
Iran was the source of one of the greatest and most influential religions of the Ancient World, the quasi-Monotheistic Zoroastrianism. Its cultural influence was so powerful that Persian was used routinely by its greatest enemy, the Ottoman Empire, and to this day poetry is still written in that language in India and Pakistan. During the Middle Ages and later it was the home of the most insightful writers and poets of the Islamic world, e.g., Omar Khayyam and Rumi. Indeed, if one thinks of any of the greatest writers of the Islamic world in this period, the odds are that he’s a Persian, even if he wrote in Arabic, like Al-Biruni and Sibaweihi.Nor is it insignificant –given the usual marks of a sophisticated leisure class —that Iranian cuisine is judged by some to be the finest in the region, though Turks, of course, would disagree.
Yet—and this is why it is a conundrum—Iran also houses one of the most barbaric groups of people in the world, the Shi’i Mullahs. By the same standard that deems Persian culture sophisticated, it is not unreasonable to say that these people are as unsophisticated as can be imagined.
How did this happen? The answer, as so often, lies in history. Historical forces yoked together two peoples in an uneasy political union unsupported by a cultural merger.
In the 7th Century, both the Byzantines and the Sassanian Persians were exhausted after a protracted war, when the forces of a new religion, Islam, struck. Over the next 18 years, the Sassanians were overrun by the Muslim forces, though the Byzantines managed narrowly to survive.
This produced a strange result. Most Iranians still followed Zoroastrianism, but in Islamic law only Christians and Jews—People of the Book as Muhammad called them—were supposed to be allowed to live without conversion. Realizing, however, that they could not reasonably exterminate the entire population of Persia, the Arabs of the Rashidun Caliphate made them honorable members of the permitted group, upon payment of the Jizya or non-Muslim poll tax.
Many converted to Islam, for it meant lower taxation, but it was a conversion that left many Persian customs intact. Allusions to wine abound in the poetry of Khayyam and Hafez, and even in the Sufi poetry of Rumi. Persia has its own calendar, the Solar Hijri calendar, which owes a lot to the Zoroastrians, though its year zero is Muhammad’s journey from Mecca to Medina. The greatest feast day in Iran is Nowruz, or New Year, which is again derived from Zoroastrianism.
However, even converted Iranians deeply resented their subservience to the Arabs: they have always seen them as a lesser people, even a contemptible one. This means that, even as Persia had been a continual problem to the Romans, now they became a continual problem to the Arabs. If a revolt were to occur somewhere, it was probably going to originate in Persia. Then an event occurred which eventually led to the inception of Shi’i Islam: ‘Ali, son-in-law of Muhammad, was elected the fourth caliph.
‘Ali is a huge figure in early Islam: he was seen as particularly close to Muhammad, and to have inherited his spiritual mantle. But he was opposed by A’isha, widow of Muhammad, and others, including Mu’awiya, soon to be founder of the Umayyad dynasty of Khalifs, who blamed him for not prosecuting the murderers of the third Caliph ‘Uthman. They therefore rose in revolt, and ‘Ali was ultimately assassinated. At first there was no connection between ‘Ali and Iran, but, after a series of deaths, his second son Husayn became head of the family, and acquired the spiritual power of the family. He died at Qarbala, Iraq, in a battle against the Umayyad governor, and by his death became the central martyr of Shi’i belief.
Much abbreviated, in this we have the origin of Shi’a Islam. It began as simply the party—which is what “shi’a” means in Arabic—of the group of people who believed that only the family of ‘Ali were the true inheritors of Muhammad. But this dynastic conflict generated a religious schism, with the Shi’a believing in following the path of Ali’s line, and Sunni Islam of his enemies.
The source of much of the power of ‘Ali’s family was in what is now Iraq, which is why he was there when he was killed. It is Arab speaking now, but in earlier times it was Persian and included the capital of the Sassanian Empire. Many Iranians seized upon Shi’ism as a means of rejecting the Arabism that Sunni Islam represented, though it did not become anything like the state religion of the country until the Safavid Dynasty in the 16th century AD attempted to Persianize itself by doing so.
Unfortunately, the version of Islam that Iran took as its own was built not so much on ideology or religious difference, but upon a millenarian lust for revenge for the death of Husayn, and a return to the true path of ‘Ali’s descent. It is thus not surprising that it is renowned for its excessive, bloody rituals, including self-flagellation as believers mourn for the Imam Husayn. Indeed, the famous Assassins of the Middle Ages were a Shi’i group.
When one considers the complex theological divisions that have come to exist in Shi’ism, it is extraordinary to consider its origin in a simple dynastic dispute.
In modern Iran, then, we do not have a single culture. We have two. One is the sophisticated civilization that Persia developed over millennia. The other is the imposed millenarian, xenophobic religion of Shi’i Islam. They live side by side; both are in some sense fundamental to the country. But they have never merged into a unity. It is said that the Shah tried to make Iran Persian but not Shi’i, and the mullahs tried to make Iran Shi’i but not Persian.
Both have failed.
–Anthony Tye Rodrigues, anthony@aristar.org, 06/23/2025
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