( Ten minute read)

Iran has scarcely been out of the headlines in recent months. But how far back does the history of Iran stretch?

Like me I am sure we know little or nothing of it history.

Long before Iran came to be known in the mid-twentieth century as one of the countries of the Middle East, for nearly two and a half millennia it was known to the Western world as Persia.

So here is a starting point for an exploration of the history of modern Iran.

The Islamic Republic has been in a state of influx almost from its start. It has managed to survive in this state of perpetual crisis — and sometimes even benefited from it — because confrontation, or anticipation of confrontation with a nemesis, that is with the United States, played into its hand. It gives the regime the pretention of legitimacy as the core to national resistance against Western hegemony and regime change. The sense of emergency hence contributed to its survival. Moreover, the ruling clergy and its associated groups, such as the Revolutionary Guards, although a small minority devoid of the true support of a majority of Iranians, survived in power probably because of a strong sense of group solidarity.

The 1979 Iranian Revolution represented the first time in the modern history of the Muslim world that a movement dominated by the clergy took control of a state. Historically, this is a very unusual event, not just in the Islamic world, but anywhere. Religion and state were seen as two pillars of stability in Iranian society.

Shi’ism as a belief system, supported and reinforced by the region’s geopolitical complexity, preserved Iran’s socio-cultural identity.

Through the preservation of the language, Iran managed to preserve a collective memory of its past, which is also rather unusual.

Basically, the memory of Islamic conquest became the foundation myth for the sense of Islamic identity that emerged in Egypt, Syria and eventually Iraq. Iran was different. It preserved its memories of pre-Islamic times and grew quite proud of them.

Iran’s oil industry was basically a colonial industry created and developed by the British. A massive amount of the revenue went to the British government while a much smaller percentage went to the Iranian government. But even that share of the revenue was crucial for a nearly bankrupt Iranian state in the post-WWI era. It provided the necessary funds for greater centralization; for enforcing modern reforms; for strengthening the armed forces; and for the creation of an autocratic regime under the Pahlavis that no longer sought the traditional support of the religious establishment.

The Allied occupation of Iran in September 1941 was a rude shock to most Iranians.

Facing the soldiers of the Red Army, the British Indian Army, and soon after American military personnel seemed almost a surreal reversal of two decades of Pahlavi assurances of Iran’s reclaimed sovereignty and the might of the Iran’s Imperial Armed Forces.

The occupation triggered one of the most eventful episodes in Iran’s modern history and revealed persistent themes in the country’s recent past: the struggle for democracy. The gradual return to autocratic practices after 1953 put an undue end to Iran’s perilous experiment with participatory politics. Instead, an era of stability, albeit politically repressive, began to set in, and with the exception of a brief interlude in the early 1960s, it remained essentially unchanged until the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

The exile of Ayatollah Khomeini and the shah’s success, at least for a while, in silencing the forces of opposition generated a sense of royal self-confidence with an almost prophetic mission. The decade of 1963 to 1973 represented, with all its shortcomings, the best of the shah’s years: an age of economic development, success in foreign policy, and relative popularity at home.

Iran in the 1960s and 1970s witnessed an era of cultural florescence, a period remarkable for artistic creativity, the rise of new talents, and greater international exposure but also greater state sponsorship. Expressions of artistic and intellectual dissent, often transmitted through a language of symbols, emerged in cinema, poetry, and popular music.

The tumultuous events that led to the revolution of 1979 and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran were a classic example of modern popular revolution.  Out of a broad alliance of Islamic tendencies there emerged a militant clerical leadership, led by Ayatollah Khomeini. Over the course of the following decade, Khomeini played a decisive part in defining the Islamic Republic.

Between August 1978 and February 1979, a period of less than seven months, Iran witnessed a revolution that brought down the Pahlavi regime and abolished the institution of monarchy, wiped out the privileges of the Pahlavi elite, and significantly weakened its secularized middle classes. In its stead Ayatollah Khomeini and his associates created the Islamic Republic, which aimed to establish the “Guardianship of the Jurist” (welayat-e faqih) as the only legitimate model of governance.

That Ayatollah Khomeini and his cohorts put their mark on the Islamic Revolution was more than an accident of history. At least since 1961, and with a greater resolve since 1970, clerical Shi‘ism explored ideological Islam and contemplated juridical authority as an alternative to secular power.

In less than a year after victory of the revolution in February 1979, the new regime managed to consolidate its base, build new institutions, and eliminate its contenders for power.

It conducted a referendum on the change of regime to an Islamic republic, ratified a new constitution, elected a parliament, elected a president to office, and established revolutionary courts, the Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Guardian Council, and the Assembly of Experts. All the while the newly established republic was engaged in major domestic and international crises that threatened its very existence.

A crisis of great magnitude was in progress, one that shook Iran’s relations with the outside world and initiated an adversarial encounter with the United States that shaped their relationship for decades to come.

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1979 November – Islamic militants take 52 Americans hostage inside the US embassy in Tehran. They demand the extradition of the Shah, in the US at the time for medical treatment, to face trial in Iran.

The hostage crisis of November 1979 started an international tremor that for the following fourteen months would enrage the United States, preoccupy world media, appal public opinion worldwide, and irreparably damage the image of the Islamic Republic.

1980 22 September – Start of Iran-Iraq war, which lasts for eight years.

1981 January – The American hostages are released, ending 444 days in captivity.

1989 November – The US releases 567 million dollars of frozen Iranian assets.

The magnitude of this paradigmatic shift, and the way a conservative Shi‘i establishment transformed into a radical force of dissent, becomes all the more striking when we set the Islamic Revolution in the broader political and cultural contexts of the past five centuries.

2002 January – US President George Bush describes Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil”, warning of the proliferation of long-range missiles being developed in these countries.

2002 September – Russian technicians begin construction of Iran’s first nuclear reactor at Bushehr despite strong objections from US.

2003 December – 40,000 people are killed in an earthquake in south-east Iran. The city of Bam is devastated

.2007 October – US announces sweeping new sanctions against Iran, the toughest since it first imposed sanctions almost 30 years ago.