The Islamic Republic of Iran was established by referendum on the 30th of March 1979, and its constitution — written by an Assembly of Experts dominated by Khomeini's clerical allies — was ratified by a second referendum on the 2nd of December that year. The political system it created has no exact parallel in any other country. It combines an elected president, an elected legislature (the Majles), and an elected Assembly of Experts with a Supreme Leader (the vali-ye faqih or "guardian jurist") who is not elected by universal suffrage and whose constitutional authority overrides that of all the elected institutions. The first Supreme Leader was Khomeini himself (1979-1989). The second has been Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (1989 to the present), formerly the third president of the republic. The country has therefore had only two heads of state, in a constitutional sense, in its forty-seven-year republican history. This is a longevity of personal rule comparable to the long Qajar reigns of the nineteenth century.
This volume is the obituary of Persia — the name and the dynastic civilisation it described — and not of Iran, which exists. The remainder of this chapter therefore restricts itself to the question with which any volume of the Lost Lands series ends: where can Persia, in the older sense, still be found?
The Iran-Iraq War
One event must be mentioned before that question, because it shaped the contemporary country to the present day. On the 22nd of September 1980, the Iraqi armed forces under Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, intending to take the oil-bearing province of Khuzestan and exploit what Saddam expected to be the residual chaos of the post-revolutionary state. The war that followed lasted eight years (until August 1988), killed perhaps half a million Iranians and a similar number of Iraqis, used chemical weapons (chiefly Iraqi mustard gas and nerve agents against Iranian troops and Iranian Kurdish civilians), and ended in stalemate on essentially the pre-war frontier. The Iranian civilian and military dead are still being commemorated; the Holy Defence Cemetery at Behesht-e Zahra, on the southern outskirts of Tehran, contains the graves of about two hundred thousand of them. The political effects of the war — the consolidation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a parallel military and economic power, the construction of a national security mentality, the long suspicion of Sunni Arab neighbours — have endured. They are inseparable from any conversation about modern Iran.
The diaspora
Between 1979 and the present, perhaps four to five million Iranians have emigrated, principally to the United States (the largest single concentration is in Los Angeles, where the term "Tehrangeles" was coined in the 1980s), Canada (Toronto, Vancouver), Europe (London, Paris, Stockholm), the Gulf (Dubai, Doha), and Turkey. The first wave (1979-1983) consisted largely of the Pahlavi-era elite — the royal family and its immediate circle, the senior officers of the disbanded imperial armed forces, the secular professional class. Later waves have been broader: Bahá'ís fleeing official persecution, students who did not return after their degrees, political dissidents, and large numbers of young professionals who left for economic and personal reasons during the post-war 1990s and 2000s. The diaspora is, in income and education, an exceptionally well-resourced one; Iranian-Americans have the highest median household income and the highest rate of higher-education attainment of any major immigrant group in the United States census. The diaspora is also, politically, the principal locus of Persian-language broadcasting, publishing, and academic Persian studies outside Iran. A visitor to Iran sees the Islamic Republic. A visitor to Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles sees the Pahlavi-era Persia, frozen and slightly amplified.
The persistence of the language
Persian — variously called Persian, Farsi, Tajik, and Dari according to local convention — is spoken by perhaps 130 million people in three main national variants. Iranian Persian (Farsi) is the official language of Iran, with eighty million speakers. Dari is the variant spoken in Afghanistan, where it is one of the two official languages and the lingua franca of perhaps half the population (twenty million speakers). Tajik is the variant spoken in Tajikistan and parts of Uzbekistan (ten million speakers); it is the only one written in the Cyrillic alphabet (since 1939, by Soviet decree). The three variants are mutually intelligible at the level of educated speakers, but vary considerably in pronunciation and everyday vocabulary. There are also smaller Persian-speaking communities in Bahrain, the Caucasus, Pakistan, and the Iranian diaspora. The Persian-language internet — Persian is the eighth-most-used language on the web by content volume — is one of the most active in the world.
The cultural reach of Persian outside the formally Persian-speaking countries is wider still. Persian was the chancellery and court language of the Mughal Empire (1526-1857), the Ottoman Empire (where it competed with Ottoman Turkish), the Delhi Sultanate, and most of Central Asia from the tenth century to the nineteenth. Urdu, the lingua franca of Pakistan and northern India, has a Persian vocabulary base estimated at about forty percent for its higher registers. The vocabulary of Bengali, Punjabi, Hindi, and Pashto contains many Persian loans. The chess game's English vocabulary — check, checkmate, rook, bishop, queen, knight, pawn — is largely Persian in origin (rook from rukh, the chariot piece; check from shah; checkmate from shah mat, "the king is helpless").
Where Persia can still be felt
The country itself — the Islamic Republic — is the obvious place. Visiting is possible for most nationalities by tourist visa, though arrangements vary; British and American visitors have at times been required to travel as part of a guided tour. Persepolis, Pasargadae, Isfahan, Shiraz, Yazd, the Caspian forests, the deserts, the long Zagros range, and the central plateau are all accessible and visited by perhaps eight million foreign tourists in a normal year. The travel pages of this volume describe twenty stops in detail.
Outside Iran, the principal centres of Persianate cultural continuity are: Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan (Timurid architecture, Persian poetry in everyday speech, the shrine of the Sufi master Khwaja Abdullah Ansari); Samarkand and Bukhara in Uzbekistan (Timurid and pre-modern Persianate; the cities were Persian-speaking until Soviet language policy began to displace Tajik with Uzbek in the 1930s); Dushanbe in Tajikistan; the Iranian diaspora communities in Los Angeles, Toronto, and London; the Parsi (Zoroastrian) community in Mumbai; the great Persian manuscript collections of the Bodleian (Oxford), the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), and the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (St Petersburg, the old Russian colonial inheritance from the conquest of Central Asia); the Persian carpet shops on every continent. The Persian language is, in this sense, more widely distributed today than at any moment since the height of the Mughal Empire.
"Persia" as a country no longer exists. "Persia" as a civilisation does. It exists, principally, inside the eighty-five million people who live in modern Iran, and inside the further fifty million who speak Persian elsewhere. It also exists in a way that has no national-state correlate: in a continuous literary tradition that runs from Rudaki (d. 941) through Ferdowsi, Saadi, Rumi, Hafez, Khayyam, and the modern poets Forough Farrokhzad and Sohrab Sepehri without major interruption, in a single language whose forms have stayed remarkably stable for a thousand years. A reader who can read a tenth-century Persian text can read a twenty-first century one with relatively little difficulty. This is something almost no other language in the world can claim. It is the most durable thing about Persia, and it is the thing that survives most certainly.
"We are not less than we were. The country is still here, and so is its poetry." — Ahmad Shamlou, Iranian poet, 1990
End of Chapter X · End of Volume V