Ten things
people get wrong
about Persia.

Iranians are not Arabs. Persian (Farsi) is an Indo-European language; Arabic is a Semitic one. The two languages are unrelated, although Persian was written in the Arabic script after the seventh-century conquest and has absorbed substantial Arabic vocabulary in religious and abstract subjects (perhaps thirty percent of the dictionary). Iran has a small Arabic-speaking minority along the Persian Gulf coast in Khuzestan (perhaps two percent of the population). The remaining ninety-eight percent of Iranians are not Arabs, are not Arabic-speaking, and would in some cases find the suggestion offensive. The country's principal ethnolinguistic groups are Persians (about sixty percent), Azeri Turks (about sixteen percent), Kurds (about ten percent), Lurs, Baluchis, Turkmen, and a number of smaller groups.

The country has been called Iran by its own inhabitants throughout recorded history. The name "Persia" was an external name, given by the Greeks after the southern province of Fars. Reza Shah's circular note of 1935 asked foreign embassies to use the country's own name, Iran, in international correspondence. The 1979 Revolution did not rename the country; it changed the form of government (from monarchy to Islamic Republic) but kept the name Iran that Reza Shah had already standardised internationally.

Mohammad Reza Shah was restored to the throne in 1953 by an Anglo-American coup that overthrew an elected prime minister. He depended on the United States for military supply and political support throughout his reign. He was, in this important sense, not an independent ruler. But he was also, particularly after the 1973 oil price increase, an increasingly assertive figure who pressed his American patrons hard — over OPEC pricing, over arms purchases, over regional policy — and who pursued ambitions (a nuclear power programme, a Persian Gulf hegemony) that the United States was uneasy with. The label "puppet" is too simple. He was a client whose patrons could not always control him, and whose patrons in 1979 declined to save him.

The 1953 coup was a joint operation of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (under the code-name Operation Ajax) and the British Secret Intelligence Service (Operation Boot). The American role was officially denied until 2013, when the CIA released documents publicly acknowledging the operation. The British role was acknowledged in subsequent releases. The principal American officers in country (Kermit Roosevelt, Donald Wilber) wrote internal histories that have been declassified and published. The operation paid Iranian street gangs, bribed members of the Majles, and coordinated with the Imperial Iranian Army. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is a documented historical event.

The Persian-speaking civilisation has been continuous for that long. The political state has not. There have been at least eight major dynasties (Achaemenids, Seleucids, Parthians, Sasanians, Saffarids/Samanids/Buyids, Seljuks, Mongols/Ilkhans/Timurids, Safavids, Afshars, Qajars, Pahlavis), and periods of foreign occupation (Greek, Arab, Turkic, Mongol, briefly British and Russian) in between. The Pahlavi dynasty's 1971 celebration of "2,500 years of monarchy" treated the political continuity as more certain than the record supports.

Iran is geographically and culturally distinct from the Arab Middle East — different language family, different majority denomination of Islam (Shi'a rather than Sunni), different political history, different cuisine, different aesthetic tradition. It is also unquestionably part of the same broader region, by any reasonable geographical definition, and has been continuously connected to it for two and a half millennia. The "Middle East" is a Western administrative category coined by the British navy in the early twentieth century; whether one places Iran inside or outside it is a question of convention rather than fact. Iranians often describe themselves as living in West Asia rather than the Middle East. Both are correct.

There are about 100,000 to 200,000 Zoroastrians alive today — about 25,000 in Iran (mostly in Yazd and Tehran), about 50,000 in India and Pakistan (the Parsis), and active diaspora communities in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The community is small but its institutional life (fire temples, charitable trusts, religious schools, scriptural scholarship) is active. The fire at the Atashkadeh in Yazd has been kept burning continuously since 470 AD. The Bombay Parsis founded the Tata Group, one of the largest industrial conglomerates in the world.

Iran has a substantial civilian nuclear programme and has, at various points, enriched uranium to higher levels than civilian power production requires (up to 60 percent at peak). It does not, on any open-source or International Atomic Energy Agency assessment as of this volume's publication, possess a deployed nuclear weapon. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of 2015, suspended by the United States in 2018 and partially abandoned by Iran since, imposed limits that have since been exceeded. Whether and when Iran might pursue a deliverable weapon is a policy question on which informed people disagree.

The Cyrus Cylinder of 538 BC is a real document, on display in the British Museum, that records Cyrus's policy of religious tolerance and the right of conquered peoples to return to their homelands. It was, in its own context, a piece of royal propaganda directed at the Babylonians. The framing of it as "the first declaration of human rights" was promoted in the 1970s by the Pahlavi regime (a replica was donated to the United Nations in 1971 and Princess Ashraf Pahlavi spoke of it in those terms). The framing is a twentieth-century reading. The document is, in any era, a remarkable piece of statecraft, but it is not a general declaration of universal principles.

Iranian women drive freely, hold driving licences from age eighteen, work in every profession including (since 1979) as members of parliament, university professors, surgeons, judges (the judiciary's lower courts; the Islamic Republic does not appoint women to the senior bench), and ministers. They are subject to a compulsory hijab requirement in public, which is the basis of recurring civil protest, most recently the 2022 protests following the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini. The compulsory hijab is real; the broader caricature of complete legal subjugation is not. The country with the legal prohibition on women driving until 2018 was Saudi Arabia, not Iran. These are different countries with different legal systems.