“If there is no Iran, let my body not exist; May no one live upon this land if Iran should fall” - Firdausi in Shahnama (A long read)
A Civilisation That Endures
Iran remains one of the most uninterrupted or continuous civilisations in world history. Despite foreign invasions, shifting dynasties and religious transformations, Iran has maintained its civilisational, cultural and linguistic identity. Iran was conquered several times by Arabs, Mongols and Turks, but the idea of Iran and its historical memory endured. The Persian language, Iran’s cultural identity, its literature and traditions continued to prosper, and the land remained a major centre of civilisation. It adapted to foreign influences, but its civilisation kept evolving without being completely compromised or replaced.
Before the Arabs conquered Iran in the 7th century and included it in their Islamic Caliphate, its dominant religion was Zoroastrianism, and it was ruled by the Sasanians. For centuries, Iranians remained Zoroastrians, Christians or Jewish, and conversion to Islam spread slowly. By the 10th century, especially under the Abbasid Caliphate, most of Iran had embraced Islam.
Interestingly, Iran did not simply adopt Arab culture. It became Islamic, but not Arabised. The modern Farsi language survived and evolved, but started using the Arabic script. Persian scholars, poets and administrators became central to Islamic civilisation. Many major figures in Islamic philosophy, science and literature, such as Ibn Sina, Al-Farabi and Firdausi, were from the Persian cultural world. Persian traditions deeply influenced Islamic civilisation in a cultural synthesis.
Religion as Statecraft: Safavid Dynasty
When the Safavid dynasty seized power in the 15th century, most of Iran was Sunni Muslim, just like the surrounding powers. It had remained Sunni for 800 years. The Safavids themselves evolved from a Sufi religious order, originally Sunni, but ultimately turned towards Shia Islam. The Safavid adoption of Shia Islam in Iran was not purely theological; it was largely a political and strategic decision. By declaring Shia Islam as the state religion, the Safavids created a clear ideological boundary between their empire and neighbouring Sunni states such as the Ottoman Empire and the Uzbek Khanates.
This helped the Safavid state differentiate itself politically, prevent Iranian loyalty from shifting towards the Sunni Ottoman Caliphate, and build a separate civilisational identity. It also helped them unify a politically fragmented country after centuries of Mongol and Timurid rule.
In effect, religion became a tool of state formation. The Safavids used Shia Islam as a state ideology to unify diverse ethnic groups such as Persians, Turks, Kurds and others under a single religious identity. They believed that imposing a single religious doctrine would strengthen central authority and loyalty to the crown.
Because Iran had been mostly Sunni, the Safavids needed to create a new Shia religious establishment. They imported Shia scholars from Lebanon, Iraq and Bahrain and gave them positions, land, perks and privileges to build a new religious elite loyal to the state. This created a clerical class dependent on the Safavid state, strengthening the monarchy’s control over society. The present-day clergy in Iran traces its roots to this clerical class from Arabs of Iraq, Lebanon and Bahrain.
Persia had a long memory of imperial identity, as it was the centre of great empires long before Islam
Once the Safavid dynasty forcibly and decisively converted Iran to Shia Islam, it became the main Shia power in the Muslim world. This created long-term hostility with surrounding Sunni powers, especially the Ottoman Empire and later Sunni religious movements in Arabia. At the same time in Arabia, the Wahhabi movement emerged in the 18th century, advocating a puritanical form of Sunni Islam that regarded Shiism as deviant. This ideology later became closely linked to the Saudi state.
This laid the sectarian foundation for modern tensions. Many historians argue that the Safavids’ adoption of Shia Islam also had a civilisational dimension, tied to the revival of a distinct Persian political and cultural identity after centuries of rule by Arab, Turkic and Mongol dynasties. This interpretation adds an important layer to the story.
Persia had a long memory of imperial identity, as it was the centre of great empires long before Islam. These empires created a strong sense of Persian statehood and imperial continuity. Classical Persian literature, such as the epic Shahnama, was widely celebrated because it glorified pre-Islamic Persian kings and heroes.
The Safavid state did not reject Islam; rather, it blended Islamic identity with Persian historical memory. Shia Islam’s themes resonated with certain cultural motifs in Iranian history. For example, the martyrdom of Imam Hussain at the Battle of Karbala emphasised ideas of sacrifice, injustice and resistance against tyranny. Some scholars argue that these themes were easily integrated into Persian literary traditions that already celebrated tragic heroes and moral struggle. This helped Shiism become emotionally and culturally embedded in Iranian society.
When the early Saudi-Wahhabi state expanded across Arabia, it clashed with Persian (Qajar) influence in the Gulf. One example was the Qajar–Wahhabi War (1808–1811), sparked partly by Wahhabi attacks on Shia holy sites such as Karbala. These conflicts reinforced mutual suspicion between Persian Shia powers and Arabian Sunni movements.
In the modern nation-state era, rivalry also emerged over the leadership of the Muslim world. Saudi Arabia was considered the guardian of Mecca and Medina and promoter of Sunni/Wahhabi Islam, and its conservative monarchy aligned historically with Western powers. Whereas Iran, which was historically a major Persian imperial civilisation, sees itself as a revolutionary or ideological leader in parts of the Muslim world.
Overthrow of a Democratic Regime: 1953
The modern crisis of Iran cannot be understood without returning to the overthrow of Dr Mohammad Mussadeq in 1953. Mussadeq was not a communist revolutionary; he was a nationalist who sought to restore parliamentary sovereignty and place Iran’s oil under Iranian control through the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. His removal in the August 1953 coup, backed by the United States and Britain, did far more than topple one elected prime minister. It destroyed a promising constitutional moment in Iran’s history and convinced generations of Iranians that foreign powers would not tolerate genuine Iranian sovereignty when it clashed with imperial and strategic interests. The coup restored Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to power and gradually transformed the monarchy into an increasingly authoritarian order closely tied to Washington.
That episode left a wound far deeper than the fall of one government. For many Iranians, 1953 became proof that the West preferred a compliant autocrat to a sovereign democracy. The memory of Mussadeq’s overthrow later fed the anti-Western temper of the 1979 Revolution. Even where Iranians disagreed on ideology, many shared the view that their country had been denied the right to shape its own future. The coup thus became a foundational trauma in the political psychology of modern Iran.
The takeover of the US embassy strengthened Khomeini’s camp by allowing it to outbid the left and moderates in anti-imperialist rhetoric while simultaneously suppressing them at home
The Shah: Modernisation Without Political Legitimacy
Under the Shah, Iran entered an era of rapid modernisation, state-led development and close strategic alignment with the United States. The White Revolution expanded education, infrastructure, land reform and industrialisation, and oil revenues gave the monarchy enormous resources. Yet this modernisation was deeply uneven. It disrupted older social arrangements, accelerated urbanisation, widened cultural anxieties, and appeared to many as Westernisation imposed from above rather than reform negotiated from within society. At the same time, the Shah concentrated power, weakened parliament, marginalised independent political currents, and relied on SAVAK, the feared secret police, to arrest, torture and silence dissidents.
This is the central paradox of the Pahlavi era: the Shah wanted a strong, modern, independent Iran, but he pursued that vision through authoritarian methods and under the shadow of foreign patronage. The more he centralised the state, the more he hollowed out legitimate politics. Liberals were suppressed, nationalists were sidelined, clerics were harassed, and the left was persecuted. The Tudeh Party, which had already been badly damaged after the 1953 coup, remained a target of repression because the monarchy saw organised left politics as both a domestic threat and a Cold War danger.
Islamic Revolution and State Repression: 1979
By the 1970s, opposition to the Shah had become broad and ideologically diverse. It included clerics, bazaar merchants, students, constitutionalists, socialists, secular intellectuals and the urban poor alienated by corruption, inequality and repression. Ayatollah Khomeini emerged as the symbolic centre of this resistance not because he represented all opposition currents, but because he spoke in a language that fused anti-imperialism, moral outrage and Islamic legitimacy.
The monarchy collapsed in 1979 under the weight of its own contradictions: political closure, social discontent and the loss of legitimacy that had haunted it ever since 1953. It was the first revolution in the Middle East to successfully topple a monarchy. Iran had to pay its price through hostility from its neighbours, still ruled by monarchs.
Yet the revolution that overthrew despotism did not produce political pluralism. The Islamic Republic quickly moved to monopolise the revolution. An unelected Supreme Leader replaced the outgoing monarch, and all legislative and administrative machinery became subservient and accountable to the Supreme Leader. In its early phase, many groups believed they had a place in the post-Shah order: Islamists, liberals, Marxists, nationalists and the Tudeh Party all claimed some share of the anti-monarchical struggle. But once the clerical state consolidated itself, it turned on its former allies and rivals alike. The takeover of the US embassy strengthened Khomeini’s camp by allowing it to outbid the left and moderates in anti-imperialist rhetoric while simultaneously suppressing them at home.
The Tudeh Party’s fate is particularly revealing. Having supported the revolution and, for a time, tried to coexist with the Islamic Republic, it was nevertheless outlawed in 1983. Its leaders, cadres, military sympathisers and intellectuals were arrested; forced confessions were broadcast; and the party was shattered. This was not merely a tactical crackdown. It was part of a broader pattern in which the new regime systematically eliminated any organised political force that might contest clerical supremacy, whether secular, socialist, liberal or even Islamist, but insufficiently obedient.
This confrontation resembles the last volleys of a fading empire in a unipolar order, giving way to an emerging multipolar world
The repression did not stop with the Tudeh. Across the 1980s, prisons were filled with political opponents. Revolutionary courts handed down harsh sentences after deeply flawed proceedings, and in 1988, the state carried out mass executions of political prisoners on a horrifying scale. Human Rights Watch says Iranian authorities summarily and extrajudicially executed thousands of prisoners, with estimates often ranging from about 3,000 to 5,000. These killings exposed the darkest logic of the new regime: a revolution born in the language of justice had reproduced a machinery of fear and elimination.
The Eight-Year War: Iran–Iraq Conflict
If the Islamic Republic consolidated itself through internal repression, it was also hardened by external war. In 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran, hoping to exploit post-revolutionary chaos, weaken a hostile new regime, assert Iraqi primacy in the Gulf, and seize advantage along the Shatt al-Arab waterway and nearby oil-rich areas. Saddam’s invasion was supported by the United States. The invasion was not simply a border dispute. It reflected Saddam’s ambition, his fear that Iran’s revolution might inspire unrest among Iraq’s own Shia population, and his belief that revolutionary Iran was militarily vulnerable. What he expected to be a short war turned into a brutal eight-year conflict of attrition.
The war transformed the Islamic Republic. It gave the regime a permanent language of siege, sacrifice and militarised nationalism. Under the banner of national defence, dissent became easier to crush and political conformity easier to demand. The war also elevated institutions such as the Revolutionary Guards, which later evolved into a major military, ideological and economic force inside Iran and across the region. In that sense, the Iran–Iraq War did not merely defend the Islamic Republic; it helped build the state architecture that defines it today.
From History to Present: A Region in Recurring Crisis
From this history emerges a clear pattern in Middle Eastern politics. The 1953 coup weakened parliamentary nationalism and restored the monarchy. The Shah’s authoritarian modernisation hollowed out legitimate political space. The 1979 Revolution overthrew the monarchy but evolved into ideological control. The Iran–Iraq War entrenched a security state and normalised a permanent crisis. At each stage, the space for democratic evolution diminished, while the language of existential struggle deepened.
This is why contemporary Middle Eastern politics cannot be reduced to sectarian divides or nuclear diplomacy alone. Iran’s regional posture is shaped by a layered historical memory: civilisational continuity, Safavid state formation, the trauma of foreign intervention, monarchical repression, revolutionary upheaval and prolonged war. To Tehran, regional influence is not simply ambition; it is also a search for security in a world it has learned to distrust. To its rivals, particularly Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States, the same posture appears expansionist and destabilising.
The rivalry intensified sharply after the 1979 Revolution. Iran’s call to challenge monarchies and export its revolutionary model unsettled the Gulf order. What followed was not confrontation alone, but a prolonged shadow conflict. From Yemen to Syria, from Lebanon to Iraq, the contest has unfolded through proxies, alliances and competing narratives of legitimacy. Even beyond the Arab world, its echoes have deepened older fault lines.
For Iran, this network of allied forces, often described as the “Axis of Resistance”, is both shield and instrument: a way to project power without inviting direct destruction. For its adversaries, it is a widening arc of instability. Between these two perceptions lies a region suspended in permanent tension, where deterrence and provocation blur into one another.
This history also explains why the idea of regime change continues to appeal to external actors, while many within Iran fear its consequences. Iran’s past offers a sobering lesson: when political evolution is interrupted, the result is rarely renewal; it is rupture. Each rupture closes one door only to open another, often narrower, often harsher.
The present moment bears the imprint of this long history. Strikes and counter-strikes ripple across borders; energy routes tremble, and old alliances harden. Once again, the crisis begins to feel almost inevitable. Within the US–Israeli–Arab alignment, Iran may appear to be the final obstacle to consolidating regional dominance. To others, however, this confrontation resembles the last volleys of a fading empire in a unipolar order, giving way to an emerging multipolar world.
Epilogue
And so Iran stands, as it has so often before, at a crossroads that is not entirely new. Its past suggests a recurring paradox: that every attempt to secure the state has, in time, constricted society; that every external intervention has deepened internal control; that every promise of order has carried within it the seeds of a future upheaval. The question is whether the Middle East can move beyond a political order in which every crisis deepens the next and in which history is not a guide but a trap.
Yet Iran has also endured in ways few civilisations have. Not through the permanence of its rulers, but through the persistence of its memory: its language, its poetry, its sense of self that has outlived empires, revolutions and wars.
Perhaps that is where the faint possibility of change resides: not in the calculations of power alone, but in the deeper currents of a civilisation that has learned, time and again, to survive its own storms.
“Do not despair, even in the darkest night;
for beyond it, the dawn is already on its way.”
The question is whether this time, the dawn will bring not another cycle, but a different horizon.