A Brief History of Iran: Empire, Faith, Revolution, and the Long Argument over Who Rules

A note on how this piece is written: Iran's recent history is fought over by its government, its domestic opponents and its very large diaspora. Where they disagree, each account is given in its own terms. Casualty figures are attributed to whoever produced them, with dates, because almost all of them are disputed.

On 28 February 2026, American and Israeli aircraft struck targets across Iran. Among the dead was Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had ruled the Islamic Republic as Supreme Leader for almost 37 years. Iranian state television at first denied it; then a presenter, in tears, announced forty days of mourning. Eight days later, an assembly of 88 clerics chose his son, Mojtaba, to replace him.

Some Iranians wept in the streets. Others went out to celebrate, and some of them, according to footage and rights groups' reports, were shot at by security forces. In Los Angeles, London and Toronto, diaspora Iranians argued with each other about whether to celebrate or to mourn the bombing of their own country. Seven weeks earlier, the same government had killed thousands of its own citizens to put down the largest protests in its history.

Nobody understands any of this by starting in 2026. Iranians invoke Cyrus the Great and the poet Ferdowsi, the martyrdom of Imam Hussein in 680 and the British oil concession of 1901, the CIA coup of 1953 and the war with Iraq in the 1980s, as if they all happened last week. In a sense they did: each is still a live argument about what Iran is, who it belongs to, and who has the right to rule it. This is that history, told at length.

In this history

1. Elam and the first world empire (to 330 BCE)
2. Parthians, Sasanians and the Persian renaissance (247 BCE–1501)
3. Safavids, conquerors and Qajars (1501–1905)
4. Constitution, Reza Shah, oil and the coup (1905–1953)
5. The Shah's Iran and the White Revolution (1953–1978)
6. Revolution and the Islamic Republic (1978–1989)
7. Reform, repression and the bomb question (1989–2021)
8. Woman, Life, Freedom, and Iran at war (2022–2026)
9. How to understand Iran today

Part 1 — Elam and the first world empire (to 330 BCE)

Look at a map and Iran is a fortress. A high, dry plateau, ringed by mountains, the Zagros to the west and the Alborz to the north, with deserts at its heart and two seas, the Caspian and the Persian Gulf, at its edges. Rivers are few. For most of history, Iranians lived by bringing water to land: the qanat, a gently sloping underground tunnel that carries groundwater from the foot of the mountains to fields many kilometres away, is one of the great inventions of the ancient world, and some are still in use.

The plateau was never empty. Farming villages spread across it from the early Neolithic. But the first state that we can name, with writing and kings, grew up in the lowland of what is now Khuzestan, in the south-west, an extension of the Mesopotamian plain. Its people called it Haltamti; the Mesopotamians called it Elam.

Elam

The city of Susa was founded around 4000 BCE, and for the next three and a half thousand years it alternated between Mesopotamian and Elamite control, according to the Encyclopaedia Iranica. From about 3200 BCE, tablets in a script now called proto-Elamite appear at Susa and at sites up on the plateau. It is one of the world's earliest writing systems, and it has still not been fully deciphered.

Elam's history comes to us mostly through its enemies' records, since far more Mesopotamian texts survive than Elamite ones. What emerges is a kingdom that was usually a federation, joining the lowland around Susa with the highland kingdom of Anshan, near modern Shiraz, and a culture that borrowed freely from Mesopotamia while keeping its own gods and its own language, which is related to no other known language.

Source: Encyclopaedia Iranica, "Elam".

The great monument of Elam is the ziggurat at Chogha Zanbil, built in the Middle Elamite period by King Untash-Napirisha. It is one of the best-preserved stepped temples anywhere in the ancient Near East. The end came at the hands of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, who in 646 BCE devastated the province and sacked Susa, boasting that he had reduced it to a wasteland. Iranica notes that his annals exaggerated: Elamite kings ruled again afterwards, until the region was absorbed by the Persians, perhaps by Cyrus in 539 BCE.

The Iranians arrive

Meanwhile, from the second millennium BCE, peoples speaking Iranian languages, part of the great Indo-European family that also includes Sanskrit, Greek and English, moved onto the plateau from the north and east. The two that mattered most were the Medes, in the north-west around Ecbatana (modern Hamadan), and the Persians, who settled in the south-west in the old Elamite highlands of Anshan, in the region the Greeks called Persis and Iranians call Fars. That name, Fars, is where "Persia" comes from. "Iran" comes from the older Aryan, the name these peoples used for themselves, which meant something like "the noble ones" and has nothing to do with the racial fantasies the word was later made to carry in Europe.

The religion most associated with ancient Iran, Zoroastrianism, traces itself to the prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster in Greek). When he lived is one of the great open questions of ancient history. Older estimates ranged across most of a thousand years; the closest thing to a scholarly consensus today, based on the archaic language of his hymns, the Gathas, places him around 1000 BCE, give or take a century or more. His teaching, a cosmic struggle between truth (asha) and the lie (druj), with humans free to choose sides, a final judgement and a renewed world, would shape Judaism, Christianity and Islam, though how directly is still debated.

Iran's first great state was not Persian at all. Elam was older than Persia, spoke a language unrelated to Persian, and lasted longer than any empire that came after it. The Persians inherited its land, its scribes, and its capital.

The first world empire: the Achaemenids (550–330 BCE)

The Persian kings of Anshan had been vassals of the Medes. In 550 BCE, one of them, Cyrus II, whom the Greeks called "the Great", overthrew the Median king Astyages and took his empire. What followed was, in Iranica's words, "a first world-empire of historical importance". In 547 or 546 BCE Cyrus conquered Lydia, the kingdom of the famously rich Croesus, and with it most of Asia Minor; in 539 BCE he took Babylon. His son Cambyses added Egypt.

Cyrus and the Cylinder

Cyrus has had a long afterlife. In Babylon he presented himself as the restorer of local gods and temples, and a barrel-shaped clay cylinder inscribed in Akkadian, now in the British Museum, records his claims to have let deported peoples return home. The Hebrew Bible remembers him as the anointed king who ended the Babylonian exile of the Jews (Ezra 1; Isaiah 45:1). In the 1960s and 1970s the last Shah promoted the Cyrus Cylinder as "the first charter of human rights". Most historians consider that anachronistic: it is royal propaganda in a standard Mesopotamian form. But it records a genuine policy of ruling a vast multi-ethnic empire through tolerance rather than terror, which was rare enough to be remembered.

For many Iranians today, especially secular nationalists and the diaspora, Cyrus is a symbol of an Iranian identity older than Islam, and his tomb at Pasargadae is a place of pilgrimage. The Islamic Republic's attitude to him has swung between suspicion and cautious embrace.

Darius and the machinery of empire

Cambyses died in 522 BCE amid a succession crisis, and a distant member of the royal clan, Darius I, seized the throne after killing a man he said was an impostor. Darius told his own version of events, carved high on the cliff at Bisotun (Behistun) in Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian. That trilingual inscription later became the key to deciphering cuneiform, as the Rosetta Stone was for hieroglyphs.

Darius was the empire's great organiser:

• He divided it into provinces, satrapies, each under a governor, with a list of peoples that ran from Egypt and Ionia to Bactria and Gandhara.
• He standardised taxation and coinage, and built roads with relay stations; the Royal Road from Susa to Sardis in Asia Minor was famous among the Greeks for its speed.
• He began Persepolis, a ceremonial capital in Fars whose staircases are carved with tribute-bearers from across the known world. Iranica records that the kings celebrated Nowruz, the spring new year still celebrated by Iranians today, there.
• Aramaic served as a common administrative language, so that a clerk in Egypt and a clerk in Bactria could read the same orders.

At its height the empire stretched from the Aegean to the Indus. It was the largest the world had yet seen.

The Greek wars and the end

For Greek writers, especially Herodotus, the Persian Wars of 490 and 480–479 BCE, with Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis, were the founding drama of freedom against despotism. From Persepolis they looked like failed punitive expeditions on a distant frontier. The empire survived them easily, and for another century and a half Persian gold shaped Greek politics more than Greek armies troubled Persia.

The end came from Macedon. Between 334 and 331 BCE, Alexander the Great defeated Darius III at the Granicus, at Issus and finally at Gaugamela. In 330 BCE Persepolis was burned, and Darius III was murdered by one of his own nobles. Iranian memory of Alexander is double: Zoroastrian tradition remembered him as a destroyer, while the Shahnameh, a thousand years later, turned him into a half-Persian prince. Both memories still exist.

Persepolis was built to be looked at: a stone catalogue of the peoples of the earth bringing gifts to one king. Two and a half thousand years later, the last Shah held a party among its ruins to say the same thing about himself. It did not end well for him either.

Part 2 — Parthians, Sasanians and the Persian renaissance (247 BCE–1501)

Alexander's empire broke apart at his death. Iran fell to his general Seleucus and his heirs, who planted Greek cities and Greek culture across the plateau. Then, around 247 BCE according to Iranica, a nomadic people from the steppe east of the Caspian, the Parni, proclaimed a king named Arsaces and began to take over the Seleucid east. They became known as the Parthians, and the dynasty as the Arsacids.

The Parthians

The Parthians ruled for almost five centuries, longer than any other Iranian dynasty, but they left few written records of their own, so they are mostly seen through Roman eyes. Their empire was loose: a high king over a federation of great noble houses and vassal kingdoms. Their armies were built around armoured lancers and horse archers, and their speciality, the "Parthian shot" fired backwards while apparently retreating, gave English the phrase "a parting shot".

In 53 BCE the Roman general Crassus, rich and ambitious, invaded Mesopotamia and was destroyed at Carrhae (modern Harran in Turkey); his legions' standards were lost and he was killed. For the next seven centuries the Euphrates was a frontier between two superpowers, Rome and Iran, neither able to conquer the other.

The Sasanians

In 224 CE a Persian prince from Fars, Ardashir, defeated the last Parthian king and took the title "King of Kings of Iran". The Sasanian dynasty he founded was more centralised, more self-consciously Persian and more closely tied to Zoroastrianism than the Parthians. It used the name Eranshahr, "the realm of the Iranians", and in many ways invented Iran as a political idea.

Ardashir's son Shapur I inflicted on Rome its worst humiliation: in 260, near Edessa, he captured the emperor Valerian and his army, and carved the scene into the cliffs at Naqsh-e Rostam, with the Roman emperor's wrist held in the Persian king's hand. Valerian died a prisoner.

The Sasanian centuries were a high point of Iranian civilisation:

• Religion. Zoroastrianism became the established faith, with a powerful priesthood. It was not the only one. Christians, Jews, Buddhists and, for a time, followers of the prophet Mani, whose Manichaeism blended Zoroastrian, Christian and Buddhist ideas and spread from North Africa to China, all lived in the empire. Mani himself died in captivity, or was executed, on a later king's orders in the 270s.
• Social upheaval. Around 500 a movement associated with a preacher named Mazdak preached the sharing of wealth, and for a while had royal backing, before it was crushed. Iranica notes that historians now question how central Mazdak himself was.
• Khosrow I (531–579), remembered as Anushirvan, "of the immortal soul", reformed taxation and the army and became the model of the just king in later Persian literature. Indian chess and the animal fables of the Panchatantra reached Iran at his court.
• Cities and crafts. Silk weaving, silverwork and great palaces such as the vaulted hall at Ctesiphon, near modern Baghdad, whose ruined arch still stands, made the Sasanian court a model for its neighbours. Sasanian Iran also controlled much of the trade along the Silk Roads.

The last great war with Rome, now the Christian Byzantine Empire, ran from 602 to 628. Khosrow II's armies took Jerusalem and Egypt and besieged Constantinople; then the Byzantine emperor Heraclius struck back into Mesopotamia. Both empires ended the war exhausted. Within a decade, a new power from Arabia would conquer one of them completely and strip the other of its richest provinces.

Islam and the Persian renaissance (651–1501)

Conquest

The Arab armies of the early caliphate defeated the Sasanians at al-Qadisiyya in Iraq in the mid-630s and at Nahavand in the Zagros in the early 640s. The last king, Yazdegerd III, fled east and was killed near Merv around 651. The empire that had faced Rome for four centuries was gone in about fifteen years.

What did not happen next is as important as what did. Iran was conquered, but it was not Arabised the way Egypt, Syria and Iraq were. Iranians became Muslims, slowly: the historian Richard Bulliet's influential estimate, based on the spread of Muslim names in family trees, is that the Muslim share of Iran's population rose from around 40 per cent in the mid-ninth century to close to 90 per cent by the end of the eleventh. But they kept their language. And they remade Islamic civilisation in their own image.

Persians make the caliphate

When the Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyads in 750, its revolution was launched from Khorasan, in north-eastern Iran, and its new capital, Baghdad, was built a few kilometres from the ruins of Ctesiphon. Persian families ran its bureaucracy. Sasanian court manners, statecraft and the very idea of a vizier shaped the caliphate. A literary movement, the Shu'ubiyya, even argued that non-Arab Muslims were the cultural equals, or superiors, of Arabs.

Some of the greatest figures of "Islamic" science and philosophy were Iranian:

Most of them wrote their science in Arabic, the shared learned language of the Muslim world, as Europeans wrote theirs in Latin. But something else was happening at the same time.

Ferdowsi and the Book of Kings

From the ninth century, under local dynasties such as the Samanids of Bukhara, a new form of Persian, written in Arabic script and full of Arabic loanwords but Persian in grammar and core vocabulary, became a language of poetry and government. Poets like Rudaki wrote in it. Then came Abu'l-Qasem Ferdowsi, born in 940 near Tus in Khorasan, according to Iranica's reconstruction from his own verses.

Ferdowsi spent some three decades writing the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, which he finished around 1010. It runs from the creation of the first king to the fall of the Sasanians: a vast mythical and legendary history, with the hero Rostam, the tragedy of Rostam killing his own son Sohrab unaware, the tyrant Zahhak with serpents growing from his shoulders, and the doomed love and betrayal of royal families. Tradition says Ferdowsi deliberately avoided Arabic words; in fact he used relatively few, and the poem became the anchor of Persian as a literary language.

"I have suffered much these thirty years; with this Persian I have revived Iran." The line is attributed to Ferdowsi and quoted constantly in Iran. Its exact wording varies between manuscripts, but its claim is accurate: the language, and with it a sense of Iranian identity, survived conquest because of poems like his.

Iranians still name their children after Shahnameh heroes, and traditional zurkhaneh gymnasiums still exercise to its verses. When a culture lost its empire and its religion, its poets kept the memory of both.

Turks, Mongols and poets

From the eleventh century, Iran was ruled mostly by dynasties of Turkic or Mongol origin: the Ghaznavids, the Seljuks, the Mongol Ilkhanate after the devastating invasions of the 1220s and the sack of Baghdad in 1258, and the armies of Timur (Tamerlane) in the late fourteenth century. The Mongol conquest in particular was catastrophic: cities such as Nishapur and Merv were destroyed and irrigation systems ruined.

And yet the conquerors kept adopting Persian as the language of their courts. Persian became the high culture of a world stretching from Anatolia to Bengal; the Mughal emperors of India and the Ottoman sultans wrote Persian poetry. These centuries produced the poets Iranians still quote daily:

• Saadi of Shiraz (thirteenth century), whose Golestan (Rose Garden) contains the lines on human solidarity, "the children of Adam are limbs of one body", that are woven into a carpet at UN headquarters.
• Rumi (thirteenth century), born in Balkh in what is now Afghanistan, who wrote his mystical masterpiece in Persian in Konya, in Turkey (see this library's Rumi: The Ecstasy of Divine Love and the Longing of the Soul).
• Hafez of Shiraz (fourteenth century), whose Divan sits in many Iranian homes. Opening it at random to read one's fortune, the fal-e Hafez, is still a family ritual on the winter solstice night of Yalda.

Iranians in this period were, by a large majority, Sunni Muslims. That was about to change.

Part 3 — Safavids, conquerors and Qajars (1501–1905)

The Safavids began as a Sufi order based in Ardabil, in north-western Iran, in the early fourteenth century. By the late fifteenth century the order had become a militant movement whose Turkmen followers, called the Qizilbash ("red heads", after their red caps), believed their leader was a semi-divine figure. Iranica describes their beliefs as having "little relation to orthodox Twelver Shi'ism".

In 1501, a fifteen-year-old Safavid leader, Ismail, took Tabriz, proclaimed himself shah, and decreed that Twelver Shi'ism would be the official faith of his realm.

What Twelver Shi'ism is

Shi'a Muslims believe that leadership of the Muslim community after the Prophet Muhammad belonged to his cousin and son-in-law Ali and then to a line of Ali's descendants, the Imams. Twelvers recognise twelve Imams. The third, Hussein, was killed with his small band of followers at Karbala in Iraq in 680 by the army of the Umayyad caliph; his martyrdom, mourned every year in the month of Muharram and on its tenth day, Ashura, is the emotional centre of Shi'a piety. The twelfth Imam, Twelvers believe, went into hiding (occultation) in the ninth century and will return as the Mahdi to establish justice.

That belief raises a political question that still shapes Iran: in the Imam's absence, who has legitimate authority? For most of history, the dominant answer among Shi'a scholars was cautious. The clergy should guide believers in religious matters, but no government could be fully legitimate until the Imam returned. Khomeini's answer, three centuries later, would be radically different.

Converting a country

Making Iran Shi'a took two centuries and a good deal of force. The Safavids persecuted Sunni scholars and Sufi orders, and imported Shi'a clerics from Arab lands, notably Jabal Amel in what is now southern Lebanon, to staff their new religious establishment. Iranica notes that historians still debate how many came and how much they shaped the faith. Over time a powerful, landed Shi'a clergy emerged, financed by religious taxes and endowments, and increasingly independent of the shahs.

The new faith also drew a sharp line between Iran and its Sunni neighbours, the Ottomans to the west and the Uzbeks to the east. In 1514 the Ottoman sultan Selim I routed Ismail at Chaldiran, his artillery and musket-armed infantry shattering the Qizilbash cavalry, and briefly took Tabriz. The border fought over in those wars is, roughly, the border between Iran and Turkey and Iraq today.

Shah Abbas and Isfahan

Shah Abbas I (reigned 1587–1629), "universally regarded as the greatest Safavid ruler" in Iranica's words, rebuilt the state. He curbed the Qizilbash chiefs by creating a standing army of slave soldiers drawn from Georgian, Armenian and Circassian captives, drove the Ottomans and Uzbeks back, expelled the Portuguese from the island of Hormuz in alliance with the English East India Company, and moved his capital to Isfahan.

He made Isfahan one of the most beautiful cities on earth. Its great square, Naqsh-e Jahan, "image of the world", is lined by a royal mosque, a palace and a bazaar. He settled Armenian merchants in a suburb, New Julfa, and they ran the silk trade that funded the state. European visitors came and wrote home that Isfahan was "half the world" (Isfahan nesf-e jahan), as the Persian rhyme still says.

Daily life in Safavid Iran

Most Iranians were villagers or pastoral nomads. Tribes, often Turkic-speaking, migrated with their flocks between summer and winter pastures and supplied much of the army. In the cities, the bazaar, a covered maze of guilds and merchants with its mosques, schools and bathhouses, was the economic and social heart, and the alliance between bazaar merchants and the clergy, who often came from the same families, would become one of the most important forces in Iranian politics right up to 1979.

The Safavid state decayed in the late seventeenth century. In 1722 an army of Afghan tribesmen besieged Isfahan for months; the starving city surrendered and the shah abdicated. Iran fell into half a century of turmoil.

Iran's Shi'ism, now its defining public identity, is younger than the Shahnameh by five hundred years. It was a state project before it was a national faith, and the clergy it created eventually outlasted the dynasty that created them.

Conquerors, Qajars and the Great Game (1722–1905)

Nader Shah and the Zands

Out of the chaos came Nader, a soldier of the Turkic Afshar tribe, who drove out the Afghans, deposed the last Safavids and crowned himself shah in 1736. He was a brilliant and brutal general. In 1739 he invaded Mughal India, sacked Delhi and carried home its treasure, including the jewel-encrusted Peacock Throne. His growing cruelty led his own officers to murder him in 1747.

The Zand ruler Karim Khan then governed much of Iran from Shiraz, never calling himself shah, only "deputy of the people" (vakil). Historians often describe his rule as a rare interval of calm. His death in 1779 brought more civil war, won by a Turkic tribe from the Caspian region, the Qajars.

The Qajars and the foreigners

The Qajar founder, Agha Mohammad Khan, made Tehran his capital in 1786 and was proclaimed shah in 1789; his dynasty ruled until 1925. These were the decades when Iran met European imperialism, and lost.

Two wars with Russia ended in the treaties of Golestan (1813) and Turkmenchay (1828), which surrendered Iran's territories in the Caucasus, roughly modern Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Dagestan, to the Russian Empire. Turkmenchay also gave Russian subjects legal immunity in Iran. To this day, "Turkmenchay" is Iranian shorthand for a humiliating treaty imposed by foreigners. Britain, guarding the road to India, pressed from the south and forced Iran to give up its claim to Herat, in what is now Afghanistan, in 1857. Iran was never formally colonised; instead, it became a buffer between the Russian and British empires in what the British called the "Great Game".

Short of money, the Qajar shahs sold concessions: rights over customs, banks, telegraphs, fisheries and mines. In 1872 the founder of the Reuters news agency, Paul Julius Reuter, a German-born British businessman, was granted a concession so sweeping (railways, mines, a bank, much of the economy) that George Curzon, later Britain's foreign secretary, described it as an extraordinary surrender of a kingdom's resources into foreign hands. It was cancelled under domestic and Russian pressure.

The Tobacco Protest

Then, in 1890, the shah granted a British company a monopoly over the production, sale and export of all Iranian tobacco. Merchants and clerics joined forces. In late 1891 a ruling attributed to the senior Shi'a scholar Mirza Hasan Shirazi declared tobacco use forbidden while the concession lasted. Iranians stopped smoking, reportedly even in the shah's own palace. In early 1892 the concession was cancelled.

The Tobacco Protest was a rehearsal for a century of Iranian politics: the bazaar and the clergy, allied with modern-minded intellectuals, mobilising the public against a ruler they saw as selling the nation to foreigners.

Two new faiths, and a society in change

The nineteenth century also produced a new religion. In 1844 a merchant from Shiraz, the Bab, announced himself as a gate to the hidden Imam and then as the bearer of a new revelation. His movement was crushed and he was executed in 1850. One of his followers, Baha'u'llah, went on to found the Baha'i Faith. The Baha'is became Iran's largest non-Muslim religious minority, and, because Shi'a clerics regard their faith as heresy against the finality of Muhammad's prophethood, among its most persecuted, then and now.

Ordinary life changed slowly. Most Iranians were still peasants working land owned by absentee landlords under sharecropping arrangements. A great famine struck in 1870–72. But printing presses, the telegraph and newspapers published abroad by Iranian exiles carried new ideas: law, constitution, nation.

Part 4 — Constitution, Reza Shah, oil and the coup (1905–1953)

The Constitutional Revolution

By 1905 Iran was bankrupt, its shah, Mozaffar al-Din, ill and in debt to Russia and Britain. A new intelligentsia, inspired by Japan's victory over Russia in 1904–05 and Russia's own revolution of 1905, joined the old alliance of merchants and clerics. Protests in Tehran escalated when the government beat sugar merchants accused of raising prices.

In summer 1906, protesters took sanctuary, bast, a traditional form of protest, in the grounds of the British legation in Tehran. Iranica's account is vivid: by 2 August 1906, 14,000 people were camped there, each guild with its own tent, meals cooked in huge communal cauldrons. Their demand grew from the dismissal of a hated prime minister to a majles, a national assembly. In August the shah conceded. The first Majles met that autumn and wrote a constitution, which the dying shah signed at the end of 1906; a supplementary law of 1907 added a bill of rights.

It was one of the first constitutional revolutions in Asia, earlier than the Young Turk revolution of 1908. It also contained a tension that never went away. The supplementary law created a committee of senior clerics to check that legislation conformed to Islam, and some of the revolution's clerical supporters, notably Sheikh Fazlollah Nuri, turned against it, demanding a mashrute-ye mashrue, a constitution limited by sharia. Nuri was hanged by the constitutionalists in 1909. Seventy years later, Khomeini's supporters would honour him as a martyr.

The new shah, Mohammad Ali, had the Majles building shelled by his Russian-officered Cossack Brigade in June 1908 and closed parliament. Constitutionalist fighters from Tabriz and Gilan, joined by Bakhtiari tribesmen, marched on Tehran in 1909 and deposed him. But the revolution was strangled from outside. In 1907 Britain and Russia had already agreed, without consulting Iran, to divide it into spheres of influence. When the Majles hired an American, Morgan Shuster, to reform its finances in 1911, Russia issued an ultimatum, occupied the north, and the Majles was closed in December 1911.

Reza Khan becomes Reza Shah

During the First World War, though Iran was neutral, Ottoman, Russian and British armies fought on its soil, and the famine of 1917–19 killed huge numbers, though how many is fiercely disputed: mainstream estimates are around two million, and some writers claim far more. In February 1921, an officer of the Cossack Brigade, Reza Khan, marched on Tehran with a few thousand men and, with the journalist Seyyed Zia Tabatabai, took power in a coup that British officers in Iran had encouraged. Reza became war minister, then prime minister, and in 1925 the Majles deposed the Qajars and made him shah. He took the name Pahlavi, after the language of pre-Islamic Iran.

Reza Shah set out to make Iran a modern nation-state on the model of Atatürk's Turkey, by force:

• He built a national army and crushed autonomous tribes and regions.
• He built the Trans-Iranian Railway, from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf, completed in 1938 and paid for largely by taxes on tea and sugar.
• He established the University of Tehran, the country's first modern university, a secular court system and state schools, taking education and law out of clerical hands.
• In 1935 he asked foreign governments to call the country Iran, not Persia.
• In 1936 he banned the veil for women in public, the kashf-e hijab. Police tore chadors from women in the street. For some women it was liberation; for many religious families it meant women stopped leaving home. The memory of that compulsion fuels both sides of Iran's arguments about the hijab to this day.
• Protest was crushed. In 1935 a demonstration against his dress laws at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad was put down by troops with heavy loss of life.

He also acquired a great deal of land for himself. When the Second World War came, he was suspected of sympathy for Germany and refused British and Soviet demands to expel German residents. In August 1941 Britain and the Soviet Union invaded, needing Iran's railway to supply the USSR. Reza Shah abdicated in favour of his 21-year-old son, Mohammad Reza, and died in exile in South Africa.

In 1906 Iranians demanded a constitution. In 1979 they demanded an Islamic Republic. In 2022 they demanded "Woman, Life, Freedom". The constitutional revolution's question, whether law comes from the people, from God, or from whoever commands the army, has never been settled.

Oil, Mosaddegh and the coup of 1953 (1901–1953)

The oil

In 1901 the Qajar shah had granted a British investor, William Knox D'Arcy, a sixty-year concession to find and sell oil across most of Iran. In 1908 his engineers struck oil at Masjed Soleyman in Khuzestan. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and later still BP, built at Abadan what became for a time the largest oil refinery in the world. In 1914 the British government bought a controlling stake, to fuel the Royal Navy.

Iranians watched their main resource enrich a foreign company and a foreign treasury. Iran's royalties were a small share of the profits; the company's Iranian workers lived in slums next to the British managers' neat bungalows. Renegotiation in 1933 changed little. By the late 1940s, oil was the national question.

Mosaddegh

Mohammad Mosaddegh was an aristocrat, a veteran of the constitutional era, a lawyer trained in Switzerland and a famously theatrical parliamentarian. His National Front, a coalition formed in 1949, demanded nationalisation of the oil industry and a shah who reigned rather than ruled.

In March 1951 the prime minister who opposed nationalisation was assassinated by a militant Islamist group, the Fada'iyan-e Islam, linked to the cleric Ayatollah Abol-Qasem Kashani. In late April 1951 the Majles made Mosaddegh prime minister, and two days later, as Iranica records, the oil industry was nationalised.

Britain responded with a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, a naval show of force and a case at the UN and the International Court of Justice. Iran's oil revenue collapsed. Mosaddegh became a hero across the developing world (Time magazine made him its Man of the Year for 1951) and a problem at home, as the economy weakened and his coalition split. The communist Tudeh party grew. Kashani and other clerics broke with him. In 1953 he dissolved the Majles by a referendum widely criticised as rigged.

The coup

What happened next is the most consequential event in modern Iranian history, and the hardest to discuss without starting an argument.

Britain had been planning Mosaddegh's removal since 1952. The Truman administration refused; after Eisenhower took office in January 1953, Washington agreed. The plan, code-named TPAJAX by the CIA, was run on the ground by Kermit Roosevelt. On 15–16 August 1953, an officer delivered the shah's decree dismissing Mosaddegh; Mosaddegh's supporters arrested him, the coup appeared to have failed, and the shah fled to Baghdad and Rome. On 19 August (28 Mordad in the Iranian calendar), crowds, some of them paid, poured into central Tehran, army units joined them, and after a day of fighting in which between about 200 and 300 people were killed, Mosaddegh's house was taken. General Fazlollah Zahedi became prime minister and the shah returned.

How much did the foreigners matter? Here historians genuinely disagree. The majority view, associated with scholars such as Mark Gasiorowski and Ervand Abrahamian, is that the coup would not have happened without American and British planning, money and propaganda. A minority, including the former Iranian diplomat Darioush Bayandor (Iran and the CIA, 2010) and the American historian Ray Takeyh, argue that the CIA's operation had in effect failed by 16 August and that the decisive push on 19 August came from Iranian actors: the army, royalists, and clerics such as Kashani who had turned against Mosaddegh. Both sides agree that foreign powers intervened and that many Iranians also wanted Mosaddegh gone.

For the Islamic Republic, 1953 proves that America will always try to overthrow an independent Iran. For secular nationalists, it proves that Iran's democratic experiment was killed by foreigners and the clergy together. For monarchists, it was a rescue from communism. All three are reading the same event.

Part 5 — The Shah's Iran and the White Revolution (1953–1978)

Oil, America and SAVAK

After 1953, a consortium of Western companies, now including American firms alongside the old British company, ran Iran's oil, splitting profits with Iran. Iran became a close American ally, a member of the Western-backed Baghdad Pact, and a buyer of American weapons on a vast scale. In 1957 the shah created a secret police, SAVAK, trained in part by American and Israeli services. Political parties were reduced to approved ones; from 1975 there was only one, the Rastakhiz (Resurgence) party.

The White Revolution

In January 1963 the shah launched a reform programme he called the White Revolution, white because, he said, it was a revolution from above without bloodshed, as opposed to a red one. It was approved in a referendum on 26 January 1963, with official figures of 5,598,711 votes for and 4,115 against, in a vote boycotted by the shah's opponents, a result that tells you as much about the referendum as about the reforms. Its main points:

• Land reform: large estates were bought up and sold to the peasants who worked them, with landlords compensated in shares of state factories.
• Votes for women, and later reforms of family law that restricted polygamy and men's unilateral divorce.
• A Literacy Corps of conscripts sent to teach in villages, and health corps.
• Nationalisation of forests, profit-sharing for factory workers, privatisation of state enterprises.

The results were real and mixed. Income per person rose greatly over the following years, and oil revenue paid for factories, dams and a rush to the cities. Literacy rose; malaria was pushed back; roads, dams and universities were built; a modern middle class grew, and women entered universities and professions. But many peasants received plots too small to live on, and millions moved to the slums of Tehran, where the mosque and the cleric were often the only institutions that welcomed them.

Khomeini's first stand

The White Revolution's loudest opponent was a cleric in Qom, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He attacked the land reform and votes for women, but above all he attacked the shah's dependence on America and his relations with Israel. In June 1963 (15 Khordad in the Iranian calendar), after Khomeini was arrested, riots broke out in several cities and were put down by the army, with a death toll still disputed. In 1964 Khomeini denounced a law granting American military personnel immunity from Iranian courts, comparing it to the capitulations of the Qajar era. He was exiled, first to Turkey, then for thirteen years to the Shi'a shrine city of Najaf in Iraq.

In Najaf, in a series of lectures in 1970, published as Islamic Government, he developed the doctrine that would become the Islamic Republic's constitution: velayat-e faqih, the "guardianship of the Islamic jurist". In the hidden Imam's absence, he argued, a qualified senior cleric had the right, and the duty, to govern. It broke with the cautious mainstream of Shi'a thought, and most of the senior clerics of his generation did not accept it.

Boom, glitter and anger

In 1971 the shah held a celebration of 2,500 years of Persian monarchy in a tent city beside Persepolis, with heads of state flown in and food from Paris. After the oil price quadrupled in 1973–74, oil money flooded in; the shah promised Iran would soon rival Europe. Instead the economy overheated: inflation soared, the countryside emptied, and the gap between a westernised elite and the pious majority in the bazaars and the new slums grew obvious to everyone.

Opposition came from many directions: the old National Front liberals; the Tudeh communists; Marxist and Islamist guerrilla groups, among them the People's Mojahedin (MEK), which blended Islam and Marxism; and religious intellectuals like Ali Shariati, whose lectures recast Shi'ism as a revolutionary ideology of the oppressed. SAVAK's prisons and torture were widely reported by human rights organisations.

The shah also founded Iran's nuclear programme. It began in 1957 under an American civil nuclear agreement, part of President Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" initiative, and in 1974 the shah created the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and announced plans to generate 23,000 megawatts from a network of nuclear power stations within twenty years, signing contracts with Western firms. Construction began at Bushehr on the Gulf coast. The same programme, inherited and transformed by the Islamic Republic, would become the centre of an international crisis half a century later.

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated 8 October 2026). The fertility collapse after the 1980s, one of the fastest ever recorded, happened under the Islamic Republic, helped by a state family-planning programme launched in 1989.

Part 6 — Revolution and the Islamic Republic (1978–1989)

The revolution

In January 1978 a government-inspired newspaper article insulting Khomeini set off protests in Qom; police fired on them. In Shi'a custom, the dead are mourned on the fortieth day, and each forty-day memorial produced new demonstrations and new dead, in a rhythm that carried the movement across the country.

On 19 August 1978 the Cinema Rex in Abadan was set on fire with its doors locked; around 400 people died. Much of the public blamed SAVAK. Later evidence pointed to Islamist militants, and a man who confessed was eventually executed by the Islamic Republic. On 8 September, Black Friday, troops fired on demonstrators in Tehran's Jaleh Square under newly declared martial law; the toll was disputed then and remains so, with figures in the dozens by later counts and thousands in the claims made at the time. Strikes, above all in the oil industry, paralysed the economy. In December, during the Shi'a mourning days of Muharram, millions marched.

The shah, secretly ill with cancer, hesitated between repression and concession. On 16 January 1979 he left Iran. On 1 February, Khomeini flew home from Paris to a reception by millions. On 11 February the army declared itself neutral and the old regime collapsed.

How many died in the revolution? Khomeini spoke of 60,000 martyrs. A researcher at Iran's own Martyrs' Foundation, Emadeddin Baghi, later counted 2,781 protesters and revolutionaries killed in 1978–79. That gap, between the founding myth and the state's own archive, is typical of Iranian history.

Who made the revolution?

It was not only, or at first, an Islamist revolution. Students, workers, bazaar merchants, secular liberals, Marxists, the MEK and the clergy all took part. Khomeini's genius was to unite them behind a simple demand, that the shah must go, while being vague about what would follow. Within three years, his followers had defeated or destroyed almost all of their former allies.

Building an Islamic Republic

In a referendum at the end of March 1979, voters were asked a yes-or-no question: Islamic Republic? The official result was about 98 per cent yes. A constitution drafted that year, and approved in another referendum in December 1979, wrote velayat-e faqih into law. Its structure still defines Iran:

It is a hybrid: real elections, sometimes fiercely contested, inside a frame drawn by unelected clerics and guarded by an ideological army.

The hostage crisis

On 4 November 1979, after the deposed shah was admitted to the United States for cancer treatment, students loyal to Khomeini stormed the US embassy in Tehran. Fifty-two Americans were held for 444 days, until 20 January 1981. Khomeini endorsed the seizure; it destroyed the moderate provisional government of Mehdi Bazargan, which resigned, and it fixed the image of the new Iran in American minds. A US rescue attempt failed in April 1980 in the desert. The two countries have had no diplomatic relations since.

The war with Iraq

On 22 September 1980, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Iran, expecting a quick victory over a state in chaos and hoping to seize the oil province of Khuzestan. Instead, Iranians rallied. The new Basij militia sent waves of young volunteers, many in their teens, against Iraqi lines; Iran retook Khorramshahr in 1982 and then, against advice from some of its own leaders, carried the war into Iraq. It became a war of trenches, of attacks on cities, of attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf, and of chemical weapons. Iraq used mustard gas and nerve agents against Iranian soldiers and, in March 1988 at Halabja, against Iraqi Kurdish civilians. Most Western governments and the Soviet Union backed Iraq to varying degrees.

On 3 July 1988 a US warship, the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 people on board; the US said its crew had mistaken the plane for a fighter. Later that month, Iran accepted UN Security Council Resolution 598, which had been passed a year earlier. Khomeini said that in accepting it he had drunk "the poisoned chalice", in the usual English rendering of his words. The guns fell silent on 20 August 1988. Neither side gained territory.

The Islamic Republic calls the war the "Imposed War" and the "Sacred Defence". Its martyrs' murals, cemeteries and museums are central to the state's identity.

The terror of the 1980s

The war years were also years of internal terror. In June 1981 the MEK turned to armed struggle; a bombing of the ruling Islamic Republican Party's headquarters that month killed around 70 senior officials, and further attacks followed. The regime replied with mass arrests and thousands of executions. Leftists, Kurds and Baha'is were persecuted. In the summer of 1988, after an MEK force based in Iraq invaded western Iran, Khomeini ordered the execution of political prisoners who refused to recant. Estimates from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International put the number killed between about 2,800 and 5,000; the MEK claims 30,000. Among the officials on the committees that sent prisoners to their deaths, according to survivors and rights groups, was a young prosecutor named Ebrahim Raisi.

Khomeini died on 3 June 1989. The Assembly of Experts chose as his successor Ali Khamenei, then president, a mid-ranking cleric who did not meet the constitution's requirement that the Leader be a senior source of emulation (marja); the constitution was amended to drop it.

"Neither East nor West, Islamic Republic" was the revolution's slogan. It meant independence from both superpowers. To its supporters it still means that. To its critics it came to mean independence from the Iranian people, too.

Part 7 — Reform, repression and the bomb question (1989–2021)

Rebuilding, and a reform movement

President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989–1997), a wily cleric and businessman, rebuilt the war-shattered economy and relaxed some social controls. Then, in May 1997, a little-known cleric, Mohammad Khatami, won the presidency in a landslide on a platform of civil society, rule of law and "dialogue among civilisations". Young people and women voted for him in huge numbers.

The reform era opened space: newspapers multiplied, women's magazines flourished, and Iranians talked politics openly. But the unelected institutions struck back. Newspapers were closed by the dozen; a series of murders of dissident writers and activists in late 1998, the "chain murders", was traced to "rogue elements" in the Intelligence Ministry, whose alleged leader died in prison before trial, and agents convicted in 2001 were tried in proceedings that victims' families and rights groups dismissed as a sham; student protests in July 1999 were crushed by vigilantes and police. The Guardian Council blocked reform laws. Reformists learned that winning elections did not mean winning power.

Ahmadinejad and the Green Movement

In 2005 the populist mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, won the presidency, promising to put "oil money on people's tables". He spent heavily, denied the Holocaust at international forums, and pressed ahead with the nuclear programme.

On 12 June 2009, the government declared him re-elected with nearly 63 per cent of the vote. His main challenger, the former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and many Iranians believed the vote had been rigged. Millions marched under the slogan "Where is my vote?" and the green colour of Mousavi's campaign. The Green Movement was crushed over the following months, with dozens killed, thousands arrested and televised show trials. The shooting of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, filmed on a phone, became the movement's image worldwide. Mousavi and the other reformist candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, were placed under house arrest from 2011.

The nuclear programme

Iran's nuclear programme began under the shah, with American help. After 2002, when an exile group revealed undeclared facilities at Natanz and Arak, it became the centre of a long international confrontation. Iran insisted, and the Islamic Republic still insists, that it seeks only civilian nuclear power and that the Supreme Leader has issued a religious ruling against nuclear weapons. Israel, the United States and European governments did not believe it, pointing to enrichment far beyond civilian needs, hidden sites and evidence of past weapons work. The UN Security Council passed sanctions resolutions from 2006. Israel assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists; a computer worm, Stuxnet, widely attributed to the US and Israel, sabotaged centrifuges at Natanz.

In 2013 Iranians elected Hassan Rouhani, a centrist cleric who promised to end Iran's isolation. On 14 July 2015 in Vienna, Iran and six powers (the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China) with the EU agreed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Iran accepted strict limits on enrichment and stockpiles and intrusive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); in return, UN, EU and US nuclear sanctions were lifted from Implementation Day, 16 January 2016, under UN Security Council Resolution 2231.

The deal's defenders said it blocked Iran's paths to a bomb for a decade or more; its critics, led by Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said its limits expired too soon and ignored Iran's missiles and regional militias. In May 2018 President Donald Trump withdrew the United States and reimposed sanctions under a policy of "maximum pressure". From 2019 Iran stepped up its enrichment in stages, eventually reaching 60 per cent purity, close to the 90 per cent used in weapons.

Protest and a downed plane

Economic pain brought new protests, now from poorer Iranians rather than the urban middle class: in 2017–18, and in November 2019, when a fuel price rise set off nationwide unrest. Security forces killed hundreds of protesters by Amnesty International's count; a Reuters report citing Iranian officials put the toll at about 1,500.

On 3 January 2020 an American drone strike in Baghdad killed Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guards' foreign operations arm, the Quds Force, and architect of Iran's network of allied militias, the "Axis of Resistance". Iran fired missiles at US bases in Iraq. Hours later, on 8 January, Revolutionary Guards air defences shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 just after take-off from Tehran, killing all 176 people on board. The authorities denied it for three days.

These years also built the regional alliance the Islamic Republic calls the "Axis of Resistance". It began with Hezbollah in Lebanon, organised in the early 1980s with the help of Revolutionary Guard instructors and pledged to Iran's Supreme Leader, and grew to include Palestinian Islamist groups, militias in Iraq and Syria and the Houthis in Yemen. Its supporters see it as Iran's shield against Israel and the United States; many domestic critics see money and lives spent abroad while Iranians grew poorer.

In 2021, with almost every serious rival disqualified by the Guardian Council, Ebrahim Raisi was elected president on the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic's history to that point.

Part 8 — Woman, Life, Freedom, and Iran at war (2022–2026)

Mahsa Jina Amini

On 13 September 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini (Jina was her Kurdish name), was arrested in Tehran by the morality police for wearing her hijab "improperly". Witnesses said she was beaten in the van; the authorities denied it. She collapsed in custody and died in hospital on 16 September.

Protests began at her funeral in her home town of Saqqez and spread across the country under a slogan born in the Kurdish women's movement, Jin, Jiyan, Azadî in Kurdish, Zan, Zendegi, Azadi in Persian: Woman, Life, Freedom. Schoolgirls tore off their headscarves and waved them; young women burned them in bonfires and cut their hair in public. Unlike earlier movements, which had mostly asked for fair elections or cheaper fuel, this one openly chanted against the Islamic Republic itself.

By September 2023 at least 551 people, including 68 children, had been killed, according to rights groups' counts; executions of protesters followed. A UN fact-finding mission created by the Human Rights Council in November 2022 concluded in early 2024 that the crackdown included crimes against humanity. The movement did not topple the state, but it changed the street: reporters and residents described large numbers of women in Tehran going out uncovered, in open defiance of the law. In October 2023 the imprisoned human rights activist Narges Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Direct war with Israel

For decades, Iran and Israel had fought indirectly: Israel through assassinations and sabotage, Iran through allies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq and Syria. After Hamas's attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 (see this series' A Brief History of Israel), that shadow war came into the open. In April 2024, after Israel struck an Iranian consular building in Damascus, Iran launched its first ever direct attack on Israel, with hundreds of drones and missiles, most shot down. In May 2024 President Raisi died in a helicopter crash; a reformist-backed former health minister, Masoud Pezeshkian, won the election that followed. In October 2024 Iran fired some 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, and Israel struck back at Iranian air defences and missile factories.

The nuclear crisis and the Twelve-Day War

Iran's government said 1,060 people were killed in Iran in the June 2025 war; the US-based rights group HRANA counted 1,190, including at least 436 civilians. Israel reported 32 civilians and one off-duty soldier killed by Iranian missiles. Iran suspended cooperation with the IAEA, accusing it of helping Israel choose its targets.

The uprising of 2025–26

On 28 December 2025, shopkeepers in Tehran's bazaar went on strike as the currency collapsed. The protests spread nationwide within days and turned, again, into demands for the end of the Islamic Republic. On 8 and 9 January 2026, behind a near-total internet blackout, security forces opened fire on crowds across the country.

The death toll is the most disputed figure in this history. On 17 January 2026, Khamenei himself acknowledged that "several thousand" had been killed, blaming the United States and Israel. By 9 February, HRANA had confirmed 6,872 protesters killed, including more than 150 children, while the authorities acknowledged at least 3,000 deaths, some of them security personnel (BBC, 9 February 2026). Other estimates, citing hospital data and Health Ministry sources, ran above 30,000. In January 2026 the UN Human Rights Council ordered its fact-finding mission to investigate urgently. Executions of people convicted over the protests continued through 2026.

The 2026 war

In January and February 2026 the United States assembled its largest military build-up in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, while also holding talks with Iran over its nuclear programme. On 28 February 2026, the US and Israel struck. Khamenei and much of Iran's military and security leadership were killed in the first hours. The US and Israeli governments described the war as necessary to stop Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, to protect Iranians from their own government, and to secure the region. Iran called it "wholly unprovoked, illegal, and illegitimate", and the UN Secretary-General and many governments condemned the attack (BBC, 28 February 2026).

Iran fired missiles and drones at Israel, at US bases and at Gulf states that host them, and closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which a large share of the world's oil passes, causing what has been described as the largest supply disruption the global oil market has ever seen. On 8 March, the Assembly of Experts named Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, a cleric who had never held government office, as Supreme Leader; days earlier President Trump had said Khamenei's son was "unacceptable to me" (BBC, 8 March 2026). The internet was cut for almost three months.

By 7 April HRANA had documented 3,636 deaths in Iran from the strikes, 1,701 of them civilians. Israel reported dozens of its own civilians and soldiers killed; by 21 July, 21 US service members and one contractor had been killed, according to tallies of US official figures. As of the end of October 2026, the war was unresolved: the US was blockading Iranian oil exports, Iran was attacking shipping near Hormuz, and indirect talks through Qatar continued. For the economy, the World Bank estimated that GDP per person fell from about $5,190 in 2024 to about $3,920 in 2025, with inflation of 42 per cent in 2025, figures that predate the worst of the war.

In the space of fourteen months, Iranians lived through a war, a massacre, another war, the death of the only Supreme Leader most of them had ever known, and the succession of his son. Whatever comes next, it will be built on that.

Part 9 — How to understand Iran today

Three ways of telling the story

Every Iranian history is, underneath, an argument about which of these stories is true. Here each is set out as its own adherents would tell it.

The Islamic Republic's story. For two centuries Iran was humiliated by foreigners: Russian treaties that tore away its provinces, British concessions that sold its tobacco and its oil, the Anglo-American coup that destroyed its elected government in 1953, and a shah installed and armed by Washington who mocked his own people's faith. In 1979 the Iranian nation, led by its clergy, threw off that dependence. The revolution brought electricity, roads, clinics and schools to villages the shah had ignored, and it sent a whole generation of village girls to university. Then the world, East and West alike, armed Saddam Hussein to destroy it, and Iran's young men defended their country in the Sacred Defence while the world looked away from Iraq's chemical weapons. Since then America and Israel have assassinated its scientists and commanders, strangled its economy with sanctions, and in 2025 and 2026 bombed it while it was negotiating. Its unrest, in this account, is stirred up and financed by those same enemies, and its "resistance" is the price of independence.

The domestic opposition's story. There is no single opposition inside Iran; there are reformists who once hoped to change the system from within and have largely given up, secular democrats, women's rights activists, labour organisers, students, and ethnic movements among Kurds, Baloch, Arabs and Azerbaijanis. What they share is this account: the revolution of 1979 was made by many Iranians and stolen by one faction, which then executed thousands of its former allies, imposed the hijab by force, and turned a mosaic of peoples into subjects of a clerical state. The Iranian people voted for reform in 1997, for change in 2009 and against the system in the streets in 2017, 2019, 2022 and 2025–26, and each time were answered with bullets and the noose. Foreign enemies exist, but the Islamic Republic's worst enemy has been its own disregard for the Iranians it rules. "Woman, Life, Freedom" names what they want. Many of them also opposed the foreign bombing of their country in 2025 and 2026.

The diaspora's story, or stories. Several million Iranians live abroad, most of them having left after 1979, with large communities in the United States (especially Los Angeles), Canada, Germany, the UK, Turkey and the Gulf. They are as divided as the country they left:

• Monarchists look back on the Pahlavi era as a time of modernisation, women's freedom and national pride, and many look to the late shah's son, Reza Pahlavi, as a figure who could lead a transition.
• Secular republicans and liberals, heirs of Mosaddegh's National Front, remember 1953 as the crime that made 1979 possible and reject both the clerics and the monarchy.
• The MEK, now based in Albania, presents itself as the democratic alternative; most other Iranians, inside and outside the country, distrust it deeply, not least because it fought alongside Saddam Hussein's army in the 1980s.
• Younger diaspora Iranians, many born abroad, have often been drawn into politics by the Woman, Life, Freedom movement rather than by the older quarrels.

The 2026 war split the diaspora painfully, between those who welcomed foreign strikes on a government that had just massacred its own people and those who saw foreign bombs falling on their families' cities.

Ideas that unlock the country

1. Iran is old, and knows it. Few countries have a continuous sense of themselves stretching back two and a half thousand years. Iranians quote Ferdowsi and Hafez in ordinary conversation, celebrate Nowruz, a festival older than Islam, and see their history as a series of foreign conquests (Greek, Arab, Mongol, Turkic, Russian, British, American) that Iran survived by absorbing its conquerors. That long memory explains the deep suspicion of foreign interference that runs through every political camp.

2. Faith and nation are intertwined, and contested. Iran is the only major state where Twelver Shi'ism is the state religion, and Shi'a rituals, Muharram, Ashura, the shrines of Mashhad and Qom, are woven into national life. But Iranian identity is also Persian, pre-Islamic and, for millions, increasingly secular. Iran's ethnic map is diverse too: alongside a Persian-speaking majority are Azerbaijanis (Iran's largest minority), Kurds, Lurs, Arabs, Baloch and Turkmen, and religious minorities including Sunni Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and the persecuted Baha'is.

3. Oil has shaped every regime. Oil money funded Reza Shah's railways, the shah's White Revolution and the Islamic Republic's subsidies and militias. It has also made every Iranian government less dependent on its own citizens' taxes and consent, and made Iran a prize for outside powers.

4. The state is a hybrid. The Islamic Republic has held elections since 1979, some of them genuinely competitive and surprising, inside limits set by the Supreme Leader, the Guardian Council and the Revolutionary Guards. Whether that hybrid can survive the loss of its founding generation, war and the alienation of much of its youth is the central question of 2026.

5. Iranian society has changed faster than its government. Iran is now overwhelmingly urban and literate. Women are educated in large numbers. Fertility has fallen from more than six children per woman in 1979 to under two. Much of the population was born after the revolution and has known no other system, and opinion research and street protests alike suggest that many of them reject it. That gap between society and state is where the next chapter of Iranian history will be written.

Key dates

Who's who

The takeaway

Iran is one of the world's oldest continuous civilisations: Elam, then the empires of Cyrus and Darius, the Parthians and Sasanians who held Rome at bay, a Persian culture that survived the Arab conquest by remaking Islam in its own language, and a Shi'a identity built by the Safavids. Its modern history is a running argument, through the constitution of 1906, the oil nationalisation and coup of 1953, the revolution of 1979 and the protests of 2009, 2022 and 2026, about whether the people, the clergy, the king or foreign powers get to decide Iran's future. In 2026 that argument is being fought under bombardment, after a massacre, with a new Supreme Leader, and with no agreement among Iranians at home or abroad about how it should end.

Try this: pick one date from the Key dates table, 1953, 1979 or 2022 are good choices, and look for two accounts of it written by Iranians on opposite sides: one from Iranian state media and one from an opposition or diaspora outlet. Notice which facts each includes, which each leaves out, and which words each uses for the same people. That is the fastest way to understand why Iranians argue the way they do.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Encyclopaedia Iranica (Columbia University), articles "Elam", "Achaemenid Dynasty", "Arsacids ii", "Sasanian Dynasty", "Ferdowsi i", "Safavid Dynasty", "Constitutional Revolution i–ii", "Coup d'état of 1332 Š./1953" and "Iraq vii. Iran–Iraq War", read via archived copies on 31 October 2026.
- National Security Archive (George Washington University), CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup, Electronic Briefing Book No. 435 (19 August 2013).
- World Bank, World Development Indicators, Iran (updated 8 October 2026): population, fertility, life expectancy, GDP per capita, inflation.
- UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, mandate page (Human Rights Council resolutions S-35/1, 55/19, 58/21 and S-39/1 of 23 January 2026).
- BBC News reporting, 2025–26: IAEA report (31 May 2025) and Board resolution (12 June 2025); Grossi interview (29 June 2025); snapback sanctions (28 September 2025); Khamenei's acknowledgement of protest deaths (17 January 2026); BBC Persian victims project and HRANA figures (9 February 2026); Khamenei's killing (28 February 2026); Mojtaba Khamenei's appointment (8 March 2026); Pakistan-mediated ceasefire (8 April 2026); internet restoration (26 May 2026); text of the US–Iran memorandum (18 June 2026); Hormuz shipping attacks (16 October 2026).
- Human rights organisations' figures as summarised in the record: Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International (1988 executions); HRANA (2025 and 2026 war casualties; 2026 protest deaths); rights groups' count of 551 killed in the 2022–23 protests.
- Emadeddin Baghi's count of revolution deaths and the Iran–Iraq War casualty ranges as summarised in the secondary literature; ranges given where estimates differ.

Go deeper
- 📘 A History of Modern Iran — Ervand Abrahamian (the clearest single-volume account of the 20th century, from the constitutional revolution to the Islamic Republic)
- 📘 The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Iran — Homa Katouzian (a sweeping interpretation built around the cycle of arbitrary rule and chaos)
- 📘 Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings — Abolqasem Ferdowsi, translated by Dick Davis (the national epic in an English version that reads beautifully)
- 📘 The Mantle of the Prophet — Roy Mottahedeh (a classic portrait of a cleric's education in Qom, and the best way into how the revolution felt from inside)
- 📘 Persepolis — Marjane Satrapi (a graphic memoir of growing up through the revolution and the war, and leaving)
- 🌐 Encyclopaedia Iranica (the scholarly reference on everything Iranian, free online)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: Rumi: The Ecstasy of Divine Love and the Longing of the Soul; The Silk Roads; The 1970s: Malaise, Punk, Détente, and the Rise of Personal Computing (Khomeini); A Brief History of Israel (this series)