IRAN: THE VIEW FROM THE PLATEAU
Welcome to Cosmographia — a newsletter uncovering the deep roots of a turbulent world. For the full map of posts, see here.
This is the sixth in a series of posts on the history and culture of Iran, one of the world’s great civilisational centres. Read the first here, second here, third here, fourth here, and fifth here.
I. THE VIEW FROM THE PLATEAU
Imagine, for a moment, that you are Iranian.1
You are the inheritor of one of the oldest civilisations on Earth. Your forebears built the first great empire in history, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indus. Your poets and mathematicians and physicians were among the greatest minds of the mediaeval world. Your literature, your art, your architecture are among the finest treasures humankind has ever produced. You know this. It is in your blood.
You are also a Shia Muslim. You carry with you the memory of Karbala, the grief of the murder of the Prophet’s own grandson; you rage at this betrayal, committed by the hands of your fellow Muslims no less. You mourn Husayn every year. You beat your chest in the street. You sing dirges and chant elegies. You know the world to be fallen, that justice has long been denied the righteous, but you know too that one day a saviour must come to set it right.
Recent days and weeks and months have not been good to you. Your countrymen and women were months ago cut down in the street for the crime of asking for a better government.2 Now you can only watch on helplessly each night as missiles fall upon your homeland. Here is but the latest act in an ancient war, Good vs Evil, Truth vs the Lie, the Oppressed vs the Oppressors.
Those dropping the bombs claim to be your liberators, but you can only wonder, was Gomorrah liberated by the fire and brimstone? For two hundred years your country has been subjected to the whims of western powers. The Russians took your northern provinces; the British tried to take your tobacco, and when that was denied them, they helped themselves to your oil instead. When you tried to take it back by democratic means, the Americans overthrew your government and installed a puppet king, a decadent and oppressive tyrant. When your people overthrew that Shah, they called you terrorists. They conspired to impoverish your country, they sanctioned your economy into oblivion, they armed your enemies — both Israel and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — and now they are bombing your cities.
From where you stand, the game is clear, only its rules have been rigged from the start. The West speaks of democracy but destroys it when the results are inconvenient; it speaks of human rights but backs dictators who serve its interests; it speaks of sovereignty but violates yours at every turn. Israel, meanwhile, occupies Muslim land, kills Muslim civilians, men, women, and children, and is shielded from the consequences by the same America that has long lectured you about the rules-based international order. They have stopped pretending there are rules now, but that matters little: the thin veneer of legality had never served you much in the past.
Now imagine you are told, commanded even, by the same powers that did all this, to behave. To be reasonable. To come to the negotiating table and make concessions. You watch as men in blue suits and red ties claim your country an existential threat to world peace and security.3 These, the same people who invaded two of your neighbours (Iraq and Afghanistan), carpet-bombed three more (Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen), demand your country make sacrifices to keep the peace.
You might not love your government. You might even hate it. But you have seen what happens when the bombs fall. Over the last twenty years you have seen regimes toppled in Iraq, in Libya, in Afghanistan. You know there is no plan for what comes after. You know the powers that be will leave your nation to anarchy and ruin, if that is what best serves their interests. You know they do not care if you live or die.
The Islamic Republic is not on the side of the angels. Its actions — against its own people, against its enemies, against the civilians of Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria — have been monstrous. It has murdered its own women for the crime of showing their hair; it has funded militias that have killed tens of thousands across the Middle East; it has for decades imprisoned, tortured, and executed dissidents with an alarming savagery.
But the regime’s narrative of itself, the story it tells to justify its existence, is built from genuine grievances. And if you too had absorbed those grievances, those memories, that history, you might well conclude, as the founders of the Islamic Republic did, that the struggle between Iran and the West is not a simple geopolitical rivalry, but an existential struggle of cosmic significance.
Since the events of 1979, few western commentators, policymakers, and war-makers have proved willing or capable of reckoning with why the Islamic Republic of Iran sees the world as it does. Journalists appear dumbfounded by the regime’s hostility to the ‘Great Satan’; politicians seem amazed at Iran’s reluctance to come to terms; security hawks can’t understand why the Islamic Republic mistrusts every word that comes out of the mouth of the American government.
This series on Iran has been an attempt to see things a little differently. We have looked at how Iran’s geography has shaped its history; seen how the Iranians first came to arrive onto the Persian plateau; traced Iran’s influence on world theology, through Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Islam; we have through its architecture seen the plateau’s ability to produce the most transcendent art; and seen how the the events of 1979 had their roots in the years, decades, and centuries past. Now it is time to bring the story up to the present moment. Let us try to see the world as it looks from the plateau, today.
