Persia

Persia, formally the Imperial State of Persia and in its own language Iran, is a monarchy of the Iranian plateau and the northern Gulf shore, with approximately ninety-two million people. Its capital is Tehran, its sovereign is Ardeshir II of the House of Sepahdar, and it is the largest Shia state in the world and the wealthiest per head of any country of its size in the region.

It is the monarchy that did not fall, and the article exists to explain why, because a great deal of the twentieth century pointed the other way and none of it arrived.

The dynasty is not old. It was founded in 1925 by an officer of the Cossack Brigade who took the throne from a spent predecessor, and it has reigned for a hundred and three years. It has the shallow roots of every soldier’s dynasty, and it spent its first decades manufacturing a legitimacy it had not inherited, chiefly by reaching past Islam to Cyrus and Darius in a manner the clergy disliked and the country found faintly embarrassing.

What it never acquired was the stain of foreign restoration. In 1951 a nationalist ministry under Karim Ansari nationalised the oil. The British proposal that followed, that Persia’s government be removed by arrangement, was put to the United Kingdom of America and the Realm declined it. The oil stayed Persian, the concession company was compensated, and no Persian government was ever overthrown by outsiders. The consequence is the single most important fact about the modern country: there has never been a moment at which the throne could be described as a foreign creation, and no opposition has ever had that argument available.

The Register’s judgement, argued in the Assessment, is that this is why Persia was spared a catastrophe and why it was never rid of a government that deserved removing. A monarchy nobody can call foreign is very hard to overthrow, including when it should be overthrown, and the two halves of that sentence are the whole history of the country between 1954 and 1997.

Those four decades were authoritarian. The Nezarat, the security organisation formally disbanded and renamed thirty years ago and still called by its old name in every Persian household, held political prisoners in the thousands, tortured as a matter of routine, and operated under emergency powers that outlived every emergency they were granted for. Nobody has been tried for any of it. The files are closed. The dynasty that did it is the dynasty that reformed, and it is still on the throne.

The reform came from below and it came as a petition rather than a rising. The Petition of the Six Hundred in 1996, signed by lawyers, clerics, academics and retired officers, demanded the restoration of the Constitution of 1906 in substance rather than in form. The Crown conceded in 1997 rather than crushing it. Persia is at present semi-constitutional: elections are real and are sometimes lost by the government, the press is real, and there are lines nobody crosses, and they are all drawn around the throne.

The relationship with the United Kingdom of America is the country’s largest external fact and is treated in a section of its own rather than folded into foreign relations, because the Realm’s conduct is part of the record. Persia supplies oil, buys arms on a very large scale, holds the border with the Russian Republic and the listening posts along it, and places its sovereign fund in American markets, which makes the Realm’s authoritarian friend also one of its creditors. The Realm knew what the Nezarat was. Its own diplomats reported it, at length and accurately, and the reports were filed, because the border mattered more.

Persia’s deepest continuity is not the throne and not the state. It is the poetry, which is older than any dynasty that has governed here, which ordinary people recite from memory, and at whose tombs they still gather. Every regime of the last thousand years has been a tenant of that inheritance, and the present one is aware of it.

Name

The country is Iran in Persian and has been for as long as Persian has been written, from Ērān, the land of the Aryans, and the name is internal, ancient and unambiguous.

Persia is the external name, from Greek Persis by way of Latin, taken from Pars in the south-west, the province the Achaemenids came from, and applied by outsiders to the whole. It is the form in which the country is known in English and in most European languages and it is the form the state itself uses in its English-language diplomacy.

The dynasty tried to change the external name and had to reverse it, which is the interesting part. In the 1930s the founder’s government instructed foreign ministries to use Iran in place of Persia, on the argument that the internal name was the correct one and that Persia carried an antiquarian and orientalist freight the modern state did not want. The instruction was obeyed for some years and was withdrawn after the Second Great War, for reasons the state has never fully explained and that Persian historians have argued about since.

The reversion was itself a political act. The most persuasive account is that the post-war governments wanted the association with a classical past that foreign audiences recognised, at a moment when the country was arguing with much larger powers about its oil and its northern provinces, and that Iran meant nothing abroad while Persia meant Cyrus. A second account holds that the change had simply been the founder’s personal enthusiasm and was dropped with the rest of them.

The Register uses Persia for the state and Persian for its language and people, follows the country’s own English usage, and notes that the choice is a choice.

History

The Constitutional Revolution of 1906

Persia acquired a constitution and a parliament in 1906, before most of Europe’s monarchies had conceded either, and the Majlis has existed in some condition ever since.

The revolution was made by merchants, clerics and reformist officials against a dynasty that had mortgaged the country’s revenues to foreign concessionaires, and it produced a fundamental law establishing an elected assembly, ministerial responsibility and limits on the Crown. It was suppressed, restored, suspended and restored again over the following two decades, and the pattern set then has held: the constitution is never abolished and is frequently ignored, and every Persian political argument since has been about the distance between those two conditions.

The Register regards 1906 as the country’s founding political fact, more than any dynasty. Persia has never had to invent constitutionalism. It has only ever had to insist on it, and it has insisted twice at scale, in the 1940s and in 1996.

The soldier’s dynasty, 1925

The House of Sepahdar was founded in 1925 by Ardeshir Khan, an officer of the Cossack Brigade, who had made himself indispensable during a decade of foreign occupation, internal collapse and separatist revolt, and who took the throne from a dynasty that had stopped functioning.

He reigned as Ardeshir I until 1953 and he built the modern Persian state: a national army, a civil service, a road and rail network, a legal code, a university, and a programme of compulsory education that began the country’s rise to mass literacy. He also suspended the Majlis whenever it became inconvenient, exiled the politicians who objected, and treated the constitution of 1906 as a document to be honoured in preamble.

He reached for the pre-Islamic past with both hands, and the article records how that went. The dynasty adopted the imagery of the Achaemenids, staged the antiquity in ceremony and coinage and school textbooks, and traced a line from Cyrus to a Cossack officer that nobody found convincing. The clergy disliked it as a deliberate displacement of Islam from the centre of Persian identity. The educated public found it slightly embarrassing, and the embarrassment is durable: modern Persians are proud of the antiquity and wince at the dynasty’s use of it, and the two feelings coexist without difficulty.

The northern occupation and the founding crisis, 1941 to 1946

Persia was occupied in the Second Great War, and the article is precise about the extent because everything afterwards turns on it.

The north was occupied and the rest was not. The Russian Republic entered the northern provinces in 1941 to secure a supply corridor, and it did not leave when the war ended. It stood up a client administration in Azerbaijan, cultivated a separatist movement there and among the Kurds, and made it plain that the occupation would be indefinite.

Getting the Russians out is the founding crisis of the modern alignment. Persia took the case to the League of Nations, argued it in public over months, and obtained a withdrawal in 1946 under sustained pressure in which the United Kingdom of America was decisive. The client administration collapsed within weeks of the troops leaving.

Two consequences run through the rest of the article. The first is that Persia learned that its independence depended on a distant great power taking an interest, which is the beginning of the American relationship and the reason it has survived everything since. The second is that the northern minorities were on the wrong side of a security crisis at the moment their claims were first taken seriously, which is why language and provincial rights in Persia are still handled as a security question by the state and as a rights question by everybody else.

The constitutional decade, 1946 to 1954

The years after the withdrawal were the most open in Persian history until the present century, and the constitutional movement of that decade won more than any other.

The Majlis recovered its powers in substance. Ministries rose and fell on votes. The press was various and unmuzzled. Women received the vote and full civil capacity, and it was the movement that delivered it rather than the Crown, over the objection of parts of the clergy and without the Crown’s enthusiasm, which is a distinction Persian women’s organisations have insisted on ever since and which the state’s official histories blur.

Language and provincial rights date from the same decade: education and publication in Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Baluchi and Arabic, and elected provincial assemblies with defined competences. They were conceded to a movement that had watched the northern crisis and concluded that a state which denied its minorities everything would keep handing Russia an opening.

The movement did not seek the throne. It was constitutionalist rather than republican throughout, it argued for the fundamental law of 1906 rather than against the monarchy, and that self-limitation is the reason it won what it won and the reason it could be dismantled afterwards without a revolution.

Ansari, the oil, and the coup that did not happen

Karim Ansari became Prime Minister in 1951 at the head of the constitutional movement’s parliamentary majority, and nationalised the Persian oil concession within months.

The case was overwhelming. The concession had been granted by a bankrupt dynasty, its terms gave Persia a minority of the profits from its own ground, its accounts were not open to the Persian government, and its refinery town was run as a foreign enclave. The nationalisation was carried by the Majlis, was popular past the point of unanimity, and was legally defensible.

The concession’s government proposed to New Westminster that Ansari’s ministry be removed by arrangement, and set out how it might be done. The Realm declined. The refusal was not made on Persia’s behalf and was not presented as principle; the American position was that a covert removal would be discovered, that the discovery would deliver Persia to the Russians within a decade, and that the price of the oil was not worth the border. Persia was saved by a calculation about Russia, which is the pattern of the entire relationship and is visible at its very first moment.

A settlement followed. Persia kept the oil and the concession company was compensated, on terms Persian nationalists called a surrender and Persian finance ministers called the best available. The National Persian Oil Company dates from that settlement and has never been reversed by anybody.

The easing-out of Ansari, 1954

Ansari won the oil and lost his office to the Crown, and Persians have never agreed on whether it was lawful.

The mechanism was constitutional in form. The Shah dismissed a Prime Minister who no longer commanded a reliable majority, at a moment when the coalition behind the nationalisation had begun to fracture over economic policy, and a new ministry was formed and confirmed by a Majlis that had been under considerable pressure in the preceding weeks.

Whether the pressure vitiated the confirmation is the question. The Crown’s defenders hold that Ansari had lost his majority and that a monarch is entitled to notice. His defenders hold that the majority was broken deliberately by an executive that had decided to be rid of him, and that a dismissal engineered in advance is a dismissal whatever the vote afterwards says.

The Register does not resolve it, because resolving it means deciding who is right and Persian constitutional scholarship has not managed it in seventy years. What is not in dispute is the sequence: the man who took the oil was out of office within three years of taking it, the constitutional decade ended with him, and the emergency powers that defined the next forty years were first taken in the year after he went.

The long emergency, 1954 to 1997

The four decades after Ansari are the ones nobody has accounted for.

The Majlis continued to sit and to be managed. Elections were held and were arranged. The press was licensed. The Nezarat was established in 1957, grew through the 1960s into an organisation of real size and real competence, and did what such organisations do: informers in the universities and the bazaar, detention without charge, interrogation centres, and a body of exiles abroad that grew with each tightening.

Political prisoners ran into the thousands at the peak. Torture was systematic and is documented, chiefly from the accounts of survivors and from material that has leaked rather than from anything the state has opened. Executions were carried out after trials that were closed.

The land reform of the 1960s belongs to this period and is its most consequential domestic act. It broke the great estates, which was overdue, and distributed holdings too small to be viable to peasants without credit, water rights or machinery. Within a generation the villages had emptied into Tehran, which grew from a manageable capital into one of the largest cities in the world, and the rural society the reform was supposed to enfranchise had substantially ceased to exist. The reform is defended as necessary and was executed in a way that served the state’s interest in breaking a rival landed class more than it served anybody’s interest in agriculture.

The Baháʼí are the failing the state has least defended. A religious minority of Persian origin, they held no protected status, were excluded from the constitutional guarantees extended to recognised religious minorities, and were subject to campaigns of dismissal from public employment, denial of education, seizure of property and periodic mob violence that the authorities did not prevent and occasionally encouraged. The state’s position was that they were not a religion and therefore had nothing to protect, and the position has been softened and not reversed.

Afghanistan and the second alignment, 1980s

The Russian Republic invaded Afghanistan, and Persia became indispensable.

Aid to the Afghan resistance ran through Persian territory, on a scale and with a consistency that no other route could match, and Persia took refugees in the millions and is carrying some of them still. Whatever pressure the Realm might have brought to bear on Persian internal conduct ended entirely in that decade, and the ending is documented in the Realm’s own diplomatic record.

The Petition of the Six Hundred, 1996

The liberalisation was forced from below, in writing, and the Crown conceded rather than crushing it.

The petition was published in the spring of 1996 over six hundred names: lawyers, judges, university teachers, retired officers, journalists, and a substantial body of clergy including several of the most senior. It did not attack the monarchy. It asked for the restoration in substance of the Constitution of 1906, the ending of the emergency powers, the release of political prisoners, and the accountability of the security organisation to the Majlis.

Its power was in who had signed it. A petition from students can be dispersed. A petition carrying the signatures of the men who staffed the courts, taught the law and led the prayers is a statement that the institutions of the country no longer accepted the arrangement, and there was nobody left to disperse it with.

Ardeshir II conceded in 1997, in a sequence that took nine months and was contested inside the government throughout. The emergency powers were repealed. The Nezarat was formally dissolved and its functions transferred to a new body answerable to a Majlis committee. Political prisoners were released, in stages and not all of them. Press licensing was ended and a defamation regime substituted.

Nobody was tried. No commission was appointed. The files were not opened and have not been opened. The organisation was renamed and the country still uses the old name, which is the most eloquent thing about the settlement of 1997 and is treated in the Assessment.

Geography

The plateau

Persia is a high interior plateau ringed by mountains, with a narrow humid strip on the Caspian shore, a hot lowland along the Gulf, and two great salt deserts in the middle that almost nobody lives in.

The Alborz close the north and separate Tehran from the Caspian. The Zagros run north-west to south-east along the whole western side, holding the Kurdish and Bakhtiari country and the oil beneath their foothills. Between them the plateau is arid, settlement follows water rather than land, and the historic cities stand where mountains meet plain and the underground channels could reach them.

Water, and the slow crisis

Persia is drying, and the article states that the state knew and chose.

The classical settlement pattern ran on qanats, underground channels tapping mountain aquifers and carrying water by gravity for tens of kilometres, maintained by the communities that used them, self-limiting because a qanat cannot draw more than the water table will yield.

They were abandoned for pumps. Deep wells and diesel pumps were promoted from the 1960s as modernisation, they were cheaper and faster and they took more than the ground could replace. The aquifers have fallen for sixty years. Lake Urmia has largely gone, the wetlands of the interior with it, subsidence is cracking the ground under the plateau cities, and the villages that were emptied by the land reform were emptied again by wells that stopped reaching water.

The state has the technical competence to have prevented most of this. The decisions were taken knowingly, on the reasoning that agricultural output and rural employment were immediate and the aquifer was a problem for a later ministry, and the later ministry has arrived.

Cities

Tehran is enormous, and its size is a modern accident. It holds something over fifteen million in its metropolitan region, it grew from the villages the land reform emptied, and it dominates the country’s politics, economy and media to a degree the rest of Persia resents.

Isfahan is the classical capital of the Safavid empire and holds the country’s most celebrated architecture. Tabriz is the Azerbaijani capital of the north-west, the historic commercial gateway toward Anatolia and the Caucasus, and the centre of the language question. Mashhad in the north-east holds the most important Shia shrine in Persia and is the country’s principal pilgrimage city. Shiraz in the south is the city of the poets and of the tombs of Hafez and Saadi. Abadan and the Gulf coast hold the oil.

The older capitals think Tehran is an upstart, and by the standards of Isfahan and Shiraz it is.

Government and politics

The constitutional settlement

Persia is governed under the Constitution of 1906 as amended, restored in substance by the settlement of 1997, and the country’s constitutional argument is about the distance between the document and the practice.

The Majlis is a real parliament. It legislates, it holds ministries to account, it controls supply, and governments have lost its confidence and left. It is also worked around: the Crown retains prerogatives over the armed forces, the security services and foreign affairs that no ordinary majority has been able to reach, and the practical constitution of Persia is that Parliament governs the country and the Crown governs the state.

The lines nobody crosses are drawn around the throne. The press criticises ministries freely, prosecutes corruption, and reports the Majlis without interference. It does not criticise the Shah, does not investigate the royal finances, and does not report the succession as a political question. The restraint is partly legal and substantially habitual, and Persian journalists describe it with a precision that suggests they have thought about it a great deal.

The Crown

Ardeshir II has reigned since 1981 and is the fourth of his house. He inherited an authoritarian state at the height of the Afghan emergency, presided over its worst decade, and conceded the constitution in 1997, and Persian opinion has never settled how to weigh those facts against each other.

The succession is the country’s open question. Crown Prince Farhad is a reformer by every available indication: his associations, his appointments, his published views on the security files, and a habit of saying in public that 1997 was a beginning. The question is not what he wants but whether he will be permitted to have it, and the constituency that would prevent him is real, is inside the state, and has never been dislodged because 1997 dissolved an organisation without removing anybody from it.

The clergy

The Shia religious establishment in Persia is unusually independent of the state, because it is financially independent of it.

It holds its own endowments, funds itself from the religious taxes its followers pay directly to the jurists they choose to follow, trains its own scholars in its own seminaries, and administers personal-status law in its own courts. No Persian government has ever controlled it and every Persian government has had to arrive at terms with it.

The terms are the accommodation, and the accommodation is why the monarchy survived. The clergy keeps its endowments, its courts, its seminaries and its schools; it does not seek office and does not contest the throne; and the state does not attempt to displace religion from Persian public life. The dynasty tested the arrangement once, in its first decades, with the antiquity campaign and a brief and bitterly resented dress prohibition, and drew back.

The consequence is the one that matters. In a country where the mosque had not been made the only shelter for opposition, opposition did not have to become religious to survive. It stayed constitutional, secular and parliamentary, and when it finally forced the Crown in 1996 it did so with the clergy’s signatures on the petition rather than at the clergy’s direction.

The establishment is divided between a quietist majority holding that clerical authority is spiritual and that government is nobody’s business, and an activist minority that has argued for a century that it should be. The activists have never carried the seminaries. That they have never had to be suppressed is why they have never won.

Parties and the Majlis

The party system runs on three broad traditions: a constitutional-liberal tradition descended from the movement of the 1940s and from the petition; a conservative and monarchist tradition strongest in the provinces and among the older commercial classes; and a provincial and minority bloc that holds the balance more often than its numbers suggest.

There is no religious party of consequence, which is the single most surprising thing about Persian politics to an outside observer, and the reason is the accommodation. A clergy that holds its position by staying out of government has no interest in a party that would drag it in.

Minorities, language and the provinces

Persia is a state that calls itself Persian and governs a population that is substantially not.

Azerbaijanis are the largest minority and are not a minority in the usual sense: they are heavily represented in the state, the army, the bazaar and the throne’s own connections, and the Azerbaijani question is about language and provincial standing rather than about exclusion. Kurds, Baluch, Arabs of the south-west, Turkmen, Armenians and Assyrians make up the rest.

Language and provincial rights were won in the 1940s and have held, unevenly. Education and publication in the minority languages are lawful and funded, provincial assemblies exist with defined competences, and the practice is generous in Tabriz, adequate in Kurdistan and thin in Baluchistan, which is the poorest region and the least attended to.

The state handles all of it as a security question, and the reason is the northern occupation. A separatist administration stood up under Russian protection within living memory, and a Persian security establishment that remembers 1946 treats a language demand and a border problem as the same file. The minorities’ own position is that they were the ones who were occupied, that they took the case to the League and won it alongside everybody else, and that being permanently suspected for it is the country’s oldest injustice.

The Realm

The relationship with the United Kingdom of America is the largest external fact in Persian life, and it has its own section because the Realm’s conduct is part of the record and folding it into foreign relations would let it pass as ordinary diplomacy.

What the relationship is made of

It rests on four things and they are not equal.

The border. Persia holds a long frontier with the Russian Republic and the listening posts along it, and has done since the Realm’s interest in such things began. This is the load-bearing element and every other part of the relationship is arranged around it.

Oil, and more importantly the security of its export, and the strait at the mouth of the Gulf through which it leaves.

Arms, sold on a very large scale over sixty years, which built a Persian navy and air force of real capability and produced a defence relationship that both governments describe as a partnership and that the balance of payments describes as a market.

And money. Persia’s sovereign fund is placed largely in American markets. The Realm’s authoritarian friend is also one of its creditors, an inversion neither government finds it useful to discuss.

The restraint at the strait

Persia has never seriously threatened to close the strait, and it is the largest thing it has ever given the Realm.

It has had the capacity for fifty years and the provocations have not been few. That the possibility is priced permanently into the world’s shipping and insurance markets without ever having been tested is a fact about Persian statecraft, and Persian diplomats raise it, in private, whenever the Realm’s enthusiasm for the relationship appears to be flagging.

What the Realm knew

The Realm knew what the Nezarat was, and the article states this in the plainest available terms.

The Realm’s own diplomatic reporting from Tehran across the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s described the detentions, the interrogation centres and the torture accurately, in detail, and repeatedly. The reporting was competent. It was read. It was filed, because the border mattered more.

Arms sold to Persia for the defence of that border were used internally, which was foreseeable, was foreseen, and appears in the same reporting. The Jimmy Carter ministry, which had made human rights the organising principle of its foreign policy, maintained ordinary relations with the Persian monarchy throughout and could not plausibly claim that its standard applied here, and the Register’s article on Carter says so.

The Realm’s public criticism of Persian conduct began after the cold war cooled, which dates its conscience precisely. Persia liberalised in 1997 under domestic pressure, in a decade when the Russian threat had receded and American tolerance had become conditional for the first time in forty years, and the sequence is not a coincidence and is not the same thing as the Realm having caused it.

Persian opinion is clear-eyed about all of this and is not especially bitter. The settled Persian view is that the Realm acted in the Realm’s interest throughout, that it did so consistently, that in 1953 this saved the country and in 1975 it did not, and that a great power which is reliably self-interested is easier to deal with than one that is intermittently moral. Persian diplomats say this pleasantly, and it is not a compliment.

Foreign relations

Arabia

The Kingdom of Arabia is Persia’s largest neighbour and the relationship is partnership and rivalry in permanent alternation.

They cooperate because the Gulf requires it: shipping lanes, energy grids, environmental protection of a shallow and heavily used sea, and commerce that neither can conduct without the other. They mistrust each other over four things: the water itself, and whose it is; the Shia populations of Arabia’s Gulf region and Persian claims to speak for them; islands and maritime boundaries; and oil pricing.

The rivalry is real, is old, and is conducted by states, which is the whole difference between this and the alternative. Both crowns are answerable, both have standing armies and foreign ministries and something to lose, and neither has ever found it useful to fight the other through people who cannot be called off. There are no proxy militias in this rivalry. There are naval deployments, subsidies, conferences, broadcasting and a great deal of lawyering about islands.

Arabia refuses to treat the Gulf as the property of either shore, and Persia’s naval expansion and its support for coastal Shia communities are what Arabia points at when explaining why. Persia’s clients are in fact small and coastal, and the anxiety is out of proportion to them, which Persian diplomats observe and Arabian ones do not accept.

The name of the Gulf

Persia calls it the Persian Gulf. Arabia does not. Both usages appear in shipping registers, conference programmes and international documents, sometimes in the same sentence by way of a neutral formula that neither population uses in speech.

The Register uses the Gulf where it can and the Persian Gulf where precision requires it, and records that this is a choice rather than a neutrality.

Russia

The Russian Republic is the organising fact of Persian foreign policy and has been for two centuries.

It is the neighbour that occupied the northern provinces within living memory and had to be argued out through the League; the power that invaded Afghanistan on Persia’s eastern frontier; and the state whose long border Persia’s whole alignment exists to hold. Relations are correct, commercial and permanently watchful. Persia sells it nothing strategic, buys nothing from it that matters, and speaks to it constantly.

Elsewhere

Persia is not in the Atlantic Treaty Organization, whose membership test is Atlantic geography and willingness, and Persia has neither. The relationship with the Realm is bilateral and deep, and Persia has never seriously sought accession, understanding that a test it cannot meet is not a rebuff.

Persia has no nuclear weapons and accepted a guarantee instead, and that exchange is what holds the alignment together. It possesses a substantial civil programme, has been transparent about it beyond its treaty obligations for thirty years, and treats the transparency as a standing demonstration that the guarantee is worth what it cost.

It is a member of the League of Nations, took its northern case there in 1946 and won, and has been a consistent institutionalist ever since for reasons that are historical rather than idealistic.

Economy

Structure

Persia is genuinely wealthy per head by regional standards, which distinguishes it from most large oil states, and the reason is that the fund was managed well and the population is not enormous relative to the reserves.

Oil and gas are the foundation, and the gas reserve may be the larger of the two. The National Persian Oil Company owns the resource outright, operates it, and is the state’s principal instrument as well as its principal revenue, which is a concentration of function that Persian economists have warned about for fifty years.

The sovereign fund holds the surplus and is placed largely in American markets. It is professionally run, has been insulated from ordinary political raiding by statute since the 1970s, and is the reason Persia entered the present century without the debt that comparable producers carry.

Beyond hydrocarbons the economy runs on manufacturing built under state direction in vehicles, steel and petrochemicals, of which some is competitive and much is not; on agriculture, carpets and the old export trades, constrained now by the water; and on transit, Persia being the land bridge between the Gulf, Russia and Central Asia, which is a position it has monetised less effectively than its geography would allow.

Pressures

The three standing problems are the water, the concentration of everything in Tehran, and an educated young population that the state sector cannot absorb and the private sector has not been permitted to grow fast enough to employ.

Society

Population and education

Approximately ninety-two million people, urbanised, young by European standards and ageing rapidly, and highly educated.

Mass literacy and a large university system are the monarchy’s genuine achievement and the article says so without hedging. The programme began under the dynasty’s founder, was pursued consistently by every government of the long emergency, and took a country that was substantially illiterate in 1925 to near-universal literacy and one of the largest tertiary sectors in the region.

This complicates the verdict and is supposed to. The same state that ran the Nezarat built the universities whose teachers signed the petition that ended it, and Persian historians have been arguing about the relationship between those two facts since 1997.

Women

Persian women hold full civil and political rights, and they were won by the constitutional movement rather than granted by the Crown.

The vote and full civil capacity came in the 1940s, from a parliamentary movement and over clerical objection, and the state’s official histories have preferred to present them as a royal gift. Persian women’s organisations have corrected the record continuously for eighty years and the correction is now generally accepted in scholarship and generally absent from ceremony.

Family law remains the most contested field, administered in religious courts under the accommodation, and reformed by statute in stages that each required a parliamentary fight. Educational attainment among women exceeds men’s at university level and has for two decades.

Dress

There is no dress law in either direction, and the Register notes how unusual that is.

Persia neither compels religious dress nor prohibits it. The dynasty’s founder attempted a prohibition in his first decade, it was bitterly resented, it was the sharpest crisis in the state’s relations with the clergy, and it was abandoned. No government since has legislated on the question in either direction, and the settled Persian position, held across the political spectrum, is that a state which tells women what to wear has already conceded that it may.

Religion and the Baháʼí

Twelver Shia Islam is the religion of the great majority and the established faith of the state. Recognised minorities, the Christians of the Armenian and Assyrian churches, the Jews and the Zoroastrians, hold constitutional protection, reserved representation and their own personal-status jurisdiction.

The Baháʼí hold none of it, and this is the failing the state has least defended and least remedied. Excluded from the constitutional guarantees on the argument that theirs is not a religion at all, they were dismissed from public employment, denied university places, had property seized, and were subject to mob violence the authorities declined to prevent. The position has been softened since 1997 and has not been reversed. They remain unrecognised, the exclusion remains lawful, and no Persian government has been willing to spend the clerical goodwill that changing it would cost.

The diaspora

Persians abroad are largely the product of scholarships rather than of catastrophe, which distinguishes the community from most large diasporas and shapes its politics.

The state sent students abroad in very large numbers from the 1950s onward, chiefly to the United Kingdom of America, on the reasoning that a country modernising at speed needed engineers and physicians faster than it could train them. A substantial proportion never came home. They were joined by successive waves of political exiles after each tightening, and by Baháʼí and others whose position had narrowed, so that the community abroad is a mixture of the state’s own alumni and the people the state drove out.

The largest concentration is in Los Angeles, whose Persian community is among the city’s most established. Its politics are correspondingly divided: a wealthy professional stratum with warm ties to Tehran, and an exile stratum that has been demanding the security files be opened since before the petition.

Culture

The poetry

Persian poetry is the country’s deepest continuity and is older than any dynasty that has governed here.

Hafez, Saadi, Ferdowsi, Rumi and Khayyam are not a school syllabus. They are a popular possession, recited from memory by people with no formal education, quoted in ordinary argument, consulted for divination, and printed in editions that sell in numbers no living writer approaches. People gather at the tombs, at Shiraz for Hafez and Saadi and at Tus for Ferdowsi, and they gather in ordinary clothes on ordinary evenings.

It has also been the country’s political cover for a thousand years. A tradition in which the beloved may be God or a person or a king, and in which the wine is real or figurative according to who is asking, is a tradition built for saying things a state would not permit plainly. Persians under every regime including this one have said what they meant in the fourteenth century’s words, and the practice was never more useful than between 1954 and 1997.

Antiquity

The pre-Islamic past is a genuine popular inheritance and was a dynastic embarrassment, and the two facts sit together.

Persepolis, Cyrus, the Achaemenids and the Sasanians belong to Persians and are visited, taught and loved. The dynasty’s attempt to annex them to a soldier’s throne is remembered as overreach, the clergy resented the displacement of Islam it implied, and the educated public found the pageantry excessive at the time and finds the photographs funny now.

Cinema

Persian cinema is admired internationally and grew under censorship, which is where such cinemas usually come from.

Denied the political subject directly, it developed obliquely: children, villages, long takes, non-professional actors, domestic interiors in which something else is being discussed. The style was a response to a constraint and outlived it, and the generation working since 1997 has had to decide what to do with a freedom the form was not designed for.

Everyday life

Daily life runs on family, on an elaborate courtesy that foreigners find bewildering and Persians navigate without thinking, on tea, on the mountains above Tehran, on the poetry, and on a national conversational habit of indirection that predates every regime that has made indirection necessary.

Symbols

The Lion and the Sun

The flag is three horizontal bands of green, white and red, with the Lion and Sun in gold on the white and a crown above it.

The device is far older than the dynasty that uses it, which is the whole of its significance and the reason the House of Sepahdar reached for it. The lion with the sword and the sun rising at its back appears on Persian coinage, tilework and banners for many centuries before any modern state existed, carries astrological and Islamic readings alongside the royal one, and belonged to the country long before it belonged to any throne.

The dynasty added the crown, and the addition is the argument in miniature. A device that had signified Persia was made to signify the monarchy of Persia, by a house that had been on the throne for a decade and needed the association more than the country did. The clergy disliked it for the same reason it disliked the rest of the antiquity campaign, the sun with a human face being difficult to reconcile with an aversion to images and the lion being royal rather than religious. The objection was registered, was not pressed to a crisis, and the accommodation held.

Nothing about the flag was changed in 1997, and the Register regards the omission as consistent with everything else about that settlement. A country that dissolved its security service without dismissing anybody was unlikely to redesign its flag, and the constitutional movement had never asked it to. The petition of the Six Hundred did not mention the crown.

Persians distinguish, in ordinary speech, between the Lion and Sun as a national emblem and the crown above it as a dynastic one, and the distinction does a good deal of quiet work. It is what allows a republican to salute the flag, and it is why every proposal to remove the crown has been made by people who wished to keep the rest.

Nowruz and the calendar

Nowruz, the spring new year at the equinox, is the national festival, is pre-Islamic, is observed by everybody without regard to religion, and is entirely uncontroversial. The civil calendar is solar with the old Persian month names and is likewise uncontested.

Only the attempt to change the era itself failed. The dynasty’s replacement of the Islamic reckoning with a count from the Achaemenids lasted a few years and was withdrawn amid general derision, and it is remembered as the perfect illustration of the antiquity campaign: a real inheritance, reached for clumsily by people who did not need it.

Assessment

Persia is the monarchy that survived because nobody could call it foreign, and was therefore never removed when it should have been.

That is the Register’s judgement and both halves of it are meant.

The first half is the country’s escape. A dynasty that had been restored by outsiders would have carried the stain permanently, and every opposition to it would have had the argument that removing it was the completion of independence rather than a change of government. Persia was spared that in 1954, not by its own virtue but because a distant power calculated that a covert removal would be discovered and would deliver the country to Russia within a decade. The throne kept its legitimacy by an accident of somebody else’s arithmetic.

What followed was that the constitutional tradition never had to become a revolutionary one. There was no rupture, no year zero, no exile of the entire educated class, no war of eight years, and no theocracy. Persia is a semi-constitutional monarchy with a real parliament, a real press, near-universal literacy, one of the largest university systems in the region, women with full civil and political rights and no law telling them what to wear, an accommodated clergy that has never governed, and a sovereign fund that makes it a creditor rather than a debtor. Set beside what a country in its position could have become, this is an enormous achievement and the article will not pretend otherwise.

The second half is the price, and it was paid by people who are still alive.

Forty-three years of emergency, thousands of political prisoners, torture conducted as routine, executions after closed trials, a religious minority stripped of protection on the argument that it was not a religion, a land reform that broke the peasantry it was advertised to free and emptied the countryside into a capital that could not hold it, and aquifers drained by a state that had the competence to know better and preferred the harvest.

And no reckoning. The petition of 1996 asked for the constitution and got it. Nobody asked for the files, and nobody has opened them. Nobody has been tried. The Nezarat was dissolved on paper and its officers were transferred, pensioned or promoted, and the country still calls the successor body by the old name, which is the most honest thing anybody in Persia says about 1997.

The reason there has been no reckoning is the same reason there was no catastrophe, and this is the article’s central point. In a country where a regime falls, the new regime can try the old one, and Persia has never had a new regime. The institution that ran the Nezarat is the institution that dissolved it, and it is still on the throne. Ardeshir II presided over the worst decade of the emergency and conceded the constitution that ended it, and Persia has spent thirty years unable to decide what to do with a man who is both of those things, because he is still there and the question is not academic.

The Realm’s part in this is not incidental and belongs in the verdict. The Realm’s diplomats reported the torture accurately for three decades and the reports were filed, because Persia holds the Russian border and the border mattered more. The arms were sold knowing what they were for. The human-rights ministry of the 1970s maintained ordinary relations throughout and could not claim its standard applied. The Realm’s criticism began when the Russian threat receded, which dates its conscience to the year and is the plainest available statement of what the Realm’s principles were worth when they cost something.

Persia’s own view of that is the sharpest thing in this article and it is not bitter. The settled Persian position is that the Realm behaved in the Realm’s interest, consistently, for eighty years; that in 1954 this saved the country and afterwards it did not; and that a great power which is reliably self-interested is easier to deal with than one that is intermittently moral. Persian diplomats say this pleasantly. It is not a compliment and it is not wrong.

The open question is the succession. Crown Prince Farhad is a reformer by every indication available, and the constituency that would prevent him is inside the state and was never removed, because 1997 dissolved an organisation without dismissing anybody. Whether the heir will be permitted to be what he appears to be is the thing Persians actually discuss, in the indirect register the country has used for a thousand years, and the Register has no view about how it ends.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Kingdom of Arabia, partner and counterweight across the Gulf
• The Russian Republic, which occupied the north and invaded the eastern neighbour
• The United Kingdom of America, whose refusal in 1954 saved the monarchy and whose reports were filed for thirty years afterwards
• Jimmy Carter, whose human-rights standard could not be claimed to apply here
• Los Angeles, which holds the largest Persian community abroad
• League of Nations, through which the northern occupation was argued out in 1946
• Republic of Egypt and the Sudan, the other great state of the region and the other one that kept its own resource
• Atlantic Treaty Organization, which Persia cannot join and has not asked to

Categories

Nations of the World · The Middle East · Monarchies · The Gulf · Twentieth Century