Man, can we hold a grudge.
We’ve been in a cold war with
Iran for my entire adult life – since the American embassy was seized during
the Iranian Revolution in 1979, my senior year of college. That’s over 35 years now, coming up on as
long as we were in a Cold War with the Soviet Union. It hasn’t occupied central stage in our
consciousness the whole time like the
conflict with the Russians did, but it’s never eased.
But even then, even with a
history degree, I didn’t fully appreciate the backstory on Iran, or Persia.
Persia is one of the great civilizations in world history. The modern Iranians have a cohesive ethnic identity and a language, Farsi, which is at least as identifiable to its 2500-year-old predecessors as modern English is to Chaucer. Persia had a religion – Zoroastrianism – that I’m going to get back to in a bit here. They had cats and rugs. The Western world would probably be entirely different if the Greeks had not turned the Persians back at famous battles like Marathon and Thermopylae in the 5th century BC.
In fact, Persia is the
dividing line between what we consider the Western World and the Eastern
World. More precisely, I suppose, that
dividing line was the Fertile Crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in
modern Iraq. Our most ancient oral
literary and religious traditions date to Abraham, who came west from Ur of the
Chaldees in the Fertile Crescent about 2000 BC and settled in Canaa. At the same time, others carried the first
trappings of civilization – agriculture
and the Code of Hammarabi, among others – a few hundred miles west of Ur. Those were the Persians.
While the Persians were settling in modern-day Iran and the descendants of Abraham were migrating to Egypt and back, in Mesopotamia the city of Babylon emerged as the cultural center of the Fertile Crescent. For 1500
years, though, Babylon was ruled by Assyrians, from the west. The Assyrians also battled with the ancient
Hebrews, but it wasn’t until a resurgent Babylonian empire conquered the Assyrians and kept going, that ancient Israel actually fell, resulting in the famous Babylonian captivity of the
Hebrews under Nebuchadneezer.
The Babylonian captivity
didn’t end until this Babylon was conquered by the
Persians. It was the Persians, under
Cyrus, who allowed the Hebrews to return to Israel. But it was at this time that our Bible first
began to be put into writing; and the robust religions of Christianity and
Islam that grew out of the Hebrew Bible and religion were deeply affected by
the good-vs.-evil mentality of Persian Zoroastrianism.
Persia (as well as Israel and
everything else in the modern middle-East) was then conquered by the Macedonian
Greeks and then the Romans, but Farsi and Zoroastrianism continued to flourish
until 700 BC. The Romans, of course, eventually destroyed
Jerusalem and dispersed the troublesome Hebrews, and later adopted Christianity
as their state religion. They never
really stamped out local religions or ethnicities, though.
It wasn’t until Mohammedism,
or Islam, took root among the nomadic Arabs to the south of ancient Mesopotamia, that
the middle east became predominately “Muslim.”
And here is where it gets interesting.
For all the Western rhetoric about persecution and forced conversion,
the Islamic Arabs allowed Christian and Jewish enclaves to survive throughout
their empire, because they were “people of the book.” That’s one of the reasons the current ISIS
is so problematic – they are killing
and destroying 2000-year-old Christian communities – communities that “somehow”
survived Mohammed and Saracen and the Seljuk Turks and Saddam Hussein. The Arabic Muslim world has long had a
practice of exacting a “tax” from the Christians and Jews in their states; but
it started out as a means of having them pay for a government in which they
were not allowed to participate. Sort
of like the British view of the American colonies in the years before the
American Revolution. It’s a bad policy that
cost the British their most lucrative colonies; but it’s a long way from
genocide.
The early Arabic Muslims had
no such teachings, however, about other religions; which is why in Persia,
Zoroastrianism did die out. It does seem
that in Persia and points east, the locals may have been converted to Islam at
the point of a sword.
Most of what we Westerners
now know about ancient Persian culture comes to us through Western filters,
such as Neitszche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Michael Crichton’s re-telling of the Beowulf legend, Eaters of the Dead, was conveyed through
the eyes of a Persian official who had been kidnapped by Vikings in 10th-century
Russia. Frank Miller’s bizarre version
of the Persians in the popular 300
graphic novels and films demonized them as the ultimate “others.”
Modern Iran dates from the
dissolution of the (Islamic, but Turkish) Ottoman Empire after World War
I. It was one of several proxy states
that the British and French created in their efforts to rebuild their own
empires; but this one had a cohesive identity and culture. Shah Reza tried to stay neutral in World War
II, but the British invaded supposedly to prevent Iran from tilting toward
Nazi Germany, and also to create a supply line to Russia. After the war, the British and Americans
replaced Shah Reza with his son, Reza Pahlavi, who was a more compliant ally in
their rivalry with their new adversary, the Soviet Union.
For 25 years the “new” Shah
of Iran was presented here as a progressive pro-Western ally, but he probably
never had the support of the Iranian people.
But the Iranian Revolution of the late 1970s didn’t become violently
anti-American until after Jimmy Carter reluctantly granted the deposed and
dying Shah sanctuary on medical grounds. Their government allowed radical groups to
seize our embassy; we imposed sanctions and armed Iraq in a war against them,
and we’ve been at odds ever since.
And frankly, there isn’t a
good reason for Iran and Israel to be mortal enemies, beyond the fact that
Islam became a uniting force for the Shah’s oppressed opponents. The
Arab world has always had reasons, real and imagined, to resent the creation of
modern Israel in their midst, but strategically Israel doesn’t affect Iran
except as a foothold for what they understandably see as Western
imperialism. They’ve not helped themselves by meddling in
the affairs of Arab states and arming Hezbollah in Lebanon, but they are hardly
the only guilty party in the region.
Iran’s apocalyptic rhetoric
is frightening and not helpful toward achieving peace. But we don’t give them the benefit of the
doubt that their leaders’ sabre-rattling is a matter of playing to their base
in the same way that the sabre-rattling of American Republicans is.
The Christian (and
post-Christian) West has strong cultural ties to Israel, and part of that is
still some reasonable guilt over complicity in a Western state’s near-genocide
of the Jewish people just 70 years
ago. But if you want to get cultural,
you can argue that there may have been no Bible and maybe no Judaism if the
Persians hadn’t rescued the Hebrews from the Babylonians 2500 years ago. And we could probably stand some
self-reflection over our role in Iran’s current isolation.
I think the nuclear
limitations treaty that the U.S., along with Germany and the U.N. Security
Council, is negotiating with Iran is worth seeing through on its own merits,
but also as a next step in re-establishing relations and providing Iran with a
path back into the community of nations.
