Bonus Episode: The History Of Iran With Bianca Nobilo
Piers Morgan introduces a special treat for Uncensored fans... an episode without him! Here's a bonus episode of History Uncensored with Bianca Nobilo, looking into the history of Iran. If you like this, please go and subscribe to History Uncensored! If you want to understand world history, regional, Middle Eastern politics, and our world's broader contest between democracy and autocracy, you have to understand Iran. It is one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations and the first ancient superpower, the Achaemenid Empire under Cyrus, a state that has been repeatedly conquered by Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, yet its strong national identity rooted in Persian history has never been erased. Bianca Nobilo talks us through the history of the country that the whole world now has its eyes on, to help us understand what led the events we see unfolding today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Life Before Modern Iran00:10:05
I have a real treat for our podcast subscribers and followers today.
It's a whole show without me.
Bianca Nobelo has been covering the Iran crisis expertly over on our new channel, History Uncensored.
I haven't heard a better breakdown anywhere of how Iran's past is shaping its deadly present.
So I wanted to share it with you today.
If you like it as much as I did, you know what to do.
Follow History Uncensored, wherever you're watching or listening to this.
If you want to understand world history, regional Middle Eastern politics, and our world's broader contest between democracy and autocracy, you have to understand Iran, because it's not a country that's peripheral to world order.
It is one of the pressure points.
Iran is the world's 17th largest country, but size specifically isn't what's made it matter over the march of time.
Iran's history and geography are what make it indelible.
Because Iran is one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations and the first ancient superpower, the Achaemenid Empire, under Cyrus.
A state that has been repeatedly conquered by Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, yet its strong national identity, rooted in Persian history, has never been erased.
Iran is a linchpin of the Middle East, sitting at the strategic crossroads of Arab, Turkish, Russian, and Indian worlds.
It touches three seas, the Caspian, the Persian Gulf, and the Sea of Oman.
It controls part of the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow maritime corridor through which roughly 20% of the world's oil passes.
Disruption there is not regional.
Global ripple effects are profound.
Iran itself also holds some of the world's largest energy reserves, among the top three for natural gas and among the top tier for proven oil, which makes it central to global energy security.
It's also the largest Shia Muslim majority state in the world.
Roughly 90% of its Muslim population adheres to Twelver Shiism.
More on that later.
And that sectarian identity is fundamental to global power dynamics in its rivalry with Sunni powers and its alliances across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.
Long before there was a country called Iran, long before there was Persia, there were people living on this plateau.
Gala Kurd Cave is the oldest archaeological site discovered in Iran.
In 2024, researchers found ancient human remains there, including a human deciduous tooth, a baby tooth, first upper molar, and they had come from the Middle Pleistocene.
That's a period ranging from 452,000 to 165,000 years ago.
And that discovery extended the accepted timeline of human settlement in the region by more than 300,000 years.
These discoveries happened just a few years ago, and the areas of excavation have been limited.
So it's likely just a fraction of what there is to discover, which could rewrite our whole collective human story.
The Iranian Central Plateau has served as a vital corridor for migration and interaction since the Pleistocene.
In fact, as you probably already know, it is now confirmed that humans and Neanderthals interbred.
And recent research shows that this precise region served as a critical crossroads for Neanderthals moving south and early humans migrating north.
So these mountains may well have been like a cross-species timber of their day.
More than 100,000 years ago, small groups sheltered in the caves in the Zagros Mountains, which run for 990 miles embracing western Iran.
People there hunted wild goats and deer, shaped flint tools and moved with the seasons.
For tens of thousands of years, life here was mobile and fragile.
The Ice Age started to recede about 19,000 years ago and something revolutionary happened.
People stopped moving around so much.
So by 8,000 years before the ministry of a man called Jesus cropped up in Galilee, farming villages there were established.
In the valleys of the Zagros Mountains in western Iran, communities began domesticating animals and cultivating grain.
So permanent houses replaced temporary shelters.
And a site called Ganjdara in western Iran, which translates as treasure valley, shows some of the earliest evidence of goat domestication anywhere on earth.
So the people here were not primitive stumbling into farming.
The Zagros people of the mountains were a genetically distinct group who it seems almost certainly independently invented agriculture and whose descendants would eventually spread farming eastward into Pakistan, India and beyond.
Agriculture had spread across much of this plateau.
Food surplus meant population growth, population growth meant complexity and complexity needs administration.
And administration, as we shall see, has a way of building empires.
Around 5,000 years ago, in the lowlands of what is now southwestern Iran, a civilization called Elam emerged.
Its capital was Susa, a city that would remain continuously inhabited for over 6,000 years, later serving as the winter capital of the Persian Empire.
And it still exists today, actually, under a different name, Shush.
Elam was not a marginal player.
At that time, it was one of the leading political forces of the ancient Near East.
It developed its own writing system, among the earliest on earth, and they didn't use it for poetry or religion, but for tracking grain, livestock, laborers, tribute.
Clay tablets excavated at Susa record a bureaucratic world that's already sophisticated enough to require paperwork.
But here's where it gets stranger.
So Elam actually developed two writing systems.
The first, Proto-Elamite, appears around 3100 BC, very close in timing to when the Sumerians were inventing cuneiform, the earliest known writing system.
And that was happening pretty much right next door.
Then, for reasons that nobody fully understands, proto-Elamite seems to have disappeared.
But 800 years later, a second system emerges, linear Elamite.
And then that vanished too, when urban centres across the Middle East collapsed around 1800 BC.
In 2015, a French archaeologist named François Desset gained access to a set of ancient silver beakers that were held in a private London collection.
And on the surface of these special beakers was the same message in both of those two scripts that I just mentioned.
So essentially a decoder ring for lost languages.
Dessette said that he was able to use this to crack the code and identify 96% of known linear Elamite symbols.
There's not unequivocal support for this, but leading scholars at Harvard and Chicago and Yena call it a major achievement.
What they found was surprising, that linear Elamite appears to be purely syllabic, so no pictures, making it potentially the oldest known writing system to work more like a modern alphabet, rather than logographic ones like hieroglyphs or Chinese.
So if correct, that could rewrite the history of writing itself.
But back from my linguistic diversion, so Susa was a bridge between east and west.
Artifacts found there show trade stretching as far as the Indus Valley.
We've got evidence of bracelets, carnelian bees and seals from what is now Pakistan and India.
This was the first Iranian society to enter written history.
But the plateau itself remained culturally diverse, villages, regional centres and shifting networks, rather than a single unified kingdom.
Around 1500 BC, new peoples began arriving on the Iranian plateau from the north and the east, and they called themselves Arya, meaning noble, the root of the word Iran itself.
And then, somewhere in this world, we don't know exactly when and we don't know exactly where, a priest had a vision.
His name was Zarathustra, known in the West by his Greek name Zoroaster, and he was a priest of the ancient Iranian religion, and he received a radical vision.
Because in this world of many gods, he declared that there was essentially one, Ahura Mazda, the wise lord.
He reframed the entire universe as a cosmic battlefield, truth and order, Asher, versus falsehood and chaos, or Druj, meaning the lie.
Scholars debate when he lived, and estimates range from 1500 BC to 600 BC, and there is no reliable biography, but we do have his hymns, the Gathas, which are composed in an ancient Iranian language and were passed down orally for centuries before anyone wrote them down, and they're among the oldest forms of religious poetry in the world.
So Zoroastrianism burst into coruscating relief, one of the world's oldest monotheistic traditions and the spiritual backbone of Iranian civilization.
At its center stood Ahura Mazda, associated with order and justice and light.
Humans, in their view, had free will.
Choices had consequences, and after death, the soul faced judgment.
Some scholars believe that its ideas about cosmic dualism, judgment after death, and a final reckoning between good and evil fed directly into Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The three great Abrahamic faiths may owe more to this Iranian prophet than history gives them credit for.
By the 9th century BC, two groups of these Iranian-speaking peoples, the Medes and the Persians, were growing in strength and number across the plateau.
The Medes built the first Iranian kingdom, controlling a vast territory from their capital, Ekbatana.
The Persians were, for a time, their subjects.
But by 550 BC, a Persian king, a towering figure of world history, would change everything.
His name was Cyrus.
He would become known as Cyrus the Great, and the title is warranted.
Cyrus was a Persian king who'd been living under Medean rule.
In 550 BC, he rose up against his Medean overlord, King Astyges, and overthrew him, absorbed his kingdom, and unified the Iranian plateau for the first time under a single Persian ruler.
Rise of the Persian Empire00:15:35
But he wasn't done.
He defeated Lydia, whose king, Croesus, was so wealthy that his name became a byword, permanently for riches, as rich as Croesus, and swept westward to the Aegean coast.
Then he turned east towards Babylon, the greatest, wealthiest, most storied city of the ancient world.
When Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BC, his army entered without a battle.
The Babylonian population had grown resentful of their own king, who had demoted the city's patron god, Marduk, and imposed forced labor.
So Cyrus presented himself as Marduk's chosen ruler, a liberator rather than a conqueror.
He restored temples.
He returned statues of gods that previous kings had seized.
He allowed deported peoples to go home, among them the Jews, exiled in Babylon for decades.
Cyrus allowed them to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple.
In the Hebrew Bible, I believe he's the only non-Jewish ruler called Messiah.
And there's a clay cylinder, the Cyrus Cylinder, which is now in the British Museum, that records his general policy of mercy in his own words.
I'll pop a link in the caption so that you can read it for yourself if you want.
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This was a new model of empire.
Powerful but also pragmatic.
At its height, the Achaemenid Persian Empire stretched from Central Asia to the Mediterranean, from Anatolia to Egypt, covering over 2 million square miles and governing an estimated 44% of the world's population, the largest empire the ancient world had yet seen.
Darius, the third Achaemenid king, came to power in 522 BC amid chaos, because after the death of Cambyses, who was the son and successor of Cyrus the Great, the empire began to fracture.
Cambyses had expanded Persian rule into Egypt, but he died suddenly while returning from campaign.
In his absence, a man claiming to be his brother Bardia seized the throne.
Darius, a distant relative from another branch of the royal house, overthrew him because he insisted that Bardia was an imposter.
Whether that was the truth or just carefully constructed propaganda, Darius did prevail.
He wasn't Cyrus' son, so he couldn't rely on that inherited glory.
And he decided to build his legitimacy in other ways.
He reorganised the empire into roughly 20 major provinces or satrapies, each governed by a satrap.
But no satrap ruled unchecked.
Military commanders and financial officers reported separately to the king.
Royal inspectors, the king's eyes and ears, would appear without warning.
So power was delegated, but it was never allowed to consolidate.
Darius standardized weights and measures.
He introduced gold coinage, the derrick.
He expanded the royal road, nearly 1,700 miles from Susa to Sardis, and relay couriers could cross it in just over a week.
I quote from Herodotus, who said, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness of night would stop them.
So it was an empire bound together by this very efficient administration.
And then there was the city of Persepolis, built on a vast stone terrace rising from the plain.
It wasn't a city in the ordinary sense, but it was a stage for empire.
Monumental staircases carried visitors upward between walls carved with delegations across the known world.
Tall fluted columns topped with bulls supported by cedar roofs imported from Lebanon, polished stone reliefs that caught the light of the Iranian plateau.
It was theatre, political theatre in stone, an empire made visible.
That empire also clashed with the Greek city-states.
Persian forces were defeated at Marathon in 490 BC.
Darius' son Xerxes returned burning Athens before being driven back at Salamis and Plataea.
In Western memory, these battles became this story of freedom defeating tyranny.
But from a Persian perspective, it was more like a border skirmish on the edge of an empire that stretched all the way to India.
It's interesting, isn't it?
In 334 BC, a young king looked at the largest empire on earth and decided he wanted it.
His name was Alexander of Macedon, another known as the Great.
Heavy times with all the greats, Darius, Cyrus, Alexander.
And Alexander invaded with an army of over 40,000 men.
Decisive battles shattered the Persian army and he pursued the Achaemenid king across the plateau.
By 330 BC, he burned Persepolis, reportedly in revenge for the burning of Athens a century and a half earlier.
The dynasty was over.
But Persia, Phoenix-like, lived on.
Alexander adopted Persian court dress, he married a Bactrian princess, and he tried, with limited success, to fuse Macedonian and Persian elites into kind of a single ruling class.
When he died in Babylon in 323 BC without an obvious heir, his generals then divided the empire.
Iran passed to the Seleucids, Greek rulers who never fully controlled the Iranian interior.
And they wouldn't hold it for long either, because around 247 BC, an Iranian dynasty from the northeast, the Parthians, began pushing back.
And over the following century, they expelled the Seleucids and reclaimed the plateau.
Their new adversary was Rome.
But Iran had endured its first great conquest.
However, it would not be the last.
In 224 AD, a regional ruler named Ardashir defeated the last Parthian king and founded a new dynasty, the Sasanians.
And they called their realm Eranshahr, the Empire of the Iranians.
And it wasn't just a regime change, it was a conscious revival of imperial Persian identity.
Zoroastrianism was elevated and institutionalized.
Royal authority and priestly power grew and became more tightly intertwined.
The empire looked west, as Persian empires always had, toward its great rival, Rome.
Under Ardashir's son, Shapur I, the rivalry exploded into spectacle.
In 260 AD, at the Battle of Edessa, Persian forces captured the Roman emperor Valerian, the only time a reigning Roman emperor was taken prisoner by a foreign power.
And you can imagine that the impact of this was seismic.
Rome's near divine ruler stood in Persian custody.
For four centuries, the Sasanian Empire and Rome, later Byzantium, fought across Mesopotamia in one of history's great superpower standoffs.
Then came overreach.
In the early 7th century, internal turmoil in Byzantium gave the Sasanian king, Khosro II, an opening.
And what began as an intervention became conquest.
So Persian armies swept through Syria, Anatolia, and Egypt.
Jerusalem fell.
And for a brief moment there, it appeared that Persia had decisively won its centuries-long struggle with Rome.
But victory hollowed them out.
The war drained treasuries and exhausted armies on both sides.
The Byzantine emperor Heraclius reorganized and struck back, carrying the war deep into Persian territory.
The Persian king was overthrown and killed in 628.
Peace followed, but both empires were spent.
And into that exhaustion stepped a new force rising from Arabia, one that neither empire had prepared for.
In the early 7th century, in the city of Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula, a merchant named Muhammad, who Muslims revere as the final prophet of God, received a divine revelation.
He proclaimed a new faith, Islam, submission to one God.
By the time he died in 632 AD, he had united most of Arabia under its banner.
Within a decade of Muhammad's death, Arab armies carrying this new faith had exploded out of the peninsula in every direction.
In 637 AD, Arab Muslim armies met the Sasanian forces at the Battle of Qadisiyah, somewhere in modern-day Iraq.
The Persians had war elephants famously, and they had centuries of imperial experience, but they lost.
Within a decade, the Sasanian Empire was gone.
The last king fled east across his own country and was murdered by one of his own subjects in 651 AD.
And that detail tells us quite a lot about how hollow the empire had become.
But Iran didn't disappear.
The Arab conquerors needed administrators, scribes, engineers and tax collectors, and they found them in what's now Iran and they kept them.
Arabic became the language of religion and administration.
Zoroastrian elites lost political power.
But conversion to Islam was gradual.
It took centuries, not just years.
For generations, Iran, as we know it today, was religiously mixed.
Muslims, Zoroastrians, Christians, Jews living alongside one another.
What's striking is this, that Iran was one of the most sophisticated civilizations on earth at the time of that conquest.
And it didn't receive Islam passively.
It shaped it too, because Persian scholars, poets, and administrators poured into the new Islamic intellectual world and then helped build it, the Islamic Golden Age, from within.
By the 9th century, as the Abbasid Caliphate weakened at the edges, local Iranian dynasties began reasserting control.
The most important of these was probably the Samanids, because under them, the Persian language, now written in Arabic script, re-emerged as a living literary language, and this was the birth of New Persian, the language that modern Farsi is closely descended from.
And it was under the Samanids that a poet named Fadalsi, born around 940 near the city of Tus in northeastern Iran, began his 35 years writing a single epic poem, the Shanameh, the Book of Kings, around 60,000 verses composed by one man telling the story of Iran's mythical and historical kings from the creation of the world to the Arab conquest.
It's the longest epic poem, I think, ever written by a single author.
Crucially, Fadalsi wrote it mostly without Arabic vocabulary, deliberately, as a conscious act of linguistic resistance, because Iran had become Muslim, but it hadn't stopped being Persian.
In the 11th century, new masters rode in from the Central Asian steppe, the Seljuk Turks.
Nomadic warriors, newly converted to Sunni Islam, swept across Iran and into the heart of the Islamic world.
But even under the Seljuks, Persian became the language of administration, court poetry, political thought.
Arabic remained the language of theology and law.
Interestingly, the empire's great architect was not a sultan, but a Persian scholar, Nizam al-Mulk.
He organised the state and founded madrassas, which would train Sunni scholars and shape Islamic education for generations.
Intellectual brilliance was really flourishing at this time.
Ibn Sina, who was known in the West as Avicina, had been born near Bukhara.
He was a prodigy by his own telling.
He mastered philosophy as a teenager, he turned to medicine before he was 20, and he wrote by some estimates over 450 works covering maths, philosophy, astronomy, geology, and music.
His million-word medical encyclopedia remained the standard medical textbook in European universities until the mid-17th century.
Even Dante placed him in limbo alongside Socrates and Aristotle because he was a pagan whose virtue was considered too great to be damned.
Then, in 1219, another of history's most famous men enters the fray.
They're all here in this region.
The armies of Genghis Khan came galloping.
Mongol hordes obliterated cities.
Persian chroniclers describe massacres in vivid detail.
Irrigation systems collapsed, so agricultural production fell.
And in parts of eastern Iran in particular, urban life shrank dramatically.
And this shock was civilisational.
However, that same pattern that I've been describing reasserted itself.
The Mongol rulers in Iran found themselves governing one of the most sophisticated bureaucratic cultures on earth.
They adopted Persian administrators.
They sponsored historians and architects.
In 1295, ruler Ghazan converted to Islam and the court increasingly patronised Persian scholarship too.
This stability did not last and it splintered into competing regional dynasties in the mid-14th century.
Cities were rising and falling with dizzying speed.
Into this fractured landscape rode the Turkish warlord Timur, known in the West as Tamerlane.
His armies moved with devastating speed across Iran, Iraq, Syria, Anatolia.
Cities that resisted were made examples of, and we have these contemporary sources that describe towers of skulls of the vanquished.
Whether they are literal or rhetorical, terror was deliberate policy.
However, Tamerlane also patronised art and architecture.
And like the Mongols before him, he ruled both through destruction and also cultural appropriation.
And when he died in 1405, the empire split almost immediately.
But beneath all of this instability, a deeper transformation had settled, that Iran was now firmly part of the Islamic world.
But what had not yet solidified was its sectarian identity.
And that would change decisively in the 16th century.
In 1501, a teenager warlord named Ismail rode into Tabriz and declared himself Shah of Iran.
He was 14 or 15 years old, a charismatic leader of a militant Sufi order.
He commanded fierce loyalty from his followers, known as Qizilbash, who would wear red headgear with 12 folds, symbolising the 12 Shia Imams.
Some of his followers actually believed that Ismail himself was divine.
He proclaimed Twelver Shiism, the official religion of the state.
So 12 Ashiism teaches that leadership of the Muslim community rightfully passed through Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, and then through a line of 12 divinely guided imams.
Shah Ismail and Shia Power00:11:04
And the 12th Iman, according to belief, went into what they call occultation, which means that he didn't die.
He was hidden by God and will one day return to establish justice.
In 1501, Iran was largely Sunni.
So this Safavid imposition of 12 Ashiism was a top-down revolution.
Sunni scholars were removed, sometimes violently, and Shia clerics were imported from Arab lands because what the country we now call Iran lacked sufficient Twelver scholars of its own.
So why did Ismail do it?
Part conviction, but also geopolitics, because Iran was encircled by Sunni powers.
Sound familiar.
And most dangerously was the Ottoman Empire to the west.
So by making Iran explicitly Shia, Ismail drew a sharp sectarian boundary that distinguished his realm from Ottoman claims to Sunni leadership.
So the Sunni-Shia divide had existed for centuries, but under the Safavids it became territorial, state-backed and entrenched.
A century later, Abbas the Great consolidated this transformation.
Taking power in 1588, he built a standing army loyal to the crown, strengthened the bureaucracy, and turned Isfahan into one of the architectural jewels of the early modern world.
So by the time the Safavid dynasty fell in 1736, Iran had a distinct religious identity.
The Safavids were followed by instability.
Short dynasties, Afghan invasions, strong men.
By the late 18th century, the Ghajar dynasty had established control.
But the world had changed a lot.
This was not an age of expansion.
For Iran, it was an age of contraction.
In the early 19th century, Iran had fought two disastrous wars with Imperial Russia and lost.
And under the treaties of Gulistan, a Turkmenchai, Iran ceded vast territories in the Caucasus, land that today is Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.
So the empire began to shrink.
Britain and Russia were competing for influence over Iran in this contest, flippantly known as the Great Game, each seeking to control the routes to India and Central Asia.
So Iran was technically independent, but in practice, it was being treated as a prize being divided between empires.
The combination of military defeat, territorial loss, and foreign manipulation produced something new, Iranian nationalism.
In 1906, popular protests with merchants, clerics, intellectuals all acting together forced the Qajar Shah to accept a constitution and create a parliament.
It was one of the first constitutional revolutions in the Middle East, and it happened in Iran.
Then, in 1908, oil was discovered.
The discovery of oil reserves in Iran intensified its strategic importance and made it even more vulnerable to foreign interference.
Amidst the vacuum of Qajar weakness and meddling from outside powers, Reza Khan, a military officer in the Persian Cossack Brigade, first seized power in Iran in a 1921 coup.
In 1925, after parliament deposed the Qajar dynasty, he crowned himself Reza Shah Pahlavi.
And he modernised Iran with authoritarian efficiency.
Railways, a centralised army, secular courts, state schools, universities.
In 1936, he banned the veil in public.
He required European dress for men.
He sought to reduce clerical influence and build a strong centralised state.
He also suppressed dissent and pursued an increasingly independent foreign policy.
In the 1930s, seeking to counterbalance British and Soviet influence, he deepened economic ties with Germany, which became Iran's largest trading partner.
When World War II broke out, Britain and the Soviet Union, fearing German influence and needing to secure supply routes, invaded Iran in 1941.
Reza Shah was forced to abdicate, and his 21-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Shah, took the throne under Allied occupation.
Iran remained strategically vital because of oil.
The British government held a controlling stake in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which would later become BP.
And many Iranians were angry that their national resources were being exploited under unequal terms.
In 1951, Mohammad Mossadegh, a nationalist politician backed by parliament, became prime minister and nationalised Iran's oil industry.
He was enormously popular domestically and became an anti-imperialist icon.
Britain responded with a global boycott.
In 1953, in coordination with Iranian royalists and other internal actors, the CIA and MI6 organised Operation Ajax, which was a coup that removed Mossadegh.
The Shah, who had briefly fled, returned.
A new oil consortium was established, with Western companies retaining significant influence.
For many Iranians, the 1953 events became a defining memory and evidence that foreign powers would intervene to protect strategic interests over Iranian sovereignty.
And that's a memory that would later fuel revolutionary rhetoric.
The Shah ruled for another 26 years.
He launched the White Revolution in 1963, land reform, women's suffrage, literacy campaigns, industrial expansion, oil revenues surged, and Iran appeared to be modernizing rapidly.
But political opposition was violently repressed by the Security Service.
Economic growth was uneven.
Rural populations were displaced.
The monarchy grew increasingly centralised and insulated from criticism.
So by the late 1970s, opposition was combining from unlikely quarters.
Secular nationalists, leftists, clerics, bazaar merchants, and segments of the urban poor.
Unified in ideology?
Definitely not, but they were unified in opposition.
In January 1979, Mohammad Reza Shah left Iran and he never returned.
In February 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Tehran from exile.
He was forced out in 1964 after denouncing the Shah's reforms and what he called Iran's subservience to the United States.
The monarchy was already collapsing, and what replaced it was unprecedented.
The new state was built on the guardianship of the jurists.
So Khomeini argued that in the absence of the hidden Imam, the 12th Imam of Twelver Shiism that's believed to be divinely concealed until his return, that political authority must rest with a senior Islamic scholar.
So ultimate sovereignty would not belong to the people, but to a cleric.
The Islamic Republic institutionalised that principle.
Elections were held for president, parliament and local councils, but all candidates were vetted in advance by the Guardian Council, half of whose members are directly appointed by the Supreme Leader, the Supreme Leader himself chosen by the Assembly of Experts, and the Supreme Leader commands the armed forces, controls the judiciary, can override the whole system, controls state media, appoints key officials.
No candidate opposed to the system could realistically compete.
Then, in September 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, calculating that this revolutionary turmoil and the purges of the Shah's officer corps had left the country vulnerable, which was logical, but he miscalculated.
The war lasted eight years.
It saw trench warfare reminiscent of World War I, missile exchanges between cities and the large-scale use of chemical weapons by Iraq.
Casualties ran into the hundreds of thousands on each side.
The conflict, though, reinforced the new regime.
Defending Iran became inseparable from defending the Islamic Republic.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which was formed in 1979 to protect the revolution, expanded dramatically during the war, evolving into a parallel military and political force that would become one of the most powerful institutions in the country.
In 1988, Iran accepted a ceasefire, and Khomeini described it as drinking a poison chalice.
Khomeini died in 1989.
His successor, Ali Khamenei, brutally enforced the theocratic system and became one of the longest-serving rulers in the world.
He was killed by US-Israeli airstrikes in 2026.
The tensions at the heart of the Islamic Republic have never been resolved.
A large, young, educated population, Iran has one of the highest literacy rates in the Middle East, repeatedly testing the system's limits.
The Green Movement protests of 2009 after a disputed presidential election, economic protests in 2017 and 2019, and in 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, Massa Amini, died in the custody of the morality police, and protests erupted across the country.
The slogan was women, life, freedom.
Each time, the pattern was protest, crackdown, and survival of the system.
In 2020, a US drone strike killed General Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, a powerful branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
And Soleimani was a key figure in building Iran's network of regional influence.
His death hardened regime resolve.
By 2025, Iran was enriching uranium to 60% purity, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is below the 90% required for a weapon, but close enough that theoretically that technical gap could have been closed quite quickly.
Since then, strikes have degraded Iran's nuclear facilities and capacity.
Once upon a time, the 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA, offered a framework, but the Trump administration withdrew in 2018.
Today, Iran sits at the center of a web that it has spent 40 years building.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah, created with Iranian support in the 1980s, is a powerful non-state military force in the Middle East.
In Iraq, Iranian-backed militias are embedded in the state.
In Syria, Iranian money and fighters helped keep Bashar al-Assad in power when he was on the verge of collapse for over a decade.
In Yemen, the Houthis, supplied and trained with Iranian help, control the country's north and have the capability to threaten Red Sea shipping lanes.
Iran doesn't micromanage these actors because it doesn't need to.
Shared interests, like opposition to the United States, opposition to Israel, protection of Shia communities, create a degree of strategic coherence without requiring direct command.
The result has been that a country under severe sanctions for decades, whose economy has contracted sharply, whose currency has lost catastrophic value, has nonetheless expanded its regional influence dramatically in the early 21st century.
Outlasting Three Millennia00:00:27
Iran has also become a litmus test for something larger, whether authoritarian religious governance can withstand sustained social pressure in an educated, metropolitan 21st century society.
3,000 years of civilization, conquered again and again, but never erased.
Iran has always found a way to outlast the forces trying to contain it.