Iran

Iran, a mountainous, arid, and ethnically diverse country of southwestern Asia. The country maintains a rich and distinctive cultural and social continuity dating back to the Achaemenian period, which began in 550 bce. In recent decades it has become known for its unique brand of Islamic republic. Although the system of government was intended as a parliamentary democracy, persistent instability both at home and abroad have steered its slide into a more theocratic authoritarianism. In 2022 the state’s push to pacify economic unrest through repression prompted widespread and debilitating protests, which were catalyzed in part by the death of Jina Mahsa Amini while she was in custody for improper attire.

Geographically, much of Iran consists of a central desert plateau, which is ringed on all sides by lofty mountain ranges that afford access to the interior through high passes. Most of the population lives on the edges of this forbidding waterless waste. The capital is Tehrān, a sprawling jumbled metropolis at the southern foot of the Elburz Mountains. Famed for its handsome architecture and verdant gardens, the city fell somewhat into disrepair in the decades following the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, though efforts were later mounted to preserve historic buildings and expand the city’s network of parks. As with Tehrān, cities such as Eṣfahān and Shīrāz combine modern buildings with important landmarks from the past and serve as major centres of education, culture, and commerce.

The heart of the storied Persian empire of antiquity, Iran has long played an important role in the region as an imperial power and later—because of its strategic position and abundant natural resources, especially petroleum—as a factor in colonial and superpower rivalries. From the Achaemenian period the region that is now Iran—traditionally known as Persia—has been influenced by waves of indigenous and foreign conquerors and immigrants, including the Hellenistic Seleucids and native Parthians and Sasanids. Persia’s conquest by the Muslim Arabs in the 7th century ce was to leave the most lasting influence, however, as Iranian culture was all but completely subsumed under that of its conquerors.

An Iranian cultural renaissance in the late 8th century led to a reawakening of Persian literary culture, though the Persian language was now highly Arabized and in Arabic script, and native Persian Islamic dynasties began to appear with the rise of the Ṭāhirids in the early 9th century. The region fell under the sway of successive waves of Persian, Turkish, and Mongol conquerors until the rise of the Safavids, who introduced Twelver Shiʿism as the official creed, in the early 16th century. Over the following centuries, with the state-fostered rise of a Persian-based Shiʿi clergy, a synthesis was formed between Persian culture and Shiʿi Islam that marked each indelibly with the tincture of the other.

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With the fall of the Safavids in 1736, rule passed into the hands of several short-lived dynasties leading to the rise of the Qājār line in 1796. Qājār rule was marked by the growing influence of the European powers in Iran’s internal affairs, with its attendant economic and political difficulties, and by the growing power of the Shiʿi clergy in social and political issues.

The country’s difficulties led to the ascent in 1925 of the Pahlavi line, whose ill-planned efforts to modernize Iran led to widespread dissatisfaction and the dynasty’s subsequent overthrow in the revolution of 1979. This revolution brought a regime to power that uniquely combined elements of a parliamentary democracy with an Islamic theocracy run by the country’s clergy. The world’s sole Shiʿi state, Iran found itself almost immediately embroiled in a long-term war with neighbouring Iraq that left it economically and socially drained, and the Islamic republic’s alleged support for international terrorism left the country ostracized from the global community. Reformist elements rose within the government during the last decade of the 20th century, opposed both to the ongoing rule of conservative clergy and to Iran’s continued political and economic isolation from the international community. Their rise was reversed in the 21st century, however, owing to intervention from the conservative leadership and the greater penetration of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) throughout government and society.

Land

Iran is bounded to the north by Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkmenistan, and the Caspian Sea, to the east by Pakistan and Afghanistan, to the south by the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, and to the west by Turkey and Iraq. Iran also controls about a dozen islands in the Persian Gulf. About one-third of its 4,770-mile (7,680-km) boundary is seacoast.