Iran in World History

 a 2005 painting by the Tehran-based woman artist Shohreh Mehran, 
evokes the massive popularity among young Iranian women for cosmetic 
rhinoplasty. In Iran today, where dress codes have forced women to find creative 
ways of expressing stylishness, wearing a nose bandage suggestive of surgery 
is seen as a status symbol. 
Photo by Manya Saadi-nejad, reproduced with 
permission from Shohreh Mehran and MÉKIC Gallery, Montréal

---

Th e I s l a m ic R e p u b l ic o f I r a n
119
Under the populist and reactionary Ahmadinejad, the openness of 
the Khatami period steadily evaporated. Strict enforcement of women’s 
dress codes was resumed, newspapers were closed, arrests and execu-
tions increased, and the West was once again painted as an irremediable 
enemy. Western politicians and media returned the favor by demon-
izing Ahmadinejad, seizing on his penchant for making provocative 
statements and often exaggerating or distorting them. For example, it 
became widely reported that Ahmadinejad had called for Israel to be 
“wiped off the map” as if this were some new official policy, whereas 
in actuality he had simply repeated Khomeini’s prediction years before 
that one day “the Zionist regime will disappear from the pages of 
history.”
8
Ahmadinejad also alarmed and antagonized the West by ramping 
up Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, which raised the specter of an 
Israeli attack or even a US-led invasion. Few leaders in the West con-
sidered such actions to be desirable, particularly given the failures of 
US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, but hawkish elements in 
both Israel and the United States aggressively pushed for war.
Though broadly disliked by the end of his first term both in Iran 
and abroad, Ahmadinejad was re-elected in 2009 under conditions 
that were widely perceived to have been rigged. Many held that the 
actual winner had been Mir Hossein Musavi, a mild-mannered archi-
tect who seemed at times almost reluctantly thrust into the limelight by 
his enthusiastic followers. Millions of Iranians poured into the streets 
to protest the election results, generating an apparently spontaneous 
phenomenon that came to be known as the “Green Movement.”
The government responded with mass arrests of protesters and a 
wide range of known reformist figures suspected of sympathizing with 
them. Musavi and fellow candidate Mehdi Karrubi were placed under 
house arrest. A number of protesters were shot in the streets by security 
forces, as was an attractive young woman, Neda Agha Soltan, who was 
merely a bystander; her tragic death soon made her the poster girl for 
Green Movement supporters all over the world. Street protests contin-
ued to break out over the coming months, organized mainly through 
social media networks.
The government responded by busing militias of villagers into 
the cities and instructing them to attack the protesters, reportedly in 
exchange for kebabs and fruit juice. Thousands were arrested, and 
Karrubi used his website to bring to public attention the systematic 
rape of both male and female detainees in prison. According to one 
victim’s account, “they did to me an act that is denounced even by 

---

I r a n i n Wo r l d H i s t o r y
120
unbelievers and idol worshippers.”
9
(Responding to these allegations, 
then-president Mahmud Ahmadinejad admitted that rape and torture 
had occurred, but stated that they had somehow been carried out by 
enemy agents.) The Green Movement eventually disappeared from the 
streets, but its ideals continued to serve as a symbol of opposition and 
hope for change.
With these shaky beginnings, Ahmadinejad’s second term was 
characterized by even harsher domestic policies and still more aggres-
sive rhetoric toward the West. During this period, the Revolutionary 
Guards, with whom Ahmadinejad had close ties, bought up significant 
sectors of the Iranian economy, particularly in the oil industry and 
telecommunications. Iran’s nuclear program dominated international 
policy toward Iran, leading to increased economic sanctions against 
the country. Most Western governments continued to press for a dip-
lomatic solution to the impasse, but hawkish Israeli Prime Minister 
Binyamin Netanyahu, supported by right-wing elements within the US 
Congress, remained loudly adamant that military intervention was nec-
essary to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.
Iran’s international isolation and stifling social atmosphere gen-
erated a considerable amount of cynicism during the Ahmadinejad 
period, especially among the younger generation who tended to be 
over-educated and under-employed. Sexual license and drug abuse 
were increasingly visible as expressions of rebellion and despair. Air 
pollution in the cities—exacerbated by the proliferation of vehicles 
constrained by sanctions to use inferior grades of gasoline—reached 
dangerous proportions, resulting in thousands of premature deaths. 
Universities were subject to tighter controls, with ideologically suspect 
professors being forced into retirement and “Western” fields such as the 
humanities being cut from many programs.
Amid growing international tension surrounding the nuclear issue, 
the election of a comparatively moderate cleric, Scotland-educated 
Hassan Ruhani, to the presidency in August 2013 was greeted with a 
sigh of relief by many both inside and out of Iran. Ruhani immediately 
softened Iran’s position vis-à-vis the West, especially in regard to the 
country’s nuclear program, but as his term progressed Iranians saw 
little in the way of change when it came to social freedoms, economic 
improvements, or democratic reforms.
The various crises and challenges Iranians faced during the last 
quarter of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first spurred an 
unending stream of migrations to more stable countries, particularly in 
Western Europe, North America, and Australia. Prior to the Iranian 

---

Th e I s l a m ic R e p u b l ic o f I r a n
121
revolution in 1979, emigration from Iran had been minimal. The first 
Iranian expatriate communities in Europe and North America were 
established by individuals, usually from wealthy families, who went 
abroad to study and then stayed on, often taking Western wives.
The Iranian revolution, on the other hand, sparked a massive wave 
of out-migration, especially among the elite classes. Over a million 
ended up in southern California, which came to host the world’s larg-
est expatriate Iranian community. Others went to England, France, 
Germany, Canada, and Australia. In subsequent years large numbers 
of Iranians continued to leave their country, either for economic or 
political reasons or both. Most were highly educated professionals, 
representing a massive brain drain not seen since the sixteenth and sev-
enteenth centuries when droves of talented Iranians sought better lives 
in India.
As was the case then, in Western countries today Iranian migrants 
have a very high rate of professional success and social integration. In 
North America they are statistically the second most highly educated 
immigrant group, after Germans. They tend to be overwhelmingly sec-
ular, unlike immigrants from other Muslim countries—Iranians hav-
ing had perhaps too much of religion in public life, in contrast to other 
nationalities leaving home because they felt there wasn’t enough.
The Iranian world has never recovered from the fragmentation it 
experienced in the eighteenth century. Afghanistan has remained a 
separate nation ever since Ahmad Durrani’s declaration of indepen-
dence in 1747, with its own modern history distinct from Iran’s. The 
Tajiks living on the other side of the Oxus River to the north came to 
be part of Russian, then Soviet history, achieving statehood only in 
the late twentieth century. Kurds remain dispersed across Iran, Iraq, 
Turkey, Syria, and the Caucasus, their dream of an independent state 
still unrealized.
And yet, for many Persians, Afghans, Tajiks, Kurds, and others 
today—both at home and throughout the global diaspora—a strong 
emotive attachment to Iranian history and culture outweighs their for-
mal citizenship. One is as likely to hear passionate recitations of the