Abbas Amanat: Iran Protests, Mahsa Amini, History, CIA & Nuclear Weapons
Guests: Abbas Amanat
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents16 chapters
§01Transcript · 00:00–11:46§02Transcript · 11:50–23:00§03Transcript · 23:05–34:57§04Transcript · 34:59–45:22§05Transcript · 45:27–55:28§06Transcript · 55:30–1:06:55§07Transcript · 1:06:58–1:18:35§08Transcript · 1:18:38–1:29:40§09Transcript · 1:29:46–1:41:14§10Transcript · 1:41:15–1:52:34§11Transcript · 1:52:37–2:04:33§12Transcript · 2:04:37–2:16:21§13Transcript · 2:16:23–2:28:10§14Transcript · 2:28:14–2:43:01§15Transcript · 2:43:04–2:55:28§16Transcript · 2:55:32–3:05:50§01Transcript · 00:00–11:46
This is not a nice Islamic fatherly regime.
Clear signs of fascism.
Clear signs of the state's control
and pay any price to stay in power.
- So even violence.
- Extreme violence.
- The following is a conversation with Abbas Aminat,
a historian at Yale University,
specializing in the modern history of Iran.
My love and my heart goes out to the Iranian people
in their current struggle for freedom.
I hope that this conversation helps folks who listen
understand the nature and the importance of this struggle.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Abbas Aminat.
Let's start with the current situation in Iran.
On September 16th, protests broke out in Tehran
and quickly spread over the death
of a 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.
Eyewitnesses saw her beaten to death
by the morality police.
This is a heavy topic, but it's a really important topic.
Can you explain what happened?
- The protests are now in their sixth week.
The death of that young woman, a Kurd,
who was visiting Tehran as a tourist,
sparked something very deep
that particularly concerned the younger generations.
That is what you would call the equivalent
of the Z generation in this country.
They call themselves Dahiy-e Hashdadi in Persian
because Iran follows the solar calendar of its own.
It's an ancient solar calendar.
And the time that they were born,
they were in the 1380s.
That's what they called themselves, Hashdadi.
'80s, Hashdad for the '80s.
Well, the circumstances that surrounds
the unfortunate death of this young,
beautiful Kurdish woman is really tragic.
She was arrested by what is referred to
as the morality police, morality patrol,
called the Gashd-e-Ershad,
a guidance police, that is.
Presumably, there were two women fully clad,
that is, officers serving on that force,
and two men.
And nobody exactly knows what had happened.
She had been beaten up,
and apparently there was no sign
of any wrongdoing on her side.
She was fully covered.
It seems that there was some altercation in the process.
And the outcome was that she was unconscious,
not necessarily when she was arrested,
but in the course of the detention,
when they take them to a center,
presumably to re-educate them.
And she apparently collapsed,
and maybe my sense is that she must have had
some kind of a problem because of the skull being broken
or something had happened.
And she died in the hospital the next day.
And that, through the social media,
was widely spread throughout Iran.
And almost the next day, surprisingly,
you could see this outburst of sympathy for her.
People are in the streets weeping
because she was seen as such an innocent young woman,
22 years old.
And the family, the mother and the father,
also mourning for her.
And being a Kurd visiting Tehran,
this all added up to really turn her
into some kind of a martyr of this cause.
And that's what it is.
And her picture,
graphics that were artistically produced
based on her portrait,
has now dominated basically as the symbol
of this protest movement.
And the protest movement goes on.
Everybody was thinking,
or at least the authorities were thinking,
that it's going to die out in a matter of a few days.
But it became more intense,
first in the streets of Tehran by young women,
mostly probably between, I would say, 17, 18, teenagers
to 22, 23, or thereabout,
and then to university campuses all around the country,
and then even to high schools.
And that also made it a very remarkable protest movement
because, first of all, it involves the youth
and not necessarily the older generations.
You see them around, but not as many.
Also, you see men and women together,
young girls and boys,
and they are adamant,
they are desperate in the sense of the tone of their protest,
and they are extremely courageous
because they stand against the security forces
that were immediately sent off to the streets,
and in full gear, that is.
- So what are the currents of pain, emotion?
What is this turmoil that rose to the surface
that resulted in these big protests?
What are the different feelings, ideas
that came to the surface here
that resulted in such quick scaling of this protest?
- Well, if you listen to the main slogan,
which is the message of this movement,
it's called Women, Life, Freedom.
Zan, Zendegi, Azadi,
which is a translation of actually the Kurdish equivalent,
which is close to Persian being in the European language,
and it's apparently initiated first
in the Syrian Kurdistan,
where they were fighting against the Islamic Daesh forces
because they were attacking the Yazidis there,
and the women being enslaved.
But the message, as it moved,
well, historians are interested in this kind of trends,
so it just moved to Kurdistan and from Kurdistan,
now being the message of this movement,
reflects pretty much, sums up
what this movement is all about.
Women in the forefront,
because of all the, one might say, discriminations,
the treatment, the humiliation,
that this younger generation feels,
well, not only the younger generations,
but most of the Iranian secular middle classes
since 1979, basically, for the past 43 years.
And they would think that these all basically symbolized
or represented by the wearing,
the mandatory wearing of the hijab,
which is at the core of this protest.
You see the young women,
if you look at many of these clips
that comes through in the past six weeks,
women in streets take off their mandatory scarves,
which is a young shawl,
or some kind of a head covering, that's all,
and they throw it into the bonfire
in the middle of the street,
and they dance around it, and slogans.
So there is a sense of complete rejection
of what this regime for 42 years, 43 years,
have been imposing on women.
It's not, as it's sometimes been portrayed,
a movement against hijab through and through,
but it basically says there has to be a choice
for those who want to wear hijab
and those who want to remain without hijab.
- Yeah, the hijab is a symbol of something much deeper.
- Much deeper, and actually, before we get into that,
it's interesting to note that in many of these demonstrations
we see in the university campuses or in the streets,
you see women with hijab, young women with hijab,
or next to those who have to remove their hijab,
and they're together basically protesting.
That's the most interesting feature of these demonstrations,
and then men and women together against the segregation
that the regime has imposed upon them all these years.
Now, in terms of what it represents, as I pointed out,
one is the question of the whole series of,
one might say, civil and legal discriminations against women.
You are considered as a kind of a second-class citizen.
You depend on your men.
There's a kind of a patriarchy that has been institutionalized
in the Islamic Republic in a very profound fashion,
and that means that probably in matters of divorce,
marriage and divorce, in matters of custody
of your children, in matter of inheritance,
in matter of freedom of movement,
you depend on your husband, your father, your brother,
a male member of your family, your child, your son,
could be the case, and because of that,
obviously a younger generation who is so well-informed
through social media, knows about the world
as much as an American does, American kid does,
and probably sometimes more.
They're very, very curious.
It's from what I hear, or sometimes that I met
a few of them outside Iran.
You'll see that Hadi, this new generation
is completely different from what the Islamic Republic
wanted to create in its social engineering.
It's basically the failure of 43 years
of the Islamic Republic's acts of imposition
of a certain so-called Islamic values on women.
Then it's a matter of education.
You would see that there is segregation in the schools.
One of the issues that now, right now,
is at the heart of this demonstration
is that self-services in many of the campuses
of the Iranian universities are segregated,
male and female, to different rooms, to different halls.
§02Transcript · 11:50–23:00
Now they are breaking through the walls
virtually everywhere and sit together
in order to basically resist the authorities
who wants to impose segregation.
In matters of appearance in the public,
of course it may seem to us as kind of trivial
and secondary, but appearance is important.
Clothing is important.
How you would imagine yourself is important.
They don't want to be seen in the way
that the authorities would like to impose upon them
as this kind of an idea of a chaste Islamic woman
who is fully covered and is fully protected.
The idea of a male member of the family
protects the female.
That is what you would see at the heart of this rebellion.
And of course, that goes with everything else.
The second part of this message, the idea of life,
basically means, if you like to use the American equivalent
of this, the pursuit of the happiness.
That's what they want.
They want fun.
They want music.
They want dancing.
They want to be free in the street.
They want to have boyfriends.
And live freely.
And don't be constantly looked by the big brother
to tell them what to do and not to do or not to do.
So that is, that they share virtually
with the entire Iranian society as a whole.
Although the older generations, that's a big puzzle.
What you would see, the older generation don't,
so far at least, don't take part as extensively
as one might imagine.
And this is a variety of reasons.
Perhaps we can get to that later on, if you like.
But as far as this younger generation, they don't care.
They don't listen even as much to their parents
as the older generations did.
So one might say even the nature of the relationship
between the parents and the youth has changed.
It's not the concept of again a patriarchy.
That a father or even a mother would tell the daughter
or son what to do.
That's basically they have to negotiate.
- It's fundamentally a rejection of the power of authority.
Parents, government.
- Yes.
- That every person can decide their own fate.
And there's no lessening of value of the wisdom
of old age and old institutions.
- Precisely, that's what it is.
And they are surprisingly aware
that where they are as a generation.
So it's a sense of pride as we are different
from the older generation.
From your parents who compromised and lived
with the restrictions that the Islamic regime put on you.
Your grandparents who was the generation
that actually involved in the revolution of '79.
The parents which were the middle generation.
And these are the third generation
after the revolution of 1979.
And therefore they differentiate themselves
in terms of their identity from the older generation.
So that's the life part of it.
I mean one can go more and more.
They want to access.
And they see on social media what happens
in the rest of the world.
They're well aware.
They're much better digitally skilled
than my generation for instance.
And they know about all the personalities.
They know about all the celebrities.
They know about all the trends that goes on outside Iran.
So that's a second part of this message.
And then of course the third part is the word azadi.
Meaning freedom or liberty.
Which is this long standing demand of the Iranians
I would say for the whole century.
Ever since the constitutional revolution of 1906.
Iran has witnessed this problem of authorities
that usually emerged at the end of a revolution
to basically impose its own image on the population,
on the youth.
And create authoritarian regimes.
Of which over the course of time I would say
that the Islamic Republic is the worst.
In the sense that its intrusion is not only
in the political sense.
In for instance banning the freedom of speech.
You know meddling with the elections.
Banning political parties.
All kinds of that things which are the political
or civil freedoms.
But its intrusion into the personal life of the individual.
Which is the worst kind in a sense as you would see
that there is always an authority that basically
dominates your life or monitors your life.
So and they do it in a kind of a very consistent fashion
which makes this idea of freedom so important
as part of the message of this new movement.
You would see that in today's Iran
there are no independent political parties.
There is very little probably freedom of the press.
I wouldn't say that it's entirely gone.
But it's fairly limited.
There's enormous amount of propaganda machine
which dominates the entire radio and TV system in Iran.
It's completely in the hands of the government.
And of course you would see this variety of other tools
for trying to indoctrinate Iranian population
across the board.
So that's another sign of this kind of a sense
of being totally left out.
You're not belonging to what's going on
in terms of power, empowerment and disempowerment.
So that's the situation as far as the idea
of a freedom is concerned.
And there's three somewhat miraculously
and perhaps unintentionally,
the three parts of this message complement each other.
Because perhaps for the first time we see
that women are in the forefront of a movement.
I hesitate to say revolution
because I'm not particularly happy with revolutions.
Revolutions worldwide in Iran have always been so miserable
in terms of their outcome that we have to be careful
not to use the word revolution again.
So that's where it stands now.
And the regime was thinking that well, these are kids,
they're going to go away.
And then of course they're completely conspiratorial
in their thinking.
They constantly think that these are all the instigations
and provocations of foreign powers.
These are the great Satan, the United States,
this is Israel, or these are the,
it's actually the Supreme Leader says in so many words.
His only response so far that he had in the past six weeks
with regard to this demonstrations is that
these are the children of the Sabaq,
Sabaq being the security forces of the Shah's time.
That's 43 years later, he claims that the children,
16, 17 years, 20 years old, kids in the street
are the grandchildren or children of some imaginary
survival of the Shah's security force.
- So there's, the idea is that these protests are internal
and external saboteurs.
So people trying to sabotage the government.
- Yes.
And they are misled.
- Misled.
- As far as they can go.
- And then there's the great Satan, United States,
and other places are controlling,
sort of either controlling the narrative,
feeding propaganda, or literally sending people to instigate.
- I don't think even they have that kind of imagination
precise to say what you have said.
- Yeah.
- They would say that they're controlling the narrative.
They basically say, no, these are agents
of the foreign powers.
And their families are all sold out
and they are basically lost their loyalties
to the great Islamic Republic.
And therefore, they can be treated so brutally,
they can be suppressed so brutally.
Which I haven't actually said what they are doing
because I thought perhaps first we should talk about
who these kids are in the streets
before we move on about the response of the government.
But one major factor which seems to add to the anxiety
of, well, the regime is extremely anxious now
because they are in a position,
this shows that they don't have the lack of confidence
in a sense, that they would see them reacting
in a very forceful way.
Because basically they don't seem to have
that kind of confidence to allow this message
or the movement to be aired.
But the one element which corresponds to that
is that there is a expatriate population
of Iranians worldwide.
There are probably now, according to some estimates,
close to four million, even more, Iranians abroad.
And they're all over the world,
from Australia and New Zealand, Japan,
Western Europe, Turkey, and United States and Canada.
So just to give you one example,
last Saturday there was a mass demonstrations in Berlin
by the Iranians from Germany and all over Europe,
Western Europe.
And it was at least, I think probably
the conservative estimate was about 100,000.
So 100,000 Iranians showed up in Berlin
demonstrating against the treatment of the women in Iran
§03Transcript · 23:05–34:57
or the movement in Iran.
The government thinks obviously this must have been
some instigation by foreign powers
and they want to destroy the Islamic Republic.
And not only that, but their propaganda
is kind of ridiculous.
Because I listened actually to how they portrayed it
in the newspapers.
I listened to the Iranian news,
that is officially controlled, government-controlled news.
And in the papers, much of the papers
that are in the control of the government.
One of them, or actually the major news program
portrayed the demonstrations that 10,000 people
showed up in Berlin and protested against the rising prices
or rising rates for gas and oil in Germany.
So that's how they mislead.
In a very rather stupid fashion,
because probably 95%, if not 100% of the Iranians
are listening to Persian-speaking media outside Iran.
So there's a BBC Persian, there is Iran International,
there are at least five or six of them.
- That's probably really important to highlight
that Iran is a very modern and tech-savvy nation.
Not just the young people.
- Probably more than I feel sometimes
when I compare myself to what they are doing.
It's since 1979, the earlier years, for a decade or two,
they tried in a very crude fashion
to restrict access to media outside Iran.
Because this is all through dishes, okay?
And satellite dishes are everywhere.
If you look at the buildings,
small towns and villages in Iran,
there's always a dish.
And they watch all kinds of things through this.
And particularly because of what's happening now,
they listen to all the news broadcasts
from all this media, and they're extremely active.
There are probably, some of them, even 24 hours,
or close, very extensive coverage
of every clip that comes through.
So what the government is doing now, the Islamic Republic,
is that they restrict the entire internet.
- They shut down the internet.
- They shut down the internet,
but they cannot afford shutting down the internet
because much of the business, much of the everyday life,
much of the government affairs depends on the internet,
like everywhere else.
And Iran is extremely,
if I hear from many of the colleagues and friends,
it's like, in certain respects, it's like Sweden.
Where you go there, there's no more currency,
and for a very good reason,
because there's so much inflation,
that the banknotes are worthless, in a sense.
So everything is through sweeping your card.
And that entire system is in a standstill
because people cannot buy food.
You go to the supermarket, that's how you would do it.
You order food to come to your house,
which Iranians, at least the middle classes,
more prosperous middle classes, doing all the time.
So they deliver everything.
And because of the COVID, it became even more.
And they have to pay all through this system.
So what happens is that now they're estimating
that every day, $50 million, the Iranian government
or the Iranian economy is losing
because of slowing the internet.
- Plus the frustration is growing
because you can't order food.
- Among other things.
I mean, they are in touch with,
WhatsApp, every Iranian, virtually every Iranian,
that has education, and education in the sense
that has gone through the high schools and universities,
knows how to use the WhatsApp.
- So there's a big middle class,
like you said, secular middle class in Iran.
And there, there's a lot of, at least, capacity for,
if not revolution, then political, ideological turmoil.
- And a huge amount of hatred.
- So the hatred has grown.
- Yes, hatred of the policies of the regime,
of isolation, that's a huge point
that you hear a great deal about.
We don't want to be isolated.
We don't want to be humiliated.
Iran is not about this miserable regime
that is ruling over us.
We have a great culture.
So there's a sense of pride in their own culture,
some of it Islamic, some of it pre-Islamic.
So there's a huge sense of pride in that.
And they see that they cannot communicate
with the outside world.
They want to travel abroad, which they do.
I mean, for one thing, the Iranian regime never actually,
for majority of the population, never puts restrictions.
It's not like, what is it, Soviet Union,
where you have to have, you used to have permission
to move from one place to another.
And then, of course, the Islamic regime, since 1979,
basically chased away or destroyed the old middle class.
That's my generation, basically, or my parents' generation.
These are the secular middle class of the Pahlavi era,
in the hope that they can do this social engineering
and create this Islamic society of their own.
The bad news for them was that that didn't happen,
and that memory persisted.
And the middle class that was created since past 40 years
is much larger in size than what it was,
because there was, of course, the demographic revolution.
That's the very, there's a very foundation of it,
is the demographic revolution.
Population in Iran, I've written an article about it,
actually, population in Iran,
since the turn of the century, last century,
it's 20th century, population of Iran
was about nine million or so.
It's now 83 million.
And that is, since 1979, the population was 35 million.
Between the past 40 years, it's basically doubled.
So it's 83 million.
Although, one of the great successes,
I don't want to bore you with the details
about the demography, but it's important.
- Please, demographics is not boring.
- You will, you can see that the birth rate was very high.
Otherwise, you wouldn't have doubled your population
in a matter of four decades.
But Iranians, because of the urban,
shift to an urban population,
because of the growth of the middle class,
because of the education,
they basically, the pattern of the,
of growth, population growth, changed.
Iran used to be 2.8 or 3% birth rate
in around 1980s, I would say, 1970s, 1980s.
Now, it is 1.1.
And it's probably the most successful country
in the Middle East, in terms of the population control.
Despite the government's consistent attempt
to try to encourage people to have more kids,
middle class refuses to do that.
And this is middle class, not only anymore in the capital,
but this is, when in smaller towns and cities,
places that used to be villages.
Now you look at them, they have a decent population,
50,000, 100,000, and they live an urban life,
and they don't want to be subjected
to that old pattern of agrarian society
when you had 10 children, or eight children.
And of course, it's much more advanced
in terms of health and medicine.
So you don't lose children as they used to.
The antibiotics, there's always kids to survive,
and therefore, if you have 10 kids,
you're sick with 10 kids.
You don't end up with four as it used to be in the past.
Six of them would have died,
up to the age of five, actually.
But now, because of that, you see that this urban population
in the cities have completely different demands.
And of course, the education is important.
That's another area of how the social engineering
of the Islamic Republic went away,
because they were thinking that the growth
of the population, the growth of the educated,
higher educated middle classes in their benefit,
or they could not even control it, in a sense.
Now, Iran, in my time, probably had,
in the 1970s, probably by the time of the revolution,
had 10, 12 universities.
Now it has 56 universities all across the country,
and there is something referred to
as the Free University, Azad,
which has campuses all over the country.
It has 321 campuses all around Iran.
What does that mean?
In many respects, this youth that are brought up
in these families, even in small towns,
in very traditional families,
in families that belong to that kind of a more religious,
loyal to the clergy, or to the clerical classes,
their children can now move on, particularly women.
Because in my times, it would have been unheard of
that you would have a young woman of 18,
or 17, 18, 19, from a traditional city,
such as, for instance, Yazd,
or in Southeastern Iran,
to move on elsewhere for education,
as you do in this country.
Now, it's completely accepted
that a woman wears hijab
because she's forced to wear hijab,
to go to a university completely
on the other side of the country.
§04Transcript · 34:59–45:22
And this movement of the population,
not only because of the universities,
but in general, if you now visit Iran,
you hear accents, local accents,
provincial accents, all over the country.
That is a Azerbaijani-Turkish accent
from the northwest of the country.
You can hear it in the first province in the south,
and vice versa.
So, and Kurdish, for instance.
Or even more marginal regions,
such as Sistan province in the southeast of Iran,
which has been the subject of this recent massacre,
when they actually attacked the population
when demonstrating, and killed a fair number,
at least 60 people.
So, this movement of the population,
this creation of a larger middle class,
the better-educated middle class,
much better educated.
Iran has 86% literacy,
which I think probably, I haven't checked that,
but probably is better than Turkey, even.
Is probably better than anywhere else in the Middle East.
- And it sounds like that's quickly increasing.
- Yes. - Because of the movement,
because of the growth of the education system,
that's-- - Precisely.
Iran has one million school teachers,
which may not seem as much if you're in the United States,
but it's a fairly big number, actually.
- Can you linger on the massacre?
What happened there?
- Well, the Sistan province is a Baluch ethnicity,
of Baluch ethnicity.
Baluch is a particular ethnic group in southern Iran,
which is Sunni rather than Shi'i, majority.
- And we should say that most of Iran--
- Is Shi'i. - Is Shi'i,
and that's a branch of Islam.
- Shi'ism, yes.
- Let's maybe just briefly linger Shi'ism and Sunni.
What-- - What?
- Just, let's not get into it.
- (laughs) Yeah, I don't want to.
- Let's do a one-sentence summary,
and that maybe, which is what most of Iran is.
- Majority of the population of the Muslim world are Sunnis.
These are mainstream, if you like to call it that.
Actually, sunnah means that kind of a mainstream.
- Can you actually linger on the Sunni, sunnah, Shi'a?
- Shi'a means a party,
means those that belongs to a party of Ali,
which goes back to the early Islamic history
of seventh century.
- I mean, I'm almost lingering to the silly notion
of pronunciation and stuff like that.
So, ah, ah means part, like what?
What does the extra I at the end do?
- Shi'i means belonging to the Shi'i community.
Shi'a means a person of a Shi'a.
- That belongs to that community.
- If you say, "Are you a Shi'a?"
Yes, I am a Shi'a.
- Yeah, and Shi'i is the community.
- Community, and in English, when it was Anglicized,
it becomes Shi'ite.
So, if you say Shi'ite in today, it's perfectly acceptable.
And of course, I myself, in my writings,
I always switch between one and the other.
One of my books is always Shi'ite,
the other book's always Shi'.
And that hasn't been settled.
But the Shi'i population is the smaller
compared to the Sunni population in the world.
- In the world.
- In the world.
- But in Iran, it's the opposite.
- The Iran and Iraq, and possibly now Lebanon,
are the three countries who barely,
Iraq and Lebanon have barely majority Shi'i population.
Whereas Iran is a large Shi'i population
due to its history of conversion to Shi'ism,
that by itself is another story.
But in the sense that,
the way that historically it evolved,
the center became more Shi'i,
and the peripheries remained Sunni.
So you have communities of the Baluch in the southeast,
you have the Kurds, a large portion of the Kurds are Sunnis,
they have Shi'is as well,
and they have the indigenous religion
of their own, what's called Ahlul Haqq,
which is the religion of indigenous to Kurdistan.
There are Turkmen in the northeast of Iran,
who are also Sunnis,
there are other communities in Khurasan region,
in the peripheries of Afghanistan,
they are also Sunnis.
And you have some Arab population,
Arab-speaking population in the Khuzestan province,
in the southwest of Iran,
which is also, or across the Persian Gulf.
- Is there a lot of conflict between these regions?
And also, if I blindfolded you,
and dropped you off in one of the regions,
would you quickly recognize the region?
Like by the food, by the music, by the accents, by so on?
- Yeah, the answer to your lovely question,
which I think, I hope it would have happened to me,
is that yes, you would see different cultures.
But different food, most important, different accents.
Or different languages, since they have dialects.
There's Baluch, different language altogether.
But, or so for that matter, Kurdish,
which is closer to Persian,
because they're all Indo-European languages.
But Turkish, Azeri Turkish,
which is probably closer to the Turkish of Turkey,
Republic of Turkey,
or to the Republic of Azerbaijan in the north.
They're the same, basically.
Actually, if you would have looked,
that's a fascinating picture,
if you have looked at the, let's say even 19th century,
early 20th century, linguistic map of Iran,
you would have been amazed in the number of dialects,
in the number of languages that have survived.
This is an ancient country, it's an ancient land.
And it's a lot of mountains all around it, or big deserts.
So there's a sense of isolation.
So you would say, here and there,
you see a different community that speaks differently.
- All ancient traditions and languages.
- Yeah, and because of the great number of invasions
that Iran witnessed over more than two and a half millennia,
of course, all kinds of cultures were introduced into Iran.
There are all ethnicities were introduced to Iran,
mostly coming from the northeast of Iran,
from the lowlands of Central Asia and beyond,
and continued into Iran proper.
So, but now, what has happened,
that's my point that I wanted to make.
Century of modernity, or modernization,
has produced a national culture
of great strength, in a sense, I would say.
I ended my book, the book on Iran, Iran in Modern History,
basically saying that despite everything else
that has created so much trouble for today's Iran,
there is a sense of a cultural identity
that is very strong.
And I think I can say with some confidence
that despite this regional identities
that are still there and they're great
and they should be celebrated,
today, if you go to Kurdistan,
or if you go to Cistan, they all can speak Persian.
They all have an education in Persian.
So they all basically are becoming part of,
whether they like the regime in power or not,
they have a sense of belonging to a culture
and an identity with the center.
And of course, the idea of a center versus periphery
in Iran is very old.
It goes back to ancient times,
because even the name of the country
was the guarded domains of Iran.
This is the official name,
(speaking in foreign language)
Namely, that it was recognized
that this is not just one entity,
but it's a collection of entities--
- Like the United States of America.
- Exactly, exactly.
But the United States of America,
in a sense, you can say that it was a very successful,
well, it remains to be seen how successful--
- To be continued.
- To be, that was basically invented, created,
that you would have this sense of it.
In the case of an old nation,
which has been on the map of the world
for 3,000 years, 2,500 years,
this is not an exaggeration.
I am not a nationalist per se,
but if you look Persia on the map of the world
in ancient times, it is still there as it is today.
Very few countries in the world are like that,
that they would have that kind of a continuity
over a course of time.
And that's not without a reason,
because there was this sense of a center versus periphery
that had found, there's a huge amount of tension,
but there is also a sense of belonging to something.
And state is very much at the center of it.
I mean, that's why the concept of a state matters
for the creation, for the shaping of this culture.
What happened is therefore, you can see that today
in answer to your point about traveling blindfolded,
is that you would be surprised to see
§05Transcript · 45:27–55:28
how much people share
in terms of, I just give you one anecdote.
In 1968, I believe, must have been,
I traveled to Azerbaijan.
I used to travel and actually photograph.
- Not blindfolded.
- No. (laughs)
- Mostly.
- Well, yeah, not blindfolded, no, no, not blindfolded.
So I went to a bazaar in the city of Khoyi,
which is in the northwestern Iran.
On the border with what is today the Republic of Turkey.
And I went to the bazaar and I was interested
in the kind of leather work that they produce.
So I tried to buy some stuff and I was surprised to see
that how few people knew Persian.
So they could not communicate in Persian with you.
Either they have to ask somebody from some other store
to come and translate for you.
This is 1968.
- 1968, so even though it's the official language--
- Was Persian.
- Of the country, there's still--
- Yeah.
- So what are they teaching school?
So it doesn't matter.
- It was Persian.
But this guy--
- He doesn't go to school.
- He hasn't been to the school
or he was not fully exposed to it.
- Or forgot it.
- Bazaars usually are very conservative places.
So it stuck in my mind.
Now, recently in 2004, I was traveling to the same area,
not to the same city, but to the same area.
And I was amazed to see how the youth,
as soon as they would know that you're coming
from somewhere else, so to say,
opening conversation with you,
talking about the latest movies
that was produced in the West.
And it's not only Hollywood.
Of course, there's a huge amount of fascination
with Hollywood and Western cinema.
Cinema is a major thing.
Filmmaking is a major thing.
- Yeah.
- So these kids in the city of Ahar
were asking me, we were having lunch,
they're asking me, okay, then what do you think
about this producer, not producer,
this director or that actor?
- American.
- American, European as well, but mostly American.
- Were they speaking Persian?
- It was a complete Persian
that I would converse with them.
- Do they speak English too?
Interesting.
- Yes, actually you would be surprised
to see what percentage of the Iranian youth,
at least in big cities, are fascinated
with learning language, and for a reason.
Because they think that's the way to get access
either on social media or eventually leave Iran,
unfortunately.
And because they don't see a future
for themselves in the country,
either you have to be part of this regime,
or if you hate them and you don't like
the way of their life, you look up outside.
I was having drivers to drive me around the country
in the cities around Tehran.
And the guy was young, extremely well-educated,
well-dressed, and we would have looked at him,
we could have found him in any street
in any country in the Western world.
And his major concern, knowing that I'm from outside,
major concern is, well, tell me which would be
a better place for me to go.
So what's wrong with the place that you're in right now?
You are in your own country, you speak your own language,
no, this is no good.
I have to have a better future.
This has no future for me.
- Well, it's really interesting because the thing
I feel about the protests right now is there's
a large number of people that instead of giving
into cynicism about this government is no good,
they're actually getting this energy,
this desire for revolution in a non-violent,
in the democratic sense of that.
Let's actually find the ideas,
let's build a great nation here.
This is a great nation, this is my nation,
let's build something great here.
- Well--
- That's my hope, that's the outside--
- Yeah, yeah.
- That's what I'm hoping for.
- I share your aspiration, but I'm fearing that,
I hope it's not a wishful thinking.
Certainly that's what they want.
Certainly that's what they want to create.
But the historian always tells you from where they start
to where they finish, there's going to be a huge
kind of a change.
And in this particular case, I wouldn't be,
I would very much hope that it's not going to be
a revolution like 1979, Islamic revolution.
And I have my hopes in that.
For one thing, this is a revolution
that doesn't have a leader, okay?
And it seems that they're comfortable with that.
At least so far, because we are,
well, the sixth week of this movement.
And I hope it's not going to be actually a revolution,
as I pointed out before.
I hope it's going to be more of a sense of trying to come
to some compromise and gradually move toward change
rather than a collapse of this regime
and replacement with what?
- So the anxiety of the regime, you hope,
will turn into a kind of realization
that you have to modernize, you have to make progress,
you actually have to make certain compromises.
- Yes.
- Or constitutional changes, all those kind of stuff.
So the basic process of government and lawmaking.
- The problem is that they say we have it all, you know?
We have our parliament, we have our constitution,
we have our elections, which has all been, of course, fake.
But they claim they have all of that.
But the problem for them is that they try to superimpose
a certain ideology, like all other ideological autocracies
or autarchies, as in this case, that tend to dominate
all these institution buildings that they have,
and they constantly claim we have this, we have that.
And of course, it's a generational thing.
The upper echelons of this regime
are mostly older people, turbaned, they are the clergy,
that are afraid of the fact that they may lose their control
over their whole system, that it is a sophisticated,
huge system of government.
And they rely on certain tools of control,
which is the revolutionary guards and other institutions
that are loyal to the state.
And they spend enormous amount of funds
that is available to them, at least before the sanctions.
But even during the sanctions,
they still have enough funds to do so.
And in order to remain in power.
And they're extremely ruthless in that regard.
This is not a nice Islamic fatherly regime.
This is a regime that I would see easily in it.
Clear signs of fascism, clear signs of the state's control
and pay any price to stay in power.
- So even violence?
- Extreme violence.
- To return to the massacre,
what were the uses of violence to suppress protests?
- Well, yes, it was actually quite remarkable
to see that from the first or the second day
of the protest, you see out in the streets,
this riot police, okay?
Which comes out in large numbers, fully geared up.
Their appearance are rather terrifying,
like any other riot police,
probably more than any other riot police.
They're violent.
They stand in the streets
when the students are demonstrating,
even in smaller number.
Because before I go to that,
I should point this out to you as well.
That these demonstrations are not large ones in one place.
You don't see 100,000 people in one place.
But you see in every neighborhood,
couple of thousand of kids are demonstrating.
- All over Iran?
- All over Iran.
- Now all over the world in different parts?
- Yes, yes, yes.
Actually, during the demonstrations three weeks ago,
as I said, they had people in Sydney, Australia,
New Zealand, Tokyo, all over the world.
- All protesting high gas prices, it's funny.
Everywhere.
- Everywhere.
(laughing)
To the extent that they could be ignored.
- Yeah.
- Nothing, but if they could not be ignored.
And it's actually quite remarkable
that this is very embarrassing to them.
But somehow they think that this propaganda machine
of them is working.
- Also you think they don't have a good even sense.
I mean, so there's an incompetence
§06Transcript · 55:30–1:06:55
within the propaganda machine.
- Yes, it is.
There's an incompetence across the board.
I mean, despite all of this massive government
administration or whatever you would call it,
all these various components of it,
there is a sense of inefficiency
and incompetence that is associated
with every action that you see.
Even in their suppression of this street movement.
But in answer to that question,
you would see that they're, this riot police,
very, it's quite obvious that they were trained
for the purpose.
So their appearance, everything,
these are not just regular army forces
or soldiers, conscripts.
They are professional forces.
And they come not only on foot number,
but they come on motorbikes.
So there are, you would see in any of these demonstrations,
there are 10, 12, 15, 20 motorbikes with two passengers.
One in front riding, one in the back,
fully equipped with a baton, with paint guns,
with pellet guns, and with bullets.
So they are very fully equipped.
And they are terrifying.
They go through the demonstrations
and hit and beat people.
And then they arrest.
And then you see behind the first line
of these riot police, you would see all this latest
models of these special
armored trucks for moving to the demonstrations
and arresting people, throwing them into this.
And then behind that, water cannons, you see.
And I was looking at that, I was saying,
okay, this is Tehran probably.
They have this.
But then you look at the smaller cities,
they still have the same thing.
So all over the country, one thing that they had managed
to produce extensively, irrespective of the fact
that whether they are effective or not,
but you see them everywhere.
So this shows that how afraid this regime is.
- But that also shows that there's an infrastructure
that can implement violence at scale.
- Yes, very much so.
And it's probably part and parcel of this regime.
From day one, the number of prisons that they have,
according to perhaps an exaggerated version,
they said that about 12,000 or so arrested
that are in jails today, since past six weeks.
They were 230 or 40 people were killed, including children.
I under 18.
They are, they beat up women,
women in the street, which is extremely, actually,
disturbing when you see these scenes of--
- So there's a lot of this is on video, too, right?
- Everything is on video.
Everybody has a camera.
And everybody sends to major news outlets outside Iran.
And they immediately showed every night,
if you look at BBC Persian or Iran International,
or a few, I think it is six of them, actually.
All over, in England, they are in Deutsche Welle in Germany,
which has a particular interest in the Iranian,
BBC World Service and so forth in London,
and Voice of America Persian here in this country.
There is another one, Radio Fado,
which is also funded by the American government.
Also fully covers all of these events.
So there is no way that these people can,
that the Iranians can miss what's going on in the streets
of these demonstrations and the scenes of beating up women,
which in Iranian culture, as I presume in most cultures
in the world, there is a certain sanctity
that you don't attack women.
But they do, and this is an Islamic regime
that supposedly have to have a certain sense of concern
and protection.
- Well, like a protection, like a deep respect for women
grounded in a tradition of protecting them,
but instead this kind of idea that was instilled in law
has turned into a deep disrespect of women.
- Exactly, or fear that these women are not any longer
the girls that we thought we are bringing up in this society.
- The source of you losing your power will be these women.
That's the fear. - Yes, yeah.
And you see, of course, this government
do have a support base.
I mean, it would be totally wrong to think
that the Islamic Republic has not created
its own power base.
It does, but it's probably, if there's no way,
there are no statistics that we can,
or I'm not aware of any statistics
that I can give you in numbers,
what's the percentage of support for the regime in Iran?
But quite frankly, I don't think it's more than
probably 10% of the population.
Be very generous.
- I would be surprised if it's that low.
I would say, so if my understanding,
because I've been very deeply paying attention
to the war in Ukraine, to Ukraine, to Russia,
and to support in Russia for Putin,
I think, without knowing the details,
without even considering the effects of propaganda
and stuff like that, is there's probably a large number
of people in Iran that don't see this
as a battle of human rights,
but see it as a battle of conservatism,
like tradition versus modernization,
and they value tradition.
What they fear from the throwing away of the hijab
is not the loss of power and the women getting human rights.
What they fear is the same stuff you fear
when you're sitting on a porch and saying,
"Kids these days have no respect."
Basically, there's a large number of Iranians
that probably value tradition and the beauty of the culture.
And they fear that kids with their internet
and their videos and their revolution
will throw away everything that made this country
hold together for millennia, right?
- Yes, I know.
I would agree with you in the sense that probably
like everywhere else in the world,
this is a generational thing.
Every generation thinks differently
about the younger generation, no doubt.
And in Iran, it's the same.
But there is another factor here is involved.
Those that we would consider them as traditional
no longer seem to have their loyalties to this regime.
That's powerful.
Meaning that they consider it as a brutal regime
that is prepared to kill children in the streets.
And does a lot of things wrong.
Of course, it tries to take care of its own power base.
There's a very strong sense of, if we start here,
there's a very strong sense in this regime
that there are people that is theirs
and there are others which are not theirs.
There's a word for it, if you're very impressed.
They call it "khudi," one of us, okay?
- Oh, so it's a, well, that's very fascistic.
- Yes, yes, or for that matter,
I suppose Soviet Union, if you were a member of the party
and your children would have received
a special kind of treatment, yourself as well.
This sense of us versus them,
for a while worked because the younger people
coming from the countryside to the cities,
certain sector of them would have found protection
and support from the government.
They wanted to belong to something,
and the mosques and the morning associations
in the neighborhoods and so forth would have given them.
There's actually a term for it, it's called "basiji."
Those have been recruited by the state,
and this is the youth kind of vigilante, if you like,
that you can see them also in these demonstrations.
Sometimes thugs, they're called the civil cloth,
so the people that comes to these demonstrations
that start beating up these young people,
and they are not in security police uniforms,
but they are just regular clothes.
And these people, yes, they still support,
and they still benefit, 'cause they get jobs,
they get privileges, and these are very important
for a state that basically monopolizes
most of the resources.
You see, even during the sanction,
let alone before the sanction, the oil revenue of Iran,
which is the major source of the state government,
was the monopoly of the state.
It was monopoly of the state during the Pahlavi era,
from the start, basically.
So what does that mean?
That means that the regime in power is not,
no longer is particularly accountable
to the majority population,
'cause it extracts wealth from underground,
and it uses it for its own purposes,
in order to make it more powerful,
in order to make it more repressive
than what it is, the regime today.
So it feeds a small, or I wouldn't say,
but a fair number of its own supporters.
I mean, the revolutionary guard in Iran
is probably about 350,000, or something like that.
It's a very big force.
And this is not the regular army.
The revolutionary guards are independent from the army.
- Revolutionary guard is armed forces
controlled by the state.
- Yes, the same as the army,
§07Transcript · 1:06:58–1:18:35
but these are more ideologically tied up with the state.
- And they're also in-facing, internal facing,
what's the stated purpose of the revolutionary guard?
- Well, from day one, when the revolution succeeded,
the regime in power, the Islamic regime in power,
was vulnerable to all kinds of forces of opposition
within Iran itself.
- To prevent further revolution.
- Yeah, that's the revolutionary guards,
and their job was to try to make sure
that the regime stays in power.
And of course, over the course of 40 years,
they became more powerful, more organized,
better funded, better trained.
Well, at least we think they're better trained,
but we don't know, because the level of incompetence,
perhaps, can be seen through their rank and file as well.
But, you know, they developed their own military industry.
I mean, those drones that you see now,
Putin's regime are throwing on Ukrainians,
poor Ukrainians, those are all built
by the revolutionary guards, by the military industry
under the control of the revolutionary guards.
And like similar regimes in the Middle East, at least,
these are military industrial complexes.
You can find them in Egypt, of course,
which is very powerful, very traditional,
has been in power and still is in power.
You find them in Pakistan, which is extremely powerful,
and they can change the prime ministers
as they did in the case of the last one.
You can find them probably in Myanmar,
is the same phenomenon.
And if you look around, you can find quite a number of them.
And the revolutionary guards is the equivalent of that.
This is a powerful establishment force,
which militarily is powerful, industrially is powerful.
And since the start of the revolution,
they have been given projects.
So you want to build dams,
which they did a major disaster, environmental disaster.
They built 100 and something dams all across the country.
This is the revolutionary guard who does it.
So they have all kinds of tentacles
all around the country controlling various things.
- And because it's their job,
and they have power, they have prestige,
there's a huge incentive to--
- Join them.
- Yeah, to join them and to stay.
So like they, you know, when they're having dinner at home
with their families, there's not an incentive
to join the protests, sort of.
- Well, that is the point.
I think, and the revolutionary guards may be an extreme,
but many of the people who depend on the state
for their support, now the younger generation
are telling their parents, you were wrong.
You don't provide for us, this society,
this state does not provide what we want.
So there is a dissent within the family,
it seems to me.
I hope it's not a wishful thinking.
You know, there is a kind of a joke going around.
You see this, a terrible guy is the clergy,
bearded, traditional clerical appearance.
When you see them talking about women,
they are very, of course, politically incorrect.
They are very looking down towards women.
As I said, you know, they have to be inside,
they have to be protected, they have not to be seen,
and so forth.
But if they have a young person,
a young daughter in their family,
you see that their discourse changes.
They no longer seem to be referring to women
as second-class citizens.
- Yeah.
- So that's very important, that's precisely that point,
that when you have this younger generation,
no matter how privileged they are,
and many of them are privileged, you know,
and there is also, the regime has created
its own privilege class
that are not necessarily directly paid by the regime,
but they benefit from contractors,
certain professions that benefit
from what the state provides for them.
And Iran is a, I mean, the past 40 years,
you can see Iran has developed,
in terms of material culture, remarkably.
Iran has good communication, has roads all over the place.
It's not like a, it's more like,
I don't know whether you have ever visited Turkey,
for instance. - No, I haven't.
- In certain respects, even more advanced than Turkey,
but it's closer to that, rather than if you travel,
I don't want to bring particular names,
in North Africa, or parts of the Middle East,
or other parts of the Islamic world, it's much, much different.
So in this respect, you would see
certain contrasts or paradoxes here.
On the certain respect, there is the growth,
and there is urbanization, there is modern economy.
On the other hand, you see this superimposed ideological,
doctrinal aspect that has driven the regime
over all these years, and they cannot get rid of it.
They cannot, in this respect,
they cannot modernize themselves.
They think that they are already perfect
in ideological sense, this is the best solution
for the world, not only for Iran,
but for the Muslim world, and for the world as a whole.
We are anti-imperialist, we have managed to survive
either under sanctions, this is all part of the rhetoric.
But of course, at the huge expense,
the huge expense for their own population.
And the point that you have raised is the fact
that we now witness there is not only a generation gap
between the youth and their parents,
but there is a break, in a sense,
from the older generations.
And they are very distinctly the youth
that has a different view of the world.
And it does not want to compromise.
Whether they would be able to succeed or not
remains to be seen.
Whether this regime is going to suppress it, maybe.
But it actually brought to surface many of aspects
of the weaknesses of this regime in power.
- Well, I hear from a lot of people
that are in these protests now,
and so my love goes to them, and stay strong.
Because it's inspiring to see people
fighting for those things, the women, life,
and freedom, especially freedom.
Because that can only lead to a good thing
in the long term, at least.
And if possible, to avoid a violent revolution.
Of course, that is something that we all want to see.
Before we return to the present, let's jump around,
let's go to the past.
We mentioned 1979.
What happened in 1979 in Iran?
- Well, in 1979, there was a revolution
that eventually came to be known as the Islamic Revolution.
And even up to this day, many of the observers
or those who have strong views would not like
to refer to it as an Islamic Revolution,
or even a revolution.
Because the nature of it, in the earlier stages of it,
started really probably around 1977, it took two years.
Was much more all-embracing.
It was not Islamic in a particular fashion,
or at all, in a sense.
It started with a kind of a very liberal,
Democrat agenda, which required,
which demanded, mostly by people who were the veterans
of the older generations of Iranian liberal nationalists
that were left out in the Pahlavi period,
is a period of the Shah,
became increasingly authoritarian,
increasingly suppressive,
and therefore, basically, leaving no space,
no political space open for any kind of a give and take,
any kind of a conversation or participation.
- That was in the '70s. - '70s, '70s.
Particularly in the '70s.
- Can we actually even just do a whirlwind review
from 1906 to 1979?
- Okay, sure.
In 1906, there was a period, actually, as you might know,
the first decade or so of the 20th century,
witnessed numerous, what we refer to
as constitutional revolutions,
including Russia in 1905, the first revolution,
including the Chinese Revolution in 19,
constitutional revolution in 1910,
the Young Turks Revolution in 1908,
and the Iranian Revolution in 1906.
- Do I understand why the synchronicity of all of it,
why in so many different places,
very different cultures, very different governments?
- Very different cultures, but all of them,
in a sense, were coming out of regimes
that became progressively powerful
without having any kind of a legal system
that would protect the individual vis-a-vis the state.
So the idea of law and the constitution,
according to which there should be a certain protection,
a certain civil society, became very common.
- Yeah, but I wonder where that,
'cause that's been that way for a very, very long time,
and so I wonder, you know, it's funny,
certain ideas, just their time comes.
- Exactly, it's like 1848, when you would see
that there's a whole range of revolutions across Europe,
or you would see, for instance, the Arab Spring.
You see all these revolutions in the Arab world,
which unfortunately, nearly all of them failed.
§08Transcript · 1:18:38–1:29:40
So yes, these are very contagious ideas
that moves across frontiers from one culture to another,
and I presume we can add to that there are two elements
which one can say there was a greater communication,
there is a greater sense of a world economy,
and the turn of the century witnessed,
the first decade of the century,
witnessed a period of volatility,
particularly in currency.
So many of the countries of the world,
particularly non-West, suffered,
particularly the businesses suffered,
and not surprisingly, the business class
were in the forefront of many of these
constitutional movements, requiring the state
to give the, kind of create the right kind of institutions
to listen to their voices, to their concerns,
and the creation of a democratic system,
parliamentary system in which there would be
a representation, popular representation,
proper elections and so forth, and constitutions.
And this very much is a kind of a French idea
of the constitution going back all the way,
perhaps to 1789 revolution, Montesquieu,
all this kind of philosophes were greatly appreciated,
particularly the French system.
- So what were the ideas in the 1906 Iranian constitution?
- They, precisely the same, they were demanding
a creation of a legal system with division of power
between the three, executive, legislative,
and the judiciary, not unlike the American system.
And they requested basically a certain public space
to be created between the two sources of power,
the state, which had this kind of a control
over the, if you like, the secular aspect of life
in the society, and the religious establishment
that had a full control over the religious aspects.
And both of them, from the perspective of the constitution,
it is considered as repressive, and therefore,
there has to be a new space open between these two.
And that was the idea of a constitutional revolution.
By its very nature, it was an idea of modernity.
They wanted a modern society.
They wanted a better material life.
They wanted more representation, and so forth.
The constitutional revolution, as I always would say,
is much more of an innocent revolution.
It's a revolution that did not particularly
have much violence in it, contrary to many other revolutions.
It did not have a centralized leadership, per se.
That's why, actually, I'm getting,
I mean, besides the practices,
I'm getting a lot of requests for interviews
to compare what's happening now
with the revolution of 1906, 1909.
- Are there any echoes?
- Yes, yes, there are, there are.
Because that was a movement that started
without a centralized leadership,
but actually various voices that emerged
in various, among the merchants,
or the businessmen in the economic community,
among the representatives who came to the first parliament,
the press, the new generation
of the privileged aristocracy
who were educated and believed in the constitutional values.
All of these voices emerged at the same time,
and somehow they managed to coexist
in the first and the second parliaments
that were created between 1906 and 1910, or 1911.
But they all faced huge problems,
in the sense that Iran was in a dire economic situation.
This is before the days of the discovery of oil,
which actually coincides in the discovery.
There are two important coincidences.
One is that the oil was discovered in the South in 1909,
during the course of the constitutional revolution.
The second is that in 1907,
the two great powers of the time,
the Russian Empire and the British Empire,
who always honored Iran as being a buffer state
between them, because they didn't want
to get too close to one another,
basically came to an agreement facing the fear
of the rise of the German Empire.
So this is the period of Entente,
as you might know in European history,
whereby the French, the British, and the Russians
all create an alliance that ultimately leads
to the First World War against Germany.
- And at the same time, the discovery of oil,
that the oil industry being a very powerful,
defining factor of the 20th century for Iran.
- Exactly.
- Source of a lot of money.
- Lot of money, but not all of it
in the hands of the Iranians.
Only one fifth of it, by way of royalties,
came to Iran.
Much of it went to the Anglo-Persian oil company,
which they actually discovered the oil in the province,
Khuzestan province in the southwest of Iran,
where the major oil industry is today, right now.
And this was an extremely profitable enterprise
for that company, and for the British government.
It was actually purchased by the British government.
Churchill purchased Anglo-Iranian oil company
for the British government.
So it was not anymore a private company.
It was a British interest, as a matter of fact.
And in the course of the 20th century,
although it helped the modernization in Iran,
but it also helped the creation of a more authoritative,
a more strong state, if you like to call it.
That 19th century Iran never had that kind of a power.
Never had that kind of resources.
Is it 20th century, even that one fifth of the income
that reached the Iranian state gave it a greater power.
- That's another coincidence.
So yes, yes, you could say the oil was one of the catalysts
for absolute power, but the 20th century
saw quite a few countries
have dictators with power
unlike anything else in human history.
- Yes.
- That's weird too.
- Precisely.
And you know, you can name them
from the beginning of the century with people like,
I don't know, Lenin, Stalin, of course Hitler.
- Mao.
- Mao, of course, you can name them.
And probably, as I would say,
the last of them is Khomeini in that century,
that you would see this strong man
with a sense of a,
either artificial or real,
or a sense of a so-called charisma,
and with this total power over the regime that they create.
Some of them do, Nasser,
he didn't have much of an oil resources in Egypt,
but he was also one of these strong men, okay,
in the 20th century.
Loved by some, hated by others.
So it necessarily does not tie up
to economic resources underground.
But in the Iranian case, unfortunately it did.
And it was a,
it was more than,
it created more than one issue for Iran.
It's created a strong state,
which is the Pahlavi state,
from 1921 onward.
Because in 1921, at the end of the First World War,
Iran was in almost a state of total bankruptcy.
And the British had a desire
to try to bring Iran to the system
that they created in the Middle East
in the post-war era, the mandate system.
Palestine, Iraq, and then, of course,
French mandate of Lebanon and Syria, all of this.
And Iran was separate because Iran
was an independent country.
It wasn't part of the Ottoman Empire that collapsed.
So they had to somehow handle it.
And what they tried to do didn't work.
As a result, partly domestic,
partly international issues,
wrote about a regime which is headed
by the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Shah.
Okay, a first military officer called Reza Khan,
actually a military officer of the Cossack forces.
And the Cossack forces was the force
that was created in the 19th century
model of the Russian Cossacks.
When the ruler in the 19th century visited Russia
as in a royal tour, and the desire showed
the great Cossack forces, he said, "I like this."
And he created one for himself
with Russian officers, actually.
So Russian officers served in Iran
from around 1880s up to the revolution of 1917,
the collapse of the Cossack regime.
- So many revolutions.
- So many revolutions.
And Reza Shah was an officer in that, Reza Khan
was an officer in that force.
And he created a new monarchy for reasons
that we need not to go to it.
And this called the Pahlavi regime.
Pahlavi regime was a modernizing regime, okay?
That brought, in effect, fulfilled many of the ambitions
of the Constitution, many of the aspirations
of the Constitutional Revolution.
Better communication, secular education,
centralized states, centralized army,
better contact with the outside world,
greater urbanization, that's what a modern state
is all about.
And in that regard, in a sense, for the first 20 years
§09Transcript · 1:29:46–1:41:14
up to the Second World War, was successful.
Despite, and more significant of all,
it managed to keep the European powers,
which was always interfering in the local affairs
of Iran, in an arm's length.
So they were there in an arm's length,
but they were also respecting the power of the state,
power of the Pahlavi state.
During the Second World War, the same phenomenon
as earlier interference led to the occupation of Iran
by the Allied forces, the British from the south,
the Russians from the north, the Red Army.
They took over Iran, and of course they said--
- The Second World War.
- Yes, from 1941 up to 1945.
And of course, when the Red Army refused to withdraw
from Iranian Azerbaijan, and with some thought
of possible annexation of that province,
there was a big issue in the post-war Iran.
- So after 1945--
- Yes, 1945 to 1946, there was a big--
- Soviet Union getting greedy.
- Yes, but eventually they agreed.
Eventually Stalin agreed to leave the Azerbaijan province
in the hope that it would get some concessions from Iran,
which in the oil of the Caspian area,
which didn't work, and it's a different story altogether.
But what happened is that in the post-war era,
between 1944, '45, and 1953,
is a period of greater democratization,
because Reza Shah's dictatorship basically disappeared.
And this is where you would see political parties,
free press, a lot of chaotic, really,
as democracies often are.
- So something like, was it officially a democracy?
- Yes, it was a democracy.
- Was there elections?
- There were elections, yes, of course, yes, of course.
And there were very diverse political tendencies
came to the picture, including the Tudeh Party of Iran,
which is Communist Party of Iran.
This Communist Party of Iran is probably the biggest
Communist Party of the whole of the Middle East,
and one of the biggest in the world, actually, at that time.
- Did the Soviet Union have a significant influence on--
- Of course, they were basically following orders
from the Soviets, although they denied it,
but in reality, that's the case.
But what happened, they were seen by the Americans
during the Cold War as a threat,
and Iran was going through a period
of demanding nationalization of its oil resources.
That's a very important episode, with Mossadegh,
whom you might have heard about his name.
Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, who was the prime minister
and the national charismatic leader from 1951 to 1953.
Prior to that, he was a famous parliamentarian,
but this period, he was the prime minister of Iran,
and he nationalized the Iranian oil industry,
and the British didn't like it at all,
and eventually resulted in a famous coup,
which at least partly was supported by the funding
and by the moral support of the British and the Americans,
particularly by the Americans.
It was always seen as one of the earliest
and the most successful CIA operations during the Cold War.
- So CIA had something to do with it?
- Yes, of course, that's one of the earliest operations
of the CIA.
- Wait a minute, what was, yes, of course,
what was the CIA doing?
- CIA, this is the time at the post-war era.
- In the '50s.
- In the '50s, '40s and the '50s.
The British Empire, which was really the major superpower
of the region after the collapse of the Tzarist Empire,
gradually took the second seat to the Americans,
who were the newcomers and the great power
and the victors of the Second World War,
and the Americans viewed Iran as an important country,
since it has the largest common borders
with the Soviet Union, and it was,
and in the south was the Persian Gulf,
which at the time was the greatest supplier
of oil to the outside world,
and therefore the Americans had a particular interest
in Iran, and in the earlier stages,
their interest was in the interest of the Iranian government
because they wanted to get rid of both the Soviet Union,
which made a return in the post-war era,
and of course the British that were gradually withdrawing
from Iran, but they had a full control
over the Anglo-Iranian oil company.
They changed the name to Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
When the name of the country officially changed
from Persia to Iran, in the west,
the name of the company changed,
and they got into a huge dispute with the other government
that eventually led to the coup of 1953,
which eventually created a very,
a very distressful memory in the minds
of many of the Iranian nationalists,
that this was the betrayal of the great powers,
the British and Americans.
Yes, CIA played a part because CIA feared,
contrary to the British, that they were afraid
of their own oil in Iran, the CIA was afraid
of the Soviet penetration in the south,
and particularly because there was a very powerful,
very powerful Communist Party in Iran,
the Tudeh Party of Iran.
So they gradually shifted between the Truman administration
and Eisenhower administration,
these are early days of the CIA,
and then they actually did participate
to send their agents.
There's a long story to that,
and it eventually resulted in a successful coup
that removed Mossadegh from power.
- What's the United States' interest here?
Why are they using CIA?
Are they trying to make sure there's not
too much centralization of power in this region?
- They were afraid of the fact that the,
that of the Soviet Union, and during the Cold War,
that was their concern, only concern.
- They actually almost want to protect Iran
and its own sovereign processes from influence
of the Soviets. - Yes.
'Cause they were afraid of the fact if Iran,
or at least this is part of the,
I'm simplifying a very complex picture,
but the Americans basically were thinking
that if Iran is going to be lost to Soviet influence,
then eventually, basically, all the oil resources
in the Persian Gulf are going to be threatened.
- Yeah.
- And this would basically is the national security
of the United States and all of the Western allies,
European allies.
So in a sense, this was the long arm of the CIA
to try to make sure that that's not going to happen.
And then, of course, they were persuaded by the British.
Because British were the old hand,
which were in Iran since the beginning of the 19th century.
They always had relations with Iran and so forth.
So they gradually replaced.
And of course, I don't want to give them
this kind of a satanic view that Americans
was a bad influence, because they had also
some very good influences in Iran.
But this particular episode somehow shed a dark light
on the American presence and was used
and abused time and again, particularly
the revolution in 1979, which was this great Satan idea
that Khomeini created, basically was based
on the fact is 1953, you were responsible
for the downfall of a national government in Iran.
Which as a matter of fact, he had no respect for it.
Khomeini had no respect for the secular,
nationally liberals, including Mohammad Mossadegh.
But he was using it as a rhetorical tool
for his own purposes.
But what happened is that after 1953,
we see again the rise of authoritarian
Mohammad Reza Shah's power.
- And that he's, that's the Shah?
- That's the Shah, that we know as Shah.
This is son of Reza Shah.
- And technically, what is Shah?
- Shah is an old term in Persian
that comes from a pre-Islamic Persian of ancient times.
- So in the context of democracy,
should it be seen as like a supreme leader, king?
- Is the head of the executive power,
according to the Constitution of 1906.
- Oh, that's in the Constitution, the actual term Shah.
- Of course, he has a place in the Constitution.
- But the actual term Shah, okay, interesting.
- But the Shah is a very old term.
- Yeah, it's almost like a monarchic term, like a king.
- Yeah, it is actually is a term peculiar to Iran.
I've written about it somewhere.
But because the term, the Western word in the ancient times
has been rex for royalty and the king.
In the Eastern world, in India, is raj,
is the same origin, the same root.
Iran never shared that.
They had the idea of, because rex and raj,
I don't want to get into too much of etymology,
but this is an interesting one.
Rex and raj both means the one that opens the road
for basically enforcer of religion, okay?
Enforcer of the right religion.
Because rex and raj both have the,
of the etymological origin of right, you see?
And raj means the right religion, basically.
- By the way, there's so much beautiful language here.
I'm just looking at the Persian Constitution in 1906,
and it says it's the constitution
§10Transcript · 1:41:15–1:52:34
of the sublime state of Persia, Qajar Iran.
I mean, just the extra adjectives
on top of this stuff is beautiful.
- Yeah, because that was actually the change that came about.
I don't want to go too much into it.
But it was called, as I pointed out before,
the guarded domains of Iran.
They changed that to the sublime state of Iran
during the constitutional revolution.
Because they wanted to give a greater sense
of centrality of the state.
And sublime was the term we used.
- But also, what permeates all of this is a poetic,
I mean, there is a history of poetry to the culture.
- Of course, very strong, very strong.
- Which is fascinating.
So I mean, of course, I don't speak the language,
but even in Russian, there's also a music
to the soul of the people that represents itself,
that presents itself in the form of poetry and literature
in the way that it doesn't in the English-speaking world.
I don't know what that is.
There's a--
- Yeah, there's a romantic side.
- Romantic side.
- To all my students.
- Romantic side, that's right.
- Yeah, I agree with you.
In Iran, of course, you know,
there's a time of the constitutional revolution,
is a time of great poetry.
This kind of a patriotic sentiments
that comes through poetry plays a very important part.
Of course, these days, poetry has kind of declined,
and instead, you see the visual image
that is at the center.
That's why cinema is so important.
- Kids these days with their TikTok.
- Yeah, let me finish this about the period
of Muhammad Reza Shah.
He built up, because he received a greater income
from the oil revenue, and he built up a very strong state
with a strong security force, a strong security apparatus,
which is the SAVAK, which is an acronym
for the security force in security organization.
And he, of course, unfortunately,
in the 1960s and '70s, particularly in the 1970s,
basically suppressed the voices of,
or the possibility of any kind of a mass participation
in the political process.
It became very much an authoritarian regime
with its own technocrats,
very much a modernist vision of Iran's future,
and almost kind of messianic,
that he was hoping that Iran, in a decade,
would become the fifth most powerful state in the world,
and the riches, as he would have said,
the gates of the great civilization,
very much in the mind, had this image of ancient Iran
of the Achaemenid Empire.
And we want to go back to that greatness
of the Achaemenid Empire, somewhat rather naive
and very nationalistic in a crude fashion.
And what happened is that, as a result,
there was built up some kind of a resistance
from the intellectuals, from the left,
eventually resulting in a kind of a protest movement,
as I said, by 1977, 1978.
Then, of course, the question that comes to mind,
and that probably you would like to know about,
is the fact that why it becomes religious,
why it becomes Islamic,
if it's the popular nationalist, liberal tendency
of opening up the political space
and allowing greater participation,
going back to the Constitution of 1906, 1907,
why it's all of a sudden, it becomes Khomeini,
where does he come from?
The reason for that, at least in a concise fashion,
is the fact that on one area,
that after the greater suppression
of all the other voices remained open, was religion.
Mosques, the mullahs on the pulpit,
and the message that gradually shifted
from all the traditional message of the sharia of Islam,
I mean, all the rules and regulations
of how one has to live, into something very political,
and not only political, but also radical political.
So, in the whole period from the Constitutional Revolution
to the Revolution of 1979,
basically the religious establishment
gradually was pushed to the opposition.
They were not originally very conservative,
supporters of the state, as the Catholic Church,
for instance, was supportive of majority
of the authoritarian governments around the world.
But the politicization was the result of isolation,
because they were left out of the system.
And while in isolation, they did not,
they were not successful in trying to reform themselves,
to try to become, to try to find answers
to many of the questions of modern times.
What happens to women?
What happens to civil rights?
What happens to a civil society?
How modern law and individual freedoms
have to be defined in Islamic terms?
- How to separate religion and state?
- Or how to separate religion and state?
These issues were never addressed.
What happened is that there was this bypass
through political Islam, and revolutionary Islam,
as it gradually, they learned, you know,
that this is the bypass, bypass to power, basically,
to become again a voice in the society,
and eventually a prominent voice,
and eventually a monolithic voice in the society.
That's the process that led into the revolution of 1979.
Basically, this period, greater attention was paid
to religion, even among the secular middle classes,
who were alienated for a very long time
because of this extensive modernization
of the Pahlavi period.
They didn't have a sense of that old
monolithic disturbance, but they became,
they had a kind of aura in this period.
Yes, they are those who remained not corrupted.
They are the people who basically went against
the suppression of the Pahlavi regime,
and Khomeini became a leader, a symbol of that.
Nobody ever thought in the earlier stages,
among this very excited multitudes that came
to the streets of the Iranian cities in 1979,
or 1978, actually, thought that this old,
more like in the '70s, that all of a sudden
has appeared from the Najaf through Paris to Tehran,
is going to take over and create a autocracy,
a religious autocracy.
- We have to back up for just a second.
Who is Khomeini?
You just mentioned a few disparate facts about the man.
- Yes.
- He was the person that took power in 1979,
the supreme leader of Iran.
- Yes.
- You mentioned something about Paris,
something about being in the '70s.
- Yes.
- What should we know about the guy?
- Ayatollah Khomeini, who eventually was known
as Imam Khomeini, he was kind of promoted
to an even more sublime position.
- Okay, can we, just a million tangents.
Ayatollah, Imam, what do these terms mean?
- Well, Ayatollah means the sign of God.
In the course of the 19th century, or early 20th century,
as the religious establishment gradually lost
its greater presence in the society
and its prominent places in society,
they had some kind of an inflation in titles.
So they gave themselves more grand titles.
- Yeah, more adjectives.
- More adjectives, more grand titles, such as Ayatollah,
that became a kind of a highest rank
of the religious hierarchy.
- But it's not--
- Which incidentally was in an unofficial hierarchy.
It was not like the Catholic church that you have,
you know, bishops and, you know, further off.
It was very unofficial model.
And he was an Ayatollah, was eventually recognized
as an Ayatollah.
- He wasn't the first Ayatollah?
- No, no, no, not at all.
The Ayatollahs were before him ever since the beginning
of the century.
But he was eventually recognized as an Ayatollah.
And if I want to start it this way,
Ayatollah Khomeini was born in 1900.
And in a sense, all this tremendous change
that Iran witnessed in the course of the 20th century,
was in a sense materializing this person.
He become a mullah of a lower rank,
went to the traditional madrasas,
to the traditional centers for the education
of the seminarians, never had a secular education,
had a very complex Islamic education
on this one hand jurisprudence, on the other hand,
probably a little bit of Islamic philosophy and mysticism,
which is unusual for the jurists,
for the faqih, as they call them.
These religious scholars or legal scholars of Islam.
And then he, in the 1960s,
when he was residing in Tehran,
and gradually becoming more important,
he became a voice of opposition against the Shah.
And the reason for opposition in the early 1960s
was the fact that the Shah carried through a series
of extensive modernization policies,
of which the most important was the land reform.
§11Transcript · 1:52:37–2:04:33
So in effect, the land distribution that took place
in the early '60s, removed or weakened greatly
that class of landowners from the 19th century.
And he, Khomeini, saw himself as a voice
of that old class that felt that,
actually declared that this land redistribution
is un-Islamic according to the Islamic law.
Property is honored, and you cannot just,
no matter how much and how large are these estates
that the landowning class has,
the government has no right to redistribute it,
even among the peasants, among the people
who are tilling the land.
So that was a major issue.
Shah also gave the right of vote to women.
And that also he objected,
he said women should not have a right.
- Can we just linger on the Islamic law?
How firm and clear is the Islamic law
that he was representing and embodying?
Is this-- - Codified?
- Codified, yes, that's a good term.
- That's another issue.
Not only the hierarchy was unofficial and informal,
but also Islamic law, particularly Shia law,
did not have any codified system,
because these religious authorities always resisted
becoming under a umbrella of a more codified system
of Islamic law, because they were outside the state
in a sense, civil law was in the hand
of the religious establishment,
they had their own courts independent of the state.
But other matters, legal matters,
was in the hand of the government.
There was a kind of de facto division
between these two institutions,
state versus the religious establishment.
Therefore it was not codified.
So he could declare that this is unofficial,
or sorry, illegal, according to the Islamic law,
that you would distribute land to the peasants.
And another mujtahid, or another religious authority,
would say no, no, it is perfectly fine,
because he would have a different reading of the law.
So that being in mind, that adds to the complexity
of the picture, he, in 1963, there was a period
of uprising of the supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini.
That was a turning point in a sense,
to try to politicize the religious supporters
of Ayatollah, who were loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini.
And in a sense, all the community
of more religiously orientated,
against the secular policies of the Shah,
and against, of course, the dictatorship of the Shah.
- So that's where the religious movement
became a political party.
- Became, in 1963 is the first moment,
it's a huge uprising.
And the government suppressed it.
- But then, suppression would start to build.
- Of course.
And he was sent to exile.
He went to Najaf, which is this great center in southern.
- So became a martyr on top of this.
- At the martyr, he was probably even forgotten
to some extent.
But not, he was forgotten for the secular middle class.
But not to those supporters of his,
who were paying him their dues,
because in Islam, you would pay dues to religious leaders.
You know, there's religious dues and alms
that you would pay to the clerical authorities,
and they redistribute them among their own students,
and so forth.
So they built, actually, a network of loyalty
based on these donations.
And these donations that received by Ayatollah Khomeini
was very effectively through his network,
was distributed, even if he was in exile outside Iran.
So, the 1977, 1978, when the situation changed,
and there was a little bit of opening
in the political climate,
then you saw that Ayatollah Khomeini
started sending cassette messages.
That was his mean of communication.
Was sending cassettes, and cassettes were sent
through the country by his network.
So, or declarations, and saying first
that we would like to see a greater democratization,
and the Shah has to abide by the constitution
of 1907, this is a constitution,
this is a democratic system, and so forth.
- Was he charismatic?
- Well, it depends who would call,
what you call charismatic.
He had a long beard, he was kind of a man
in turban and the gown, which was a very unusual
leadership for people who were much more accustomed
to the civilian clothing, or to the equipments
of the Shah's military uniforms that he used to wear.
- But I also mean like, he is a man
that was able to take power, to become popular,
sufficiently popular. - Yes.
- So, I would like, is it the ideas, is it an accident,
or is it the man himself, the charisma,
or something about the man that led
to this particular person basically changing
the tide of history in this part of the world,
in a way that was unexpected?
- All the above that you mentioned--
- Or was it just the beard?
- No, I think no, it's beyond the appearance.
The appearance greatly helps, as you know.
- Yeah. - You know?
- In the 20th century, appearance is helpful.
Yeah, pictures for propaganda, for messaging.
- Yeah, that's an important factor.
And he was kind of adamant and very severe
in his own positions.
He could appear very uncompromising,
and he had a sense of confidence, self-confidence,
that virtually everybody else lacked.
And he was a man of opportunity.
As soon as he would see that a chance,
an opportunity would open up, he would jump on it.
And that's what he did, basically.
As more the political space opened,
the weaknesses of the Shah's government became more evident.
His indecision became more evident.
His lack of confidence became more evident.
Khomeini managed to move further
into the center of the movement
because he was the only authority
that had this network of support through the mosques,
through the people who paid homage to him,
who followed him, because there's a sense of following
of the religious leader in Shi'ism.
You are a follower of this authority,
you're a follower of that authority.
And he's basically created an environment
in which people looked upon him
as a kind of a messianic figure
that came to save Iran from what they considered
at the time the problems of dictatorship under the Shah.
- So there's not a suspicion about Islamic law
being the primary law of the land?
- Not at all.
People had very little sense
that what Islamic law is all about,
because the secular education has left that
into the old religious schools.
This is not something that ordinary educated Iranian
who goes to the universities is going to learn.
Therefore, there is a sense of idealization
that there is something great there.
And there were quite a number of intellectuals
who also viewed this kind of an idea
of they would refer to as West's toxication,
that is this civilization of the West
that has brought with it all the modernity
that we see around ourselves,
has enormous sinister features into it.
And it has taken away from us our authenticity.
That was the thing, that there is something authentic
that should be protected.
And therefore, a man in that kind of a garb and appearance
seemed as a source for return to this originality
of their own culture, authenticity of their own culture.
And he perfectly took advantage of that, that is Khomeini,
took advantage of it and the secularity
at the expense of everybody else,
which he managed in the course of 1979 to 1989,
which he passed away, he died in the 10 years
during this period, managed to basically transform
the Iranian society to create institutions
of the Islamic Republic
and to acquire himself the position
of the guardian jurist.
That was something completely new,
it didn't ever exist before.
As a matter of fact, as you might know,
the model of government that a religious establishment
takes over the states is unprecedented
throughout the course of Iranian history,
throughout the course of the Islamic history, I would say.
This is the first example, and probably the only example
of a regime that the religious establishment
that has always, in the course of Iranian history,
ever since I would say probably at this 16th century,
if not earlier, has been always separate from the state
and always kind of collaborating with the state
with certain tensions in between the two of them.
They were two, basically as they would call themselves,
the two pillars of stability in the society.
That situation changed.
For the first time, the religious establishment
took over the power of the state,
and that's at the core of what we see today
as a major issue for Iranian society,
because these are basically that old balance
§12Transcript · 2:04:37–2:16:21
between the religion and the state,
which was kind of a de facto separation
of the authorities of the two, has been violated.
And now you have in power a theocracy in effect,
which of course only in its appearance is theocracy.
Deep down, it's a, in my opinion,
it's a brutal fascist regime that stays in power,
but it has the appearance of religion into it.
So this is really the story of the revolution.
And as a result of that,
the Iranian middle class has greatly suffered.
It's not without a reason
that you see four million Iranians abroad,
because basically the emergence of this new power
gradually isolated or marginalized
the secular middle class,
who could not survive under that regime,
and gradually moved out in the course of perhaps 30, 40 years
Up to now, Iran has the largest,
I think I'm right to say so,
has the largest brain drain in any country in the world,
- So-- - in relation to its population.
- So fascinating that,
how much of a weird quirk of history is it
that religion would take hold in a country?
Like, does it have to do with the individual?
It seems like if we re-ran the 20th century a thousand times
we would get the '79 revolution resulting in Islamic law
like less than 1% of the time, it feels like, or no.
Which percentage would you put on that?
- Well, I think it has something to do
with the very complex nature of how Iran evolved
over a long period of time, since the 16th century.
That's why, if I would for a moment
talk about what I have written,
I've written a book that's called "Iran, a Modern History,"
and it does not start in the 20th century.
It starts in the 16th century.
- Yeah.
- Because that's what I've argued,
that this complex process that at the end of today
resulted in what we see around us today
is something that was in making for a very long time.
- And religion was a big part of it.
- Yes.
- She and the Messiah complex.
- Yes, exactly.
- The longing for this great vision of a great nation
that somehow is a sublime nation
that can only be fully sublime through religion.
- Or at the time, it was thought that it's through religion.
Ever since then, it's disillusionment with that image,
or at least a process of disillusionment.
The outcome of it is what we see today.
Basically, that process of 40 years
is a process of readjusting to the realities of the world.
That great moment of romantic success of a revolution,
like most revolutions, of course,
that is going to change Iran
and bring this kind of a moment of greatness
led into this great disappointment.
So it's a movement of the great disappointment in a sense.
Like most Messianic movements, by the way,
Messianic movements in general
are always leading into great disappointment.
But what I have here that perhaps should be added to it,
that yes, it was a peculiarity of Iran as a society
that had to experience this eventual encounter
between religion and state.
That's something to do with the nature of Shi'ism.
That's just one point that should be pointed out.
Most of Sunni Islam don't have that kind of,
I say most because there is something there,
but Sunni Islam in general does not have
that kind of an aspiration
for the coming of a Messianic leader.
Shi'ism does.
Shi'ism in its very shaping,
particularly the way that it was set up in Iran,
was a religion that has always this element
of expectation to it for the coming of this Messianic leader.
Of course, I mean, between parentheses,
all societies look for Messianic leaders.
I mean, just look around us.
- But some societies more than others.
There's certain culture, it might have to do
with the romantic poetry that we mentioned earlier.
(laughing)
I mean, surely, I mean, not to draw too many parallels,
but with the Soviet Union, there was romanticism too.
I mean, I don't know.
It does maybe idealism.
- A sense of a savior who would bring you
out of the misery that you are in.
And always looking for a third party
to solve your issues.
That's why probably this movement
has a particular significance,
because it probably doesn't look for a Messiah.
Although, I was talking to my brother,
who is a historian also, and he was saying,
perhaps the Messiah of this movement is that Mahsa Amini,
the 22-year-old girl that was killed.
It's a martyred Messiah who is now leading a movement
which no longer has that charismatic leadership with it.
But yes, I would say that Iran has been the birthplace,
if I might say that, of Messianic aspirations,
going back to ancient Zoroastrianism,
which is really the whole system that you see
in major religions, or at least so-called Western religions,
so Abrahamic religions, is parallel,
or perhaps influenced, by Zoroastrianism,
in which there is an idea of this world
and the other world, there is a hereafter.
There is an idea of a judgment at the end of the time.
And there is a concept that there is a moment of justice
that is going to come with the rise of a religious
or a charismatic figure.
So it's a very old phenomenon in Iran, very old.
And it's time and again repeated itself
in the course of its history, but never as powerfully
as it happened in 1979, and never in the form
of authority from within the religious establishment.
It was always the dissent movements
that were kind of antinomian.
They were against the authority
of the religious establishment.
That changed in the 20th century.
- But the revolution in 1979,
that change is still with us today.
Can we just linger on, are there some practical,
games of power that occurred, you know,
in the way that Stalin took power
and held power in the early days?
Is there something like this in terms
of the establishment of the Revolutionary Guard
and all those kinds of stuff?
- Yes, yes.
- So the messianic figure has some support
from the people, but does he have
to crush his enemies in competition?
- It certainly did.
Probably not, certainly not as brutal
in terms of the victims as you would see
in Soviet Union under Stalin, who the bloodshed
or the destruction of the population was far greater
than what you would find in Iran
of the Islamic Republic, it's uncomparable.
Perhaps I would find a greater parallel
with Mao Zedong, and particularly
because China has a very strong messianic tradition
since the ancient times, so they have something,
and Mao appeared as a kind of a messianic figure.
There I can see there is a parallel,
but also you can see with any other authoritarian regime
with a messianic figure at the head of it,
that it destroys all the other forces.
So during the course of the first 10 years
of the Islamic Revolution, it destroyed
the liberal nationalist secular,
it destroyed the guerrilla movements,
some of them Islamic, some of them Marxist,
who turned into political parties or tendencies
in the course of the post-revolution 1979.
They were completely destroyed,
and in a very brutal fashion.
And their opposition, even within
the religious establishment, because it wasn't a uniform,
there were many different tendencies,
those that were opposed to the authority
of Ayatollah Khomeini, or now Imam Khomeini,
meaning almost a sacred religious figure
above the level of a religious authority.
He's a saint kind of a figure.
Since Shi'ism has this idea of Imams,
there were 11 of them, the 12th is hidden,
and would come back at the end of the time,
this is a messianic figure.
So the title that was always used for them only in Shi'ism,
never used for any other person.
He is the first person in the revolution of 1979,
first referred to as Deputy of Imam,
but the term Deputy gradually disappeared
and he became Imam Khomeini.
That's his official title.
- I love human beings so much.
It's so beautiful, these titles that we give each other.
It's marvelous to observe.
- You love it because you haven't been under that system.
- No, I love it in a very dark--
- Dark fashion, yes.
- Kind of way.
It caricatures itself.
It's almost funny in its absurdity,
if not for the evil that it has led to in human history.
- But also the fact that it's a man,
it's in fact fulfillment in a kind of completely
unintended fashion.
It's a fulfillment of that idea of a Messiah
that they've been fighting for.
§13Transcript · 2:16:23–2:28:10
This Imam which is in a hidden for a thousand years
is here and not here.
And therefore Khomeini would have in a sense
fulfilled those anticipations.
But beyond that, I just give you one example.
I know that you may have other concerns.
But when I say elimination,
at the end of the Iran-Iraq War
by the direct order of Ayatollah Khomeini,
a fatwa that he wrote,
a group of prisoners
who belonged to a variety of
political parties, the left, religious left,
majority of them, the left,
the Marxist left and the religious left.
In a matter of a few weeks, or perhaps a few months,
I'm not actually quite sure about the time span,
in a series of, these were people who have already
been tried and they were given sentences.
They were brought back before the
summary trials of three judges,
or more, three, four of them.
One of them is now the
new president of the Islamic Republic, Raisi.
And they were given quick summary sentences
which meant execution.
So something between probably six to 8,000
were executed in a matter of a month or two months,
something like that.
Mostly in Tehran, but also in provinces.
And that remained an extraordinary trauma
for the families, for those who had these kids.
They're all young, all young.
So this remains very much
kind of original sin of the Islamic Republic
that cannot get rid of.
And it's in people's memories,
they didn't allow them, even the families,
to go and mourn their dead
in an official symmetry which they created for them.
Now the latest thing is that they put a huge
concrete wall around it so nobody
would be able to get into it.
So these all part of this extraordinary level of,
level of atrocity, brutality,
that you see that the regime who claimed
that it comes with the morality of religion and Islam
to bring back the justice and be more,
in a sense, kind to people,
ended up with what it is in the memory
of many of the people in Iran.
- So developing these fascistic tendencies.
- Very much so.
Destroying minorities, Baha'is, one of them.
Hundreds of Baha'is were, without any reason,
without any involvement, were picked up and executed.
Their properties were taken over.
Their rights were taken away from them,
even up to this day.
It's the largest, by the way, religious minority in Iran.
So you would see that in many areas,
this is a, acts very much as a, beyond authoritarian.
It's a kind of really a fascistic regime.
- So Khamenei held power for 10 years,
and then took power, the next supreme leader,
who is still the leader today, for over 30 years.
Who is he?
- Well, he was one of the, this is Ali Khamenei.
- Ayatollah.
- Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
- Imam one day, perhaps?
- No, well, they hesitated to use the term Imam for him,
but in any other respect, he was given all of that adulation
that they did to Khamenei.
He is the guardian jurist.
That's what's important.
Because the guardian jurist in the Constitution
of the Islamic Republic is an authority
that is above the state.
He is not elected, quote unquote,
because this is a divine authority,
although he has been designated by the group
of determined mullahs like himself.
And he has the full power over all institutions
of the state, the army, the media, the economy,
every aspect of it.
He acts like a shah.
He acts like this authoritarian authority.
- Did that gradually develop, or was that very early on?
- Well, that's part of the Constitution
of the Islamic Republic.
The first Constitution, the first draft of the Constitution
did not have the authority of the guardian jurist.
But then it was added by Khamenei and his supporters.
- Is there actually in the Constitution
any limits to his power?
- Yes, there is a council of the experts, so to say,
that would remove him from power, I think theoretically.
But there is so much restrictions to that
that I don't think it would have ever happened
in reality, in his case, at least.
- But in terms of executive to make decisions
and all that kind of stuff,
does he need to check with anybody?
- No.
He does check with his own advisors,
but he doesn't have any constitutional obligation
to check on the decisions that he's making.
- So that's the supreme leader,
but there's been presidents.
- Yes.
- And what's the role of the president?
- The president, in a sense, is the executive power
under the Islamic Republic.
There are three heads of powers.
There is the president that presumably
has the executive power.
There is the head of the judiciary,
and there is the head of the,
the speaker of the parliament, majlis,
Islamic majlis, which is the legislative.
So there's the legislative, judiciary, and executive.
Raisi, who is not a president,
is the head of the executive.
Above them is the supreme leader,
or the guardian jurist.
- Can you give me some insight,
because I especially, I'm not exactly sure why,
but the president, Ahmadinejad,
is somebody I'm, as an American, really familiar with.
Why is that exactly?
But why was the president the public-facing person
to the world versus the supreme leader?
Is that just an accident of a particular humans involved,
or is this by design?
- No, because the supreme leader tries to keep himself
out of issues of everyday politics, supposedly.
But therefore, he is not coming to the United Nations
to give a speech during the session.
But Mr. Ahmadinejad, who at the time was the president,
would come and make outrageous statements.
That's why you probably know something about him.
- So all of them make public statements,
but he had a proclivity for outrageous statements.
(laughing)
- He does all kinds of things.
He makes all kinds of statements.
But he is somewhat above the everyday politics, in theory.
But of course, he's pulling all the strings,
without doubt, in every respect.
And it seems that you were asking,
I thought you were going to ask me this question,
almost without an exception,
since the inception of the Islamic Republic in 1979,
up to the last of the presidents of the Islamic Republic,
Rouhani, before the guy that is last year,
or a year and a half ago, was in a phony election,
got into the position of the president.
All of them, and it's a long list,
all of them eventually fell out with the regime.
So there is no president,
except perhaps to some extent Rouhani,
but we'll wait and see what's going to happen to him.
But prior to him, all of them, including Ahmadinejad,
fell out with the regime, with the current regime in Iran.
- Who's Rouhani?
He was officially president for eight years.
- Yeah, prior to Raisi.
- Ibrahim Raisi, the 221,
what you're saying is a phony election.
- Yes, it's a phony election.
- What happened?
What's interesting, what happened?
- Because the process of actually candidacy
for presidency is completely controlled
by a council that is under the control
of the supreme leader.
So they have to approve who is going to be the candidate.
So not everybody can enter and say,
"I would like to be a candidate."
- So did Rouhani fall out of favor?
You're saying there's some--
- Well, he is kind of out of favor now,
because he was more moderate than this most recent regime.
But the point is that if you look,
this is something almost institutional,
constitutional to the regime.
This is a regime that rejects all of the executive powers,
because the division between the supreme authority,
as the place of a supreme authority,
versus the presidency, is problematic.
It is as if there would be a supreme leader
in the United States above all the three sources of power.
That's the kind of view that you can see in today's Iran.
And of course, he's at the focus of all the criticism
that he receives from the demonstrators in today's Iran.
- So on top of all this, recently,
and throughout the last several years,
US and Iran are in the midst of nuclear deal negotiations.
This is another part of the story of Iran,
§14Transcript · 2:28:14–2:43:01
is the development of nuclear weapons, the nuclear program.
They're looking to restore the nuclear deal
known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA.
What is the history, the present, and the future
of these negotiations over nuclear weapons?
What is interesting to you in this full context
from the 16th century of the messianic journey?
What's interesting to you here?
- You can argue that for a long time, even under the Shah,
but much more expressively and decisively,
under the Islamic Republic, there was a determination
to have a nuclear power or nuclear weapon, in a sense.
I think the bottom line of all the negotiations,
everything else, is that Iran, of the Islamic Republic,
had the tendency of having its own nuclear weapon.
The reason for that is that Iran was subject
of nearly nine years, eight and a half years,
of Iran-Iraq war, when not only Iran faced an aggressor,
Iraq, that actually attacked Iran at a very critical time,
at the very beginning of the Iranian Revolution,
but the fact that Iran felt kind of a helpless,
in the course of this war, and has to make great sacrifices,
actually, which supported the Islamic regime,
and consolidated the Islamic regime, because of this war.
And most of the time, their support of the United States
was behind Iraq vis-a-vis Iran.
And Iran felt that it's been isolated
and has to protect itself.
So there is some argument for having nuclear capabilities.
But in reality, this has resulted in a completely
mindless, crazy, wasteful attempt on the side
of the Iranian regime to try to develop a nuclear power.
And therefore, the rest of the world,
particularly in this region, were very worried
that if Iran would get access to a nuclear weapon,
then the entire region of the Persian Gulf might,
particularly Saudi Arabia, possibly Turkey, possibly Egypt,
all of them may require, may demand to have
also nuclear weapon, given the fact that Pakistan
and India already have it.
So there was a determined attempt, as you might know,
on the side of the Western communities,
or now gradually world communities, to try to,
as much as possible, to control Iran from getting access
to a nuclear capability, or actually limit Iran's
nuclear capabilities, to what was defined usually
in a euphemism as a peaceful fashion, okay?
That being said, there was also Israel,
which viewed the Islamic Republic as a arch enemy.
And some of it might be due to the Israelis' own
exaggeration of Iran's threat, and some of it is
because Iran has developed a fairly strong military,
as we see today.
And as such, this attempt to try to prevent Iran
from ever getting access to a nuclear weapon,
which resulted, as you might know, in these massive
sanctions that were imposed upon Iran,
ever since the beginning of the revolution in 1979,
and of course more intensively since 2015, 2016,
even prior to that, probably a little bit earlier.
This agreement, the nuclear agreement, was supposed
to control or monitor Iranian nuclear industry,
or nuclear setup, in exchange for removing the sanctions.
But this never worked, as a matter of fact,
in a very successful, satisfactory way for the Iranians,
or for the Americans, particularly under Trump
administration, which I think foolishly decided
to scrap the agreement that was reached
under President Obama.
Like many other policies that was implemented
under Trump administration, this created a major problem.
That is, how to, under Biden, how to try to come up
with a new nuclear agreement with Iran.
In this process, since 2016, where the United States
withdrew from the agreement, Iran felt comfortable
to try to go and do whatever they want,
without any kind of monitor, being monitored
by the international community.
And that's the situation now.
We don't know whether Iran is really sincere
under the present regime to negotiate a deal.
We don't know that every United States is willing to do so.
And it seems that now, what is happening in terms
of the protests in the Iranian streets,
makes it even harder in public eye to try to negotiate
a deal with Iran, because that means in the minds of many,
and with some justification, that if the nuclear agreement
would result in the removal of many of these sanctions,
millions, billions, as the result of the removal
of the sanctions and Iran's ability to sell it,
it's oil in the international market
without any restrictions, means that the Iranian government
is going to become even more powerful,
more financially secure, in order to suppress
its own people.
So that's the agreement that goes against coming to terms
with Iran.
But the problem is that there is no clear alternative,
even I'm not particularly personally favorable
for this agreement to be ratified.
But the alternative is very difficult.
There's no way to try to see what can be done.
- Geopolitics where every alternative is terrible.
Let me ask you about one of the most complex
geopolitical situations in history.
One aspect of it is the Cold War between Iran and Israel.
The bigger picture of it is sometimes referred to
as Israel-Palestine conflict.
What are all the parties, nations involved?
What are the interests that are involved?
What's the rhetoric?
Can you understand, make the case for each side
of this conflict?
- You're opening a new can of worms that takes
another three hours of conversation.
- Just three hours?
- At least.
What I can tell you is this.
Iran prior to 1979 viewed itself under the Shah
as a kind of a, if not supporter of Israel,
was in very good terms with Israel.
They had an embassy in Iran, or unofficial embassy in Iran.
They had certain projects that's helping
with the agriculture and so forth in Iran.
But since 1979, that completely reversed.
Part of it is that the issue of the Palestinian plight
remained very much at the heart of the revolutionary
Iranians who would see that part of the United States
is to support, part of the United States guilt, sin,
is to support Israel vis-a-vis its very suppressive,
very oppressive treatment of the Palestinians,
completely illegal taking over of the territories
which is not theirs since 1967.
And therefore it is upon the Iranian regime,
Iranian Islamic Republic, to support
the cause of the Palestinians.
This came about at a time when the rest of the support
for the Palestinians, including Arab nationalism,
basically reached a stage of bankruptcy.
I mean, much of the regimes of the Arab world
either are now coming to terms with Israel,
or in one way or another, because of their own contingencies,
because of their own concerns and interests,
are willy-nilly accepting Israel in the region.
Now, that old task of rhetorically supporting
the Palestinians falls upon the Islamic Republic
that sees itself as a champion of the Palestinians now.
Without, as a matter of fact, having either the support
of the Iranian people behind him.
If you ask, if tomorrow there would be a poll
or a referendum, I would doubt that 80%
of the Iranian people would approve of the policies
of the Islamic Republic vis-a-vis the issue of Palestine.
Nor the Palestinians themselves,
because the Islamic Republic's only supporting
those factions within the Palestinian movement
which are Islamic, quote-unquote.
And even within that, there is problems
with Hamas, for instance.
But nevertheless, it's for the Islamic Republic
some kind of a propaganda tool to be able to use it
for its own sake, and claim that we are the champions
of the Palestinian people.
Whether they have a solution, if you look at the rhetoric,
if you listen to the rhetoric, it's the destruction
of the state of Israel.
And that, it seems to me, creates a certain anxiety
in the minds of the Israelis, Israeli population,
and Israeli government.
Particularly those who are now in power.
Netanyahu, the Likud, and more kind of a right-wing politics
of, polity of today's Israel.
That being said, I think also the Israelis try
to get an extra mileage out of threat of Iran, quote-unquote,
in order to present themselves rightful
for terms of security and whatever else.
The way that they're treating the Palestinians,
which I think is extremely unjust.
I think it's extremely unwise for Israel
to carry on with these policies as they did
since '67 at least, and not to try
to come to terms with it.
Of course, there are huge amount of,
I'm not denying that at all,
there's a huge amount of failures, mistakes,
and stupidity on the side of the Palestinian leadership
in various stages.
Not to try to make a deal, or try to come to terms
in some fashion, but it's a very complex picture,
and it's rather unfair to the Palestinians
to accuse them for not coming to terms with Israel
under a very uneven circumstances,
when they are not in a position to try to make a fair deal
in terms of the territories, or in terms of their security
in future vis-a-vis Israel.
- So I think there's, as you probably know,
quite a lot of people that would have
a different perspective than you just stated,
in terms of taking the perspective of Israel
and characterizing the situation.
§15Transcript · 2:43:04–2:55:28
Can you steelman their side?
Can you steelman Israel's side,
that they're trying to be a sovereign nation,
trying to protect themselves against threats,
ultimately wanting to create a place of safety,
a place where people can pursue all the things
that you want to pursue in life,
including foremost, happiness?
- I tend to agree with you,
and I have all the respect for the fact
that Israel would like to create security
and happiness for its own people.
But there are two arguments.
One is a moral argument.
To my mind as a historian,
Jews across, around the world,
for all through their history, suffered.
And this is a history of suffering.
It's a history, memory of suffering.
And I find it enormously difficult to believe
that a nation that's the product of so much sacrifice,
suffering, loss of life,
and variety of Holocaust above all,
would find itself in a position
not to give the proper justice
to a people who could be their neighbors.
And that is a moral argument,
which I cannot believe under any circumstances
can be accepted.
Second, in real terms,
what do you want to, you want to commit a genocide?
Do you have a population there
that you have to come to terms with it?
And you cannot just postpone as they did.
Since '67, they are postponing
and hoping that it goes away somehow.
I don't think it's going to go away.
And it's going to get worse rather than better.
- It's a long, nuanced discussion,
and I look forward to having it.
So we'll just leave it there for the moment.
But it is a stressful place in the world
where the rhetoric is existential,
where Iran makes claims that it wants to wipe
a country off the face of the earth.
It's just the level of intensity of rhetoric
is unlike anywhere else in the world.
- And extremely dangerous.
- And in both directions.
So one, the real danger of the rhetoric
actually being acted upon,
and then the extreme political parties
using the rhetoric to justify even a greater escalation.
So if Iran is saying that this is,
saying that they're wanting to wipe Israel
off the face of the earth, that justifies any response.
- On the other side.
- On the other side.
- Of course, I tend to agree with you fully.
And unfortunately, this is a very critical situation
that this region is facing, Iran in particular.
I would say that, I hope that in the minds
of the people of Israel, there is enough or common sense
to realize that probably escalation on the Israeli side
is not in the favor of anybody.
And try to let the Iranians to go on
with their empty rhetoric as they do so far.
But at the same time, I cannot deny the fact
that there is a danger on the side of this regime
and what it says.
It cannot be denied, nobody can justify that.
Particularly because the Iranian population
is not behind this regime.
Certainly in the case of the Palestinians.
Or for that matter, it's not Palestine.
It's the Islamic Republic's involvement in Lebanon
with Hezbollah, it's the Islamic Republic's involvement
in Syria with Bashar Assad, it's involvement
in other parts of the world, perhaps even Yemen.
That all of them creates extraterritorial responsibilities
or interventions, unnecessary interventions
that ultimately is not in favor of best interests
of the Iranian people or Iran as a country.
Iran has never been involved in this kind of politics
before of the Islamic Republic.
So in a sense, the Iranian regime, it seems to me,
by going to the extreme, try to create for itself
a space that it did not exist before.
Did not have or did not deserve to have
within the politics of the region.
So in other words, that has become part of the tool,
a kind of an instrument for, if you like to call it
some kind of an expansionism of the regime.
In parts of the world where it can see
there is a possibility for its presence,
for its expansion.
Of course, historically speaking,
Iran ever since 15th century,
I think that's the earliest example I can see,
in early modern times, has always a tendency
of moving in the direction of not only what is today
the state of Iraq, but further into the eastern coast
of Mediterranean.
So that's a long-term ambition that has been in the cards
as far as Iran as a strategic unit is concerned.
But by no means justified and by no means
could be a reasonable, could be a sane policy
of a nation state as today's Iran.
But the second point is that also
regimes are always victims of their own rhetoric.
So it's, once you keep repeating something,
then you become more and more committed to it.
And it cannot remain anymore in the level of a rhetoric.
You have to do something about it.
So it's a compelling pressure to try to
materialize what you've been saying in your rhetoric.
And that is even extremely more dangerous
as far as Iran is concerned.
And it brings it to some unholy alliances
that today we are witnessing Iran is getting involved.
Even more dangerous than this rhetoric
in terms of the, vis-a-vis Israel,
is its involvement with Russia
and to some extent with China, which we can't talk about.
- What do you think about the meeting
between Khamenei and Vladimir Putin in July?
What's that alliance?
What's that partnership?
Is it surface-level geopolitics
or is there a deep, growing connection?
- I cannot see the difference between geopolitics
and these deep connections.
I see it's one and the same.
Why?
Because I think the experience of 40 years
of distancing from the West
in terms of the Islamic Republic.
And the fact that there is a shelf life
to imperial presence for any empire anywhere in the world.
So after the terrible experience of the United States
in Iraq and in Afghanistan,
pretty much like the British empire,
that after the Suez experience in '56,
decided to withdraw from east of Suez,
maybe there is a moment here that we are witnessing,
or it may come, that a great power
like the United States sees in its benefit
not to get too much involved into nitty-gritty things
in other parts of the world,
that it's not its immediate concern.
And I think that is part of the reason,
not the entire reason,
part of the reason why we see the emergence
of a new geopolitical environment
in this part of the world,
of which China, Russia, possibly Iran,
possibly Turkey, possibly both of them,
are going to be part.
Perhaps Saudis also, but I doubt that the Saudis
under the present circumstances,
although we've witnessed some remarkable issue
in the course of the past few weeks,
where the Saudis giving assurances
to American administration and then shifting
and getting along with Putin,
in terms of the oil production,
I think it's more than that even.
And it's not only them,
but also the Emirates are doing the same thing.
So what does that just tell us?
- And that's another many-hour conversation
about the oil industry in Iran and the whole region.
- In emerging this kind of a world,
which was perhaps even 10 years ago unimaginable,
that you see now a great power, China,
that it's going to remain from what we see around us
as a great power,
and Russia, adventurous,
foolish, but nevertheless would remain criminal,
I would say, as far as its behavior in Ukraine.
But actually, it's a rogue nation
that attracts another rogue nation.
So Iran finds itself now in a greater place of security
in alliance with Russia,
in the hope that this would give Iran a greater security
in this part of the world.
Whether this is realistic or an illusion,
I think remains to be seen.
I think Iran-China relation makes more sense.
Although, if you ask ordinary Iranians,
they don't like it.
They would tell, "Why should we be tied up
"with China as the only trade party with America,
"because of the foolish isolations
"that you have created for us,
"because of all the sanctions that you have created for us,
"the Islamic Republic?"
So in a sense, it's a very difficult question to answer.
Probably Iranians also like to be more on the other camp.
But what happens is that in real term,
§16Transcript · 2:55:32–3:05:50
what surprises me most is not this alliance with China,
but it's kind of becoming a lackey or subservient
to Putin's regime in Russia.
Since if you look at it,
Iran, ever since at least the 19th century,
not going further back,
the beginning of the 19th century,
always viewed Russia as the greatest threat strategically,
because it was sitting right at the top of Iran.
It was infinitely more powerful than Iran has ever been.
And Iran fought two rounds of war
at the beginning of the century,
lost the entire Caucasus to Russia,
and learned its lesson,
that you have to be mindful of Russia,
and you have to keep it at arm's length.
And that's what was Iran's policy
throughout the course of the 20th century,
19th and 20th century,
up to what we see now around us,
which is a very strange situation.
Whether the balance has changed
in terms of if Russia is purchasing weapons
from Iran, which was unheard of,
it means that there is a new balance is emerging,
a new relationship is emerging.
Perhaps remains to be seen.
But if you look at the historical precedence,
it would have been enormously unwise
to be an ally of Russia,
given its long history of aggression in Iran.
See, Russians, part of the reason
why it's actually Iran allied itself with British Empire
was the fact that it was so much afraid
of the Russian expansion.
And as such, I don't know what's going to be
the future of this relationship.
- There is a big disconnect
between governments and the people.
And I think ultimately, I have faith
that there's a love across the different cultures,
across the different religions, amongst the people.
And the governments are the source
of the division and the conflict and the wars
and all the geopolitics that is in part grounded
in the battle for resources and all that kind of stuff.
Nevertheless, this is the world we live in.
So you looked at the modern history of Iran
the past few centuries.
If you look into the future of this region,
now you kind of implied that a historian
has a bit of a cynical view
of protests and things like this
that are fueled, at least in the minds
of young people, with hope.
If you were to just for a while
have a bit of hope in your heart and your mind,
what is a hopeful future for the next 10, 20, 30 years
of Iran?
- I'm not cynical.
- Yes.
- I try to be realistic.
And I actually may be critical,
but I have great hopes
in Iran's future for a variety of reasons.
I actually did write an article,
only the last version of it is going to go out today,
in which the title of it is
The Time of Fear and Women of Hope,
which in a sense is this whole coverage
about what this movement means
that we see today.
It may fizzle in a few weeks' time,
or it may just go on and create a new dynamics
in Iranian society that would hopefully result
in a peaceful process of greater accommodation
and a greater tolerance within the Iranian society
and with the outside world.
And I think majority of the Iranian people
don't want tension,
don't want confrontation,
don't want crisis.
They, if 40 years they have suffered
from a regime that have dictated an ideology
that is regressive and impractical,
they want to go back to a life
in which they don't really create trouble
for their neighbors or for the world.
And therefore, I would see a better future for Iran.
That's for one reason.
Strategically or geopolitically,
maybe in Iran's advantage in a peaceful fashion
to negotiate as it's the fate of all the nations
rather than commit itself
or sworn to a particular course of policy.
So there's a give and take as the nature of politics
is art of possible, as it's been said.
So probably Iran is going to be hopefully
moving that direction.
I think there is a generational thing.
That's the third reason.
No matter how much the Islamic Republic
tried to Islamicize the Iranian society
in its own image of kind of radical,
ideological indoctrination, it has failed.
It has failed up to what we see today
in the Iranian streets.
And the Iranian population said no to it.
And I think if there would have been,
and I very much hope there will be,
a possibility for a more open environment,
more open space where they would be able
to speak their views out,
Iranians are not on the side of moving
in the extreme directions.
They are on the side of greater accommodation
and a greater interest in the outside world.
And if you look at every aspect of today's,
beside the government, every aspect of life
in today's Iran, you can see that.
From the way that people dress,
to the way that they try to live their lives,
to the way that they're educating themselves
or educated in the institutions,
do you see a desire, an intention to move forward?
And I'm optimistic.
- Well, in that struggle for freedom,
like I told you offline,
one of my close childhood friends is Iranian.
Just a beautiful person, his family is a wonderful family.
On a personal level, it is one of the deeper windows
into the Iranian spirit and soul
that I've gotten a chance to witness,
so I really appreciate it.
But in the recent times, I've gotten to hear
from a lot of people that are currently living in Iran,
that currently have that burning hope
for the future of the country.
And so my love goes out to them
in the struggle for freedom.
I have to-- - That's so nice
of you to say so.
And I very much hope so.
There are moments of despair,
and there are moments that you would think
that there is no hope,
but then again, something triggers,
and you see 100,000 people in the streets of Berlin
that are hoping for a better future for Iran.
And I very much hope it eventually emerges,
even I'm hoping at the same time
there's not going to be a very strong leadership,
as it was the case in the past.
We started with hope, we ended with hope.
This was a real honor.
This is an incredible conversation.
Thank you for giving such a deep
and wide story of this great nation,
one of the great nations in history.
- Well, that's very kind of you to say so.
- Thank you for sitting down today.
This was amazing. - Well, a history that's,
as I've said in the start of my book,
I say it's the history of a nation
which has learned a huge amount from the outside world
by force of its geography.
It was always located somewhere that people would invade,
or come for trade, or something happened to it
that this diffused culture continued to,
and they were not afraid of learning or adopting,
as they do right now today.
This is a very different society.
- Never a boring moment in its history, as you write about.
Thank you so much, this was awesome.
- Thank you.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Abba Samanat.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you with a few words
from Martin Luther King, Jr.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)