1

Iran in History

Iran in History

by Bernard Lewis

In attempting to attain some perspective on Iran in history, I begin,
as I think one must, with the Arab-Islamic conquests in the seventh
century—that series of epoch-making events following the advent
of Islam, the mission of the Prophet Muhammad and the carrying
of his message to vast areas east and west from Arabia, and the incor-
poration of many lands, from the Atlantic and the Pyrenees to the
borders of India and China and beyond, into the new Arab-Islamic
empire. These events have been variously seen in Iran: by some as a
blessing, the advent of the true faith, the end of the age of ignorance
and heathenism; by others as a humiliating national defeat, the con-
quest and subjugation of the country by foreign invaders. Both per-
ceptions are of course valid, depending on one’s angle of vision.

What I would like first to bring to your attention is a significant

and indeed remarkable difference between what happened in Iran
and what happened in all the other countries of the Middle East and
North Africa that were conquered by the Arabs and incorporated in
the Islamic caliphate in the seventh and eighth centuries.

These other countries of ancient civilization, Iraq, Syria, Egypt,

North Africa, were Islamized and Arabized in a remarkably short
time. Their old religions were either abandoned entirely or dwin-
dled into small minorities; their old languages almost disappeared.
Some survived in scriptures and liturgies, some were still spoken in
a few remote villages, but in most places, among most people, the
previous languages were forgotten, the identities expressed in those
languages were replaced, and the ancient civilizations of Iraq, Syria,
and Egypt gave way to what we nowadays call the Arab world.

Iran was indeed Islamized, but it was not Arabized. Persians re-

mained Persians. And after an interval of silence, Iran reemerged as

Bernard Lewis

 is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeri-

tus at Princeton University. He delivered his lecture under the auspices of the
Mortimer and Raymond Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies at Tel Aviv Univer-
sity, on 18 January 1999.

2

Bernard Lewis

a separate, different and distinctive element within Islam, eventu-
ally adding a new element even to Islam itself. Culturally, politi-
cally, and most remarkable of all even religiously, the Iranian contri-
bution to this new Islamic civilization is of immense importance.
The work of Iranians can be seen in every field of cultural endeavor,
including Arabic poetry, to which poets of Iranian origin compos-
ing their poems in Arabic made a very significant contribution. In a
sense, Iranian Islam is a second advent of Islam itself, a new Islam
sometimes referred to as 

Islam-i Ajam

. It was this Persian Islam,

rather than the original Arab Islam, that was brought to new areas
and new peoples: to the Turks, first in Central Asia and then in the
Middle East in the country which came to be called Turkey, and of
course to India. The Ottoman Turks brought a form of Iranian civi-
lization to the walls of Vienna. A seventeenth-century Turkish visi-
tor who went to Vienna as part of an Ottoman embassy, notes with
curiosity that the language which they speak in Vienna is a corrupt
form of Persian. He had of course observed the basic Indo-Euro-
pean kinship between Persian and German, and the fact that the
Germans say 

ist

 and the Persians say 

ast

, almost the same thing, for

the verb “to be,” present indicative third-person singular.

By the time of the great Mongol invasions of the thirteenth cen-

tury, Iranian Islam had become not only an important component;
it had become a dominant element in Islam itself, and for several
centuries the main centers of Islamic power and civilization were in
countries that were, if not Iranian, at least marked by Iranian civili-
zation. For a while this supremacy was challenged by the last center
of power in the Arab world, the Mamluk Sultanate based in Egypt.
But even that last stronghold disappeared, after the contest between
the Persians and the Ottomans to decide which should conquer Egypt
and the Ottoman success in what might call the preliminary elimi-
nation bout. Arabian Islam under Arab sovereignty survived only in
Arabia and in remote outposts like Morocco. The center of the Is-
lamic world was under Turkish and Persian states, both shaped by
Iranian culture. The major centers of Islam in the late medieval and
early modern periods, the centers of both political and cultural power,
such as India, Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, were all part of this Ira-
nian civilization. Although much of it spoke various forms of Turk-
ish, as well as other local languages, their classical and cultural lan-

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Iran in History

guage was Persian. Arabic was of course the language of scripture
and law, but Persian was the language of poetry and literature.

The Iranian Exception

Why this difference? Why is it that while the ancient civilizations of
Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, were submerged and forgotten, that of Iran
survived, and reemerged in a different form?

Various answers have been offered to this question. One sugges-

tion is that the difference is language. The peoples of Iraq, Syria,
Palestine, spoke various forms of Aramaic. Aramaic is a Semitic lan-
guage related to Arabic, and the transition from Aramaic to Arabic
was much easier than would have been the transition from Persian,
an Indo-European language, to Arabic. There is some force in that
argument. But then Coptic, the language of Egypt, was not a Se-
mitic language either, yet this did not impede the Arabization of
Egypt. Coptic survived for a while among the Christians, but even-
tually died even among them, except as a liturgical language used in
the rituals of the Coptic Church.

Some have seen this difference as due to the possession by the

Persians of a superior culture. A higher culture absorbs a lower cul-
ture. They quote as a parallel the famous Latin dictum: “conquered
Greece conquers its fierce conquerors”—in other words the Romans
adopt Greek culture. It is a tempting but not convincing parallel.
The Romans conquered and ruled Greece, as the Arabs conquered
and ruled Iran, but the Romans learned Greek, they admired Greek
civilization, they read, translated, imitated Greek books. The Arabs
did not learn Persian, the Persians learned Arabic. And the direct
Persian literary influence on Arabic is minimal and came only through
Persian converts.

Perhaps a closer parallel would be what happened in England

after 1066, the conquest of the Anglo-Saxons by the Normans, and
the transformation of the Anglo-Saxon language under the impact
of Norman French into what we now call English. There are inter-
esting parallels between the Norman conquest of England and the
Arab conquest of Iran—a new language, created by the breakdown
and simplification of the old language and the importation of an
enormous vocabulary of words from the language of the conquer-

4

Bernard Lewis

ors; the creation of a new and compound identity, embracing both
the conquerors and the conquered. I remember as a small boy at
school in England learning about the Norman conquest, and being
taught somehow to identify with both sides—with a new legitimacy
created by conquest, which in the case of Iran, though not of course
of England, was also buttressed by a new religion based on a new
revelation.

Most of the other conquered peoples in Iraq, in Syria, in Egypt,

also had higher civilizations than that brought by the nomadic in-
vaders from the Arabian desert. Yet they were absorbed, as the Per-
sians were not. So we may have slightly modified or restated the
question; we haven’t answered it. Another perhaps more plausible
explanation is the political difference, the elements of power and
memory. These other states conquered by the Arabs—Iraq, Syria,
Palestine, Egypt and the rest—were long-subjugated provinces of
empires located elsewhere. They had been conquered again and again;
they had undergone military, then political, then cultural, and then
religious transformations, long before the Arabs arrived there. In
these places, the Arab-Islamic conquest meant yet one more change
of masters, yet one more change of teachers. This was not the case in
Iran. Iran too had been conquered by Alexander, and formed part of
the great Hellenistic Empire—but only briefly. Iran was never con-
quered by Rome, and therefore the cultural impact of Hellenistic
civilization in Iran was much less than in the countries of the Le-
vant, Egypt and North Africa, where it was buttressed, sustained
and in a sense imposed through the agency of Roman imperial power.
The Hellenistic impact on Iran in the time of Alexander and his
immediate successors was no doubt considerable, but it was less deep
and less enduring than in the Mediterranean lands, and it was ended
by a resurgence, at once national, political and religious, and the
rebirth of an Iranian polity under the Parthians and then the Sasanids.
A new empire arose in Iran which was the peer and the rival of the
empires of Rome and later of Byzantium.

This meant that at the time of the Arab conquest and immedi-

ately after, the Persians, unlike their neighbors in the West, were
sustained by recent memories, one might even say current memo-
ries, of power and glory. This sense of ancient glory, of pride in
identity, comes out very clearly in Persian writings of the Islamic
period, written that is to say in Islamic Persian in the Arabic script,

5

Iran in History

with a large vocabulary of Arabic words. We see the difference in a
number of ways: in the emergence of a kind of national epic poetry,
which has no parallel in Iraq or Syria or Egypt or any of these other
places; and in the choice of personal names. In the Fertile Crescent
and westwards, the names that parents gave their children were mostly
names from the Qur’an or from pagan Arabia—Ali, Muhammad,
Ahmad, and the like. These names were also used in Iran among
Muslim Persians. But in addition, they used distinctively Persian
names: Khusraw, Shapur, Mehyar and other names derived from a
Persian past—a recent Persian past, that of the Sasanids, but never-
theless Persian. We do not find Iraqis calling their sons
Nebuchadnezzar or Sennacherib, nor Egyptians calling their sons
Tutankhamen or Amenhotep. These civilizations were indeed dead
and forgotten. The Persian sense of pride did not rest on a history
retained and remembered, because their history too, except for the
most recent chapters, was lost and forgotten, no less than the an-
cient glories of Egypt and Babylon. All that they had was myth and
saga; a sketchy memory of only the most recent chapters of the pre-
Islamic history of Iran, none at all of the earlier periods.

The Islamic view of history may serve as an explanation of this—

why does one bother to study history, what is the importance of
history? History is the record of the working out of God’s purpose
for humanity, and from a Muslim, particularly a Sunni Muslim point
of view, it has a special importance as establishing the precedents of
the Prophet, the Companions and the early “rightly-guided” rulers
of Islam, who set the pattern of correct law and behavior. That means
of course that the only history that matters is Muslim history, and
the history of picturesque barbarians in remote places, even of pic-
turesque barbarians who may happen to be one’s ancestors, has no
moral or religious value, and is therefore not worth retaining. By the
time the Persians recovered their voice, after the Islamic conquest,
they had lost their memory—though not, as we shall see, perma-
nently.

The history of ancient Iran prior to the Sasanids, the immediate

predecessors of Islam, was obliterated by successive changes. The
ancient language was replaced by Muslim Persian, the ancient scripts
were forgotten and replaced by the Arabic script modified to suit
Persian phonetic needs. The old language and script survived among
the dwindling minority who remained faithful to the Zoroastrian

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Bernard Lewis

religion, but that was of little importance. Even the personal names
to which I alluded a moment ago were forgotten, except for the
most recent. Thus, for example, the name of Cyrus, in modern times
acclaimed as the greatest of the ancient Persian kings, was forgotten.
The Persians remembered the name of Alexander in the form
Iskandar, but they did not remember the name of Cyrus. Alexander
was remembered better among the Persians than were the Persian
kings against whom he fought.

Iran, Greeks and Jews

What little information survived about ancient Iran was that which
was recorded by two peoples, the Jews and the Greeks, the only
peoples active in the ancient Middle East who preserved their memo-
ries, their voices and their languages. Both the Greeks and the Jews
remembered Cyrus; the Persians did not. The Greeks and the Jews
alone provided such information as existed about ancient Iran until
comparatively modern times, when the store of information was
vastly increased by Orientalists, that is to say European archeolo-
gists and philologists who found a way to recover the ancient texts
and decipher the ancient scripts.

Let me pause for a moment to look at the image of Iran as pre-

served in the Bible and the Greek classics, that is to say, as preserved
by the Jews and the Greeks. The Greek view, as one would expect, is
dominated by the long struggles, beginning with the Persian inva-
sion of Greece and culminating in the great Greek counter-attack
by Alexander. This is a major theme in ancient Greek historiography;
the contrast between Greek democracy and Persian autocracy also
forms an important theme of Greek political writings. But despite
the fact that the history was mainly one of conflict, the tone of an-
cient Greek writing about Persia is mostly respectful, and some-
times even compassionate, notably for example in the play 

The Per-

sians

 by Aeschylus, himself a veteran of the Persian wars, who shows

real compassion for the defeated Persian enemy.

The Bible gives us a uniquely positive picture of ancient Iran, in

a literature which does not normally deal indulgently with stran-
gers, nor even with its own people. The earliest occurrences of the
name Persia, 

Paras

, are in the Book of Ezekiel, where 

Paras

 is listed

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Iran in History

along with other exotic and outlandish names to indicate the outer
limits of the known world. 

Paras

 has something like the significance

of 

ultima thule 

in modern usage. The name makes a more dramatic

appearance in the story of the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s
feast, where the inscription 

Mene mene, tekel upharsin

 informed the

hapless Babylonian monarch that he was weighed in the balances
and found wanting, and that his realms would be shared by the
Medes and Persians.

And then of course comes Cyrus, mentioned more particularly

in the later chapters of Isaiah, what the Bible critics call Deutero-
Isaiah, that part of the Book of Isaiah dating from after the Babylonian
captivity. The language used of Cyrus is little short of astonishing.
He is spoken of in the Hebrew text as God’s anointed, messiah, and
he is accorded greater respect, not only than any other non-Jewish
ruler, but almost any Jewish ruler.

Inevitably the question arises—why? Why does the Bible speak

in such glowing terms of this heathen potentate? There is of course
one obvious answer, that Cyrus was, so to speak, the Balfour of his
day. He issued a declaration authorizing the Jews to return to their
land and restore their political existence. But that doesn’t really an-
swer the question; it merely restates the question. Why did he do
that? A series of conquests had brought a multitude of ethnic groups,
as we say nowadays, under Persian rule, Why should Cyrus take
such a step on behalf of one of them? We only know the Jewish side
of this, we don’t know the Persian side, and one can only venture a
guess as to the reason. My suggestion is that there was, shall we say,
a perceived affinity, between those who professed two spiritual, ethical
religions, surrounded on all sides by ignorant polytheists and idola-
ters. One can see this sense of affinity in the latest books of the Old
Testament, and also in subsequent Jewish writings. One notes for
example a number of Persian words, some already in the Bible, many
more in the post-Biblical Jewish literature.

This encounter between Iranian religion and Jewish religion was

of far-reaching significance in world history. We can discern unmis-
takable traces of Persian influence, both intellectual and material,
on the development of post-exilic Jewry, and therefore also of Chris-
tendom, and corresponding influence in the late Greco-Roman and
Byzantine world, and therefore ultimately in Europe.

Let me just take a few examples, first on the practical side. The

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Bernard Lewis

early Arabic sources tell us that the Persians invented a new device
for riding, a device called the stirrup, previously unknown. We can
easily see why this device, which revolutionized transport, commu-
nications and also warfare, created so great an impression. A mounted
soldier in armor, on an armored horse, with a lance, could launch a
much more devastating charge with stirrups than without them, when
he was in imminent danger of being dismounted. We hear vivid
stories, specially from the Byzantine writers, of the advent of this
new and devastating instrument of warfare, the mounted, armored
horseman, the cataphract.

The stirrup also helped the Persians to develop the postal system.

Their system, described with admiration by the Greeks, consisted of
a network of couriers and relay stations all over the realm. It was
known in Arabic as 

barid

, which comes of course from the Persian

verb 

burdan

, meaning to carry. The post-horse was the 

paraveredos

,

from which comes the German 

Pferd

. Another innovation credited

to Iran, though the evidence here is conflicting, is the mill, the use
of wind and water to generate power. This was the first and for
millennia the only source of energy other than human and animal
muscle.

In another area the Persians are accredited with the invention of

board games, particularly chess, which still uses a Persian terminol-
ogy— the Shah— and also the game which is variously known as
trik-trak, shich-besh, backgammon and other names.

We are on stronger ground in ascribing to Persians— and here

we come back to the theme of cultural history—the book, that is the
book in the form of a codex. The Greco-Roman world used scrolls,
and so did much of the ancient Middle East. The codex, stitched
and bound in the form which we now know as a book, seems to
have originated in Iran. The cultural impact of such an innovation
was obviously immense.

But let me turn to what is ultimately the more important theme,

and that is the influence of ideas. From Iran, from Iranian religion,
comes the concept of a cosmic struggle between almost equal forces
of good and evil. The Devil, as you know, was Iranian by birth,
although he is now given a local habitation and a name in the West-
ern Hemisphere. The idea of a power of evil, opposite and almost
equal, is characteristic of ancient Persian religion: Ahriman is the
predecessor of Satan, Mephistopheles, or whatever else we may choose

9

Iran in History

to call him. Linked with that was the idea of judgment and retribu-
tion, of heaven and hell; and here I would remind you that paradise
is also a Persian word. The 

para

 is the same as the Greek 

peri

; 

peridesos

in ancient Persian means walled enclosure.

Messianism too seems to have Persian antecedents, in the doc-

trine that at the end of time a figure will arise from the sacred seed of
Zoroaster, who will establish all that is good on earth. It is not with-
out significance that the Messianic idea does not appear in the He-
brew Bible until after the return from Babylon, that is to say after
the time when the Jews came under Persian influence. The impor-
tance of messianism in the Judaeo-Christian tradition is obvious.
Linked with this is the idea and the practice of a religious establish-
ment—a hierarchy of priests with ranks, under the supreme author-
ity of the chief priest, the 

Mobedhan Mobedh

, the Priest of Priests.

And by the way, that form of title, the Priest of Priests, the King of
Kings, and the like, is characteristically Iranian. It is used in many
Iranian titles in antiquity; it was adopted into Arabic: 

Amir al-

Umara

—the Amir of Amirs, 

Qadi al-Qudat

—the Qadi of Qadis.

Perhaps even the title of the Pope in Rome: the Servant of the Serv-
ants of God—

Servus Servorum Dei

—may be ascribed to indirect

Iranian influence. The whole idea of a church, not in the sense of a
building, a place of worship, but a hierarchy under a supreme head,
may well owe a good deal to Zoroastrian example.

The ancient religion of Iran survives. Zoroastrianism is still the

faith of small, dwindling, but not unimportant minorities, in India,
in Pakistan, and to some extent in Iran. They preserved the ancient
writings, in the ancient script, and a knowledge of the ancient lan-
guage, and it was these which enabled the first European Oriental-
ists to learn Middle Iranian and to use it to rediscover the still more
ancient languages of Iran.

Iran and Shi‘ism

For at least a millennium, Iran has been associated with Islam, and
in the more recent centuries with Shi‘ite Islam, which some have
seen as an expression, a reappearance of the Persian national genius
in an Islamic disguise. Some have gone even further—nineteenth-
century European writers like Gobineau claimed to see the triumph

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Bernard Lewis

of Shi‘ism as the resurgence of the Aryanism of Iran against the
Semitism of Islam. Such ideas are rather discredited nowadays,
though they were popular at one time, and still have their adherents.

The difficulty about such theories is that Shi‘ism, like Islam it-

self, was brought to Iran by Arabs. The first Shi‘ites in Iran—and
for a long time this remained so—were Arabs. The city of Qomm,
the stronghold and center of Iranian Shi‘ism, was an Arab founda-
tion, and the first settlers in Qomm were Arabs. (I remember being
taken round Qomm by a Persian friend who pointed to the deserts
that surround it, and remarked: “Who but an Arab would build a
town in a place like this?”) Shi‘ism was reintroduced and imposed
by the Safavids many centuries later, and they, I would remind you,
were Turks. Until then Iran was a largely Sunni country. But no
doubt that with the establishment of the Shi‘ite Safavid state a new
era began, one of a distinctively Iranian Shi‘ite character.

The accession of the Safavids marks a new era in Persian history

and the establishment, for the first time in many centuries, of a uni-
fied dynastic state. The Safavids brought certain important new fea-
tures. One I have already alluded to—unity. Under the first Arab
conquerors the whole of Iran was under one rule, that of the Caliphs
situated in Medina, then in Damascus, then in Baghdad. But with
the break-up of the Caliphate, Iran broke up into its various re-
gions, under local rulers of one kind or another. The Safavids for the
first time created a united realm of Iran, more or less within its present
frontiers—not just diverse regions, Pars and Khurasan and the rest
of them, but a single realm with a single ruler. It has remained so
ever since, in spite of the immense ethnic diversity which character-
izes that country to the present day. If you look, for example, round
the periphery, starting in the north-west, you have the Turkish-speak-
ing Azarbaijanis. To the south of them are Kurds, to the south of
them are more Turks, the Qashqais, to the south of them, in
Khuzistan are Arabs, in the south-east the Baluchis and then the
Turkmen. These form a periphery, all around the center, of peoples
speaking different non-Persian languages. Nevertheless, the culture
of the Persian language and the distinctive Shi‘ite version of Islam
helped to maintain the unity that was imposed by the Safavids and
maintained by their successors.

Shi‘ism brought a second important feature, and that is differen-

tiation from all the neighbors: from the Ottomans in the west, from

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Iran in History

the central Asian states in the north-east, from the Indian-Muslim
states in the south-east. Practically all of these were Sunni states.
True, Persian was used as a classical language, a literary language
and even at times a diplomatic language by all three neighbors, the
Ottomans, the Central Asians, and the Indians. But the crucial dif-
ference between the Sunni and Shi‘ite realms remained.

Another interesting development of the period, particularly un-

der the late Safavids and their successors, is the emergence of the
notion of Iran. I have been using the terms Persia and Persians, to
speak of the land and the people, as was customary in Western lan-
guages until recently. The name Iran is ancient, but its current use is
modern. We first find the word in ancient Persian inscriptions. In
the inscription of Darius for example, in the ancient Persian lan-
guage, he describes himself as King of the Aryans. Iran is the same
word as Aryan; it means “noble” in the ancient languages of Iran
and of India. The King was the King 

Aryanum

, which is a genitive

plural, King of the Aryans. It survives in the myths and sagas of the
early medieval period, in the Shahnama and related stories of the
great struggle between Iran and Turan; it reappears in the nine-
teenth century as the name of the country in common rather than
official usage. It did not become official usage until much later, prob-
ably under the influence of the Third Reich. The German govern-
ment of the time, which needed various facilities and help from Iran,
went to some pains to assure the people of that country that they
were Iranians, which is the same as Aryans, that they were therefore
different from and superior to all their neighbors, and that the Nu-
remberg Laws did not apply to them. It was at that time that the
name of the country, in foreign languages as well as in Persian, was
officially changed to Iran.

Let us look at another turning-point in history, the Islamic Revo-

lution, and its creation the Islamic Republic. This was indeed a revo-
lution. The word revolution has been much used in the Middle East
in modern times, to designate a whole series of coups d’état, palace
revolts, assassinations, civil wars and the like. What happened in
Iran, for better or for worse, was a real revolution, in the sense that
the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution were real revolu-
tions. And like them, the Iranian revolution had a tremendous im-
pact in all those countries with which it shares a common universe
of discourse, in other words in the Islamic world.

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Bernard Lewis

As with these earlier revolutions, there are contrasting views of

the Islamic revolution in Iran. In one of them, we see actions and
statements which have made the name of Iran, even the name of
Islam, stand for a regime of bloodthirsty bigots, maintained by tyr-
anny at home and by terror both at home and abroad. In the other,
that which they themselves prefer to present, we see an alternative
diagnosis and an alternative prescription for the ills and sufferings of
the region, an alternative, that is, to the alien and infidel ways that
have long prevailed, and a return to authenticity.

At the present time, with the ending of direct outside rule and

the rapid diminution even of outside influence, a familiar pattern is
beginning to reemerge in the Middle East. Today there are again
two major powers in the region, this time the Turkish Republic and
the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the sixteenth century, in the same
countries, two rival powers, the Ottoman Sultan and the Safavid
Shah, representing the Sunni and the Shi‘ite versions of Islam, fought
for the headship of the Islamic world.

A thousand years earlier, in the sixth century, in the same coun-

tries, two rivals, the Byzantine emperors and the Sasanids of Iran,
embodied rival civilizations and rival visions of the world. Both
Sasanids and Byzantines were conquered and overwhelmed by Is-
lam. Both the Ottoman Sultans and the Safavid Shahs were swept
aside by new forces from outside and also from inside their realms.

Today the rivals are two regimes, both established by revolution,

both embodying certain basic ideologies, secular democracy in Tur-
key, Islamic theocracy in Iran. As in earlier times, neither is impervi-
ous to the temptations of the other. In Turkey we have seen a reli-
gious party win a fifth of the votes in a free election and play an
important role in national politics. We do not know how many
Iranians would prefer secular democracy, since in an Islamic theoc-
racy they are not permitted to express that preference. But from
various indications one may say that their number is not inconsider-
able.

The struggle continues, within these two countries and elsewhere,

between two different versions of what was originally a common
civilization. The outcome remains far from certain.

Copyright © 2001 by Bernard Lewis