Iran's history: the long contest of turban and crown

Who ruled the plateau before Islam arrived

People were living in the Zagros Mountains in the Middle Palaeolithic, and the Iran article on Wikipedia dates the earliest traces of hominins to around 800,000 years ago. Farming appeared about 12,000 years ago: emmer wheat was domesticated at Chogha Golan, and Ganj Dareh holds the earliest known domesticated goats, from around 10,000 years ago. Susa, in the lowland south-west, was first settled between 4400 and 4200 BC and became the capital of Elam, a kingdom that wrote in a Proto-Elamite script older than cuneiform.

The first Iranian peoples arrived from Central Asia in the second millennium BC. The Medes built the first Iranian state, and in 612 BC their king Cyaxares joined the Babylonians to destroy Nineveh, the Assyrian capital. Cambyses I had united the Persian tribes, and in 550 BC his son Cyrus defeated the Medes, took their capital at Ecbatana and founded the Achaemenid Empire. He went on to conquer Lydia and Babylon; his son Cambyses II took Egypt.

Darius I, who reigned from 522 to 486 BC, governed from Susa and began a royal terrace at Persepolis about 518 BC. UNESCO describes the site as a 13-hectare ensemble of stairways, throne halls and reception rooms built by Darius, his son Xerxes I and his grandson Artaxerxes I, with columns about 20 metres high and 1.60 metres across, and it was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1979. Xerxes' invasion of Greece ended with Greek victories at Salamis and Plataea, and Persia withdrew from Europe. Between 334 and 331 BC Alexander of Macedon defeated Darius III in three battles and took the empire.

After Alexander his general Seleucus held Iran. The Parthians, a dynasty from the north-eastern steppe, pushed the Seleucids out and took Babylonia in 142 BC, and they ruled for close to five centuries. In 224 CE Ardashir I killed the last Parthian king and founded the Sasanian Empire, which at its height held all of modern Iran and Iraq with the Caucasus and parts of the Levant and Central Asia. The History of Iran article describes a centralised bureaucracy and the revival of Zoroastrianism as the ideal that legitimised and unified the state. Wars with Byzantium drained it, and between 632 and 654 the armies of the Rashidun Caliphate conquered it.

How Persian survived under the caliphs

Conquest brought Islam, and Persian outlasted it as a language of rule. Middle Persian stayed the language of the caliphate's official business until Arabic replaced it towards the end of the seventh century, and the Umayyad governors took over Persian court customs and administration. Mountain districts held out: Daylam, Tabaristan and the slopes of Mount Damavand were not brought under Arab control, and in Tabaristan Farrukhan the Great defeated the general Yazid ibn al-Muhallab in the early eighth century.

Conversion was slow. The History of Iran article puts the Muslim share of the population at about 40% in the mid-ninth century and close to 90% by the end of the eleventh. As the authority of the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad weakened, Iranian dynasties took the provinces for themselves: the Tahirids in Khorasan from 821, the Saffarids in Sistan from 861 and the Samanids, first based at Bukhara. Britannica dates this "Iranian intermezzo" from 821 to 1055 and describes a revival of Persian literary culture in it, in a language by then heavily Arabised and written in Arabic script. The Buyids held real power in Baghdad itself from 934 until the Seljuks defeated them.

Mongol armies arrived in 1220. Bukhara, Samarkand, Herat, Tus and Nishapur were razed in 1220 and 1221, and Baghdad fell in 1258, ending the Abbasid caliphate. Hulegu Khan ruled Iran as the Ilkhan, and a later Ilkhan, Ghazan, converted to Islam at the end of the thirteenth century. After the last Ilkhan died in 1335 the country broke into rival dynasties, and the Black Death killed about 30% of the population in the mid-fourteenth century. Timur invaded in 1381 and in 1387 ordered a massacre at Isfahan that killed 70,000 people. Turkmen confederations, the Qara Qoyunlu and then the Aq Qoyunlu, held most of Iran from the mid-fifteenth century.

Why the Safavids made Shia Islam official

The Safavids reunited Iran under one ruler in 1501, and Ismail I made Twelver Shia Islam the official religion of his state. The Safavid Iran article notes that the choice affected both Iran and the Sunni-majority lands around it. Britannica traces to the state-sponsored rise of a Shia clergy in the following centuries a synthesis between Persian culture and Shia Islam that marked each with the other.

Abbas I recovered Herat and Mashhad from the Uzbeks in 1598 and in the same year moved his capital from Qazvin to Isfahan, which Britannica describes as more central for control of the country and closer to the trade outlets of the Persian Gulf. He rebuilt the city around a public square. UNESCO gives Meidan Emam, also called Naqsh-e Jahan, as 560 metres long and 160 metres wide, closed on four sides by the Royal Mosque, the Sheikh Lotfallah Mosque, the Ali Qapu pavilion and the gate of the bazaar, and the square was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1979.

The same article names a second legacy: the dynasty "set in train a struggle for power between the turban and the crown", and it laid the foundation of an alliance between the clergy and the bazaar. Afghan forces under the Hotak dynasty besieged Isfahan and took it in 1722. Nader Shah, who ruled from 1736 to 1747, built a short-lived empire stretching from the Caucasus into India, and his military spending ruined the economy. The Zand ruler Karim Khan governed most of Iran from Shiraz from 1751 to 1779 without ever taking the title of shah.

How the Qajars lost land and conceded a parliament

Agha Mohammad Khan of the Qajar tribe chose Tehran as his capital in 1786, according to the Tehran article for its closeness to the Caucasus territories then contested with Russia. He killed the last Zand ruler at Kerman in 1794 and was crowned in 1796. His successor Fath Ali Shah lost the wars with Russia, and the treaties of Golestan in 1813 and Turkmenchay in 1828 ceded what is now eastern Georgia, Dagestan, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Turkmenchay also gave Russian traders and consuls access to Iran and opened a rivalry with Britain that ended in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which gave Russia a sphere of influence in the north and Britain one along the Persian Gulf.

At home the Qajar shahs paid for their court by selling concessions to foreigners. Exports shifted from manufactures to raw materials such as opium, rice and tobacco, and the Great Persian Famine of 1870 and 1871 killed between several hundred thousand and four million people, by the estimates the History of Iran article cites. In 1890 Naser al-Din Shah granted a British subject a monopoly over the tobacco trade. Merchants and clerics organised a protest that forced him to cancel it, and Britannica reads the episode as the first proof that the clergy and the bazaar together could limit the shah.

They did so again in 1905 and 1906. Protests at the government's beating of several merchants grew into strikes, the protesters took sanctuary at a shrine near Tehran under the custom of bast, and the shah granted a constitution in 1906. The first Majles, the National Consultative Assembly, opened in October 1906. Mohammad Ali Shah had it suppressed in 1908 by the Persian Cossack Brigade; it returned in 1909 and the shah fled to Russia. In 1911 Russian troops advanced on Tehran after the Majles hired an American financial adviser, William Morgan Shuster, and the regent dismissed both the adviser and the assembly in December of that year.

What the Pahlavi shahs changed and who resisted

Reza Khan, an officer of the Cossack Brigade, staged a coup in 1921 with British support and took command of all the armed forces. He considered declaring a republic on the model of Atatürk's Turkey, met fierce opposition from the Shia clergy, and in 1925 deposed the last Qajar shah and was crowned Reza Shah Pahlavi. His reforms moved courts and schools out of clerical hands: secular courts took over much of the law, the University of Tehran opened in 1934, women's veiling was banned and the minimum age of marriage raised. He banned trade unions and political parties and censored the press. In 1935 troops put down a protest at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad against the planned ban on the veil, and dozens were killed.

In August 1941 British and Soviet forces invaded to secure the oil fields and a supply route to the Soviet Union. Reza Shah was made to abdicate in favour of his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and at the Tehran Conference of 1943 the three Allied leaders guaranteed Iran's independence and borders after the war.

Oil decided the next decade. In 1951, under Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, the Majles voted to nationalise the British-owned oil industry and held to it through a British blockade. On 19 August 1953 a coup led by General Fazlollah Zahedi, organised with the American CIA and the British MI6, removed Mosaddegh. He was tried for treason and kept under house arrest, and the shah ruled as an autocrat with American support until 1979.

His programme of reform, the White Revolution, was approved in a plebiscite in 1963. Britannica records that it redistributed land to some 2.5 million families and set up literacy and health corps for the countryside, and that it widened women's rights, including the vote. It also broke up land held in religious trust that had supported the clergy. A teacher at a seminary in Qom, Ruhollah Khomeini, denounced it in 1963. The government arrested him and later exiled him, and in exile he completed the doctrine of velayat-e faqih, the governance of the jurist, which argued for a state run by the clergy.

How the revolution built a state run by clerics

Demonstrations began in January 1978 after a newspaper in Tehran attacked Khomeini, and each death at the hands of the security forces brought larger crowds. The shah left the country in January 1979. Khomeini returned on 1 February, and on 11 February the armed forces declared their neutrality, which ended the monarchy. After a referendum at the end of March, which the Iran article records as passed by 99.31%, Khomeini declared the Islamic Republic on 1 April 1979. A constitution drafted by the clergy-dominated Assembly of Experts was approved by referendum in December 1979, and it made Khomeini the first Leader under his own doctrine.

On 4 November 1979 students loyal to Khomeini seized the United States embassy. Fifty-two Americans were held for 444 days, until January 1981, and the crisis was used to force the centrists out of government, among them the first president, Abolhasan Bani-Sadr. On 22 September 1980 Iraq invaded Khuzestan. Iranian forces had pushed the Iraqis back over the border by 1982, and the war then settled into eight years of attrition, with attacks on cities, refineries and tankers. On 3 July 1988 the American cruiser USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air flight 655 and killed 290 people. Khomeini accepted a United Nations ceasefire on 20 July 1988; the History of Iran article puts the dead of the whole war at about 500,000.

Khomeini died in June 1989 and the Assembly of Experts chose the president, Ali Khamenei, as Leader. A referendum in July 1989 amended the constitution and abolished the office of prime minister. In the decades that followed, reformist presidents were elected, among them Mohammad Khatami in 1997 with more than two thirds of the vote, and Britannica records that their programmes were checked by the Leader, the courts and the Guardian Council, which in 2004 disqualified almost half of some 8,000 candidates for the Majles. A woman named Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the morality police in September 2022, and the protests that followed were met with a crackdown that the United Nations described as crimes against humanity.

Why the nuclear dispute ended in war

Iran's nuclear programme dates from the 1950s. It became an international dispute in 2002, when an Iranian dissident group revealed a secret enrichment plant and a heavy-water reactor. Iran stated that the programme was for peaceful purposes; the United Nations Security Council passed the first of several rounds of sanctions in 2006. In July 2015 Iran agreed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with the United States, China, Russia, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, cutting its stockpile and admitting inspectors in exchange for relief, and international sanctions were lifted in January 2016. In May 2018 the United States withdrew and reimposed its own sanctions. By January 2021 Iran was enriching uranium to 20%, against a cap of 3.67% under the agreement, and by late 2021 to 60%, according to Britannica.

Direct conflict followed in stages. Iran and Israel exchanged fire in April and October 2024. On 13 June 2025 Israel struck nuclear sites and military commanders across Iran, on 22 June the United States bombed the facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, and a ceasefire was agreed on 24 June. The rial then lost value fast, and protests that began on 28 December 2025 spread across the country before a crackdown from 8 January 2026. The death toll is disputed: Britannica cites officials of Iran's Ministry of Health for at least 30,000 dead, and the Iran article on Wikipedia cites estimates of at least 16,500 as of 17 January 2026.

On 28 February 2026 the United States and Israel launched joint strikes that killed the Leader, Ali Khamenei, with dozens of other officials, and the Iranian government confirmed his death on 1 March. Britannica records that a strike on a girls' school next to a naval base in Minab killed about 170 people. Iran answered with missiles and drones against American bases and oil infrastructure across the Gulf and disrupted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and on 8 March the Assembly of Experts announced a new Leader. A ceasefire brokered by Pakistan took hold on 7 and 8 April. A memorandum of understanding was announced on 14 June and signed on 17 June, with a 60-day deadline for a nuclear agreement, but Iran and the United States read its clause on the strait differently. Fighting resumed in July after Iranian forces struck three ships on 6 and 7 July, and Iran suspended its commitments under the memorandum on 18 July. Britannica's account, updated on 1 October 2026, describes renewed exchanges of fire in September, with proposals to end the war still being traded at the end of that month.