Harvard Professor Answers Iranian History Questions | Tech Support | WIRED

[00:00] I'm Professor Tarek Masoud from Harvard University. This is Tech Support Iran. [upbeat music]

[00:15] If an Arab country is a country then the answer is no. And Persian, even though it's written

[00:30] to somebody who doesn't know the language, And so there's lots of words in Persian like the word for name is nam,

[00:44] the word for mother is madar, Arabic is a Semitic language. which is spoken in Israel,

[00:56] spoken in Ethiopia. That said, there's obviously a lot of traffic After all, they practice Islam.

[01:11] The brand of Islam that they practice, Shia Islam, one of its core features is veneration that descendants of the Prophet Muhammad

[01:26] have infallible religious authority. Many of the senior clerics, like Khameneim or Khomeini, Those black turbans signal descent,

[01:40] direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad. "We're descended from Arabs." as unsophisticated as Bedouins.

[01:55] My tie has grasshoppers. Arabs also have their negative stereotypes of Persians.

[02:07] the Arabs will point to as examples of Arab contributions So, for example, there was a medieval mathematician

[02:21] The word for algorithm comes from his name. "We invented algebra, we invented the algorithm." The founder of modern medicine, Avicenna, also a Persian.

[02:35] In fact, the greatest Arab grammarian This is a guy who codifies Arab grammar So Iran is not an Arab country,

[02:48] just like the Arabs have experienced serious Iranian-Persian influences. "How did Iran become an Islamic country in the first place?"

[03:02] that practices Islam, well, that really starts with the Arab conquest of Persia Before the Islamic conquest, Iran was a Zoroastrian country.

[03:16] in which fire and the sun And they ultimately converted to Islam but they still retain a lot of Zoroastrian traditions.

[03:32] which is the start of spring, Right before that, where they leap over fire

[03:45] and giving to the fire their ailment, In fact, there are still Zoroastrians. Many of them live in South Asia.

[03:59] the lead singer of Queen. become the Islamic Republic, with a revolution against the king of Iran at that time,

[04:14] an American client, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. that was ultimately led by this man, And he basically was the man who came up

[04:27] that governs Iran today. that has at its top a senior religious leader. Senior positions are held by Islamic clerics.

[04:42] Day-to-day life on the streets is mandated to conform So if you're a woman in Iran, you have to dress Islamically. If you like to party, well, you're out of luck in Iran.

[04:57] to what are considered to be Islamic standards of behavior. "What's going on with Iran's flag?" So this is Iran's current flag, three colors.

[05:11] White represents purity. And this is the pre-revolutionary Iranian flag.

[05:23] which is the lion with the sword and the sun behind it. of royal power. The Iranian flag, after 1978, was adapted.

[05:40] and they replaced it with this kind of stylized tulip, It kind of represents martyrdom. It also looks like a stylized form

[05:58] The other differences that you have here, the words Allahu Akbar, God is Great, there's 22 of them. which is the 22nd day of the month of Bahman,

[06:14] Now, today, you'll often see people It's kind of like an act of rebellion JediBlight asks, "Just how liberal/progressive

[06:31] was Iran prior to the 1979 revolution?" Iran was run by a king which was at that time a conservative society,

[06:46] Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was the second Shah, or king, The first was his father who did a military coup

[06:58] He got a little too cozy with the Nazis, and installed his son in his place in 1941. And his son engaged in all kinds of reforms,

[07:13] the role of Islam in society. more secular and more Western. dressed in miniskirts or looking the way

[07:28] And that certainly was the case But again, the vast majority of the people in that country

[07:40] as a modern and progressive leader. of progressiveness in his program. this was a leader who was authoritarian.

[07:53] Iran was not a place where there was democracy And that of course generated some of the backlash YogurtclosetOpen3567 asks,

[08:11] whose modern borders were not created by colonial powers?" This is a map of the Middle East and some of South Asia.

[08:26] like Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, the borders between them are very straight. after the end of World War I,

[08:40] and the British and the French took over. essentially with rulers and pens. The way that Iran's borders were worked out

[08:55] Iran fought a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire It fought wars with the Russian Empire Its Eastern borders were also mainly

[09:11] in wars with British India and with Herat in Afghanistan. because they actually were drawn by British mediators in the 19th century.

[09:25] But essentially, because Iran was an independent state, of the League of Nations, from the standard Middle Eastern country

[09:38] This is from the No Stupid Question subreddit, from FArandylahey. Well, the first thing to note about the Iranian Revolution

[09:52] The American president at the time, Jimmy Carter, and toasted it as an island of stability But they say hindsight is 20/20.

[10:06] And today, there are a lot of factors that people point to The first is that the regime of the Shah He relied on his secret police to keep order,

[10:19] people were sent into exile and tortured. leading the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, because of his opposition to the Shah in the 1960s.

[10:32] was extremely wasteful with the country's resources. that by some accounts cost almost $20 million.

[10:46] said that the banquet for that celebration And so Iranians looked at something like that And then the Shah's reforms, the liberalizing reforms,

[11:04] He was also, by the end of this, very sick, he had cancer. And his wife, the Shahbanu, was not terribly popular.

[11:18] and caused the Iranian Revolution that was caused by Saudi overproduction. And that caused some serious economic distress in Iran.

[11:31] to see some weaknesses in the regime And the conditions ultimately ended up being ripe

[11:43] to take over and ride it into power Currymvp2 asks, "The son of Iran's last Shah But do Iranians really want another king?"

[11:58] So this is the pretender to the Iranian throne, And he is the son of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Now, today, in some of the protests

[12:14] or at least that were happening before the bombing campaign, saying Pahlavi will return. as to whether that means they really want this guy back

[12:28] "That hated dynasty that we overthrew He hasn't been in the country for 47 years,

[12:40] actually has the wherewithal to govern Iran Iran is made up of 40% ethnic minorities.

[12:53] Kurds, there's a small Arab minority in Iran. And those people don't look fondly on the time of the Shah. who suppressed their expression

[13:10] So they're not really yearning for a restoration of the so-called peacock throne. Thank you for watching Tech Support Iran.

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