The broad back of the Zagros Mountains sweeps down through Iran from
Anatolia in the northwest to Balochistan in the
southeast. To the west of the Zagros range, the roads are all open to Iraq.
When the British area specialist and travel writer Freya Stark explored
Lorestan in Iran's Zagros Mountains in the early 1930s, she naturally based
herself out of Baghdad, not out of Tehran. To the east and northeast, the roads
are open to Khorasan and the Kara Kum (Black Sand) and Kizyl
Kum (Red Sand) deserts of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, respectively. For just
as Iran straddles the rich energy fields of both the Persian Gulf and the
Caspian Sea, it also straddles the Middle East proper and Central Asia. No Arab
country can make that claim (just as no Arab country sits astride two
energy-producing areas). In fact, the Mongol invasion of Iran, which killed
hundreds of thousands of people at a minimum and destroyed the qanat irrigation
system, was that much more severe precisely because of Iran's Central Asian
prospect.
Iranian influence in the former Soviet republics of the Caucasus and
Central Asia is potentially vast. Whereas Azerbaijan on Iran's northwestern border
contains roughly 8 million Azeri Turks, there are twice that number in Iran's
neighboring provinces of Azerbaijan and Tehran. The Azeris were cofounders of
the first Iranian polity since the seventh century rise of Islam. The first
Shiite Shah of Iran (Ismail in 1501) was an Azeri Turk. There are important
Azeri businessmen and ayatollahs in Iran, including current Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself. The point is that whereas Iran's influence to
the west in nearby Turkey and the Arab world has been well established by the
media, its influence to the north and east is equally profound; and if the
future brings less repressive regimes both in Iran and in the southern, Islamic
tier of the former Soviet Union, Iran's influence could deepen still with more
cultural and political interactions.
There is, too, what British historian Michael Axworthy calls the
"Idea of Iran," which, as he explains, is as much about culture and
language as about race and territory.1 Iran, he means, is a civilizational
attractor, much like ancient Greece and China were, pulling other peoples and
languages into its linguistic orbit: the essence of soft power, in other words.
Dari, Tajik, Urdu, Pashtu, Hindi, Bengali and Iraqi Arabic are all either
variants of Persian, or significantly influenced by it. That is, one can travel
from Baghdad in Iraq to Dhaka in Bangladesh and remain inside a Persian
cultural realm.
Iran, furthermore, is not some 20th century contrivance of family and
religious ideology like Saudi Arabia, bracketed as the Saudi state is by
arbitrary borders. Iran corresponds almost completely with the Iranian plateau
-- "the Castile of the Near East," in Princeton historian Peter
Brown's phrase -- even as the dynamism of its civilization reaches far beyond
it. The Persian Empire, even as it besieged Greece, "uncoiled, like a
dragon's tail ... as far as the Oxus, Afghanistan and the Indus valley,"
writes Brown.2 W. Barthold, the great Russian
geographer of the turn of the 20th century, concurs, situating Greater Iran
between the Euphrates and the Indus and identifying the Kurds and Afghans as
essentially Iranian peoples.3
Of the ancient peoples of the Near East, only the Hebrews and the
Iranians "have texts and cultural traditions that have survived to modern
times," writes the linguist Nicholas Ostler.4 Persian (Farsi) was not
replaced by Arabic, like so many other tongues, and is in the same form today
as it was in the 11th century, even as it has adopted the Arabic script. Iran
has a far more venerable record as a nation-state and urbane civilization than
most places in the Arab world and all the places in the Fertile Crescent,
including Mesopotamia and Palestine. There is nothing artificial about Iran, in
other words: The very competing power centers within its clerical regime
indicate a greater level of institutionalization than almost anywhere in the
region save for Israel, Egypt and Turkey.
Greater Iran began back in 700 B.C. with the Medes, an ancient Iranian
people who established, with the help of the Scythians, an independent state in
northwestern Iran. By 600 B.C., this empire reached from central Anatolia to
the Hindu Kush (Turkey to Afghanistan), as well as south to the Persian Gulf.
In 549 B.C., Cyrus (the Great), a prince from the Persian house of Achaemenes,
captured the Median capital of Ecbatana (Hamadan) in western Iran and went on a
further bout of conquest. The map of the Achaemenid Empire, governed from
Persepolis (near Shiraz) in southern Iran, shows antique Persia at its apex,
from the sixth to fourth centuries B.C. It stretched from Thrace and Macedonia
in the northwest, and from Libya and Egypt in the southwest, all the way to the
Punjab in the east; and from the Transcaucasus and
the Caspian and Aral seas in the north to the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea
in the south. No empire up to that point in world history had matched it.
Persia was the world's first superpower, and Iranian leaders in our era -- both
the late shah and the ayatollahs -- have inculcated this history in their
bones. Its pan-Islamism notwithstanding, the current ruling elite is all about
Iranian nationalism.
The Parthians manifested the best of the Iranian genius -- which was
ultimately about tolerance of the cultures over which they ruled, allowing them
a benign suzerainty. Headquartered in the northeastern Iranian region of
Khorasan and the adjacent Kara Kum and speaking an Iranian language, the
Parthians ruled between the third century B.C. and the third century A.D.,
generally from Syria and Iraq to central Afghanistan and Pakistan, including
Armenia and Turkmenistan. Thus, rather than the Bosporus-to-Indus or the
Nile-to-Oxus scope of Achaemenid Persia, the Parthian Empire constitutes a more
realistic vision of a Greater Iran for the 21st century. And this is not necessarily
bad. For the Parthian Empire was extremely decentralized, a zone of strong
influence rather than of outright control, which leaned heavily on art,
architecture and administrative practices inherited from the Greeks. As for the
Iran of today, it is no secret that the clerical regime is formidable, but
demographic, economic and political forces are equally dynamic, and key
segments of the population are restive. So do not discount the possibility of a
new regime in Iran and a consequently benign Iranian empire yet to come.
The medieval record both cartographically and linguistically follows
from the ancient one, though in more subtle ways. In the eighth century the
political locus of the Arab world shifted eastward from Syria to Mesopotamia --
that is, from the Umayyad caliphs to the Abbasid ones -- signaling, in effect,
the rise of Iran. (The second caliph, Omar bin al-Khattab, during whose reign
the Islamic armies conquered the Sassanids, adopted the Persian system of
administration called the Diwan.) The Abbasid Caliphate at its zenith in the
middle of the ninth century ruled from Tunisia eastward to Pakistan, and from
the Caucasus and Central Asia southward to the Persian Gulf. Its capital was
the new city of Baghdad, close upon the old Sassanid Persian capital of
Ctesiphon; and Persian bureaucratic practices, which added whole new layers of
hierarchy, undergirded this new imperium. The Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad
became more a symbol of an Iranian despotism than of an Arab sheikhdom. Some
historians have labeled the Abbasid Caliphate the equivalent of the
"cultural reconquest" of the Middle East by the Persians under the
guise of Arab rulers.5 The Abbasids succumbed to Persian practices just as the
Umayyads, closer to Asia Minor, had succumbed to Byzantine ones. "Persian
titles, Persian wines and wives, Persian mistresses, Persian songs, as well as
Persian ideas and thoughts, won the day," writes the historian Philip K.
Hitti.6 "In the western imagination," writes Peter Brown, "the
Islamic [Abbasid] empire stands as the quintessence of an oriental power. Islam
owed this crucial orientation neither to Muhammad nor to the adaptable
conquerors of the seventh century, but to the massive resurgence of eastern,
Persian traditions in the eighth and ninth centuries.7
As for Shiism, it is very much a component of this Iranian cultural
dynamism -- despite the culturally bleak and oppressive aura projected by the
ruling Shiite clergy in these dark times in Tehran. While the arrival of the
Mahdi in the form of the hidden Twelfth Imam means the end of injustice, and
thus acts as a spur to radical activism, little else in Shiism necessarily
inclines the clergy to play an overt political role; Shiism even has a quietest
strain that acquiesces to the powers that be and that is frequently informed by
Sufism.8 Witness the example set by Iraq's leading cleric of recent years,
Ayatollah Ali Sistani (of Iranian heritage), who only at pivotal moments makes
a plea for political conciliation from behind the scenes. Precisely because of
the symbiotic relationship between Iraq and Iran throughout history, with its
basis in geography, it is entirely possible that in a post-revolutionary Iran,
Iranians will look more toward the Shiite holy cities of An Najaf and Karbala
in Iraq for spiritual direction than toward their own holy city of Qom. It is
even possible that Qom will adopt the quietism of An Najaf and Karbala. This is
despite the profound differences between Shia of Arab descent and those of
Persian descent.
The French scholar Olivier Roy tells us that Shiism is historically an
Arab phenomenon that came late to Iran but that eventually led to the
establishment of a clerical hierarchy for taking power. Shiism was further
strengthened by the tradition of a strong and bureaucratic state that Iran has
enjoyed since antiquity, relative to those of the Arab world, and that is, as
we know, partly a gift of the spatial coherence of the Iranian plateau. The
Safavids brought Shiism to Iran in the 16th century. Their name comes from
their own militant Sufi order, the Safaviyeh, which
had originally been Sunni. The Safavids were merely one of a number of
horse-borne brotherhoods of mixed Turkish, Azeri, Georgian and Persian origin
in the late 15th century that occupied the mountainous plateau region between
the Black and Caspian seas, where eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus and
northwestern Iran come together. In order to build a stable state on the
Farsi-speaking Iranian plateau, these new sovereigns of eclectic linguistic and
geographical origin adopted Twelver Shiism as the state religion, which awaits
the return of the Twelfth Imam, a direct descendant of Mohammed, who is not
dead but in occlusion.9 The Safavid Empire at its zenith stretched thereabouts
from Anatolia and Syria-Mesopotamia to central Afghanistan and Pakistan -- yet
another variant of Greater Iran through history. Shiism was an agent of Iran's
congealment as a modern nation-state, even as the Iranianization
of non-Persian Shiite and Sunni minorities during the 16th century also helped
in this regard.10 Iran might have been a great state and nation since
antiquity, but the Safavids with their insertion of Shiism onto the Iranian
plateau retooled Iran for the modern era.
Indeed, revolutionary Iran of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is
a fitting expression of this powerful and singular legacy. Of course, the rise
of the ayatollahs has been a lowering event in the sense of the violence done
to -- and I do not mean to exaggerate -- the voluptuous, sophisticated and
intellectually stimulating traditions of the Iranian past. (Persia --
"that land of poets and roses!" exclaims the introductory epistle of
James J. Morier's The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan.11) But comparison,
it is famously said, is the beginning of all serious scholarship. And compared
to the upheavals and revolutions in the Arab world during the early and middle
phases of the Cold War, the regime ushered in by the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution
was striking in its élan and modernity. The truth is, and this is something
that goes directly back to the Achaemenids of antiquity, everything about the
Iranian past and present is of a high quality, whether it is the dynamism of
its empires from Cyrus the Great to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Who can deny the sheer
Iranian talent for running militant networks in Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq, which
is, after all, an aspect of imperial rule!); or the political thought and
writings of its Shiite clergy; or the complex efficiency of the bureaucracy and
security services in cracking down on dissidents. Tehran's revolutionary order
constitutes a richly developed governmental structure with a diffusion of power
centers; it is not a crude one-man thugocracy like the kind Saddam Hussein ran
in neighboring Arab Iraq.
Again, what makes the clerical regime in Iran so effective in the
pursuit of its interests, from Lebanon to Afghanistan, is its merger with the
Iranian state, which itself is the product of history and geography. The Green
Movement, which emerged in the course of massive anti-regime demonstrations
following the disputed elections of 2009, is very much like the regime it seeks
to topple. The Greens were greatly sophisticated by the standards of the region
(at least until the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia two years later), and thus
another demonstration of the Iranian genius. The Greens constituted a
world-class democracy movement, having mastered the latest means in
communications technology -- Twitter, Facebook, text messaging -- to advance
their organizational throw weight and having adopted a potent mixture of
nationalism and universal moral values to advance their cause. It took all the
means of repression of the Iranian state, subtle and not, to drive the Greens
underground. Were the Greens ever to take power, or to facilitate a change in
the clerical regime's philosophy and foreign policy toward moderation, Iran,
because of its strong state and dynamic idea, would have the means to shift the
whole groundwork of the Middle East away from radicalization, providing
political expression for a new bourgeoisie with middle-class values that has
been quietly rising throughout the Greater Middle East.12
To speak in terms of destiny is dangerous, since it implies an
acceptance of fate and determinism, but clearly given Iran's geography, history
and human capital, it seems likely that the Greater Middle East, and by
extension, Eurasia, will be critically affected by Iran's own political
evolution, for better or for worse.
The best indication that Iran has yet to fulfill such a destiny lies in
what has not quite happened yet in Central Asia. Let me explain. Iran's
geography, as noted, gives it frontage on Central Asia to the same extent that
it has on Mesopotamia and the Middle East. But the disintegration of the Soviet
Union has brought limited gains to Iran, when one takes into account the whole
history of Greater Iran in the region. The very suffix "istan," used for Central and South Asian countries and
which means "place," is Persian. The conduits for Islamization and
civilization in Central Asia were the Persian language and culture. The
language of the intelligentsia and other elites in Central Asia up through the
beginning of the 20th century was one form of Persian or another. But after
1991, Shiite Azerbaijan to the northwest adopted the Latin alphabet and turned
to Turkey for tutelage. As for the republics to the northeast of Iran, Sunni
Uzbekistan oriented itself more toward a nationalistic than an Islamic base,
for fear of its own homegrown fundamentalists -- this makes it wary of Iran.
Tajikistan, Sunni but Persian-speaking, seeks a protector in Iran, but Iran is
constrained for fear of making an enemy of the many Turkic-speaking Muslims
elsewhere in Central Asia.13 What's more, being nomads and semi-nomads, Central
Asians were rarely devout Muslims to start with, and seven decades of communism
only strengthened their secularist tendencies. Having to relearn Islam, they
are both put off and intimidated by clerical Iran.
Of course, there have been positive developments from the viewpoint of
Tehran. Iran, as its nuclear program attests, is one of the most
technologically advanced countries in the Middle East (in keeping with its
culture and politics), and as such has built hydroelectric projects and roads
and railroads in these Central Asian countries that will one day link them all
to Iran -- either directly or through Afghanistan. Moreover, a natural gas
pipeline now connects southeastern Turkmenistan with northeastern Iran,
bringing Turkmen natural gas to Iran's Caspian region, and thus freeing up
Tehran's own natural gas production in
southern Iran for export via the Persian Gulf. (This goes along with a
rail link built in the 1990s connecting the two countries.) Turkmenistan has
the world's fourth-largest natural gas reserves and has committed its entire
natural gas exports to Iran, China and Russia. Hence, the possibility arises of
a Eurasian energy axis united by the crucial geography of three continental
powers all for the time being opposed to Western democracy.14 Iran and
Kazakhstan have built an oil pipeline connecting the two countries, with Kazakh
oil being pumped to Iran's north, even as an equivalent amount of oil is
shipped from Iran's south out through the Persian Gulf. Kazakhstan and Iran
will also be linked by rail, providing Kazakhstan with direct access to the
Gulf. A rail line may also connect mountainous Tajikistan to Iran, via
Afghanistan. Iran constitutes the shortest route for all these natural
resource-rich countries to reach international markets.
So imagine an Iran athwart the pipeline routes of Central Asia, along
with its sub-state, terrorist empire of sorts in the Greater Middle East. But
there is still a problem. Given the prestige that Shiite Iran has enjoyed in
sectors of the Sunni Arab world, to say nothing of Shiite south Lebanon and
Shiite Iraq -- because of the regime's implacable support for the Palestinian
cause and its inherent anti-Semitism -- it is telling that this ability to
attract mass support outside its borders does not similarly carry over into
Central Asia. One issue is that the former Soviet republics maintain diplomatic
relations with Israel and simply lack the hatred toward it that may still be
ubiquitous in the Arab world. Yet, there is something larger and deeper at
work, something that limits Iran's appeal not only in Central Asia but in the
Arab world as well. That something is the very persistence of its suffocating
clerical rule that, while impressive in a negative sense -- using Iran's strong
state tradition to ingeniously crush a democratic opposition and torture and
rape its own people -- has also dulled the linguistic and cosmopolitan appeal
that throughout history has accounted for a Greater Iran in a cultural sense.
The Technicolor is gone from the Iranian landscape under this regime and has
been replaced by grainy black and white. Iran's imperial ambitions are for the
time being limited by the very nature of its clerical rule.
Some years back I was in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, from
whose vantage point Tehran and Mashad over the border
in Iranian Khorasan have always loomed as cosmopolitan centers of commerce and
pilgrimage, in stark contrast to Turkmenistan's own sparsely populated, nomadic
landscape. But while trade and pipeline politics proceeded apace, Iran held no
real magic, no real appeal for Muslim Turkmens, who are mainly secular and are
put off by the mullahs. As extensive as Iranian influence is by virtue of its
in-your-face challenge to America and Israel, I don't believe we will see the
true appeal of Iran, in all its cultural glory, until the regime liberalizes or
is toppled. A democratic or quasi democratic Iran, precisely because of the
geographical power of the Iranian state, has the possibility to energize
hundreds of millions of fellow Muslims in the Arab world and Central Asia.
Sunni Arab liberalism could be helped in its rise not only by the
example of the West, or because of a democratic yet dysfunctional Iraq, but
also because of the challenge thrown up by a newly liberal and historically
eclectic Shiite Iran in the future. And such an Iran might do what two decades
of post-Cold War Western democracy and civil society promotion have failed to
-- that is, lead to a substantial prying loose of the police state restrictions
in former Soviet Central Asia.
With its rich culture, vast territory and teeming and sprawling cities,
Iran is, in the way of China and India, a civilization unto itself, whose
future will overwhelmingly be determined by internal politics and social
conditions. Unlike the Achaemenid, Sassanid, Safavid and other Iranian empires
of yore, which were either benign or truly inspiring in both a moral and
cultural sense, this current Iranian empire of the mind rules mostly out of
fear and intimidation, through suicide bombers rather than through poets. And
this both reduces its power and signals its eventual downfall.
Yet, if one were to isolate a single hinge in calculating Iran's fate,
it would be Iraq. Iraq, history and geography tell us, is entwined in Iranian
politics to the degree of no other foreign country. The Shiite shrines of Imam
Ali (the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law) in An Najaf and the one of Imam
Hussain (the grandson of the Prophet) in Karbala, both in central-southern
Iraq, have engendered Shiite theological communities that challenge that of Qom
in Iran. Were Iraqi democracy to exhibit even a modicum of stability, the freer
intellectual atmosphere of the Iraqi holy cities could eventually have a
profound impact on Iranian politics. In a larger sense, a democratic Iraq can
serve as an attractor force of which Iranian reformers might in the future take
advantage. For as Iranians become more deeply embroiled in Iraqi politics, the
very propinquity of the two nations with a long and common border might work to
undermine the more repressive of the two systems. Iranian politics will become
gnarled by interaction with a pluralistic, ethnically Arab Shiite society. And
as the Iranian economic crisis continues to unfold, ordinary Iranians could
well up in anger over hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by their
government to buy influence in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere. This is to say
nothing of how Iranians will become increasingly hated inside Iraq as the
equivalent of "Ugly Americans." Iran would like to simply leverage
Iraqi Shiite parties against the Sunni ones. But that is not altogether
possible, since that would narrow the radical Islamic universalism it seeks to
represent in the pan-Sunni world to a sectarianism with no appeal beyond the
community of Shia. Thus, Iran may be stuck trying to help form shaky
Sunni-Shiite coalitions in Iraq and to keep them perennially functioning, even
as Iraqis develop greater hatred for this intrusion into their domestic
affairs. Without justifying the way that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was planned
and executed, or rationalizing the trillions of dollars spent and the hundreds
of thousands of lives lost in the war, in the fullness of time it might very
well be that the fall of Saddam Hussein began a process that will result in the
liberation of two countries; not one. Just as geography has facilitated Iran's
subtle colonization of Iraqi politics, geography could also be a factor in
abetting Iraq's influence upon Iran.
The prospect of peaceful regime change -- or evolution -- in Iran,
despite the temporary fizzling of the Green Movement, is still greater now than
in the Soviet Union during most of the Cold War. A liberated Iran, coupled with
less autocratic governments in the Arab world -- governments that would be
focused more on domestic issues because of their own insecurity -- would
encourage a more equal, fluid balance of power between Sunnis and Shia in the
Middle East, something that would help keep the region nervously preoccupied
with itself and on its own internal and regional power dynamics, much more than
on America and Israel.
Additionally, a more liberal regime in Tehran would inspire a broad
cultural continuum worthy of the Persian empires of old, one that would not be
constrained by the clerical forces of reaction.
A more liberal Iran, given the large Kurdish, Azeri, Turkmen and other
minorities in the north and elsewhere, may also be a far less centrally
controlled Iran, with the ethnic peripheries drifting away from Tehran's orbit.
Iran has often been less a state than an amorphous, multinational empire. Its
true size would always be greater and smaller than any officially designated
cartography. While the northwest of today's Iran is Kurdish and Azeri Turk,
parts of western Afghanistan and Tajikistan are culturally and linguistically
compatible with an Iranian state. It is this amorphousness, so very Parthian,
that Iran could return to as the wave of Islamic extremism and the perceived
legitimacy of the mullahs' regime erodes.15
1 Michael Axworthy. A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind, Basic Books,
New York, 2008, p. 3.
2 Brown. The World of Late Antiquity, p. 163.
3 W. Barthold, An Historical Geography of
Iran, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, (1903) 1971 and 1984,
pp. x-xi and 4.
4 Ostler, Empires of the Word, p. 31.
5 Axworthy, p. 78.
6 Philip K. Hitti, The Arabs: A Short History,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1943, p. 109.
7 Brown, pp. 202-03.
8 Hiro, Inside Central Asia, p. 359.
9 Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, translated by Carol Volk,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992 and 1994, pp. 168-70.
10 Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, p. 168.
11 James Morier, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan,
John Murray, London, 1824, p. 5 of 1949 Cresset Press edition.
12 Vali Nasr, Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class
and What It Will Mean for Our World, Free Press, New York, 2009.
13 Roy, p. 193.
14 M. K. Bhadrakumar, "Russia, China,
Iran Energy Map," Asia Times, 2010.
15 Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the
21st Century, Random House, New York, 1996, p. 242.
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