Iranians Must Reverse Their History For Redemption
Iranians have never been themselves since they ceased to be Persians, but it's never too late to reverse history. Now is the time
On June 18, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a stark warning to the United States, declaring, 'Iran will never surrender". He said any American intervention in the ongoing Israel-Iran conflict would result in 'irreparable damage". He further vowed that Israel would face punishment, marking the sixth day of an unprecedented aerial war that has claimed hundreds of lives and targeted critical infrastructure across Iran. Indeed, Iran is proving no mean force in the conflict, as Tel Aviv, ravaged by Iranian missiles, bears witness to.
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), forged in the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), may be weakened but not eradicated. The defiant Iranian stance comes amid escalating tensions in West Asia, fuelled by inflammatory remarks from US President Donald Trump and Israel's initiation of a relentless bombing campaign, including strikes on Tehran's nuclear and military facilities.
As Israel targets a generation tied to the 1979 revolution, it needs to be seen whether resident Iranians would turn pro-US, as the Iranian diaspora has.
Does Khamenei's tough talk echo a broader narrative about the resilience of his nation and its people? Nations are fundamentally defined by their natives, some of whom possess an indomitable spirit that defies defeat, even if they cannot always be ruled. Do Iranians have it in them?
Certain peoples of certain lands cannot be defeated, only ruled with difficulty, as evident in Iran's current defiance amid extreme adversity. Russians, for example, fight like they play football — no great technique but brute force and sheer tenacity. The more they get killed, the more soldiers they send to the battlefield, as Stalingrad witnessed towards the end of WWII!
Afghans and some Africans can be defeated but not ruled over. They will stay as anarchic as they have always been, whether under democracy, communism, monarchy or dictatorship.
It's the essential culture that cannot be defeated in India. Even under some foreign influence, its basic Hindu nature cannot be obliterated.
Is the Iranian mind similarly shaped? One is not sure. On the one hand, the Iranian diaspora is longing for assimilation with American society, their four-decade-old home. On the other, the world hardly gets to hear voices from resident Iranians, but have they been any better?
IRANIANS HAVE HISTORICALLY BEEN GULLIBLE
Iran's history offers a complex backdrop to the question. Once the heart of the Persian Empire and a bastion of Zoroastrianism under the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE), Iran underwent a profound transformation following the Arab Muslim invasion in 651 CE. The rise of Islam led to a steep decline in Zoroastrian followers, with their numbers dwindling to between 15,000 and 25,000 by 2012 in a population exceeding 82 million.
The imposition of the jizyah tax and restrictive dhimmī laws under the Abbasids forced many Zoroastrians to convert or flee and seek refuge in India. This historical shift marked the beginning of Iran's transition from Persia to an Islamic identity, a change that was accelerated by foreign influences rather than an organic evolution.
The 20th century brought further upheaval. The Pahlavi dynasty, particularly under Mohammad Reza Shah, sought to revive Iran's pre-Islamic heritage, valuing Zoroastrian contributions and enacting reforms to elevate minority status.
However, the 1979 Islamic Revolution, led by Khomeini — backed by the CIA that went to the extent of hiring Saddam Hussein to assassinate the Shah, an attempt that failed — reversed these efforts, establishing a theocratic regime that suppressed secular and pre-Islamic traditions. This 'revolution' saw many Iranians — much like Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir valley since the reign of Sikandar Shah Miri (alias Butshikan) — flee abroad, diluting their cultural practices in diaspora.
A contemporary dimension of this identity struggle must be highlighted: The role of US intervention. Recent protests, such as those sparked by Mahsa Amini's death in 2022 over the mandatory hijab law, were amplified by Western media and the Pentagon's propaganda machine as a ploy to undermine Iran's theocracy. While these protests symbolised resistance — women burning hijabs and cutting their hair in public — they subsided perhaps when the US deemed the ploy insufficient to topple the regime. Washington must be asked why it stopped echoing the voices of 'suppressed' Iranian women? Has the mission to free them been accomplished? Contrary to the media narrative, Iranian women are among the 'free-est" in the Islamic world, with minimal police action against hijab violations in rural areas, challenging the narrative pushed by some US-based Iranians who celebrate Israeli attacks.
IRAN MUST TURN AROUND
Drawing parallels with the tenacity of Russians, the anarchic resilience of Afghans and the enduring Hindu essence of Indian culture, a critical question must be raised about Iranians: Are they as resolute? Why did the people of Iran lose their pre-Islamic Persian identity, for example, not resisting the Abbasid invaders? If, today, some Iranian-Americans are praying for an end to the Islamic regime, have they forgotten that the country they are domiciled in now is the country that had orchestrated the fall of the Shah and replaced the secular leader with Ayatollah Khomeini in 1977-79? Are the Iranians destined to remain pawns in a geopolitical chess game forever?
Will this pattern of foreign exploitation, where Iran's internal dissent is co-opted for geopolitical gain, reverse now, even after the dismantling of Iran's proxies, such as Hezbollah and the Assad regime in Syria, which has left Tehran vulnerable? Will the historically non-existent resilience of Iranians prove a wildcard?
Iran's future hinges on its people's ability to reconcile their Persian and Islamic identities. To whatever extent the Mahsa Amini protests were true, external manipulation notwithstanding, it reflected a genuine yearning for freedom, aligning with a broader rejection of theocratic rule.
The caveat that must be issued here is that US-backed regime changes warn against external solutions. Look at the pattern of American interventions wherever they succeeded:
The US 'lost' Vietnam which was, thus, spared the horror.
One of the worst students of the respective sociologies of other nations, the Americans have always left a nation-state they interfered in worse off when they left.
Iran's liberation, if it comes, must depend on an internal awakening, drawing on its Zoroastrian and Persian roots, much like India's enduring Hindu culture. Speaking from an Indian perspective, neither the continuation of the pro-Pakistan, Islamist Iran that conventionally voted against New Delhi in UN forums on the question of Kashmir, nor a US-backed government that would never let India into the Chabahar port to counterbalance the Sino-Pakistani Gwadar port, is good.
A CALL FOR SELF-DETERMINATION
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As the aerial war rages and Khamenei's words resonate, Iran stands at a crossroads. If its people find resilience that they never did in the past, the world may get back glorious Persia, the people of which were essentially farmers but whose king build roads and ports, the language of which was influenced by fellow Indo-European Sanskrit, the science of which made one wonder how it could turn into an Islamic fundamentalist regime, and the economy of which, supported by King Darius' standardised currency, traded goods with India, China and the Roman Empire.
(The author is a senior journalist and writer. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views)
tags :
Israel Iran tension
Location :
New Delhi, India, India
First Published:
June 22, 2025, 20:39 IST
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