Why are young Persians calling for the “return of the king” from the Pahlavi dynasty? Why are they protesting against Shiite Islamic law, which has been present in the country for several centuries? Is a sense of pride in a “non-Muslim” history growing among young Iranians?
Although testimonies recently brought by the British newspaper Financial Times about potential “commandos in black” who allegedly blended in among ordinary demonstrators disturb the image of an “attempt at revolution,” the scale and origins of the protests cannot be attributed to the actions of Israel or the USA. Iran’s Generation Z is simply demanding that the shah from the Pahlavi dynasty return to the domestic political scene.
He would take the throne as Reza II and restore the tradition of Persian or Iranian monarchy that reaches back to the beginning of the 16th century. Since we also observe in other countries a return of young adults to some form of traditionalism, Iran need not be an exception. Young Iranians today no longer remember the “reign of terror” of his father, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the way their grandparents remember it.
The origins of the Aryans’ homeland
Despite the later historical stigma, Iranian Persians often styled themselves in the role of “Aryans,” that is, “the noble,” thereby identifying with the original Indo-Iranian population that lived in the area between Mesopotamia and northern India from the 12th century BC. From the Indus River (Sanskrit Sindh, Old Persian Hindh), Proto-Iranian tribes expanded westward from a region that the oldest Iranian texts call “Airjanem Vaedjah” — the homeland of the Aryans.
The Persian language used by authors of the time to record the sacred text, the Avesta, is for this period referred to as Avestan — in this tongue the word “airja” has been preserved, later pronounced in Middle Persian as “ēr.” From the name of the country “Airjanam” thus came “Ēran,” which could be translated literally as “Aryan land.”
The early Indian term “ariya,” according to modern linguistics, denotes people who came before 1100 BC from an unknown homeland in the north and brought with them language and the Vedic religion — especially the cults of gods such as Indra and Agni.
Around the turn of the millennium, according to Iranian tradition, a prophet named Zarathustra (Zoroaster) appeared, who rejected the previous polytheistic Mazdaic religion and placed at the head of the Iranian pantheon the “Lord of Wisdom” — Ahura Mazda. This new dualistic religion, however, did not take hold immediately and it took roughly five centuries before it became dominant.
The oldest “Iranian” kingdom also arose much later — the beginning of the empire known as Media is dated to the 7th century BC. By the beginning of the 6th century BC, the Medes had conquered all surrounding Iranian lands, including the kingdom known from Greek sources as Persis.
It was precisely the land on the northern shore of the later Persian Gulf that was the center of the first “official” Persia. In the city of Persepolis (Pārsa, today Takht-e Jamshid) the Achaemenid dynasty from neighboring Elam settled, and by 550 BC it brought the demise of the Median Empire to completion.
This fall was chiefly brought about by Cyrus II the Great, king of the Persians, whom later monotheists (Christians, Jews, Muslims) know as the conqueror of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the man who enabled the return of the Israelites from the Babylonian captivity (around 516 BC).
During his career, Cyrus occupied practically the entire extent of the empire of his Median predecessors. The later achievements counted to his Achaemenid dynasty include, for example, the conquest of Egypt, Asia Minor, the Caucasus, or the region of Transoxiana (today’s Uzbekistan) and the Indus basin. From the reign of King Xerxes I (Khshayarsha — “hero among kings”), Persia recorded a massive expansion of Zoroastrianism, which acted as a unifying element of the empire.
This expansion ended around 330 when Persia was attacked from the west by the Macedonian king and unifier of the Greeks, Alexander III the Great. Geographic necessity, however, likely meant that he and his successors controlled the entire territory of the previous empire — as a result the Greeks advanced as far as the foothills of the Pamirs and, after the collapse of the Seleucid Empire, founded the Indo-Greek kingdom (Yavana).
Persians and Persians
The Hellenistic empire was brought down by other Persians, whom even our history textbooks distinguish from the Fars of the land of Persis. That lay in today’s southern Iran, while the Parthians came from the northeast. From 247 BC the Parthian Empire grew again to the size of its predecessors (except Anatolia), but unlike them it lasted more than two centuries.
The Fars, whom today we call “ethnic Persians,” returned to dominance over other Iranian peoples only in 224 AD, in the form of the Sasanian dynasty. The Persian “wise men from the East,” who according to Scripture came to worship the newborn Jesus, thus came precisely from the Parthian Empire.
The Sasanian Persian Empire thus again replaced its predecessor across virtually the same entire extent. The first man of the dynasty, King Ardashir, murdered the last Parthian, Artabanus IV. In this period we also encounter for the first time terminology referring not to a Persian but an all-Iranian origin and ambition — Eranshahr. The word translates as “Iranian kingdom,” which again occupied Egypt and Mesopotamia.
In this period, the dominance of Zoroastrianism over other religions, especially Manichaeism, became definitively established. Although both religions were dualistic (a good god versus an evil god), Zoroastrianism was tied to the ethnic identity of Zarathustra and his heirs — the Iranians — whereas Manichaeism was too universal.
And while in the Parthian period Mesopotamia was temporarily ruled by the Roman Empire, the power dynamic between them stabilized on the border between the Levant and Iraq, respectively between western and eastern Anatolia. In this deadly grip, Zoroastrian Persia and Christian Byzantium endured until the fall of the former.
The rise of Islam
That fall was brought about by a new, third player in the Middle East — the new Arab caliphate, which between 622 and 654 gradually occupied all of Persia. The rule of the elected caliphs (Rashidun — the Rightly Guided) was replaced in 661 by the Umayyad dynasty, which expanded the Arab empire to an almost unimaginable size from Spain and North Africa all the way to Pakistan.
The Umayyads, however, insisted on a kind of chosen status of Arabs over other Islamized peoples, even though they adopted from the Byzantine Greeks and Persians almost the entire system of state administration and a vast number of customs — including the veiling of women from the Byzantine aristocracy.
Toward other religions they were tolerant, allowing Christians and Jews to practice their faith in exchange for the “infidel tax” — the jizya. In 686, however, a civil war broke out between the various factions of the Umayyad clan and non-Arab peoples, known as the Second Fitna, which allowed the governor of Fars, Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, to make the core of ancient Persia independent.
Northern Iran, that is the Media of the time, was in turn controlled by the general Mukhtar al-Thaqafi, who, according to Arab and Persian sources, was “on Ali’s side.” Supporters of the fourth caliph, Ali ibn Abi Talib, thus began to call themselves — in Arabic shiʿat ʿAli, later shortened to shiʿa, and to this day the basis for the term Shiites.
Shiites rejected the dynastic rule of the Umayyads and sought a return to elected caliphs. Therefore this branch of Islam (in connection with rejecting Arab superiority) took root so vehemently precisely in Persia.
In 750 the Third Fitna culminated in the Battle of the Zab River, in which the decaying Umayyads were defeated by a new dynasty — the Abbasids. They relied on slogans of equality for all Islamized peoples and, after their successful accession, further Persianized Islamic culture and state administration. The end of Arab superiority and the relocation of the empire’s center from Damascus to Baghdad (later to Samarra) also led to a surge in missionary activity.
Between 861 and 870, however, the Abbasid dynasty also lost popularity and most of its power, as a result of which local dynasties again rose, such as the Saffarids, the Samanids in today’s Uzbekistan and northern Iran, the eastern Persian Ghaznavids, the Buyids in the land of Persis, and many others. Some of these dynasties were Shiite in confession and Persian in origin; others were Sunni in confession and Kurdish in origin.
This development was overshadowed by a new threat in the form of the Seljuk Turks. This nomadic people of Turkic origin conquered the remnants of the Abbasid empire from Pakistan to Palestine at the beginning of the 11th century and, after the Battle of Manzikert (1071), Anatolia as well. It was precisely against them that the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos called Latin knights to the First Crusade.
The Seljuks in Persia were replaced by the Turko-Cuman Khwarazmian Empire, which fell in 1231. This was the period of Mongol expansion, which, of course, affected Persia itself — after the conquest by the Mongols led by Hulagu Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, they established here one of the provinces (ulus) of their nomadic empire.
The return of Persia
Hulagu Khan conquered Baghdad in 1252 and eight years later made old Persia independent under the name Ilkhanate. It again stretched across the original territory from eastern Anatolia to Pakistan and from the Caucasus to Mesopotamia.
Aside from the period of Arab rule, all regimes list Persian (Farsi) as the official language of the court and administration. For today’s Persians this is thus one of many sources of national pride.
The Seljuks in Anatolia and the Persianized Mongols underwent gradual disintegration in the middle of the 14th century, which another hundred years later enabled the rise of another great power — the Ottoman Empire. In 1370 a smaller intermezzo was provided by the Persian-Uzbek warlord Timur the Lame (Tamerlane), who unified Persia and Uzbekistan, although his seat was in the Uzbek city of Samarkand.
Tamerlane’s empire was overthrown by the Turkmen tribe Aq Qoyunlu (White Sheep), the Indian Mughal Empire, and the rising Shiite dynasty from Azerbaijan — the Safavids. Their first ruler Ismail I adopted the Persian title shah and definitively converted the country to Shiite Islam.
From 1522 the Safavid Empire was in warm contact with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Habsburg and the Hungarian king Louis II Jagiellon — the outcome of their coalition, later concluded in Moscow, was to be the defeat of the Ottomans.
Azerbaijanis, Turkmen, and the Pahlavis
The Safavids definitively introduced as the emblem of the country the lion with the sun in the background. Their dynasty lost power in 1736, and this year also dates the “end of the Safavid empire.” It was not quite a collapse, rather a palace coup in which the vizier Nader Qoli Beg deposed Abbas III and became the founder of the Afsharid dynasty.
Afsharid Persia, with a dynasty of Turkmen origin at its head, continued to exist until 1789, when the ruling family was replaced by the likewise Turkmen Qajars. In wars with the Russian Empire they lost the southern Caucasus (Armenia and Azerbaijan), but their rule ended only in 1921 when General Reza Pahlavi of the Cossack Brigade took power.
With his person we definitively enter modern history, which — as can be seen — continues in surprising continuity. Reza I slightly modified the country’s name from the “Guarded Dominions of Iran” and the “Noble State of Iran” to the “Imperial State of Iran.”
Since the accession of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1925, the name Iran instead of Persia also became definitively established — besides the Fars and Parthians, only few peoples (such as Kurds in the west or Baluchis in the southeast) identified with the label “Persians.” “Iranians,” by contrast, was a unifying identity for several peoples at once.
Since Reza I sided with Nazi Germany during the Second World War (apparently because of identification with the Aryans), he brought upon the country a double occupation by both the British and the Soviets. In 1941 they forced him to abdicate and replaced him with his firstborn son Mohammad Reza.
Reza I already in his time introduced several economic but above all social reforms, such as the banning of nomadism and detribalization [a process in which individuals or groups break out of traditional tribal ties and ways of life, ed. note], with the aim of creating a homogeneous Iranian nation. His son and the second shah of the Pahlavi dynasty, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, followed him in this despotism.
Shah Mohammad continued modernization in a way that earned the label “White Revolution.” Like his father, he too was in conflict with Shiite clerics, who at every opportunity criticized the loosening of morals from clothing to the building of cinemas. Alongside modernization, however, Mohammad Reza consolidated his power, until in the 1970s Iranians were calling him a “despot” or a “tyrant.”
The main executive arm of the shah’s cruel rule was the state security intelligence service SAVAK, which, for example, was responsible for the lives of three hundred insurgents on the coast of the Caspian Sea, the use of corporal punishment on mere suspicions, and the torture of many opponents of the shah’s regime.
As early as 1951, the then prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh sought to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and also wanted to reform state administration to weaken the shah’s throne. In 1953 the army officially rose against him, but it was coordinated by the CIA as part of Operation Ajax.
The American intelligence service even took part in building SAVAK, as it acknowledged in a declassified memorandum from 1980. In 1979 student demonstrators seized on this sentiment, accusing the intelligence service of driving political opponents into exile.
That was true: SAVAK indeed exiled the Shiite cleric Ruhollah Khomeini, who already carried the title “sign of God” (ayatollah). After the successful revolution against the hated Mohammad Reza, he did not abolish the agency, he merely reformed it into the Ministry of Intelligence and Public Security (SAVAMA), which functions as a secret service.
The Islamic Revolution and the establishment of a form of rule with an elected head of state caused a previously unimaginable rupture and disruption of the continuity of rule as well as the identity of Iranians. It was, however, a response of its time, since it came only a decade after the American and European “sexual” revolution.
The fact, however, is that even the “Supreme Religious Leader” — the title of the head of state — is chosen by an 88-member Assembly of Experts. Its members are selected by the 12-member Guardian Council, with half appointed by the supreme leader and the other half by parliament on the proposal of the head of the supreme court (a nominee of the supreme leader). All must be scholars of Islamic law and philosophy (mujtahids).
Attention should also be drawn to the fact that this Middle Eastern country and its “first historical nation” — as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel defined it — was thus ruled by a “shah of the Iranians” or “of the Persians” from 1501 until 1979.
The very next successor after the first “religious leader of the republic” is currently facing extensive and bloody clashes with demonstrators, who call for his death and declare that the shah “Pahlavi will return.” Young Iranians no longer remember the shah’s “reign of terror” the way their grandparents do.
Why the king returns
In countries collectively referred to as Western, analysts and the media observe a kind of widening gap between the sexes. This applies especially to Generation Z, with young men increasingly clinging to some form of traditionalism, while women become ever more liberal or progressive.
This is not true only for the United States — particularly in South Korea this shift is clearly visible, as it is in Argentina or Brazil. In Europe, too, support for nationalist or national-conservative parties is growing among men aged 18 to 30.
Although there are also views that this is not a return to conservatism but rather disappointment with how the world works and a desire for radical change, they are accompanied by a steady increase in articles about the revitalization of religious (mainly Christian) life — again among young men.
These two social movements above all do not exclude one another (disappointment with the present world revives the desire for the world of the past), and it should be put in proper perspective that they do not concern only the “collective West.” In the previous two years we observed Gen Z revolutions in Bangladesh, where they overthrew the 15-year rule of Hasina Wajed, in Nepal, where they nearly changed the constitutional order, and in Mexico, where the government of Claudia Sheinbaum rapidly wobbled. The protests in Sri Lanka are also counted among Gen Z demonstrations.
In the past, Štandard also pointed to the growing number of expressions of antisemitism on social networks, which could be counted as the “dark side” among manifestations of a desire to return to the past.
A similar principle may therefore apply in Iran as well, where young men disappointed and disgusted by the Islamic Revolution long for a return of stability and historical splendor, which was offered precisely by the monarchy lasting since 1501.
The identity of “Iranians” even existed in some form already five thousand years ago, which, from the perspective of strengthening national pride, is certainly not to be dismissed. Probably for precisely this reason, demonstrators who threaten the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran — and who call for the glory of the Iranian kingdom — are returning to that ancient identity.