A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  It soon emerged that the Iranian negotiators had full backing for the terms they had agreed—Ali Khamenei quickly issued a statement welcoming the agreement, saying that “God’s grace and the support of the Iranian nation were the reasons behind this success.” Netanyahu in Israel had spoken strongly against the talks in Geneva, and blasted their outcome also, as being too soft on Iran. Similar opposition from Saudi Arabia seemed also to fall on deaf ears. Obama was able to face down their objections, but he had to persuade skeptics in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere to give this new process a chance and not to impose new sanctions. To this end Obama and his colleagues presented the deal as a first step that halted or reversed the Iranian nuclear program. That was one way of looking at it; signed off by seven of the world’s most important foreign ministers, it nonetheless also signified international recognition of Iran as a major nuclear power.

  Part of the significance of the interim agreement was about the directions that the United States and Iran had not taken. They had both pulled back from positions of intransigence, confrontation and escalation. The Iranians could have remained obdurate against any kind of concessions or limits on their nuclear program, hunkering down and accepting the price of isolation and the massive economic damage from sanctions that had been making life miserable for their people. The United States could have continued with the “no enrichment, can’t trust Iran” line, steadily increasing the sanctions pressure until the only sanctions left were military ones. But Obama pulled back from that, and took a chance on trusting the Iranians. That was the real significance of the Geneva agreement, and the process that followed.

  It emerged after the Geneva deal that there had been direct bilateral talks in secret between the Iranians and the United States since March 2013—well before Rouhani had been elected as president. Big political figures in Iran and in the United States had made a commitment to a positive process of diplomacy. The involvement of the other state parties was important, but in its essentials it was a U.S.-Iran negotiation. As with all initiatives involving a commitment of this kind, momentum and the political capital invested in the process counted for as much as the technical details.

  According to the interim deal achieved in Geneva, a final settlement was to be achieved within six months. But predictably, the negotiations proved difficult, and the deadline was postponed twice, in June and November 2014, before a framework deal was agreed upon on April 2, 2015, on the basis that the technical details of a final agreement would be completed by the end of June. Eventually, after further extension of deadlines, a final and definitive agreement was made in Vienna on July 14.

  Building on the Geneva deal, the Vienna settlement—officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA—committed Iran to reduce its number of operational centrifuges from twenty thousand to fewer than six thousand, to enrich no uranium beyond the level of 3.67 percent, to limit stocks enriched to that level to a maximum of three hundred kilograms (for fifteen years), to restrict research and development of more efficient centrifuges (for thirteen years), to convert the underground Fordow plant to medical research with a moratorium on enrichment there for fifteen years, to redesign the Arak plant to prevent production of plutonium, to accept more or less continuous supervision of existing sites, and allow access to other facilities on request (subject to a consultation period of twenty-four days at most), and to agree that the lifting of sanctions would be gradual and dependent on fulfillment of the Iranians’ obligations.

  Although it was adopted by the UN Security Council within a few days, the agreement was met with a storm of criticism from Republicans within the U.S. political system. Much of this hostility was based on an assumption that Iran was incorrigibly malevolent and untrustworthy; hence, the verification provisions were held to be inadequate (because there was a possibility for the Iranians to disguise some weapon-related activity), and the provisions for Iran to be free of some restrictions after fifteen or thirteen years were thought to imply too much faith in Iran’s ability to establish a higher level of trust with the other countries involved within that time period. From the Republican side, more considered objections were augmented by a deep-seated conservative mistrust of arms control measures on principle, the visceral dislike of Iran that had endured since 1979, and a profound unwillingness to allow the Obama administration any kind of policy success. But Obama made clear he would use his presidential veto to uphold the agreement; over weeks of debate it became clear that the opposition had little to offer in the way of serious policy alternatives, and eventually opposition to the agreement in Congress collapsed.

  Congressional misgivings over the agreement were not the only potential problem. Verification provisions designed to develop trust can often give rise to renewed disagreement, accusations of bad faith, and acrimony, especially in the short term. The agreement also stipulated that Iran would give an account of previous weapon-related activity—a provision that was never likely to be conducive to goodwill (this condition was satisfied by an IAEA report at the end of the year). But the deal had been possible only because the leaders of the United States and Iran, the prime parties involved, had both made a huge political investment in it. Given the continuation of that high-level commitment from both sides through the verification process, it seems at least likely that the inevitable problems will be overcome, as before.

  Assuming that the agreement holds, resolution of the nuclear problem could have important security benefits across the Middle East region. Despite Netanyahu’s opposition (he described the JCPOA as a “historic mistake”), Israel would benefit more than any other state from a serious normalization of relations with Iran, despite the loss of an element of Israel’s regional nuclear dominance. Removal of the nuclear problem could open up new possibilities between Iran and the United States. High on any further list of U.S. wishes would be relaxation of Iranian hostility toward Israel. If, along the lines of what was envisaged in the Grand Bargain offer of 2003, Iran could be brought to a de facto acceptance of Israel’s existence and withdraw support for violence against Israel by Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah, the benefits would surely outweigh Israel’s lingering concerns over Iran’s nuclear program (there were reports in the latter part of 2015 that Iran had, in fact, ceased support to Hamas). Such a shift would also have a positive effect—perhaps not decisive but nonetheless helpful—on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

  The Middle East region could benefit from reconciliation with Iran in a variety of ways. It would be of huge benefit for the United States and other Western countries to be able to work with the Iranians to reduce the growing and violent hostility between Sunni and Shi‘a across the region, from Syria to Iraq, Bahrain, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—perhaps the most threatening development in the contemporary Middle East. This opportunity became more obvious following the capture of the city of Mosul in Iraq by the Islamic State (IS) in May 2014—after which the United States and Iran became de facto allies in the fight against IS in Iraq. In the medium term, if Iran can become more of a partner in stabilizing the region, it may do no harm in the relations between the West and Saudi Arabia, for example, too. A Saudi Arabia that has to compete with others for the attention and sympathy of Western nations might be more motivated to take effective action against the domestic factors that breed terrorism and regional instability.

  For Iran itself, if the nuclear settlement holds and yields the fruit all expect from it, Iranians can hope for relief from sanctions, an opening to international commerce, and a renewal of economic prosperity. Given the potential of the educated, entrepreneurial Iranian people (not to mention the highly developed, highly competent Iranian diaspora), the economic effects could be dramatic. The effect of reducing Iran’s isolation would be likely also to benefit political freedoms and civil society within Iran, because the security threat and therefore the justification for repression would also diminish. Between the dates of Rouhani’s election in 2013 and the nuclear agreement in the s
ummer of 2015, the general assumption was that other matters, like greater political and press freedoms, and the release of political prisoners, would have to await a result in the nuclear negotiations. The nuclear deal was plainly a success for Rouhani, but the combination of his enhanced prestige and renewed pressure from reformists for progress on those other matters is potentially dangerous for him and requires careful handling. Regime hardliners, jealous of their position and perhaps disgruntled already with the concessions made in the JCPOA, might be inclined to reassert themselves to demonstrate their continuing hold on power and to prevent Rouhani encroaching on it. In the weeks after the signing of the JCPOA, Khamenei made statements that appeared to prohibit further bilateral cooperation with the United States, and these were widely interpreted as reassurance to regime hardliners that the traditional positions of hostility toward the United States were not going to change. Iran drew closer also to Russia over the Syrian crisis in the autumn of 2015. But United States and Iranian diplomats talked to each other about Syria at the multilateral talks in Vienna nonetheless, and there were some signs that anti-western hardliners opposed to the JCPOA were losing traction within the Iranian system in advance of the 2016 Majles elections.

  The detail is hard to predict, but the summer of 2015 looks like a turning point for Iran in the region and in the world—an opportunity for reintegration into the international system and for a relaxation of internal restrictions. For Iran and the world to take advantage of those opportunities, previous doubters, within Iran and without, must adapt to the changed circumstances and recognize the new potential. For the good of all, we all need the vision to follow through on the hard-won nuclear agreement.

  Notes

  PREFACE—THE REMARKABLE RESILIENCE OF THE IDEA OF IRAN

  1. Gobineau, the earliest theorist of Aryan racial theories, served as a diplomat in the French Embassy in Tehran in the 1850s.

  CHAPTER 1—ORIGINS: ZOROASTER, THE ACHAEMENIDS, AND THE GREEKS

  1. Accessed from the University of Pennsylvania’s Web site, www.museum.upenn.edu/new/research/Exp_Rese_Disc/NearEast/wines.html.

  2. A. T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire: Achaemenid Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 22–23.

  3. The nature of the early Zoroastrian religion is subject to great difficulties of interpretation, on the surface of which I can barely make a scratch. I have relied heavily on Alessandro Bausani, Religion in Iran: From Zoroaster to Bahu’u’llah (New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 2000); see also Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, Volume One: The Early Period (Leiden: Brill, 1975), and Shahrokh Razmjou, “Religion and Burial Customs,” in Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 150–180.

  4. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 10–11; see also Mary Boyce, Zoroastrianism: A Shadowy but Powerful Presence in the Judaeo-Christian World (London: Dr. William’s Trust, 1987), 9.

  5. Though Bausani, Religion in Iran, doubted this explanation as too simplistic, 29–30, it is an attractive intellectual model with an obvious read-across to the way early Christianity assimilated some previous religious forms, while literally demonizing others as superstition or witchcraft.

  6. Though in the earliest times Ahriman’s direct opponent was Spenta Mainyu—Bounteous Spirit—rather than Ahura Mazda, who was represented as being above the conflict.

  7. Boyce, Zoroastrianism, 8.

  8. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 53.

  9. The late Mary Boyce believed that Zoroastrianism became better known to the Jews after the end of the Achaemenid Empire, through these diaspora communities (Boyce, Zoroastrianism, 11).

  10. See Richard C. Foltz, Spirituality in the Land of the Noble: How Iran Shaped the World’s Religions (Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2004), 45–53, and Edwin Yamauchi, Persia and the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1990), 463–464, for a counter to the Boyce thesis.

  11. Daniel D. Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia (London: Histories and Mysteries of Man, 1989), 115–120.

  12. James Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament with Supplement, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 316.

  13. Patricia Crone, “Zoroastrian Communism,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (July 1994): 460.

  14. Maria Brosius, Women in Ancient Persia, 559–331 BC (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 198–200 and passim.

  15. Olmstead, 66–68, quoting later Greek sources.

  16. Alessandro Bausani, The Persians (London: Book Club Associates, 1975), 20.

  17. Josef Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 33 and 82. An alternative reading of the evidence would be that Darius murdered the real Bardiya (and possibly his brother Cambyses before him) to gain the throne. He then had to crush a series of loyalist rebellions and concoct a cover story.

  18. Ibid., 67–69.

  19. Alexandra Villing, “Persia and Greece,” in Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 236–249.

  20. See Villing, 230–231.

  21. Olmstead, 519–520.

  22. Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, 78–79.

  CHAPTER 2—THE IRANIAN REVIVAL: PARTHIANS AND SASSANIDS

  1. Wiesehöfer, 134.

  2. Ibid., 145.

  3. Habib Levy, Comprehensive History of the Jews of Iran, H. Ebrami, ed. (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1999), 113–115.

  4. I have taken these lines from an eighteenth-century translation of Plutarch, “by Dacier and others” published in Edinburgh in 1763. In the modern Penguin edition of The Bacchae (Harmondsworth: 1973), Phillip Vellacott translated the same lines: “I am bringing home from the mountains / A vine-branch freshly cut / For the gods have blessed our hunting.”

  5. “Arsacid Dynasty,” in Encyclopedia Iranica (New York: Routledge, 1982– ).

  6. Ibid.

  7. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 12; Wiesehöfer, 149.

  8. “Arsacid Dynasty,” in Encyclopedia Iranica.

  9. Levy, 113.

  10. “Mithraism,” in Encyclopedia Iranica.

  11. Touraj Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); Wiesehöfer, 160.

  12. Homa Katouzian, Iranian History and Politics: The Dialectic of State and Society (London: Routledge, 2007).

  13. Daryaee, Sasanian Persia.

  14. Wiesehöfer, 161; “Shapur I,” in Encyclopedia Iranica.

  15. Anthologized in Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, eds., The School Bag (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 183–186.

  16. Daryaee, Sasanian Persia.

  17. See Touraj Daryaee, Sahrestaniha-i Eransahr: A Middle Persian Text on Late Antique Geography, Epic, and History (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2002).

  18. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 107.

  19. Ibid., 83–96.

  20. Daryaee, Sasanian Persia.

  21. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 89.

  22. Ibid., 89, 118, and 120; Daryaee, Sasanian Persia.

  23. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 87.

  24. For Pelagius the best book, an important book, is B. R. Rees, Pelagius: Life and Letters (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 1998). My account of Augustine would be disputed by some, who still uphold his theological positions (reasserted in the sixteenth century and later by Calvinists), but the facts of his time as a Manichaean are not disputed. Much recent Christian theology has turned away from many Augustinian positions, favoring more Pelagian attitudes. An interesting aspect of the dispute is that Pelagius maintained that man could perfect himself and attain salvation by his own efforts; Augustine insisted that salvation could only come by the aid of God’s grace. There is a similarity between Pelagius’s ideas on this point and the thinking of some Islamic thinkers, notably Ibn Arabi (see Chapter 3).

  25. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 86.

  26. Also Sprach Zarathustra: “wenn ich frohlockend sass, wo alte Götter begraben liegen, weltsegnend, weltliebend neben den Den
kmalen alter Weltverleumder”—“if ever I sat rejoicing where old gods lay buried, world-blessing, world-loving, beside the monuments of old world-slanderers.”

  27. “Shapur I,” in Encyclopedia Iranica.

  28. Daryaee, Sasanian Persia.

  29. Bausani, Religion in Iran, 11–13. See page 15 for Bausani’s explanation of the later redaction of the Zoroastrian Pahlavi texts in the ninth century.

  30. “The Sassanids,” in Encyclopedia Iranica; Ammianus Marcellinus, vol. 2, 457–503, Loeb Classics.

  31. Ibid.; Daryaee, Sasanian Persia.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Crone, 448. She considered the religious movement to be a life-affirming reaction to gnosticism rather than an outgrowth of Manichaeism (461–462), and followed an alternative chronology of events that set the death of Mazdak after Khosraw’s accession to the throne. Many aspects of the Mazdak episode are disputed.

  34. Mohammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, The Sasanids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen, vol. 5 of History of al-Tabari, edited and translated by C. E. Bosworth (Albany: State University of New York Press), 135 and note. The story also appears in Western accounts, but some of them give the woman as Kavad’s wife.

  35. Wiesehöfer, 190.