Iran's Revolutions: Crash Course World History 226

Hi, I’m John Green and this is Crash Course World History and today we’re talking about Iran.

Oh, Mr. Green? Mr. Green? I know that country. It’s in the Middle East. It’s with Egypt.

No, Me from the Past, we’re going to talk about Iran. Now, I used to be you so I remember when you would look at this part of the world and you would be like, “oh yeah, that’s a thing.”

And in your case that “thing” extended more or less from I guess, like, western China to, like, uh, Poland.

Then you’d make a bunch of broad generalizations about that area and no doubt use the terms Arab and Muslim interchangeably.

But as usual Me From the Past the truth resists simplicity. So today we are going to talk about Iran and just Iran. Specifically, the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

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So the 1979 Iranian Revolution and its aftermath are often seen by detractors as the first step in the creation of an isolated, fundamentalist state that supports terrorism,

and, you might be surprised to hear me say, that there is some truth to that interpretation.

That said, the way you think about the Iranian Revolution depends a lot of which part of it you are looking at.

And regardless, it’s very important because it represents a different kind of revolution from the ones that we usually talk about.

So the 1979 uprisings were aimed at getting rid of the Pahlavi Dynasty, which sounds, like, impressive, but this dynasty had only had two kings, Reza Shah and Mohammed Reza Shah.

Before the Pahlavis, Iran was ruled by the Qajar dynasty, and before that the Safavids.

The Safavids and Qajars were responsible for two of the most important aspects of Iran:

The Safavids made Shia Islam the official state religion in Iran, starting with Ismail I in 1501, and the Qajars gave the Muslim clergy – the ulema – political power.

So most of the world’s Muslims are Sunnis but the Shia, or Shiites are an important sect that began very early on – around 680 CE and today form the majority of Muslims in Iran and Iraq.

Now within both Sunni and Shia there are further divisions and many sects, but we’re just going to talk about, like, the historical difference between the two.

Shia Muslims believe that Ali should’ve been the first Caliph, Sunni Muslims think that Abu Bakr, who was the first Caliph, was rightly chosen.

Since that disagreement, there have been many others, many doctrinal differences but what’s more important is that from the very beginning,

Shia Muslims saw themselves as the party of the oppressed standing up against the wealthy and powerful and harkening back to the social justice standard that was set by the prophet.

And this connection between religious faith and social justice was extremely important to the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and also to previous revolutions in Iran.

This is really crucial to understand because many historians argue that the Iranian revolution represents what the journalist Christian Caryl called an “odd fusion of Islam and late-twentieth century revolutionary politics.”