ハーバードの教授だけど「イランの歴史」について質問ある？ | Tech Support | WIRED Japan

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]The first thing to note about the Iranian revolution is that nobody saw it coming. I'm Professor Tar Massud from Harvard University. Let's answer your questions from the internet. This is tech support Iran.

[00:00:14]Here's a question from Quora. Is Iran an Arab country? If an Arab country is a country where the majority of people speak Arabic, then the answer is no. In Iran, people don't speak Arabic, they speak Persian. and Persian, even though it's written with the Arabic script, and so it would look like Arabic to somebody who doesn't know the language, it's actually an Indo-Uropean language. And so there's lots of words in Persian that might sound familiar to a western ear.

[00:00:43]Like the word for name is Nam. The word for cow is gav. The word for mother is mad, father is pedar, brother is barad.

[00:00:50]Arabic is a Semitic language. It's much more closely related to Hebrew, which is spoken in Israel, or Amharic, which is one of the languages spoken in Ethiopia.

[00:01:00]So, Iranians aren't Arabs. That said, there's obviously a lot of traffic between the Arab world and the Persian world. After all, they practice Islam.

[00:01:11]Islam was brought to them by the Arabs.

[00:01:14]The brand of Islam that they practice, Shia Islam, one of its core features is veneration of the prophet Muhammad and the belief that descendants of the prophet Muhammad have infallible religious authority. They're all Arabs.

[00:01:31]Many of the senior clerics like Kami or Humeni, you notice that they all wear black turbans. Those black turbans signal disscent, direct descent from the prophet Muhammad. And so again, they are basically saying, "We're descended from Arabs." And yet, Persians tend to view Arabs as unsophisticated, as Bedawins. They have slurs for Arabs.

[00:01:57]They call them lizard eaters. Mike Thai has grasshoppers. They also call them grasshopper uh eaters. Arabs also have their negative stereotypes of Persians.

[00:02:07]But here's the thing. Many of the historical personages that Arabs will point to as examples of Arab contributions to human civilization actually are Persians. So for example, there was a medieval mathematician named Alawarismi who invented algebra. The word for algorithm comes from his name.

[00:02:26]And you'll often hear Arabs say, "We invented algebra. We invented the algorithm." He was a Persian. The founder of modern medicine, Avisenna, also a Persian. In fact, the greatest Arab grammarian was a guy named Sabo.

[00:02:41]This is a guy who codifies Arab grammar in the 8th century, also a Persian. So, Iran is not an Arab country, but it is definitely experienced serious Arab influences just like the Arabs have experienced serious Iranian Persian influences. OK Sandwich 7208 asks, "How did Iran become an Islamic country in the first place?" If the question is when did Iran become a Muslim country that practices Islam? Well, that really starts with the Arab conquest of Persia in the 7th century AD. Before the Islamic conquest, Iran was a zorastrian country. They practiced a kind of monotheistic religion in which fire and the sun appear as very central elements in their rituals. And they ultimately converted to Islam over the following centuries. But they still retain a lot of Zorastrian traditions. For example, one of the biggest holidays in Iran is no ruse, which is the start of spring, which is absolutely something that comes from Zorastrianism. Right before that, they have a celebration called Shahar Shamur, where they leap over fire in the hope of extracting the strength from the fire and giving to the fire their ailments, infirmities, and uh weaknesses. In fact, there are still zorastrians today. They're called parses. Many of them live in South Asia.

[00:03:59]The most famous parsy by the way was Freddy Mercury, the lead singer of Queen. If your question is when did Iran become the Islamic Republic? Well, that happened in 1979 with a revolution against the king of Iran at that time, an American client, Muhammad Resa Bavi.

[00:04:18]And that was a revolution that was ultimately led by this man, Ayatollahi.

[00:04:24]And he basically was the man who came up with the entirety of the political system that governs Iran today. And it's a political system that has at its top a senior religious leader. Some would call it a theocracy. Senior positions are held by Islamic clerics. Day-to-day life on the streets is mandated to conform to a particularly conservative understanding of Islam. So if you're a woman in Iran, you have to dress Islamically. If you like to party, well, you're out of luck in Iran. You have to conform to what are considered to be Islamic standards of behavior.

[00:05:02]Aggravating Hour 131 asks, "What's going on with Iran's flag?" So, this is Iran's current flag. Three colors. The green represents Islam, the religion. White represents purity. Red represents the blood of the martyrs. And this is the pre-revolutionary Iranian flag. Same colors, but you have this device in the middle, which is the lion with the sword and the sun behind it. And that's really a symbol of Persian identity, of royal power. The sun represents Zorastrianism.

[00:05:36]The Iranian flag after 1978 was adapted.

[00:05:40]They got rid of the line in the sun and they replaced it with this kind of stylized tulip which in Persian culture is very important. It kind of represents martyrdom. You have the sword that represents the nation. It also looks like a stylized form of the name of God, Allah. The other difference is that you have here the words Allah Akbar, God is great. There's 22 of them and that symbolizes the date of the revolution which is the 22nd day of the month of Bahaman which is a month in the Persian calendar. Now today you'll often see people waving this pre-revolutionary flag. It's kind of like an act of rebellion against the Islamic Republic.

[00:06:27]Jedi Blight asks just how liberal/progressive was Iran prior to the 1979 revolution.

[00:06:35]Prior to the 1979 revolution, Iran was run by a king who was trying to make Iran, which was at that time a conservative society, more liberal and more western. Muhammad Resa Sha Bahavi was the second Sha or king in the so-called Pahavi dynasty. The first was his father who did a military coup against the previous Sha in the 1920s.

[00:07:02]He got a little too cozy with the Nazis.

[00:07:04]So the British overthrew him and installed his son in his place in 1941.

[00:07:09]And his son engaged in all kinds of reforms particularly as they related to the rights of women, the role of Islam in society. He was trying to make the society more secular and more western.

[00:07:22]You'll often see photographs of women before the revolution dressed in miniskirts or looking the way that uh very modern western women look. And that certainly was the case for a certain segment of the Iranian population. But again, the vast majority of the people in that country were conservative. Some people tend to present the sha as a modern and progressive leader. And there certainly were elements of progressiveness in his program. But you've also got to remember this was a leader who was authoritarian. Iran was not a place where there was freedom of speech. Iran was not a place where there was democracy or respect for human rights and that of course uh generated some of the backlash that ultimately led to the Iranian revolution of 1979.

[00:08:08]Yogurt closet open 3567 asks is Iran the only Middle Eastern country whose modern borders were not created by colonial powers? Great question yogurt closet open. Let's look at a map. This is a map of the Middle East and some of South Asia. And the first thing that you notice when you look at Middle Eastern countries like Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, the borders between them are very straight. That's because these are countries that emerged after the end of World War I, after the Ottoman Empire was dissolved and the British and the French took over. And basically, they're the ones who drew these borders essentially with rulers and pens. Iran was never part of the Ottoman Empire.

[00:08:52]The way that Iran's borders were worked out was basically through fighting wars.

[00:08:57]Iran fought a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire that determine its western border. It fought wars with the Russian Empire that essentially determined its northern border. Its eastern borders were also mainly, but not totally determined in wars with British India and with Hat in Afghanistan. These borders here are a little straighter because they actually were drawn by British mediators in the 19th century. But essentially because Iran was an independent state. In fact, it's one of the founding states of the League of Nations, its borders came about in a different way from the standard Middle Eastern country where the colonial powers drew all the borders. This is from the no stupid question subreddit from FAR Andy Lehey. Why did the Iranian revolution happen? Well, the first thing to note about the Iranian revolution is that nobody saw it coming. The American president at the time, Jimmy Carter, actually visited Iran in 1977 and toasted it as an island of stability in a troubled region of the world. But they say hindsight is 2020. And today there are a lot of factors that people point to as having led to the Iranian revolution. The first is that the regime of the sha was pretty repressive. He relied on his secret police to keep order. Disscent was not tolerated.

[00:10:21]People were sent into exile and tortured. In fact, the person who ends up leading the Iranian revolution, Ayatini, was a guy who was exiled because of his opposition to the sha in the 1960s.

[00:10:32]Another factor is that people felt that the sha was extremely wasteful with the country's resources. In 1971, he threw a lavish party that by some accounts cost almost $20 million. The Guinness Book of World Records said that the banquet for that celebration was the longest banquet ever in recorded history. And so Iranians looked at something like that and they felt that their country's wealth was being squandered. And then the sha's reforms, the liberalizing reforms had really made him a lot of enemies in his country. He was also by the end of this very sick. He had cancer. His son was not yet of age and his wife, the Shahabanu, was not terribly popular. Another reason for some of the discontent that bubbled up and caused the Iranian revolution was a decline in oil prices that was caused by Saudi overprouction and that caused some serious economic distress in Iran. All of these factors made it possible for protesters to see some weaknesses in the regime and to take to the streets in the hope of bringing it down. and the conditions ultimately ended up being ripe for a charismatic leader like Humeni to take over and ride it into power and establish the Islamic Republic. Curry MVP2 asks, "The son of Iran's last shaw is rallying protesters, but do Iranians really want another king?" So this is the pretender to the Iranian throne, a man named Reza Bahavi and he is the son of Muhammad Razasha Bahavi who was overthrown in 1979. Now today in some of the protests that are happening on the streets in Iran or at least that were happening before the bombing campaign, people absolutely were chanting his name saying Pahavi will return. But it's an open question as to whether that means they really want this guy back or they just want to taunt the regime by saying that hated dynasty that we overthrew is preferable to us than you are. He hasn't been in the country for 47 years. So there's a serious question as to whether Resa actually has the wherewithal to govern Iran should the regime fall. Iran is made up of 40% ethnic minorities. thing people like Azeris who speak Turkish Kurds there's a small Arab minority in Iran and those people don't look fondly on the time of the Sha they think of the sha as having been a kind of Persian supremacist who suppressed their expression of their non-Persian identities so they're not really yearning for a restoration of the so-called peacock throne so those are all the questions we have for today thank you for watching tech for Iran.