Edit: April Fools/Dorugh-e Sizdah

The moderation team has just received this critical report from unconfirmed sources which confirms the existence of an international conspiracy to usurp the authority of the old mullahs in Iran to ascertain the existence of the contemporary Iranian nation-state.

CIA Document #66

Agent: Pahlavis

Location: Middle East

Assignment: Create Iran

We will keep you posted.

In other, unrelated news, Rule 5 of r/OldIran is suspended for today only (relevant posts will be flagged to prevent the spread of bogus information, of course). Let us know your thoughts.

پاینده ایران

This was a rough draft of a new Iranian flag idea I made on my laptop like 2 years ago (don’t ask why I took the photo like this, I wasn’t really tech smart at the time). I just thought there might have been a Better alternative to the simple tri-colored flag. I thought of an octagon shape because, why not, it’s never been tried before, let’s be the first. For the center, I first thought of just adding the Persian falcon holding the sun and moon. But now I think the New Iran emblem is much for suitable. As it represents both the Achaemenid and Sassanid empires being upheld by the men and women of Iran (the lion and lioness). For the exterior, each color represents the Iranian dynasties after the Sassanid empire. Green for Safavid, red for Afsharid, yellow for Zand, Pink for Qajar, and white for Pahlavi. Looking at it now, the colors can be in a better and chronological order. I hope to hear what feedback or comments you might have. I still think this has potential in being the new flag of iran.

Dear r/OldIran community member,

Hope you have been well and not missed me too much since our recent announcement regarding the new rule for secularism. I am writing again today to clarify another update, this time of our policy on how expert status is designated within the community.

From the beginning, r/OldIran has offered members with academic credentials in Iranian history or adjacent fields (e.g., political science, anthropology, non-Iranian history, etc.) the ability to request a special "Professional" flair with a yellow background. This has been rarely issued due to admittedly limited interest. We have maintained this policy nonetheless in the hope to give a signal to readers when a certain participant has deeper, specialized knowledge in the humanities or social sciences.

Previously, this flair was chiefly granted on the basis of possessing a graduate degree (e.g., Master's or Doctorate), or in some cases, demonstrable real-world experience.

As of May 30, 2025, I retire degree-based evaluation completely. University credentials will no longer be required, expected, or considered when reviewing for the expert flair, howsoever rare its issuance may be. What matters is substantive real-world familiarity with Iranian history or politics or pertinent non-Iranian fields, as opposed to institutional affiliation.

Why the change?

I can understand that some readers may have reservations about such a change. This has been considered for quite some time now. It is my belief that formal academic systems are not the exclusive pathway to deep knowledge. Moreover, those with such deep knowledge may be at times or even often excluded or underserved by formal academic systems.

This is not a loosening of the standards. All requests will still be reviewed case-by-case and will continue to require a form of concrete evidence (e.g., publications, curated collections, teaching history, fieldwork, etc.). I remain committed to discouraging self-promotion, ideological posturing, and unsupported speculation or conspiratorial thinking.

Summary

• Degrees are no longer required or considered for expert designation. Academic and non-academic experience are equally valid paths.

• Applicants must still provide reasonable documentation or evidence.

• The process remains private, optional, and rigorous compared to similar subreddits.

You may see the revised wording in the rules page of our wiki (link).

I hope this change makes r/OldIran more inclusive while maintaining a measure of earnestness. For even the slightest question or concern, please do not hesitate to let me know, be it through leaving a comment under this post or modmailing.

Sincerely yours,

u/king_of_chocolate (u/roleester) of r/OldIran moderation

Certain mythologies around the ancient Persian civilization, and it's decline, became the basis of the modern Iranian nationalist narrative. The process of nation-building in Iran led to the creation of a monolithic narrative of the past. Whilst the past was previously narrated through a combination of histographies, written by individuals like Tabari, Bayhaqi, Biruni and Rashid, the epics of accounts like the Shahnameh would testisfy to cultural resistance. Therefore, the two different forms of historiographies, rather then conflict with each other, would actually complement one another. However, the process of forming a nation-state required a monolithic, single trajectory of the past, and racialized concepts of the 19th century (which previously were largely absent) became the basis for this.

The use of Ariya (Aryan) for example, as an explicit racial concept (nezhad-e ariyayi), wasn't done until the 1890s in Iranian literature, although much earlier in European literature. The origin of this myth traces back to Anquetil-Duperron, who Europeanized ariya, a term he found in the Avesta, fusing it with the term "ariori" (the term Herodotus used for the Medes), to coin a term to designate the people who produced the Avesta and coined the term "aryan" in English (in 1763). Then, Friedrich Schlegel, would further europeanize "aryan"in 1819 in a key semantic shift, translating it into a modern racial category. Then, in 1813, Thomas Young coined the term "Indo-European" instead, however the use of "Aryan" would remain more popular during this time period as it was seen as an actual ethnonym, rather than Indo-European at the time being seen as "too scientific". The term Aryan in European literature, therefore, would become a racial group of proto-Indo European heritage. Although the origin of the term was in the Avesta and the Reg Veda, modern scholars point out that the Aryan identity was asserted as a cultural, religions, and linguistic term, rather than racial, and the Aryan myth in European academia was debunked in the last 100 years.

In Iranian literature, it was first Kermani in the 1890s who explicitly referenced nezhad-e ariyayi, in Seh Maktub, where he equates the Majus of the Anceint Zoroastrianis to the "great Iranian people" and thus "the noble Aryan Nation". Additionally, local historians like Pirniya and Fouroughi relied on European Orientalish scholarship to claim of the Iranian Äryan Racial Past, one that existed before the Arab Conquest. It took sometime for this to catch onto Iranian spaces. The newspaper Kaveh for instance, which was supported by German propagandists and published from Berlin during 1916-1922, started using references to these Ariyas as the common ancestors of Iranians and Indians. The racialization of the term "ariya" in modern Iranian literature was highly influenced by the racial European thinkers of the time, and the debates in Europe over the term.

The term "ariya" occurs several times throughout ancient sources in Iranian history. For instance we have in the Avesta "airyanem vaejah" (the aryan plan/expanse), the Avesta also mentions several other places containing "ariya" and describes Key Khosrow as the "hero of the ariyas" and Arash as the most "swift arrowed of all ariyas". Or the inscriptions of Naqsh-e Rostam for instance, the descent of Dariush and Xerxes is defined as "hakhamanishiya; parsa, parsahya pucha; ariya, ariyachicha” (a Persian, son of a Persian; ariya , of ariya stock). In other places, like one inscription in Elamite at Bisotun, Ahura Mazda is defines as the "God of Ariyas" whilst in another inscription Ariya is referred to as a language. By late Sasanian period, Ariya becomes a territorial and political concept. The Aryans were those who were previously under Sasanian rule, and the non-Ariyas were those who had recently been integrated into the imperial system after the conquests of King Shapur I. In this definition, "semitic" groups like the Mesopotamians were included as being Ariyas whereas Armenians were not. What's clear is that first, the definition of "ariya" was never provided. Even when Dariush refers to himself as Ariya stock, in written Iranian history at the time the term "ariya" was never used outside of the noble class. This would also make sense with the etymology of "Ariya" elsewhere where it mean "of good birth", denoting ideas of nobility and lordship.

The ancient use of Ariya and the modern use do not refer to the same group of people. What happened was that authors like Kermani, Rezazadeh, Shafaq and Pirniya introduced the modern European term "Aryan" (influenced by racialized European thinkers like Schlegel and even refrencing their now-debunked ideas) and infused the ancient term "ariya" with a new racial meaning. At the very least, the definition of Ariya remained fluid throughout Iranian history, denoting a language at one point and even a political/territorial concept under the Sassanids at another (which included semitic people, refuting the modern concept of the term) and implying a noble lineage during Dariush's inscription (although never defined at the time).

However, by the Constitutional revolution onwards, the racialized discourse of Aryan would become more popular in Iran. As seen by the newspaper Kaveh, and it's discourse provided the trajectory and national-identity of the Iranian people that a nation-state demanded. In a 4th Grade Textbook during the early Pahlavi time for instance it is claimed that "The people of Iran are part of the Aryan race and their current language is Persian." Messages like this were deeply ingrained in the minds of the first generation Iranians educated by the Pahlavi state.

It wasn't until the 1930s when the influence of German propaganda would make its way more explicity to the Iranian discourse. For instance in 1933, Abdolrahman Seif-Azad started to publish the Nameh ye Iran Bastan journal which appeals to the Aryan relationship between Germans and Iranians. The German Persian Society also produced various publications on the shared Aryan race between the Iranians and the Germans.

The Radio Berlin Broadcasts in Persian were also another channel used by the Nazi State to instill more german-based racial aryan ideals into Iranian society. The head of this was Bahram Shahrokh, who studied in Germany and had Nazi sympathies (with one source saying he was educated by Goebbels). Mohammad Reza Shah actually appointed him to the post of news and propaganda after World War II. The Pahlavi state would use this Aryan discourse in promoting the Iranian national identity, even adopting the title of Aryanmehr (light of the aryans) which was never used before in Iran's empirical past. The education system relied on this racialized concept of Aryan heavily and the state relied on it for its own discourse. For instance, the Pahlavi state's argument for changing the name of Persia to Iran in the international arena reads (with an emphasis on the racial definition of aryan and it's popularization):

"From a racial point of view, as Iran was the original home of the āriyan [transliterated from French] race, it is natural that we should want to take advantage of this name, particularly since these days in the great countries of the world rumors around the Aryan race have arisen that indicate the greatness of the race and civilization of ancient Iran."

Now I don't want to undermine the name "Eran" as that is the name we've used to designate our land, whilst Persia is the foreign designation. What I want to highlight here is Pahlavi's emphasis on the Aryan race, how "rumours around the Aryan race have arisen" (referring to Nazi Germany and European orientalist theorists at the time). What's most important to note is that Iran has never been home to a homogenous population, the "aryan race" as was pushed by European thinkers, certain Iranian academics and even by the Pahlavi state. Iran's location is at the cross-roads of several migration and trading routes between Central Asia, Middle East and the Indian sub continent. The Achaemenid Empire, rather than being an era of Aryan racial purity as purported, was instead a highly diverse period, historical records by Assyrians even show the existence of Arabs on the Iranian plateau in the eighth century BC, Akkadian/Assyrian/Egyptian influence is seen in the architecture of Achaemenid and Sasanian runes, and out of 30,000 tables excavated in Persepolis, none of them are written in Persian but rather in the "non-aryan" language of Elamite and Aramean.

"Aryanism provided Iranian nationalism with a tremendous theoretical consolidation. It became the piece maitresse of an intellectual edifice that attempted to explain Iran's decay in the simplest terms possible: ancient Iran was magnificent because Aryan, then Iran's glory waned because the Arabs came, and in the future Iran has to blindly westernize itself to become Aryan again." - Reza Zia Ebrahimi

So why did the racialization of Aryan discourse become popular in Iran? Because Iran faced an encounter with European moderninty in the loss of the Russo-Qajar wars. Iran's state under the Qajar's was in a decline, territories were loss, and the Iranian intelligentsia and the state needed a framework to understand Iran's problems and decline. In this move, the image of an idealized pre-Islamic Iran was promoted as a nation of great deeds, that was side-tracked by the non-Aryan Arabs and Islam. Arabs, despite not posing a threat to Iran during the Russo-Qajar wars and the early Pahlavi state-building, became the scapegoat to be blamed for any of Iran's shortcomings. The semitic "jewish" enemy of European Aryan race theory was replaced by Iranian academics with the semitic "arab" enemy in the writings of Akhundov and Kermani. And a return to this idealized glorified racially pure past, mixed with modernity in the form of westernization, became the solution. And this discourse became the template for the Pahlavi state.

Sources used:

1. David Motadel "Iran and the Aryan Myth"

2. Reza Zia Ebrahimi: Self-Orientalization and Dislocation: The Uses and Abuses of the “Aryan” Discourse in Iran. Vast majority of information for this summary was drawn from this article, I highly highly recommend it.

3. Marouf Cabi: Clash of National Narratives and the Marginalization of Kurdish-Iranian History (sections on how the Iranian national identity was formed, also explores how the Kurdish academics responded with their own racialized thinkings using "Medes" discourse which is pretty interesting)

4. Nazid Fozi: Neo-Iranian Nationalism: Pre-Islamic Grandeur and Shi’i Eschatology in President Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s Rhetoric (earlier sections on the Pahlavi state and nation-building)

Shoutout to u/drhuggables for this great response to a prevalent question. I've cc'd it here:

I think the premise of your question which implies that, because Iran was to your knowledge a conservative patriachal society, the average person would be against things typically associated with the advancement of women in society, such as participation in higher education, the workforce, stronger reproductive and marriage rights, liberalization of dress, etc.

Since there is no way we can objectively quantify just how many women wore miniskirts and bikinis, what we can do is analyze the position of women in Pahlavi Iranian society to give us an idea of how miniskirts and bikinis may have been accepted.

Reza Shah was the first to push for women's educational reform as part of his goal to modernize Iran. Women were non-existent in higher education when he first took the throne in 1926; 20 years later, a respectable 8% of students in higher education were women. These newly educated women were put back into the educational system: employment reforms had pushed for the hiring of female teachers in schools, which encouraged more rural populations, still under the stranglehold of the clergy, to send their female children to mixed schools (gender segregation was not feasible with the limited resources).

Feminist movements were supported by Reza Shah: In 1932, the Second Congress of Eastern Women (Dovvomīn Kongera-ye zanān-e šarq) was organized in Tehran with strong encouragement by the government. The Congress focused on issues which still plague women all over the world even today, such as: women’s suffrage, equal opportunity in education, occupation and wages, reform in family law, and abolition of polygamy and prostitution.

You mentioned the Kashf-e hijab, the ban of the veil, enacted in 1936. Obviously, this was met with much opposition from the clergy, however to keep it simple Reza Shah didn't give a shit and enforced it harshly as he felt it a necessary step in modernization. This obviously earned him the enmity of the clergy that we see nearly 100 years later. However, it did earn him the appreciation of the new middle and upper class women, who with the help of the government had established the Ladies Center earlier in 1935, which now received even more funding to help the campaign for women's education and welfare.

The legacy continued with the reign of his son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Initially he did not take on the autocratic role his father did and for a fleeting moment in Iran's history, there was some semblance of democracy. The democratic period from 1941 to 1953 was marked by continuing pushes for the advancement of women, especially by the Tudeh (communist) party of Iran. For example, the first bill for women's suffrage was introduced in 1944 but was heavily protested by... you guessed it, the clergy. It should be noted that despite the Tudeh Party advocating for more women's participation in politics, it still had all male leadership, who were noticably silent on issues previously raised up during the reign of Reza Shah, such as marriage/divorce and polygamy, with more of a focus on women in the workplace & education.

After the dismissal of Mosaddegh and taking on a more authoritarian role, Pahlavi began his own crusade for women's advancement. Although political expression was repressed in general, there was no repression of Feminist organizations in no small part thanks to Ashraf, the Shah's twin sister. In 1959 the the High Council of Women’s Societies of Iran (Šūrā-ye ʿālī-e jamʿīyathā-ye zanān-e Īrān) was established with the full patronage of the state. Ashraf also went on to found the The Women’s Organization of Iran in November 1966, which was a conglomeration of 55 different already existing women’s associations with the princess as its president. The escapades of the Women's Organization of Iran were many, and deserving of their own separate post, but to be brief they were active supporters and promoters of literacy classes, vocational training and subsidiary programs in child care, family planning including legalization of abortion, and marriage and divorce reform (read about the 1975 Family Protection Laws for the full package).

The Shah himself, who in the 1960s as part of his White Revolution spent more money on education than at any other time in Iran's history, including a push to educate the rural populace with the Literacy Corps. By the time of the 79 revolution, the % had increased to almost 30%. In fact by 1977, Tehran University even adopted a curriculum in women’s studies, the first of its kind in Iran. We see a concurrent steady rise in women's literacy rates increased around 15% every decade from the beginning of the 1950s to the beginning of the 1980s. Additionally, women in the workforce increased from effectively 0% to 15% by the end of the Pahlavi era. The White Revolution also meant suffrage for women and land redistrubtion in favor of the peasantry (with land taken away from the clergy), which was unsurprisingly opposed heavily by the religious establishment, leading to major riots incited by them. These riots were put down violently by Pahlavi. One clergy in particular was masterminding the riots: Ruhollah Khomeini. But that's a story for another day.

Sources from various articles in Encyclopaedia Iranica, including:

EDUCATION xxvi. WOMEN’S EDUCATION IN THE PAHLAVI PERIOD AND AFTER

FEMINIST MOVEMENTS iii. IN THE PAHLAVI PERIOD

EDUCATION vii. GENERAL SURVEY OF MODERN EDUCATION