Origins

Iranians in Canada come from a country characterized by great ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. Flanked by the shores of the Caspian Sea to the north and the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman to the south, Iran shares borders on land with Iraq and Turkey to the west, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan to the north, and Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east.

Within its 1.6 million square kilometres live nearly 60 million people. Of these, less than half are Persians (47 percent), followed by Azeris (17 percent), Kurds (10 percent), Guilanis (5 percent), Lurs (4 percent), Mazandarani (3.6 percent), Baluchis (2 percent), Arabs (2 percent), Bakhtiars (1.6 percent), and Turkmen (1.4 percent). Some of these peoples are concentrated in specific areas, such as the Azeris south of the border with Azerbaijan, the Kurds along the borders with Turkey and Iraq, and the Baluchis in the far southeast adjacent to Pakistan.

The terms Iran and Iranian may give rise to confusion. The traditional name of the country was Persia, while the modern-day designation Iran – derived from the Indo-European Aryan tribes who settled the country during the first millennium B.C.E. – was not adopted until the 1930s. As for the adjective Iranian, it is used to describe all citizens of Iran, regardless of their ethnic background. Iranian also refers, however, to a group of Indo-European languages spoken by only some of Iran’s peoples, including Farsi (the language of the Persians), Kurdish, Guilani, Luri, Mazandarani, Bakhtiari, and Baluchi. Although Farsi (Persian) is the dominant language of Iran, it is the first language of only about half of the population. Aside from the Iranian languages mentioned above, also widely spoken are Turkic languages (Azeri and Turkmen) and Arabic.

In contrast to its ethnic and linguistic diversity, Iran is rather homogeneous in terms of religion. Fully 94 percent of the population is Shiite Muslim and 4 percent Sunni Muslim; the remaining 2 percent include Christians (300,000 Armenians and Assyrians) and two religious groups that are indigenous to Iran: the Baha’i (350,000) and Zoroastrians (30,000). (See PARSIS.)

In contrast to many of its neighbours, Persia/Iran has a long tradition of political independence, beginning with the Median and Persian empires that reached their height under Cyrus the Great and Darius in the sixth century B.C.E., followed by the Parthian and Sassanian empires that lasted until the coming of the Arabs in the seventh century C.E. Even though the Persians accepted Islam and were part of the Arabic Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, by the ninth century they had established local dynasties that maintained the independence of the country until the twentieth century.

In the early 1920s, an Iranian army officer, Reza Khan, gradually took control of the country and in 1926 established himself as Reza Shah, the first monarch of the Pahlavi dynasty. He was particularly instrumental in creating internal stability among the country’s various tribal groups and in gaining greater control from Britain over Iran’s lucrative oil industry. His pro-Nazi sympathies, however, alienated Great Britain and the Soviet Union, and those countries invaded Iran in 1941 and replaced him on the throne with his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

The new shah of Iran was to rule for nearly four decades, during which he used the enormous income from the sale of oil (Iran possesses 10 percent of the world’s reserves) to modernize the country. He oversaw the so-called “white revolution” of 1962–63, when various reforms were introduced (including giving women the right to vote and hold public office) and the country’s constitutional monarchy was effectively transformed into a dictatorship under an all-powerful shah. The shah systematically imposed Westernization and modernization, but these provoked increasing opposition from various Muslim and secular groups who, in turn, were silenced and often brutally repressed by the government’s security police.

During this period, thousands of religious dissidents were forced into exile, including the Ayatollah Khomeini. In 1979 a revolution broke out which toppled the shah’s Western-backed government and proclaimed Iran an Islamic republic to be governed by the laws of the Holy Koran and the traditions of the Shiite Muslim religion as interpreted by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who returned triumphantly from exile.

The Islamic Revolution plunged Iran into chaos. Thousands of the shah’s supporters were killed or driven into exile; Sunni revolts among the Turkmen, Arabs, and Kurds broke out; the country was isolated from most of the world by a United States–led international embargo; and over 600,000 Iranians were killed during eight years of an inconclusive war with Iraq (1980–88). Since the end of that war, Iran has slowly tried to regain its place within the world community although it still maintains a hegemonic Islamic position which emerged from the Iranian revolution of 1979.