Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy

Chapter 9: From Khatami to Ahmadinejad, and the Iranian Predicament

• "Iran gave significant help to the coalition forces against the Taliban later in 2001, helping to persuade the Northern Alliance to accept democratic arrangements for post-Taliban Afghanistan. In 2002 Iranians were rewarded with President George W. Bush's 'Axis of Evil' speech, which lumped Iran with Iraq and North Korea." - 284
• "One theory of Iranian history, advanced by Homa Katouzian and others, is that Iran lurches from chaos to arbitrary autocracy and back again." - 287
• "The Iranian regime, as pragmatism would suggest, has always insisted on its desire for stability in both Iraq and Afghanistan." - 289
• "This is the problem: civil uranium enrichment is a legitimate activity under the NPT [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty]. But once the enrichment process has begun, the difference between enrichment to levels consistent with civil use and the levels necessary for weapons is difficult to verify from outside." - 292
• "the declaration by Iranian religious leaders against ownership of nuclear weapons should be given some credence." - 292

Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy

Chapter 8: Iran Since the Revolution: Islamic Revival, War, and Confrontation

• "The revolution of 1979 was not solely -- and perhaps not even primarily -- a religious revolution. Economic slump and middle-class disillusionment with the corruption and oppression of a regime many had previously supported were important factors, as was a nationalistic dislike of the unequal relationship with the United States. But the revolution drew great strength from its Shi'a form, which lent cohesion and a sense of common purpose to disparate elements" - 261
• May 1979: "Khomeini established the Revolutionary Guard Corps (Sepah-e Pasdaran) as a reliable military force to balance the army and to supplement the gangs of street fighters that became known as Hezbollah -- the party of God" - 263
• "The constitution set up an elected presidency, an elected Majles, and elected municipal councils, but it also established a Council of Guardians (twelve clerics and jurists) to vet and approve candidates before they could run for election, and to approve or veto legislation passed by the Majles." - 264
• September 1980: "Saddam Hussein's forces invaded Iran" - 267
• "The arsenal supplied to Iraq [by 'Western nations'] included chemical weapon technology that was used against Iranian soldiers as well as Kurdish civilians in the north of Iraq, whom Saddam treated as rebels" - 268
• 1984: Saddam begins attacking Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf transporting oil - 268
• July 1988: the "disastrously gung-ho commander" of the U.S. warship called USS Vincennes "shot down an Iranian civilian airliner...killing 290" while in pursuit of Iranian gunboats - 268
• June 3, 1989: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died - 269
• "the economy remained heavily dependent on oil, the oil industry remained inefficient for lack of international help to secure the most up-to-date technology, and that help was further blocked by U.S. economic sanctions, which sharpened through the 1990s as part of the policy of dual containment applied to both Iran and Iraq." - 275
• May 1997: President Khatami elected and "called for proper constitutional government and for a halt of extra-judicial violence....But his reforms were blocked" - 277

Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy

Chapter 7: The Pahlavis and the Revolution of 1979

• "The Pahlavi monarchy was an odd kind of monarchy, with no real roots in tradition. It was established only after Reza Khan had failed to set up a republic." - 222
• "As in Turkey, the shah set up a language reform to remove words not of Persian origin, and to replace them with Persian words." - 226
• 1935: Reza Shah "ordered that foreign governments should drop the name 'Persia' in official communication and use instead the name 'Iran' -- the ancient name that had always been used by Iranians themselves." - 226
• 1927/1928: Reza Shah "ended the capitulations" to foreign trade interests - 226
• "The Allies were the immediate cause of Reza Shah's abdication, but his removal was welcomed by most Iranians...Reza went into exile in South Africa (where he died in July 1944)." - 230
• "Mohammad Reza Shah had confirmed at his coronation that he would rule as a constitutional monarch, and in 1944 elections were held for the first genuinely representative Majles since the 1920s." - 231
• "The shah tried to appeal to pro-American feeling, and to the United States for support. He made a speech drawing a comparison between Iranian nationalism and America's struggle for independence" - 232
• May 1946: "after a tense period of negotiations and pressure from the United States and Britain", all Soviet forces had left Iran - 234
• "Mohammad Mossadeq assembled a broad coalition of Majles deputies that came to be called the National Front. It was organized around the central demand for oil nationalization" - 235
• March 15, 1951: Majles voted to nationalize oil reserves "under his [Mossadeq's] leadership" - 235
• April 28, 1951: Mossadeq named prime minister - 235
• "In the wake of this demonstration [on August 19, 1953 and partially arranged by the C.I.A. under code name Operation Ajax,] Mossadeq was arrested, the army and Zahedi were in control, and the shah returned. Mossadeq was tried and convicted of treason by a military court but was allowed to live under house arrest until he died in 1967." - 237
• the coup "established the United States in Iran as the prime ally and protector of the Pahlavi regime....the removal of Mossadeq damaged U.S. interests in a much more serious way than could have been imagined at the time." - 237-8
• July 1956: "Egypt's Jamal Abd al-Nasser...followed the example of Mossadeq and nationalized the Suez Canal." - 238
• 1957: "a British diplomat with more than ordinary perspicacity wrote the following of Tehran...'The slums have a compact self-conscious unity and communal sense that is totally lacking in the smart districts of chlorinated water, macadamed roads and (fitful) street lighting. The bourgeois does not know his neighbor: the slum-dweller is intensely conscious of his.'" - 241
• 1963: "a cleric little known outside of ulema circles, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, began to preach in Qom against the shah's government. He attacked its corruption, its neglect of the poor, and its failure to uphold Iran's sovereignty in its relationship with the United States -- and he also disliked the shah's sale of oil to Israel." - 242
• "In the mid-1970s half the population were under sixteen, and two-thirds were under thirty. This was to be the generation of the revolution." - 247
• Ali "Shariati was not a Marxist, but he could be said to have recast Shi'a Islam in a revolutionary mold, comparable to the Marxist model: 'Everywhere is Karbala and every day is Ashura.'" - 255
• January 16, 1979: the shah leaves Iran - 258
• February 1, 1979: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini flies back to Tehran - 258

Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy

Chapter 6: The Crisis of the Qajar Monarchy, the Revolution of 1905-1911, and the Accession of the Pahlavi Dynasty

• "Persian merchants began to protest the fact that cheap European products, especially textiles, were coming onto Persian markets with low or no tariffs and were undercutting domestic craftsmen, destroying their livelihoods. Predictably, the merchants who made a profit from handling the imports kept quiet." - 186
• "Another development during the reign of Mohammad Shah was the appearance in Iran of the Babi movement, which eventually gave rise to the Baha'i religion." - 187
• March 1857: The Peace of Paris "stipulated that Persia must abandon all claim to Afghan territory" -192
• "The British, feeling their loss of the latest round in the Great Game, decided in 1902/1903 to liaise with some members of the ulema, notably Ayatollah Abdollah Behbehani, to oppose the customs arrangements, including the Belgian administrators and the Russian loans....The following year the harvest was bad. Next, the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war, followed by the 1905 revolution in Russia, interrupted imports from the north and made them more expensive. The significance of the outcome of the war, in which the Japanese inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Russians (with the help of the British-built battleships), was eagerly taken in by Iranian intellectuals, for whom it demonstrated that the dominance of the imperialist Europeans was not unshakeable." - 200-1
• October 1906: the Majles, or national assembly, ordered by Mozaffar od-Din Shah "convened for the first time...and rapidly set about drafting a constitution, the central structure of which took the form of what were called the Fundamental Laws." - 203
• "The Majles expected to govern, and to govern on new principles. The constitution (which remained formally in force until 1979, and was based on the Belgian constitution) stated explicitly that the shah's sovereignty derived from the people, as a power given to him in trust, not as a right bestowed directly from God." - 204
• "The Constitutional Revolution marked the effective end of the Qajar era of government, and promised to usher in a period of government under more regular, legitimate, modern principles. Instead...it inaugurated a period of conflict and uncertainty." - 204
• 1907: "Britain and Russia had finally compounded their mutual suspicions and reached a treaty over their interests in Persia. The treaty showed no respect for the new condition of popular sovereignty in the country, .... This new treaty divided Persia into three zones: a zone of Russian influence in the north, including Tabriz, Tehran, Mashdad, and Isfahan -- most of the major cities; a British zone in the southeast, adjacent to the border with British India; and a neutral zone in the middle." - 207
• July 1909: Russia moves on Tehran to restore Qajar rule, "intolerant as ever of any form of popular movement".... Mohammad Ali Shah fled to the Russian legation, was deposed, and went into exile in Russia. He was replaced by his young son, Ahmad" - 208
• Morgan Schuster, a young American financial adviser appointed by the government, "assessed, probably correctly, that the deeper Russian motive was to keep the Persian government's affairs in a state of financial bankruptcy, and thus in a position of relative weakness (as supplicant for Russian loans), the better to manipulate them." - 209
• December 1911: "the Bakhtiaris and conservatives in the cabinet enacted what has been called a coup, and dismissed both Schuster and the Majles" - 209
• 1912: the British Navy switches from coal to oil - 211
• "The effect of the Russian Revolution on trade was devastating. Before 1914, sixty-five percent of foreign trade had been with Russia, but this fell to five percent by the end of the First World War." - 214
• After World War I, "The British foreign secretary at the time, Lord Curzon...proposed [in 1919] -- or, rather, he attempted to force through -- an Anglo-Persian agreement that would have reduced Persia to the status of a protectorate (parallel with the mandate arrangements being set up at the same time for Iraq and Palestine)" - 215
• February 16, 1921: "Reza Khan marched twenty-five hundred of his Cossacks from their camp near Qazvin toward Tehran." - 218
• February 21, 1921: Reza Khan takes his Cossacks "into the capital without opposition, and the shah allowed him to set up a new government" - 218
• 1925: Reza Khan takes "the name Pahlavi, which resonated with nationalists as the name of the Middle Persian language of pre-Islamic times." - 219
• 1926: Reza crowned shah after "a constituent assembly [of the Majles] agreed to a changeover from the Qajar to the Pahlavi dynasty" - 219

Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy

Chapter 5: The Fall of the Safavids, Nader Shah, the Eighteenth-Century Interregnum, and the Early Years of the Qajar Dynasty

• "The prime agent of the Safavid dynasty's destruction was an Afghan of the Ghilzai tribe, from Kandahar, Mir Veis." - 148
• "Like most Pashtun-speaking Afghans, Mir Veis was a Sunni Muslim." - 149
• October 23, 1722: Shah Sultan Hosein "surrendered the city [of Isfahan] and the [Safavid] throne to Mahmud Ghilzai", son of Mir Veis - 150
• 1729: "Nader [Qoli, also Tahmasp Qoli Khan, meaning slave of Tahmasp]'s army had defeated the Afghans in three battles and had retaken Isfahan." - 153
• "Within Persia, Nader sought only to amend religious practices -- not to impose Sunnism wholesale. But outside Persia he presented himself and the country as converts to Sunnism" partly to compete with the Sunni Ottoman Empire for influence over the Islamic world - 157
• "Using the excuse that the Moghul authorities had given refuge to Afghan fugitives, Nader crossed the old frontier between the Persian and Moghul empires, took Kabul, and marched on toward Delhi." - 157
• "Nader's annexation of Moghul territory west of the Indus, removing the geographical barrier of the Afghan mountains, was one indicator that his regime, had it endured, might have expanded further into India." - 159
• "On his arrival in Kandahar, Ahmad [Khan Abdali, commander of the Afghans under Nader Shah] was elected to be the first shah of the Durrani dynasty, founding a state based on Kandahar, Herat, and Kabul that was to become modern Afghanistan." - 165-6
• "Agha Mohammad [Khan, first Qajar ruler] marched on to Isfahan, taking it in the early part of 1785. He was then duly accepted into Tehran in March 1786....From then on it became clear that he intended to establish himself as ruler of the whole country, and Tehran has been the capital since that time." - 169
• "The Akhbaris asserted that ordinary Muslims should read and interpret the holy texts for themselves, without the need for intermediaries. The traditions (hadith) -- especially the traditions of the Shi'a Emams -- were the best guide. The Usulis rejected this doctrine, saying that authoritative interpretation (ijtihad) on the basis of reason was necessary and required extended scholarly training" - 172
• "This dispute [between Akhbaris and Usulis] was not fully resolve until the early Qajar period...: each Shi'a Muslim had to have a marja-e taqlid, an 'object of emulation' or religious role model. This had to be a living person, a mojtahed [ a specially talented scholar in the ulema], which in practice meant only one or two of just a few mojtaheds in each generation. As some were thus elevated, a hierarchy of mojtaheds came to be created." - 173
• during Fath Ali Shah's reign, "Europeans suddenly began travelling to and reporting back from Persia in large numbers, both as tourists and as state representatives operating out of diplomatic missions. This was because Fath Ali Shah's reign coincided with the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and the European powers were reaching out in competition with one another to find new allies." - 176
• "After Agha Mohammad's massacre at Tbilisi [capital of modern-day Georgia] in 1795, the Russians established a protectorate in Georgia, stationed troops there in 1799, and later abolished the Georgian monarchy after the death of its king -- effectively annexing the territory." - 178
• "although the British encouraged Fath Ali Shah to continue the costly war with the Russians, when Napoleon attacked Russia in 1812 Britain and Russia again became allies, and Britain's enthusiasm for helping Persia against the Russians evaporated." - 180

Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy

Chapter 4 - Shi'ism and the Safavids

• "The great schisms of the Christian church, between East and Wast, and later between Catholic and Protestant, came centuries after the time of Christ. But the great schism in Islam that still divides Muslims today, between Sunni and Shi'a, originated in the earliest days of the faith....Comparisons with the Christian schisms do not really work." - 125
• 656 AD: Ali becomes the fourth caliph; "Shi'a Muslims believe that Mohammad nominated Ali as his successor" - 126
• "The Shi'a saw themselves as the underdogs, the dispossessed....A deep inclination to sympathy and compassion for the oppressed -- and a tendency to see them as naturally more righteous than the rich and powerful -- has persisted in popular Shi'ism right through to the present day....Shi'a Muslims saw themselves as a more or less persecuted minority within states [Umayyad and Abassid] run by and for Sunni Muslims." -127
• "Some Sufi shaykhs were learned hermits, wedded to poverty and contemplation. But others were less contemplative and more proselytizing, more ghuluww (extreme), more inclined to the realization of divine purposes in the world through worldly acts, and more ambivalent about violence." - 131
• 1501 AD: "Esma'il and his Qezelbash ['red-headed', referring to their red hats] followers conquered Tabriz (the old Seljuk capital)" and Esma'il declares himself shah of the Safavids and institutes Twelver Shi'ism as the Safavid religion - 131-2
• "The new army [under Abbas the Great] was largely organized around the introduction...of gunpowder weapons, including up-to-date cannon and a corps of musketeers. Many features of it echoed Ottoman practice -- the musketeers were designed to be the equals of the redoubtable Ottoman janissaries." - 135
• 1616 AD: English East India Company acquires the right to trade in Persia - 135
• 1639 AD: Treaty of Zohab "fixed the Ottoman/Persian boundary in its present-day position between Iran and Iraq" - 141
• "As Shah Soleiman's reign drew to a close, the Safavid regime looked strong but had been seriously weakened. Its monuments looked splendid, but the intellectual world of Persia, once distinguished for its tolerance and vision, was now led by narrower, smaller minds." - 144

Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy

Chapter 2 - The Iranian Revival: Parthians and Sassanids

• "in the reign of the Arsacid Mithradates I (171 -138 BC) the Parthians renewed their expansion, taking Sistan, Elam, and Media. Then they captured Babylon in 142 BC and, one year later, Seleuceia itself. In the decades that followed, the Parthians were attacked by the Sakae in the east and by the Seleucids in the west." - 33
• "Mithradates [II, the Great] had diplomatic contacts with both the Chinese Han emperor Wu Ti and with the Roman republic under the dictator Sulla." - 33
• "the rise of the Parthians in the east was helped by the prolonged struggle between the Maccabean Jews and the Seleucids in Palestine." - 34
• "While the hostile Parthians controlled the central part of the route to China, wealthy Romans were dismayed to see much of the gold they paid to have their wives and daughters clothes in expensive silks going to their most redoubtable enemies." - 38
• "Something else taken west by the Roman soldiers from their encounters in the east was a new religion -- Mithraism....Mithras always remained primarily a god of soldiers...and was an important bonding element in the lives of military men....Although Mithras was associated with the sun (sol invictus -- the Invincible Sun), Mithraism seems to have taken on some of the ritualized cult character of Western paganism, losing most of the ethical content of Iranian Mazdaism and becoming a kind of secret society a little like Freemasons." - 41
• "The wars and the disputed provinces had taken on a totemic value -- they had become a part of the apparatus by which the Persian shahs and Roman emperors alike justified their rule....Upper Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Syria had become an unfortunate playground for princes." - 46
• "Ardashir and Shapur [the first Sassanid rulers] made changes in government that may have paralleled the beginnings of some deeper change in society. Government became more centralized, the bureaucracy expanded" - 47
• "Another phenomenon that emerged in the reign of Shapur was a new religion -- Manichaeism, named after its originator, the prophet Mani." - 49
• "Manichaeism was based on the idea of a queasy, dystopic creation in which the good -- the light -- had been overwhelmed and dominated by evil -- the demonic -- which was itself identified with matter. Through copulation and reproduction (inherently sinful), evil had imprisoned light in matter and had established the dominance of evil on earth....the only real hope was the eventual liberation of the spirit in death." - 50
• "As pursued later by the Western Christian church in medieval Europe, the full grim panoply of Manichaean / Augustinian formulae emerged to blight millions of lives... -- the distaste for the human body, the disgust for and guilt about sexuality, the misogyny, the determinism..., the obsessive idealization of the spirit, the disdain for the material -- all distant indeed from the original teachings of Jesus." - 52
• "we should remember that Manichaeism was condemned by the Mazdaean Magi as a heresy at an early stage, and that it is more correct to see it as a distortion of Iranian thinking -- or indeed as an outgrowth of Christian gnosticism dressed in Mazdaean trappings" - 53
• "Shortly before Shapur II became shah [in 310 AD], Armenia turned Christian, at least officially." - 55
• "The reign of Khosraw [Anushirvan], for its intellectual achievements, for its exemplification of the Sassanid idea of kingship, was the pinnacle of Sassanid rule. In later centuries it became almost the Platonic form of what monarchy should be" - 62-3

Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy

Chapter 1 - Origins: Zoroaster, the Achaemenids, and the Greeks

• the Persian language "has no structural relationship with Arabic or the other Semitic languages of the ancient Middle East (though it took in many Arab words after the Arab conquest)." - 2
• "Before and during the period of the Iranian migrations [from the Russian steppe], an empire -- the empire of Elam -- flourished in the area that later became the provinces of Khuzestan and Fars, based in the cities of Susa and Anshan." - 2
• 700 BC: "the Medes -- with the help of Scythian tribes -- had established an independent state, which later grew to become the first Iranian Empire....At its height the Median Empire stretched from Asia Minor to the Hindu Kush, and south to the Persian Gulf, ruling the Persians as vassals as well as many other subject peoples." - 5
• "At the center of Zoroaster's theology was the opposition between Ahura Mazda, the creator-god of truth and light, and Ahriman, the embodiment of lies, darkness, and evil. This dualism became a persistent theme in Iranian thought for centuries." - 7
• 559 BC: Cyrus becomes king of Anshan, being a descendant of the royal house of Persia started by Achaemenes - 12
• 549 BC: Cyrus leads a revolt against Astyages, the Median king, and captures the Median capital of Ecbatana; "Cyrus reversed the relationship between Media and Persia -- he crowned himself king of Persia, making Persia the center of the empire and Media the junior partner." - 12
• "Cyrus and his successors permitted them to return home from exile and to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. For those acts they were accorded in the Jewish scriptures a unique status among gentile monarchs." - 14-5
• "Tomb burial was anathema to later Zoroastrians, who held it to be sacrilege to pollute the earth with dead bodies. Instead they exposed the dead on so-called Towers of Silence, to be consumed by birds and animals." - 16
• "This was an empire that always preferred to flow around and absorb powerful rivals, rather than to confront, batter into defeat, and force submission." - 21
• Darius "maintained the related principle of devolved government. The provinces were ruled by satraps, governors who returned a tribute to the center but ruled as viceroys" - 21
• 512 BC: Darius campaigns into Europe, conquering Thrace and Macedonia - 23
• 490 BC: Battle of Marathon, Persians defeated by Athenian Greeks - 23
• "The wars that continued between the Persians and the Greeks ended at least for a time with the peace of Callias in 449 BC, but thereafter the Persians supported Sparta against Athens in the terribly destructive Peloponnesian wars. These conflicts exhausted the older Greek city-states and prepared the way for the hegemony of Macedon." - 25
• "For more than a century after Alexander [the Great]'s death, Persia was ruled by the descendants of Seleucus, one of Alexander's generals" - 30