Iran, or antique Persia, as many already know, is a vast and multi-ethnic expanse expanding from the Caucasus to the spice-routes of India. Previously I have espoused India, Iran and the proximal Turkey as god-fearing in their separate ways.
This may strike some as a potential oddity, given the fractiousness of relations between the west and Iran since the 1975 Revolution that toppled the last Pahlavi.
Yes, that's obviously so, so I did some historical delving that might go some ways to explicating why Iran - and by implication Turkey and possibly India - is so beguiling to the individualist west.
Persia was far from.being united and was potentially fragmented. It took the cunning of warrior clans to forge and hold multiple regions under one Shah.
Medievally-speaking, the Safavids under founder Ismail originated the state post-Muslim conquest in 1501. Ismail established the Shah an authority under Sufism (or Shia Islam).
The Safavids ruled till the European Enlightenment, which introduced the doctrine of free-thought. Free-thought underpins the dogma of liberal-science, which some might feel is a contradiction-in-terms!
Science upholds the principle of inductive reason which -as noted passim -can easily approach a clinical sameness. The question is, is inductive reason more like a mirror of illusions that establishes differences that amount to sameness? (P176) The differences are logical (light) but not primordial.
Opposed to this is cosmic sameness (curvilinear naturalism, prev.) There is a sense of the primitive since the universe is old and vast, like Persia ("We are 5 billion year old carbon", Woodstock).
With the cosmic sameness come balance and fertility. One sees this in the harem of antique Shahs. By living under Sufism, the Shahs are in a sense honoring strength and fertility as God-given attributes.
Religions - whether Islam, Christian or Hindu - have simple symmetries that reflect a cosmic balance. The simplicity takes the form.of opposing deities in Hinduism; matriarchy and patriarchy in Christianity; the fertile crescent in Islam.
Following the rise of the industrial west, Persia was not again united until Reza Khan, a Persian officer from the Cossack Brigade (run originally by Russian imports), established the Pahlavi Dynasty.
The Persian Cossacks are another highly important factor , being composed originally of ethnic Caucasians (Circassians).
The Circassians had been massacred in 1864 by the Russians, and fled to the east. They subsequently played a major role in supporting the Qajar Dynasty, being disciplined and rigorously trained. To such an extent that, during an insurrection in 1896, they were told to
"Act in accordance with your own understanding and wisdom."
They acted as kingmakers to maintain Qajar authority until.the Constitutional crisis of 1907, followed by Reza Khan who, in 1925, became Reza Shah.
The authority vested in the Shah, being Sufism or Shia Islam, enshrined a type of humility under the Prophet. Most Shahs were not religious scholars and were just obedient to the scriptures.
Modern post-Revolution Iran, by contrast, is much less subtle and it is not simply a case of letting faith be free to flourish. The Supreme Leader is the sole authority on faith, and here it might be worth quoting from a review of The Unbroken Thread, by Iranian-American conservative Sohrab Ahmari.
At one point he draws on Augustine's City of God to argue that, rather than leaving individuals free to live as they see fit, the state should intervene to assist and encourage its version of the common good. (DT)
State intervention on religious questions is exactly what makes Iran under the Supreme Leader. Any faith - be it Confucianism or Christianity - is a temple that one honors, rather than a creation of the state.
The Imams were historically powerful political figures who called the faithful to prayers (poetry, meaning, epistemology). It's like saying religion is a the creation of a logical order (of the state) instead of a primitive wonder of the cosmos.
Many Shahs were proficient poets who honored the language and belief of antique Persia. The question of poetry versus dogma seems to apply equally to modern Iran and the west, whether the dogma is liberal-science or the dogma of espousing sameness in a historically plural region.
Clinical sameness seems to be a symptom of modernity, whether it's called liberal individualism or Iranian orthodoxy. Religions on both sides have to retain primitive credentials that attract the spirit as opposed to the pure ego of state power.
Did Europe in the Enlightenment enter a parallel universe of inductive reason? This supplants the individual with logic in a similar way. The Supreme Leader supplants individual faith with state ideology.
Historically there may be state religion, but that is not the same as a religious-state that indoctrinates. Belief has to be free. I always think of Persia as the counterpart to Turan in the Hyborian Age. Vast and colorful and ethnically diverse and I suppose sort of religious zealots. But the Holy Tarim is an idol, not a materialistic leader of men.
