Episode 2
The Eastern Agenda
The history of Persia was deliberately changed when it became a political liability for a new democratic West in the 19th century. But the reason we have no history today from the Persians themselves is not because of the West; it's because of the East.
Kriwaczek 1: All we have, was written about them by others. We have maybe a few Zarathustrian hymns that date right back to the Aryan period but hardly more than that. Everything else we know about them was written by, mostly by Greeks, who had their own particular axe to grind.
One Greek with an axe to grind was the ancient writer Herodotus. His anti-Persian bias continues to spread false history through big-budget Hollywood movies like 300. But Herodotus's dark image of ancient Persia may seem more believable today than ever before when we consider that ancient Persia is today’s Islamic Republic of Iran.
Holland2-1: It’s a presumption of a film like 300 that ancient Persia matches the worst Western nightmare of what Iran is today. But I think there’s a case for saying that if there’s any ancient state that modern-day Iran resembles, it’s actually democratic Athens. And I’ll say why: because democratic Athens, exactly like modern-day Iran was the cuckoo in the international nest.
Today's Iranians may be the direct descendants of the ancient Persians, but their cultures couldn't be more different.
Curtis: It’s not at all useful, in my view, to make any direct comparisons between ancient Persia and the modern Islamic Republic of Iran.
Milani2-2: When you think of this culture and think of what it was once, it is 180 degrees. It is as different as day and night.
But how could a culture become the mirror opposite of its former itself?
Credits
THE MOST HISTORY-CHANGING EVENT NEVER TOLD
Persia's culture was turned on its head after what was perhaps the most history-changing event that has never been told.
Lewis1-1: I think most historians would agree that the most dramatic event in the whole long history of Iran, the one that brought major changes, is the Arab conquest in the 7th century, followed by the Islamization of Iran.
After being mortally weakened by almost 100-years of non-stop war with the Byzantine empire, the last Persian dynasty, known as the Sassanians, was suddenly struck from her southern flank by a new power, hopped up on a new religion called Islam, centered out of Medina in today's Saudi Arabia. On November 19, 636 AD, at the Battle of al- Qādisiyyah, the Persian empire became the first world power to fall to the Muslim Arabs.
Lewis1-1: They destroyed the ancient Iranian empire and incorporated all its realms including Iran itself in the new Arab empire. They didn’t destroy the Byzantine empire but they conquered a very large part of the Byzantine empire, the whole of what is now Syria and the adjoining countries, Egypt and North Africa.
But the Islamization of Iran would not come easy. The new laws of the Muslim-Arab empire, known as the Caliphate, ran contrary to everything the Persians had stood for, for over a thousand years.
Holland1-1: Ancient Persia was not Islamic. Ancient Persia is anything but Islamic.
Milani2-2: This was an empire based on several key tenets everything from separation of state and church to religious pluralism, to religious tolerance to the idea of gender equality. We have payroll lists where women are getting paid as much as men. And that aspect of it is like reconciling oil and vinegar.
The only way the new Muslim rulers known as Caliphs could convert the Persians to Islam was to first cleanse their memory of their Persian past. Luckily for the Caliphs Islamic law provides for just such a problem.
JAHILIYYAH
Much like Christianity, Islam believes that its prophet Muhammad brought the light of wisdom to the world. Therefore anything that came before Muhammad belongs to the age of darkness known as Jahiliyyah.
Milani2-2: You have to look at their historiography. Islamic historiography everywhere has been founded on the idea that Islam everywhere has gone and created light out of darkness, jahiliyyah.
Jahiliyyah gave the new Muslim Caliphs license to systematically wipe out Persia's entire history because it too belonged to the age of darkness.
Milani2-2: There was a conscious effort to do away with anything that had anything to do with un-Islamic Iran or Persia. And you could see this in subsequent histories as well. You can even see it with the way Islamic scholars approach history of Arabia itself. It’s not just Iran that they tried to completely obliterate everything that came before Islam. In Arabia itself, they talk about a period of darkness, a period of jahiliyyah before Muhammad came. Every evidence indicates that that’s not the case. That there was a rich vibrant life; Mecca was as important before Islam as it was after Islam.
The age of Jahiliyyah is the reason many Muslims to this day feel compelled to destroy any history that came before Islam. But no one did more to erase Persia's history than the 2nd caliph of the Islamic empire, known as Umar.
THE LIBRARY OF SAROUYE
Virtually all of Persia's 1000 year-long history had been stored at a single location - the Imperial Library Of Sarouye.
Milani2-2: There was a big library in Iran of several hundred thousand volumes. It was apparently the biggest library of its kind at that time. There were two or three libraries in that period that were renowned around the world and one of them was in Iran, in Persia. The Sarouye library is said to be the most exhaustive library of its kind in this period.
The most efficient way to erase Persia's memory was to strike at its central library.
Milani2-2: Why is it that of all the caliphs, the one that is most despised in Iran, is Umar? Because Umar is the guy who tried to completely cleanse our memory of what was . . . what existed before.
The Islamic caliph, Umar became so well known for his book burnings that his reputation even traveled West. When one of his commanders came upon a library, he sent word back to Umar asking what to do with all the books. Umar's reply is recited in the West as follows: "If the books contradict the quran, they're heretical; burn them. If they are in agreement with the quran, they're superfluous; burn them." Either way, the books got burned.
Milani2-2: Umar orders the library burned. He says, you know, either they . . . these books contain the truth in which case we have the quran and it has all the truth, or it contains falsehoods and we don’t want the minds of our faithful contaminated.
The same fate would befall the Library Of Alexandria in Egypt only 5 years later. Along with the history of Persia so went its culture. By the time the Arab occupation of Persia came to an end, around 819, the once-proud Persians could read and write only Arabic.
Lewis1-1: The old scripts were soon forgotten, the old history was forgotten. And you see this in Iran. There was an agonizing lack of a history. They knew that they were an ancient people; they knew that they had an ancient history; they didn’t know anything about it.
So complete was the destruction of Persia's history that, after 180 years of Arab occupation, only one or two texts from Persia's pre-Islamic period had survived. But these two texts were enough to save Persia's culture from complete extinction.
THE SHAH-NAMEH
One of the texts that survived the Islamic purge was called the Khoday Nameh. It was the mythical tradition which the Persians used to pass down their morals and principles to the next generation. This rare document was used by an Iranian poet named Ferdowsi to write his timeless masterpiece called the Shahnameh, which literally means, The Book Of Kings.
Basirov 2: Shahnameh took their evidence from a book somehow saved from the royal chancellery of the last Iranian empire, Sassanians, called Khoday-namak. And that is the late Zoroastrian tradition written in Pahlavi.
Ferdowsi tells the story in the former Persian language known as Pahlavi, but he wrote it in Arabic script just so his fellow Iranians could read it. In doing so, Ferdowsi saved not only a key part of the Persian identity, he saved much of the Persian language.
Lewis1-1: Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa – all these countries lost their old identities, forgot their old languages. They became what we nowadays call Arab countries. This is not so in Iran. In Iran, the memory of greatness was very recent; I think one might say, painfully recent. They preserved their awareness of a separate identity and they preserved their language, even though in an altered and Islamized form.
But even the mere awareness of a separate identity was more than a newly Islamicized Iran could tolerate.
IDENTITY CRISIS
Iran has been the battleground for two opposing identities for over 1000 years. No one can claim to understand Iran today without first considering the identity crisis that divides its soul.
Milani 3: After the invasion of Iran by Islamic forces, the soul of Iran became riven between two spirits, the Islamic spirit and the Persian spirit.
In 1979 the Islamic spirit rose once again when an Islamic revolution swept the Ayatollah Khomeini to power. Almost immediately Iran's new Islamic rulers, set out to destroy whatever history their Arab predecessors had left behind. They even used the same word to justify it; Jahiliyyah. Their first target was the ruins of the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis. The person charged with its destruction was Khomeini's personal henchman, the Ayatollah Khalkhali.
Milani 3: You have people who are mostly Islamist forces, the most ridiculous example of them is the man known as the “hanging judge,” Khalkhali, who want to denigrate everything about Iran, pre-Islamic. They call the pre-Islamic period, the period of “jahiliyyah,” in the early days of the revolution the Islamists tried to actually do away with elements of Persepolis. They wanted to destroy Persepolis as something that is the work of infidels. It was only the efforts of some of the more moderate elements within the regime that stopped the likes of Khalkhali from destroying Persepolis.
But why would anybody want to destroy the history of their own ancestors?
Milani2-2: Because I don’t think Khalkhali considers pre-Islamic Iran as part of his ancestry. I think these people who wear the robe of a cleric, who try to infuse the Persian language with as much of this Arabicized lexicon as they can, who try to undermine every element of Persian history before Islam are, in fact, more Arab than they are Persian.
In fact many members of Iran's Islamic republic today openly admit that they are more loyal to their religion than they are to their own country.
Frye-L2: The people who rule in Iran today – they’re Persian-speaking, that’s right their Persian – but they’re Arabicized Persians. They are people who have become so concerned with Islam and Arabic . . .
Holland2-1: Clearly the big chasm in Iranian history is that which separates Islamic Iran from pre-Islamic Iran. And you can see that very clearly if you go to Tehran today, you go to the Museum of Islamic History, it’s exquisitely beautiful; no money has been spared, the exhibits are wonderfully displayed. You then go to the museum of pre-Islamic history and frankly it’s a disgrace. You have these splendid, magnificent objects and yet they’re installed in dusty, poky exhibit rooms covered in blue bottles and dust with flickering strip lamps. And that really sums up the way in which Iranian history has been divided in two by . . . particularly by the current Iranian authorities.
Despite this open hostility toward pre-Islamic Persia, many people still believe that the Islamic Republic's military build up today is an attempt to recapture the glory of the Persian empire.
Milani 3: The regime that is in power in Iran does not necessarily represent the Iranian nation, the historical Iran that we understand. This is a regime, this a group of rulers that have an agenda of their own, they have an Islamic agenda. And if they are aggressive for example in their foreign policy it is much more about expanding what they call the Shiite Arc, what they call the Islamic resurgence than it is about the Persian notion of power.
But can there ever really be an Islamic resurgence? Any government can grow into a military power through brute force and terror. But studies suggest that for a nation to grow by the approval of its people, it must first embrace certain principles.
KEY PRINCIPLES
The only key principle that the Persians and their Muslim conquerors had in common was their willingness to fight and die for what they believed in.
Milani2-2: Every inch of the way Iranians fought, the Persians fought, the Zoroastrians fought. They did not want to accept this idea. It took the Arabs . . . it took the Muslims 200 years before they could consolidate their hold on power.
But fighting for their cause is where the similarities between Persians and Muslims end. Virtually every other principle that made ancient Persia a first-world superpower was rejected by her Muslim successors.
Milani2-2: A society that basically accepts the premise of human rights almost 1800 years before Magna Carta, the idea that every human being has a right as a human being. All of these . . . and the last but not least the idea of truth . . . truthfulness. You take that and then look at what happened to Iran after the Arab invasion. This is a culture that is based on Taqqiyah which is lying, is based on the complete combination of religion and politics.
Frye-L2: Islam came along and the first thing they did was to have the church and state together. They believe that sharia, that is the caliph, ruled both the religion and the state. It’s like Khomeini today. He is both head of state and he’s also head of religion. This is contrary to Iranian tradition from the very beginning, it is contrary to American tradition.
The culture of pre-Islamic Persia had all the necessary ingredients to blossom into a first-world superpower, including the most important ingredient of all.
Milani 3: I think gender equality is probably the most important ingredient. I don’t think a society can be free or democratic or can grow much if it doesn’t have gender equality. And in that sense I think the ancient Persian empire has a great deal to be proud of.
According to ancient little tablets like these known as the 'Persepolis Fortification Tablets,' women in ancient Persia enjoyed a level of equality that remained unmatched in the West until the 20th century.
Brosius 2: These fortification tablets which were found near the fortification wall in Persepolis they, amongst others, list rations for workers and what is interesting about these ration amounts that are being apportioned to groups of workers in and around Persepolis, is that women who had the same level of qualification in that profession would receive the same amount of ration as men.
Not only were Persian women paid the exact, same wages as men they even received a maternity package when they became pregnant.
Brosius 2: Very interestingly when it comes to women giving birth to children they are entitled to a month’s worth of special ration which would consist of wine and grain.
Rose 4: And that’s incredible when we think that that was 2500 years ago and it’s taken us in the West perhaps 2500 years to approximate that . . . those kinds of conditions.
These same Persian women were sold as sex slaves in the markets of Medina following the Muslim conquest. These sex slaves are approvingly referred to in the Quran as the women "whom your right hand possesses." But studies have shown that a society which reduces its women to sexual possessions is doomed to third-world backwardness.
Namik Kemal
One of the first people to point out the harm that the oppression of women can have on a society was none other than a Muslim scholar of the Ottoman empire named Namik Kemal. Namik Kemal reached his conclusion while studying the reason for the sudden rise of western Europe and the sudden decline of his own Ottoman empire in the 19th century.
Lewis1-1: One of the reasons that is cited for Western success and Muslim failure is the treatment of women. A particularly dramatic example of that is an early 19th century Turkish writer called Namik Kemal, who says flatly . . . he says, “the reason why they succeed and we fail is the way we treat our women. By the way we treat our women, we deprive ourselves of the talents and services of half the population. And we subject the earliest education of even the male half to illiterate and down-trodden Mothers. And the result”, he says with a very dramatic analogy, he says, “compared with the western world, we are like a human body that is paralyzed on one side”.
But what was once a theory became a scientific fact in 2002, when Dr. Steven Fish of the University Of California conducted a study that proved once and for all that any culture - Islamic or otherwise - in which the death rate of baby girls is higher than baby boys and the education level of girls is lower than boys, that those societies, without exception, are backward, third-world nations.
Fish: In societies where there’s a big gap between the healthcare that is given to boys and men on the one hand, and girls and women on the other, we see a shorter life-expectancy difference. For example, women don’t tend to outlive men in . . . by as much as they do in societies where they get better healthcare. In societies where we see a big literacy gap between males and females, those societies seem to have a big disadvantage in terms of development.
This disadvantage is the reason why virtually every Muslim country today is a backward, third-world nation.
Fish: Internationally right now the literacy gap between males and females is about five, six, seven percent. In some counties though, in the predominantly Muslim world right now, it’s more like 17 to 20 percent. That’s a big gap in literacy between males and females. What that illiteracy does among females is tends to marginalize them. It’s very hard to actually participate in social life. And, of course, to participate in political life if you can’t read and write, that’s one of the best ways to keep somebody down is to keep them illiterate.
Today Iranian women don't even have the right to choose how to dress in public. The veil or chador which Iranian women are forced to wear today is a lasting legacy of their Muslim-Arab oppressors from 1400 years ago.
Frye 1: Iranian women did not wear the chadors as they do today the hijab and so on because we have no evidence whatsoever that Persian women wore the veil like they do in the present Islamic Republic of Iran.
Her respect for women is one of the main principles that made Achaemenid Persia the first empire in history to rule with the approval of her many subjects.
Kriwaczek 1: In other words, if you can make their lives better by reason of being in your empire than their lives were before, then you won’t get constant revolts everywhere, then you’ll get support from all the subject peoples and this after all is a moral, which Cyrus had at the time he was building his empire. Make people glad that you’re part of my empire, they won’t rebel against me, and that’s what he did.
Persia's first-world culture has led to, of-all things, a Persian resurgence. Today a new generation of Iranians are thirsty to know more about the Persian empire, most of all about the founder Cyrus The Great. But why Cyrus? because Cyrus was the last real Persian king. Virtually every Persian king, after Cyrus, gave up a little bit of their Persian culture for the soft pleasures of Babylonian luxury.
Lewis1-1: From, what you might call, the classical Islamic point of view, Cyrus just didn’t matter. Just as the whole pre-Islamic history didn’t matter. They didn’t bother with it. They didn’t bother to record it or read it or write it or study it. It was of no value. These were the meaningless gyrations of pagans and unbelievers. What is happening now is something different. The ancient history is one thing. The deliberate attempt to revive the ancient history is another. And what they see now, what the present rulers of Iran see, is an attempt to revive the ancient history and the ancient awareness that arises from the knowledge of that ancient history. And that they see as a threat to their own dominance. And in that, of course, they’re not entirely wrong.
Using the latest scientific research, we've been able to stitch together much of Persia's extinct culture. And what we've discovered has never been reported before. The culture that created the Persian empire was the same culture that would give rise to Western Civilization almost 1000 years later. And no one represented this culture better than Cyrus The Great.
Coming Soon: Episode 3
The Significance Of Cyrus