Anoop Verma's Diary: Itihasa & Darshana: Persia Becomes Iran

Friday 25 June 2021

Persia Becomes Iran

In the 1930s, the political elites in Persia were feeling that their country was not being treated fairly by the British. They started seeing in Hitler an alternative to British power. They were impressed by Hitler’s success in making the German army the most feared war machine in Europe, and by the initiatives that he was taking to transform Germany into an aryan paradise.

Being convinced that the future belonged to Hitler’s aryan ideology, the Persian Government developed a policy of “aryanizing” their own society. They enacted policies to purify their language and customs. They tried to resurrect cultural practices from Persia’s illustrious past. In March 1935, Prime Minister Reza Shah Pahlavi took the decision to change Persia’s name to Iran. The word “Iran” means “Land of the Aryans” in Persian.

Not everyone in the country was happy with the name change. Some intellectuals protested. In 1959, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the last Shah of Iran) decided to bring back the name Persia. The implementation of the decision was lackadaisical. Today both names Iran and Persia are used in the cultural contexts, and only Iran is used in the political contexts.

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Nirad C. Chaudhuri

“In the south the temples have survived, and in the north they have not. Over seven centuries from the eleventh to the end of the seventeenth all the great cities of northern India dating from Hindu times were sacked by the Muslim invaders and conquerors of India. All the temples there and in all other centres of Hinduism were systematically destroyed. None were left standing at Ujjain, Ajmere, Delhi, Mathura, Brindaban, Kanauj, Prayag, or Benares—which were the centres of the political, cultural, and religious life of the Hindus. In most of these places mosques were built on the sites of the temples, and in some with pillars taken from them. This religious vandalism also worked its fury on the Buddhist centres. Moreover, it was not simply that the great temples in the cities were destroyed; so were the village temples. For most of the period of Muslim rule, there was a ban on building new temples and rebuilding the old in the regions the Muslims controlled.” ~ Nirad C. Chaudhuri

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"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." ~ George Santayana

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“The fallacy in the ethics of evolution is the equation of the “struggle for existence” with the “survival of the fittest,” and the assumption that “the fittest” is identical with “the best.” But that struggle may favor the worst rather than the best.” ~ Gertrude Himmelfarb

“The quest for the origin must take into account that the world of our experience is not a static structure but a process; and the speculation on the origin must project (in one symbolism or another) this experience into a process in the origin itself.” ~ Eric Voegelin

“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye.” ~ Jacob Bronowski

“You can run agriculture for centuries by manual labor and oxcarts. But destroy the last of this country's industrial plant—and centuries of effort won't be able to rebuild it or to gather the economic strength to make a start.” ~ Ayn Rand

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“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” ~ James Joyce