P  E  R  S  I  A    O  N  C  E     M  O  R  E
A Study by the London "Economist"
October 31, 1970

Persia is not a country to be neutral about. Britain and Russia squabbled over it for more than a century. It is the only direct causeway from the Indian Ocean to the heart of Russia. It has oil. Since the second world war the Americans have, not surprisingly, taken an active interest in its affairs. Persia used, it seems for ever, to terrorise or be terrorised by Turks, Afghans, Indians, Egyptians, central Russians, Mongols. The seed of India's mughal art first flourished in Persia. To see the Persian court then, 400 years ago, was any traveller's dream. Two thousand years before that the invasion which jolted Athens into its golden age came from Persia. In turn Alexander took Persepolis, the Persian capital of Darius, Cyrus and Xerxes. This is ancient history, but the phenomenon of modern Persia will not be grasped without it.

Persia today is at once a developing economy which yet promises to equal the economic groth rates of a Japan or a South Africa; and it is a country flexing its muscles as a political power barely a decade after it seemed to be descending into internal chaos. These are heady days for Persia, which talks of itself as Asia's next -- the Middle East's first -- Japan, and of its problems, rightly, as those which come with success. This success, its oil, its place across Russia's path to the Arabian side of the Persian Gulf, taken together with its ancient and superior civilisation, make Persia a modern but unfamiliar place.

Persia's modern name is Iran, which comes from the same stem as the word "aryan." Persians are keen on not being thought of as Arabs, which all but a few of them very evidently are not. Rather they are Iranians, aryans in all the hodgepodge of European, Caucasian, Assyrian, Turkoman, Kurdish and Indian bloods which the word implies. Their Shah is called, in translation, His Imperial Majesty Mohammad Reza PahIavi, the king of kings, light of the aryans. If this sounds self-conscious, it is meant to be. Iranians talk of a new renaissance headed, as previous ones have been, by a fresh dynasty. Nationalism after years of patent decadence is seen for good or ill as a necessary virtue. The remarkable thing about Iranians, indeed, is what a homogeneous lot they are, holding together time and again as a culture and nation in the face of constant buffeting from outside. Under attack, or riven inside, the country has had a knack of breaking into its far-flung parts only to coalesce in the end as Persia once more.

The high plateau

  With, say, 28 million people, multiplying at 3 per cent a year, Iran towers over its contentious Arab neighbours. This indeed. is one of the now perennial, if recent fascinations of Iran: it is the only oil producing state in the Middle East which has a large population upon which to spend its many oil dollars. The Iranians are spread wide -- 5 people or nine families to the square mile, the same order of density as in South Africa; but because water is short over most of the country, there are 350 people, or 70 families. to the square mile of farmable land. Over half the Iranians live in the countryside -- perhaps 18 million or so of them. Some 3.8 million live in the area of the capital city, Teheran. Nearly as many in total live in nine other middle-sized towns and one and a half times as many again in smaller market towns.

There are 636.000 square miles of Iran. Most of it is a great plateau separated from the sea by the Zagros mountains, and bounded to the north by the Alborz range. North again over the Alborz mountains lies Russia, but not before several hundred miles of very fertile land and a good chunk of the Caspian Sea, all Iran's. The central plateau is high above sea level: Teheran, for instance. is at 4.000 feet. Much of it is desert. or rather several deserts which, like mountains in Japan or deserts in Australia, restrict the Iranians to islands of water supply at the edge of the wasteland or in its midst.

Iran's language is Farsi. This has spread from the southern kingdom of Phars (Fars) built around Persepolis and, after the coming of Islam, from the nearby and beguiling city of Shiraz. ("Phars,") in the mouths of scholarly but unphonetic foreigners, gave birth to the words Persepolis and Persia.) The great majority of Iranians speak Farsi and its dialects as their first language. Since lslam, Farsi has been written in the Arabic script, but Arabic is actually spoken in only small pockets of the country,  notably on the sweltering plain of Khuzestan. An unknown number of others speak dialects of Turkish and Turkoman -- including 2,5 million to 3 million mostly nomadic tribesmen, Kurds, Qashquai, Lurs, Bakhtiari and a hundred other tribes and sub-tribes who have  wandered up and down the mountain foothills since seasons began, chasing pasture for their herds,  their hardiness and wit dripping into the Persian bloodstream year by year.