Sections Section I: Ancient Biblical History of Iran Section II: Iranian Theology — From Ahura Mazda to the Hidden Imam Section III: Origins of the Country of Iran Section IV: The Overthrow of 1979 Section V: Iran the Terrorist State Section VI: Iran and Israel — A 46-Year Jihad Against the Jewish State Section VII: The Modern War on Iran Appendix A: References

Section II: Iranian Theology — From Ahura Mazda to the Hidden Imam

To understand the Islamic Republic, one has to understand a theological history that runs in two largely separate layers: an ancient Iranian religious sensibility going back perhaps three thousand years, and an imported Arab-Islamic confession that conquered the country in the seventh century but did not become the country's official creed until a Turkic-Persian dynasty enforced it at the point of the sword in 1501.

The Older Layer: Zoroastrianism

The older layer is Zoroastrianism. Founded by the Iranian prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster in Greek), conventionally placed between 1500 and 1000 BCE though scholarly estimates range widely, Zoroastrianism is among the earliest monotheistic religions in recorded history (Boyce, 1979; Stausberg, 2002). Its central deity is Ahura Mazda — "the Wise Lord" — the uncreated creator of all goodness, light, and truth (asha). Standing opposed to Ahura Mazda is Angra Mainyu (later Ahriman), the Destructive Spirit, source of lies, darkness, and decay. The cosmos is the battleground between these two forces, and every human being participates in that war through "good thoughts, good words, good deeds" (humata, hukhta, hvarshta) — a famous Zoroastrian triad still recited today (Boyce, 1979; Hintze, 2014). This is the classic religious dualism: ultimate good and ultimate evil engaged in a real, time-bound conflict that will end in the eschatological triumph of good. Many scholars have argued that post-exilic Jewish, Christian, and ultimately Islamic eschatologies — angels, demons, a final judgment, resurrection of the dead — were either influenced by or convergent with Zoroastrian categories developed during the Achaemenid centuries when Jewish and Iranian thought were in close contact (Boyce, 1987; Stausberg, 2002).

Zoroastrians worship before a sacred fire (atar), kept perpetually burning in fire temples (atashkadeh) and tended by priests called magi or mobeds. The fire is not itself divine; it is a symbol of Ahura Mazda's purity and order (Britannica, n.d.-a). The faith reached its peak under the Sassanids (224–651 CE), when it became the state religion of an empire stretching from the Levant to the Hindu Kush. The Arab conquest of the seventh century ended that status and began a centuries-long demographic decline. Today perhaps 25,000 Zoroastrians remain in Iran — a precious remnant of what was once the world religion of the Iranian plateau (US Department of State, 2021).

The Sunni-Shia Rupture and the Martyrdom of Husayn

The newer layer is Shia Islam, and within it the specific subdenomination called Twelver Shi'ism that defines the Iranian state today. To grasp Twelver theology, one starts with the original Sunni–Shia rupture in early Islam. When Muhammad died in 632 CE, the question of succession split his community. The faction that became Sunni held that leadership should pass by consensus to the most qualified companion of the Prophet — and so Abu Bakr, then Umar, Uthman, and finally Ali ibn Abi Talib (Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law) became the first four "Rightly Guided Caliphs." The faction that became Shia held that succession was divinely designated and should have passed immediately to Ali and his bloodline through his marriage to Fatima, Muhammad's daughter (Madelung, 1997; Momen, 1985).

That latent dispute became blood and theology on the tenth of Muharram, AH 61 — October 10, 680 CE — at Karbala, on the banks of the Euphrates in modern Iraq. Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet and son of Ali, had refused to swear allegiance to the Umayyad caliph Yazid I. Invited by partisans in Kufa to lead a revolt, Husayn marched with a small band of family and followers and was intercepted by an Umayyad army numbering in the thousands. After days of being denied access to the river, Husayn and seventy-two companions — including his infant son — were killed; the women and surviving children were taken captive (Halm, 2007; Britannica, n.d.-b). The martyrdom of Husayn is the defining narrative of Shia Islam. It is to Shia theology what the crucifixion is to Christian theology, structurally though not theologically: an innocent figure of divine lineage betrayed and killed by an illegitimate worldly power, whose blood seals a community of mourners pledged to resist tyranny until the end of time (Pinault, 1992; Aghaie, 2004). The annual mourning ritual of Ashura, with its processions, passion plays (ta'ziyeh), and self-flagellation in some traditions, remains the emotional center of Iranian Shia piety.

Twelver Doctrine and the Hidden Imam

From the martyred Husayn, Twelver theology traces a line of Imams — divinely guided spiritual successors of the Prophet through Ali — twelve in number: Ali, then Hasan, then Husayn, and then nine descendants of Husayn culminating in Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Mahdi (Momen, 1985). According to Twelver doctrine, the twelfth Imam was born in 868 CE in Samarra and, after his father's death (which Shia tradition holds was by Abbasid poisoning), went into a state called the Occultation (ghaybah). During the Minor Occultation (874–941 CE), the Hidden Imam communicated with the community through four successive deputies. With the death of the fourth deputy in 941, the Major Occultation began: the Hidden Imam remains alive but is no longer in direct contact with the world, and will remain so until God permits his Reappearance (zuhur) at the end of time, when he will return to fill the earth with justice as it is now filled with oppression (Sachedina, 1981; Amir-Moezzi, 1994).

The eschatology — Mahdism — is critical. In mainstream Twelver belief, the Mahdi's return will be accompanied by the return of Isa (Jesus) from heaven. Isa will pray behind the Mahdi, identifying him as the rightful leader of the worldwide Muslim community, and the two will jointly defeat the Dajjal, the Islamic antichrist, and establish a global Islamic order before the final Day of Judgment (Sachedina, 1981; Cook, 2002). This is not heretical sectarianism — it is the official theology of the Iranian state. What is contested, both in Najaf and in Qom, is what believers are supposed to do about it.

Quietism, the Safavid Forced Conversion, and 1501

For most of Shia history — from 941 CE until 1979 — the dominant clerical school, headquartered at Najaf in Iraq, taught quietism: because no human authority can legitimately rule in the absence of the Hidden Imam, faithful Shia should patiently wait, focus on personal piety and jurisprudence, and avoid the corruption of direct political rule. The grand ayatollahs of Najaf — figures like Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei and, in our own time, Ali al-Sistani — have largely maintained this tradition (Mavani, 2013; Khalaji, 2006).

Iran's official Shia identity itself was forged comparatively late, in 1501, when the fourteen-year-old Shah Ismail I, founder of the Safavid dynasty, proclaimed Twelver Shi'ism the compulsory state religion of a previously majority-Sunni Persia. Ismail enforced the conversion with violence — dissolving Sunni brotherhoods, executing recalcitrant Sunni scholars, mobilizing his Qizilbash warriors against resistance, and importing Twelver clerics from Jabal Amel in Lebanon to staff the new religious establishment (Newman, 2006; Matthee, 2012; Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d.-c). By the end of Shah Abbas the Great's reign (1629), Persia was overwhelmingly Twelver Shia, and remains so today — an identity historically only five centuries deep, layered onto a civilizational identity twenty-five centuries older.

Velayat-e Faqih and the Politicization of Mahdism

The activist rupture with the quietist tradition came in January and February 1970, when an exiled Iranian cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini delivered nineteen lectures to his students in Najaf. The lectures were compiled and smuggled back to Iran as a book titled Hokumat-e Islami: Velayat-e Faqih — "Islamic Government: Guardianship of the Jurist" (Khomeini, 1970/1981). Khomeini's argument was a deliberate break with twelve hundred years of Shia thought: in the absence of the Hidden Imam, he taught, a qualified Islamic jurist (faqih) must assume comprehensive political authority over the Muslim community, exercising all the powers the Mahdi himself would exercise upon return. There is no waiting; there is no quietism; there is no theological reason for the clergy to hold itself apart from worldly rule. The Supreme Leader becomes, in effect, the Imam's regent on earth (Arjomand, 1988; Abrahamian, 1993). When the 1979 revolution swept Khomeini back from exile, Velayat-e Faqih became the constitutional foundation of the Islamic Republic. Of the twelve grand ayatollahs alive at the time, only Khomeini and his student Hossein-Ali Montazeri endorsed the doctrine; the rest — including the most respected jurists in Najaf and Qom — rejected it as a dangerous innovation (bid'ah) without traditional warrant (Khalaji, 2006; Mavani, 2013).

The marriage of Mahdism to active state power produced what scholars now call "political Mahdism." Under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005–2013), state-funded conferences on the Mahdi's return proliferated; Ahmadinejad opened his September 2005 speech to the UN General Assembly with a prayer for the Mahdi's hasty return; he publicly suggested he had felt a halo of light during the address; and his administration poured resources into the shrine at Jamkaran near Qom, where pilgrims drop written petitions to the Hidden Imam into a sacred well (Naji, 2008; Ansari, 2008; Iran International, 2025). Most critically for foreign policy analysis: a strain of Iranian Mahdist thought, championed by clerics like Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, holds that the chaos preceding the Mahdi's return can be hastened by human action — that war, regional turmoil, even apocalyptic confrontation are not just permitted but theologically meritorious if they bring the End closer (Khalaji, 2008; Taheri, 2008). Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has been more circumspect than Ahmadinejad, but he has visited Jamkaran multiple times, formally blessing its centrality in Iranian religious life (Iran International, 2025). The question of how seriously Iranian decision-makers take political Mahdism remains contested among analysts; the question of whether it is invoked publicly to justify the regime's regional posture is not. It is.

The Other Faiths of Iran — Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Baha'is

Iran's official theology coexists, often violently, with the country's surviving religious minorities. The Constitution of the Islamic Republic recognizes three "protected" minorities — Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians — and reserves five parliamentary seats for them collectively. In practice, "protection" is conditional and narrow.

Christians in Iran fall into two categories. Historic Armenian and Assyrian Christian communities, descended from churches older than Islam itself, are legally tolerated as ethnic-religious enclaves provided their services remain in Armenian or Assyrian, their evangelism does not touch Muslims, and their numbers do not grow. Persian-language churches — overwhelmingly composed of converts from Islam — receive no protection. Conversion from Islam is apostasy, punishable under sharia by death; Iran's penal code does not codify the death penalty for apostasy in statute, but judges routinely impose long prison sentences on house-church leaders, and several converts have been executed on charges like "spreading corruption on earth" or "enmity against God" (US Department of State, 2021; Open Doors, 2024; Article18, 2023). In the year following the 2024 conflict, imprisonments of Christians in Iran rose roughly sixfold compared to the prior baseline (Center for Human Rights in Iran, 2025).

The Jewish community of Iran is one of the oldest continuously inhabited Jewish communities on earth, dating back to the Babylonian captivity and the deportations of the eighth–sixth centuries BCE — a continuous presence of about 2,700 years, predating Islam by more than a millennium (Sarshar, 2002; Yeroushalmi, 2009). Before the 1979 revolution, Iran's Jewish population numbered roughly 80,000–100,000. Today, estimates range from 8,000 to 15,000 (World Jewish Congress, n.d.; Sarshar, 2002). Synagogues operate openly in Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz, and the community holds a reserved parliamentary seat — but Jews face systemic discrimination in employment, travel restrictions, and the constant pressure of state anti-Zionism that the regime conflates with Judaism whenever it suits policy (Sanasarian, 2000; Karimi, 2022).

Zoroastrians, the indigenous religious community of pre-Islamic Persia, number around 25,000 in Iran today, concentrated near Yazd and Tehran (US Department of State, 2021). They too hold a reserved parliamentary seat. Their treatment, while officially "protected," is constrained by a sharia framework that grants Muslims rights and inheritance privileges denied to non-Muslims.

The Baha'i Faith is treated worst of all. Founded in nineteenth-century Persia by Bahá'u'lláh — and therefore, in the regime's view, a heretical post-Islamic offshoot rather than a "people of the book" — Baha'is have no constitutional recognition whatsoever. Since 1979, more than 200 Baha'i leaders have been executed; more than 10,000 have been dismissed from government and university posts; thousands have been imprisoned; Baha'i cemeteries have been bulldozed; Baha'i marriages are legally void; and Baha'i youth are systematically barred from higher education (Baha'i International Community, 2024; Sanasarian, 2000; Affolter, 2005). The persecution of the Baha'i in the Islamic Republic is one of the most sustained state campaigns of religious repression in the modern world.

The pattern is consistent: the regime tolerates religious diversity only insofar as it predates Islam and stays small. Growth, conversion, and post-Islamic faiths are existential threats to a state whose legitimacy rests on a clerical reading of the Hidden Imam's authority. The Iranian people, by contrast, are heirs to a far older religious patrimony than any government can monopolize — the same plateau that gave the world Zoroaster's ethical dualism, sheltered the Jewish exiles, produced Sufi poets like Hafez and Rumi who routinely wrote of "the Beloved" in ways the clerics deem too tolerant, and today hosts an underground Christian church that may number in the hundreds of thousands or even more than a million.