Fikra Forum
March 22, 2019
A little-publicized fact about Iran is its ethnic diversity: though Turks and Persians are the largest ethnic groups within Iran, Iran’s eight major non-Persian ethnicities represent approximately half of the country’s total population. Yet since the Pahlavi monarchy’s creation of the modern Iranian nation-state in 1936, the rulers in Tehran have imposed a brutal chauvinistic system based on the supremacy of the Persian ethnicity and of the Shiite faith. This policy continued after the 1979 revolution, when hardline theocrats seized power to create the current ‘Islamic Republic.’
