Behind Iran's Nuclear Quest: An Ancient Civilization's Pride and Insecurity
Times / Carl Vick
13-Nov-2011 (one comment)
Every nation has its pride, but the feeling runs especially deep in Iran. There, the sense of nationhood extends back 2,500 years, to the time of Darius and Xerxes and other names that Americans might possibly have heard of somewhere — maybe in the action movie 300 — but which anchor modern Iranians to a stream of history that predates every Abrahamic religion, including Islam, and carries real implications for the nuclear issue. For outsiders, it makes the issue a lot tougher

Read more: //globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/11/13/behind-irans-nuclear-quest-an-ancient-civilizations-pride-and-insecurity/#ixzz1deOIuQS4

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by yolanda on Sun Nov 13, 2011 08:49 PM PST

"Being left behind sits poorly with the descendants of a Persian civilization responsible for much of the Golden Age of Islam, the strides in medicine, astrology and mathematics that piled up while Europe was mired in the Dark Ages. And Iranians will be sure to let you know that Persians were inventing things long before the arrival of Islam, an import carried there in 637 AD by invading Arabs, a desert people the plateau-dwelling Persians always thought of themselves as above, and not only topographically. Today a particularly tart put-down of the mullahs is dismissing them “those Arabs,” lumping the clerics with the nomads that brought a faith started elsewhere, and imposed it on a civilization that had after all gotten to monotheism before anyone else: Zoroastrianism, which divides the world between light and dark, good and bad, was state religion of the Achaemenid emperors."


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