You know, Herman, I was looking at some of the maps of the Middle East we have hanging in the study, and it struck me how often we use the word Iran and the word Persia interchangeably. Our housemate Daniel actually sent us a prompt about this very thing the other day. He was asking about who the Persians actually are today and whether our historical memory of Cyrus the Great is clouding our vision of what modern Iran actually looks like. It is a fascinating question because it touches on history, theology, and the very high-stakes geopolitics we are seeing right now in March of two thousand twenty-six.
Herman Poppleberry here, and Corn, that is such a vital distinction to make. It is one of those things where our historical and religious education in Jerusalem sometimes gives us a bit of a blind spot. We have this deep, almost spiritual connection to the idea of Persia because of the biblical narrative, but the geopolitical reality on the ground today is far more fragmented than most people realize. We tend to look at the map and see one big, monolithic enemy or one big, monolithic culture, but that is a dangerous oversimplification.
Right, and it is a popular sentiment lately, especially with the tensions reaching a boiling point. You hear people in the news and on social media saying that if Israel helps the Iranian people throw off the yoke of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, we are essentially repaying a twenty-five hundred year old debt to Cyrus. It is a beautiful sentiment, a sort of historical symmetry, but is it based on a demographic reality or a historical fantasy? We are projecting a two thousand five hundred year old story onto a very modern, very complex ethnic mosaic.
It is a bit of both, honestly. But to answer Daniel’s question, we really have to dismantle the idea that Iran is a nation-state in the way we typically define it. Most people in the West, and even many here in Israel, use Persian as a synonym for Iranian. But in reality, Persians are just one ethnic group within the borders of the modern Iranian state. They are the largest group, sure, but they are not the only ones. If we walk into this situation thinking we are only dealing with the descendants of Cyrus, we are going to be blindsided by the other forty percent of the country.
So, let us get into the numbers then. If someone says they are Iranian, what is the statistical likelihood that they are actually ethnically Persian?
From the best data we have available in two thousand twenty-six, Persians make up roughly sixty percent of the population. That is a significant majority, but it means that four out of every ten people living under the regime are not Persian. The largest minority group is the Azeris, who make up somewhere between sixteen and twenty percent. Then you have the Kurds at about ten percent, the Lurs at six percent, the Baluchis at two percent, the Arabs at two percent, and several smaller groups like the Turkmens and the Qashqai. Iran is not a nation-state in the way we think of France or Japan. It is much more like a multi-ethnic empire that is being held together by a very centralized, very rigid ideological glue.
That is a massive distinction. If forty percent of the country is not ethnically Persian, then the Cyrus the Great narrative might not even resonate with nearly half the population. Before we go deeper into the other groups, I want to stick with the Cyrus thing for a second because it is so central to how we, as Jews, view that part of the world. In Jewish tradition, we literally call him Mashiach, or Messiah. Isaiah chapter forty-five, verse one. He is the only non-Jew in the entire Bible to receive that title.
It is incredible when you think about it. The word Mashiach means anointed one, and usually, that is reserved for Jewish kings like David or high priests. But Cyrus earned it because he ended the Babylonian captivity in five hundred thirty-eight before the common era and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Second Temple. He was the ultimate patron of the Jewish people. And because of that, there is this profound sense of historical favor that has lasted for millennia. We discussed some of the spiritual roots of this back in episode nine hundred sixty-two when we looked at the architecture of hatred coming from the current regime. It is such a stark contrast. You have the ancient Persian model of tolerance and pluralism versus the modern Khomeinist model of absolute Shiite supremacy.
And that is where the conflation gets dangerous, right? We look at the I-R-G-C, and we want to see the descendants of Cyrus underneath those olive-drab uniforms. We want to believe that if the regime falls, the ancient Persian soul will just automatically re-emerge and we will go back to being best friends like it is the days of the Achaemenid Empire. But the people in the streets of Tabriz or Sanandaj might have a very different idea of what liberation looks like.
And that ignores the last century of forced identity building. You have to remember, the term Iran itself only became the official international name of the country in nineteen thirty-five. Before that, the West called it Persia. The shift to Iran was a conscious move by the Pahlavi dynasty, specifically Reza Shah, to emphasize the Aryan roots of the people and to try and create a unified national identity that transcended individual tribes and ethnic groups. It was a rebranding effort designed to make the country look like a modern, unified European-style state.
So the Pahlavis were basically trying to do what the Europeans did in the nineteenth century, creating a singular national myth. They took the Persian language, Farsi, and made it the absolute standard for education and government, even in areas where nobody spoke it as a first language. It was a way of erasing the internal borders.
Precisely. It was a process of Persianization. They wanted to take this mosaic of Azeris, Kurds, and Arabs and bake them into a single loaf of bread. The current regime, despite their hatred for the monarchy, actually continued a lot of that centralization. They just swapped out the monarchist nationalism for a specific brand of revolutionary Shia Islam. But the underlying friction never went away. If you go to the borders of Iran, you see a very different story than what you see in the cafes of Tehran. The further you get from the center, the more the Persian identity starts to feel like an external imposition.
Let us talk about those borders. You mentioned the Azeris are the largest minority. They are mostly in the northwest, right? Near the border with the Republic of Azerbaijan.
Right. And this is where it gets fascinating from a geopolitical perspective. The Azeris are a Turkic-speaking people. Most of them are Shia, which gives them a religious link to the central government in Tehran, but linguistically and culturally, they have a lot in common with Turkey and the independent Republic of Azerbaijan. For decades, the regime has suppressed the Azeri language in schools. Imagine being an Azeri kid in Tabriz and being told that your native tongue is just a local dialect and that you have to master Farsi to get anywhere in life. There is a deep-seated resentment there that has nothing to do with Cyrus the Great. In fact, many Azeris look to the history of the Turkic empires rather than the Persian ones.
And then you have the Kurds in the west. We did a whole deep dive on them in episode nine hundred fifty-one, titled The Kurdish Wild Card. They are mostly Sunni, which puts them at immediate odds with the regime’s religious identity, and they are ethnically distinct from Persians. They have been fighting for autonomy for a century. To a Kurd in the Zagros mountains, the idea of a return to a glorious Persian empire might actually sound like a threat, not a liberation. They remember that the Shah was just as brutal toward Kurdish aspirations as the Ayatollahs have been.
That is a brilliant point, Corn. If your people were suppressed by the Shah and then oppressed by the Ayatollahs, why would you want to go back to a system that prioritizes Persian identity? This is the blind spot in the historical favor narrative. If Israel or the United States approaches the situation thinking we are only dealing with Persians, we might accidentally alienate the very people who are most likely to actually tear the regime apart from the inside. The Kurds have a saying: no friends but the mountains. And when they hear Westerners talking about the glory of Persia, it just confirms their suspicion that nobody actually cares about Kurdish rights.
It reminds me of the collapse of the Soviet Union. For decades, the world just saw a big red block called Russia. But the moment the central authority weakened, you realized you were actually looking at Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Georgians, and Estonians who had very different ideas about their future. They were not just Russians who had been brainwashed by communism; they were distinct nations that had been colonized.
The parallels are striking. Iran is effectively the last great multi-ethnic empire of the twentieth century that has not yet decolonized internally. The Persians are the imperial center, and the fringe provinces are the colonies. Look at the province of Khuzestan in the southwest. That is where most of Iran’s oil is located. But the people living there are largely ethnic Arabs. They live on top of the country’s greatest wealth, yet they are often among the poorest and most disenfranchised. They call the region Ahwaz, and there is a very active, if suppressed, independence movement there. They see the Persian government in Tehran as an occupying force that is stealing their resources and leaving them with nothing but pollution and poverty.
So if the I-R-G-C falls, we are not just looking at a change of government in Tehran. We might be looking at a total reconfiguration of the map. If the central grip slips, do the Arabs in the south try to take the oil and run? Do the Baluchis in the southeast, who are also Sunni and have been neglected for generations, try to link up with their cousins in Pakistan?
That is the nightmare scenario for the people in Tehran, and it is why the regime is so brutal. They use the fear of balkanization to justify their crackdowns. They tell the Persian middle class in the cities, look, if we are not here to hold the line with an iron fist, the country will splinter into five different pieces and you will lose everything. They point to the chaos in Syria or Libya and say, that is your future if you let the Kurds or the Arabs have their way. And unfortunately, that message works on a lot of people who are otherwise tired of the morality police. It is a form of nationalist blackmail.
It is a classic move. Use the threat of chaos to justify tyranny. But it brings up a tough question for us. If we are talking about a post-regime Iran, are we talking about a federalist system where these groups get autonomy, or are we looking at the end of Iran as we know it? Is the Persian identity strong enough to hold the country together without a secret police force?
That is the multi-billion dollar question. If you look at the Iranian diaspora, specifically the ones in Los Angeles or London, they are often very pro-monarchy or at least very focused on a unified Persian identity. They talk about the lion and sun flag and the glory of the ancient past. But if you talk to the activists on the ground in Kurdistan or Baluchestan, they are talking about decentralization, ethnic rights, and linguistic freedom. There is a massive disconnect there. The diaspora is often dreaming of a nineteen seventies restoration, while the people in the provinces are dreaming of a future that looks nothing like the past.
It seems like we might be repeating the mistakes of the past if we only listen to the Persian elite in the diaspora. It is like only talking to the high-ranking officials of a fallen empire while ignoring the people in the provinces who actually suffered under it. We did this in Iraq, and we saw how that turned out. We assumed everyone was just an Iraqi who wanted democracy, and we were shocked when the sectarian and ethnic identities tore the country apart.
And that brings us back to Daniel’s question about the descendants of the ancient people. The Persians of today are certainly the linguistic and cultural heirs to the Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus, but they are not the only ones. The Lurs, for example, speak a language very closely related to Old Persian. They live in the central and southern Zagros mountains. Many historians consider them the most direct descendants of the original Persian tribes that moved onto the plateau three thousand years ago. Yet, they are often overlooked in the grand political narratives because they are seen as a rural, tribal group rather than the urban elite.
So even within the Persian-ish groups, there are layers of identity that we miss. I want to go back to the religious aspect for a second. We mentioned Zoroastrianism in episode six hundred eighty. That was the original faith of the Persian Empire before the Islamic conquest. Today, there are only a few thousand Zoroastrians left in Iran, mostly in Yazd and Kerman. They are the literal keepers of that ancient Persian flame, yet they are a tiny, persecuted minority in their own ancestral homeland. It is a bitter irony that the people who most represent the era of Cyrus are the ones with the least power in modern Iran.
It is heartbreaking, really. When people talk about the Persian soul, the Zoroastrians are the ones who have preserved it in its purest form, without the Islamic layers. But the modern state of Iran has made it very clear that being Iranian means being a Twelve-Imam Shiite first and foremost. Everything else is secondary or a threat. Even the Persian language has been heavily Arabized over the centuries since the conquest. So when people talk about returning to their roots, they are often picking and choosing which roots they mean.
This is where the misconception busting comes in. Most people think that because Iran is an Islamic Republic, the people must be deeply religious in that specific way. But from what we are seeing, especially among the youth in two thousand twenty-six, there is a massive secular wave. And part of that secular wave is a return to pre-Islamic Persian identity as a form of protest. They are using the ancient past to reject the theocratic present.
You see it at the tomb of Cyrus the Great in Pasargadae. Every year, thousands of people gather there on Cyrus Day, which is not an official holiday, by the way. The regime hates it. They try to block the roads, they cut the internet, they arrest people for the crime of celebrating a king who died two and a half millennia ago. Why? Because when people shout, Cyrus is our father, Iran is our homeland, they are directly challenging the regime’s claim that Islam is the only source of Iranian identity. They are using the ancient Persian past as a weapon.
It is a powerful image. But we have to be careful not to mistake that for a desire to return to an empire. It is a cry for dignity and a secular national identity. But again, if you are a Baluchi Sunni in Zahedan, does the tomb of Cyrus mean anything to you? Probably not as much as the fact that the regime is executing your young men at a disproportionate rate or that your province has the lowest literacy rate in the country. To a Baluchi, the Persian king is just another ruler from a distant city.
That is the nuance that is missing from the conversation. We have to be able to hold two truths at once. One, that there is a beautiful, ancient Persian heritage that is being suppressed and that we, as Jews, have a deep historical connection to. And two, that modern Iran is a multi-ethnic powder keg where millions of people do not identify with that Persian heritage at all. If we ignore the second truth, we are setting ourselves up for a strategic disaster. We cannot build a stable region on a foundation of historical nostalgia.
So if we are looking at the practical implications, what should the policy be? If the goal is a stable, democratic neighbor in the future, we cannot just bet everything on a single horse. We cannot just say, we like the Persians, let us help them. We have to be engaging with the Azeris, the Kurds, and the Arabs too. We have to understand that their grievances are legitimate and that they will have a say in whatever comes next.
Precisely. We need to be supporting the idea of a pluralistic Iran. A country that can find a way to be a home for all its ethnic groups without one dominant group suppressing the others. It is a tall order. Look at Iraq. Look at Syria. When you take the lid off a multi-ethnic society that has been ruled by a dictator, the results are often messy. But the alternative is to keep the lid on with a new dictator, and we know how that ends. It just delays the explosion.
But ignoring the diversity is a recipe for a different kind of disaster. If we help a new Persian-centric government take power, and they continue to suppress the Kurds and Azeris, we are just resetting the clock for the next revolution. We would be trading a religious autocracy for an ethnic one. And that would not lead to the peace we all want to see.
And that is something we really explored in episode nine hundred thirty-one, when we talked about dismantling the octopus. The I-R-G-C’s power is not just in Tehran. They have built these patronage networks in the provinces too. They play ethnic groups against each other. They will tell the Arabs in the south that the Kurds are the real threat, and they will tell the Persians in the center that the Baluchis are all terrorists. It is classic divide and rule. They use the diversity of the country as a tool to stay in power.
It is the same thing the British did, the same thing the Ottomans did. It is the imperial playbook. So, breaking that cycle requires a level of political sophistication that I hope the international community is developing. We have to stop using Persian as a catch-all. It is lazy, and it is inaccurate. It is like calling everyone in the United Kingdom English. It might work for a while, but eventually, the Scots and the Welsh are going to have something to say about it.
It is more than lazy, Corn. It is a strategic error. When we use the wrong terminology, we signal to forty percent of the population that we do not see them. We signal that in our vision of the future, they do not exist or their concerns do not matter. That is not how you build an alliance for change. If you want the Azeris to help bring down the regime, you have to acknowledge that they are Azeris, not just Persians who speak a different language.
Let us talk about the diaspora for a minute. You mentioned Tehrangeles. There is a huge Iranian population in the United States and Europe. Are they starting to recognize this diversity, or are they still mostly focused on the Persian identity? Because they are often the ones who shape the narrative in Western capitals.
It is changing, but slowly. For a long time, the diaspora was dominated by the elite who fled in nineteen seventy-nine. They were mostly Persian, mostly upper-class, mostly from Tehran. But in the last twenty years, you have had a new wave of immigrants who are more diverse. You have Kurdish activists in Germany who are very vocal. You have Azeri groups in the states. They are starting to demand a seat at the table. They are saying, if you are planning for a post-regime Iran, you have to talk to us too. You cannot just talk to the son of the Shah and think you have covered all your bases.
That is a healthy development. It makes the conversation more complicated, but it also makes it more realistic. I think about the historical favor narrative again. If Cyrus was the great liberator because he allowed for religious and ethnic pluralism, then the best way to honor his legacy is not by creating a new Persian-only state, but by supporting a state that actually reflects the diversity of its people. Cyrus did not force the Jews to become Persians. He let them be Jews.
That is a beautiful way to frame it, Corn. Cyrus was not a great leader because he made everyone Persian. He was a great leader because he allowed the Jews to be Jews, the Babylonians to be Babylonians, and the Medes to be Medes, all while being part of a stable, overarching system. He understood that the strength of an empire lies in its ability to integrate diversity, not erase it. He was a federalist before the word existed.
So the modern I-R-G-C is actually the ultimate betrayal of the Cyrus legacy. They are trying to erase everything that does not fit into their narrow, ideological box. They are the anti-Cyrus. They are the ones who want to turn everyone into a carbon copy of their own worldview.
They are the successors to the hardline Assyrians or the Babylonians that Cyrus defeated. They are the ones who take captives and destroy temples. So, when we talk about a historical favor, the favor we owe is to the principle of tolerance that Cyrus represented. And that principle applies to the Kurd in Mahabad and the Arab in Ahwaz just as much as it applies to the Persian in Isfahan. We owe it to the people of that region to see them as they are, not as we want them to be.
I think this is a good place to pivot to some practical takeaways for our listeners. Because it is easy to get lost in the history and the maps, but this has real-world consequences for how we consume news and how we think about the future of the region. Especially as we watch the headlines in two thousand twenty-six.
The first takeaway is simple: watch your language. When you are reading an article or listening to a report, notice if they use Iranian and Persian interchangeably. If they do, they are likely missing forty percent of the story. Try to use Iranian when referring to the citizens of the state and Persian when referring to the specific ethnic and linguistic group. It sounds like a small thing, but it changes your entire perspective on the internal dynamics of the country.
Second, we need to broaden our news sources. If you are only following Persian-language media or diaspora groups that focus solely on the Persian identity, you are getting a filtered view. Look for what the Kurdish human rights groups are saying. Look at the reports coming out of Sistan and Baluchestan. There is a lot of incredible journalism happening in those regions, often at great personal risk to the reporters. They are the ones telling the story of the fringe, which is often where the real change starts.
Third, for those who are involved in advocacy or policy, the message should be about federalism and decentralization. A unified, democratic Iran is only possible if it is a federal Iran. The central government in Tehran has had too much power for too long, whether it was under a Shah or an Ayatollah. The provinces need to have control over their own resources, their own education, and their own local governance. That is the only way to prevent the country from splintering.
And finally, let us keep the Cyrus narrative alive, but let us use it correctly. Cyrus is a model of how a powerful state can treat its minorities with respect and dignity. He is not a justification for a new kind of ethnic nationalism. He is a challenge to all of us to think about how we build societies that are actually inclusive. If we want to repay the favor, we do it by supporting the freedom of all the people living in that land, regardless of their ethnicity.
Well said. It is about the spirit of the law, not just the name on the map. We have to remember that the people we are rooting for are not a monolith. They are a vibrant, complicated, and often divided mosaic of human beings who are all tired of living under a boot. Whether that boot is religious or nationalist, it still hurts the same.
You know, Herman, I feel like we have barely scratched the surface here. We could do an entire episode just on the Azeri-Turkish influence on the Iranian military, or the specific history of the Arab tribes in the south and their relationship with the Gulf states. But I hope this gives Daniel and our listeners a better framework for understanding what is actually happening. It is about peeling back the layers.
I think it does. It is about looking at the map and seeing the people, not just the borders. We see the regime, then we see the Persian culture beneath it, but we have to keep peeling until we see the Kurds, the Azeris, the Baluchis, and everyone else. Only then do you have the full picture. And only then can you make informed decisions about the future.
And that full picture is what will ultimately determine the future of the Middle East. If Iran can find a way to reconcile its ethnic diversity with a stable, democratic government, it would be the greatest success story of the twenty-first century. It would be a return to the true Cyrus model. But if it fails, and the country splinters into ethnic conflict, the consequences will be felt for generations.
It is a high-stakes game, Corn. And as we sit here in Jerusalem, watching the headlines, we have to stay informed. We have to look past the slogans and the romanticized history and see the reality of the people on the ground. They are not characters in a biblical epic; they are real people facing real life-and-death struggles.
And hey, if you are finding these deep dives helpful, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a quick review on your podcast app or over on Spotify. It really helps other curious minds find the show and helps us keep these conversations going. We are trying to build a community of people who care about the nuance.
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We have covered a lot of ground today. From the biblical title of Cyrus to the oil fields of Khuzestan and the mountain passes of Kurdistan. If you want to dig deeper into some of the specific groups we mentioned, definitely check out our archive at myweirdprompts dot com. You can find episode nine hundred fifty-one on the Kurds and episode nine hundred thirty-one on the I-R-G-C structure there.
And remember, you can subscribe to our R-S-S feed on the website so you never miss an episode. We are on Spotify as well, of course. We have a lot more planned for this season, especially as the situation in the region continues to evolve.
This has been a fascinating one, Herman. I think I am going to go back to that map in the study and look at it with a fresh set of eyes. Maybe I will even try to find where the Lurs live and see if I can find some of their music online.
They are in the south-central Zagros, Corn. Just look for the most rugged terrain you can find. That is usually where the most resilient identities are preserved. Their music is incredible, by the way. Very haunting, very ancient.
That makes sense. The mountains have a way of protecting culture from the reach of the central government. Well, thanks for the expertise as always, Herman.
Always a pleasure, Corn. This has been My Weird Prompts.
Thanks for listening, everyone. We will catch you in the next one. Stay curious.
Until next time.
