"A civilisation lasting over 3,500 years possesses huge cultural resilience": turmoil and tenacity in Iran

Michael Wood on Iran's enduring culture and beliefs

A stylised illustration shows six figures in flowing robes gathered around a large tree bearing blue, teardrop‑shaped fruits. The tree stands on patterned ground, its green canopy contrasting with a warm pink‑orange sky. To the left, dark silhouettes of oil rigs release smoke; to the right, a distant city with domes and minarets rises against the horizon. The composition blends natural and industrial elements, suggesting themes of water, scarcity, and cultural landscape.

Published: July 15, 2026 at 3:30 PM

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In the back of our garden in North London is a cypress tree, grown from a seed cone I brought back from Iran years ago. Nearly 10 metres tall now, it is an offspring of a famous sacred tree in Cham, a little Zoroastrian village in central Iran. Standing by it, sipping my morning coffee, I imagine it now beginning to share its wisdom, like sacred trees in so many mythologies of the world.

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The cypress has a deep significance in Persian culture, stretching back to long before the arrival of Islam. It is portrayed everywhere on the walls of the ancient palace of Persepolis. When a Persian poet describes his beloved, he might call her “cypress-like”, comparing her poise and shape to the tree swaying in the breeze. The cypress is held to be a model of truthfulness, uprightness and endurance, even a symbol of everlasting life. Its image is carried by Shiite Muslims, too, in the mourning ceremonies for the revered Imam Hussain on the day of Ashura.

There are still Zoroastrians living in Iran. Like the Jews, they have an MP in parliament. Their ancient religion, espousing “good words, good thoughts and good deeds”, dates back to the Indo-European roots of Iran in the Bronze Age. Theirs are perhaps humanity’s oldest living scriptures.

Zoroaster himself was born around 1500 BC in the far north-east of Iran, and his teachings later had a profound influence on Judaism and Christianity. His religion was a dualistic faith in which evil coexists with good. That idea became so ingrained that, when they were conquered by the Muslim Arabs in the seventh century AD, the Iranians resisted the austere monotheism of the Arabs, stubbornly holding onto their ancient traditions, their archaic dualism, their myths and angels, developing a conception of Islam that was uniquely Iranian.

When Iran adopted Shiism in the 16th century, these pre-Islamic beliefs were incorporated by Shiite thinkers into a vast and rich philosophical and religious system that still endures. One characteristic feature, for example, was the belief in an intermediary ‘imaginal world’, accessible through spiritual training. It exists between the outer, observable universe and the metaphysics of Islamic monotheism, filling the historical, cultural and spiritual space between Iranian and Arab Islam.

It was under the Qajar dynasty in the 19th century that Persia, as we called it, had its first real contact with western ideas. As everywhere, the battle with modernity was a hard one. The constitutional crisis of 1906, and the discovery of vast oil reserves in 1908, attracted Britain and then the US. The nationalisation of the oil industry in 1951 led to the overthrow of Iranian democracy two years later, and the repressive rule of the western-backed Shah. The Islamic revolution in 1979 was driven by growing anger about the Shah’s tyranny and the loss of Iranian autonomy and cultural identity. But Ayatollah Khomeini’s return from exile in Paris was never forgiven by the western powers, especially the US, which supported Iraq’s Saddam Hussein against the Islamic republic in an eight-year war that killed perhaps a million people.

After 1979, the Shiite ‘rule of jurists’ was imposed, and hopes of a pluralistic Iran were crushed. Khomeini wanted to internationalise Iranian Islam – in effect, to Arabise it. His attempt to ban the old Zoroastrian New Year festival of Nowruz was symptomatic; there were even calls from hardliners to demolish the palace of Persepolis. My mind goes back to a burning summer day 30 years ago, and a faloodeh (sorbet-like dessert) bar in Yazd. As the owner prepared a glass of delicious iced vermicelli, he was asked why no portraits of the ayatollahs hung in his shop. “I’m not having their pictures on my wall,” he replied. “Those bastards are killing my religion.”

Since then, the people of Iran have endured hard times, especially the women and the young. Still ruled by a vicious theocratic regime that shoots its own protesters, they’re bombed by the US and Israel, sanctioned and blockaded, their economy in ruins. There is no sign that these sufferings will end soon, but one thing is for sure: a civilisation lasting more than 3,500 years possesses huge cultural resilience. Persian poetry, literature, philosophy, art and music are, as the medieval mystics said, “an ocean without a shore”.

The most famous sacred tree in Iran, at Abarkuh near Yazd, has been dated to well over 4,000 years old. One of the most ancient trees on Earth, it has survived every storm of nature and of history. And perhaps a civilisation that has lasted thousands of years, like a great cypress tree, will also in the end always be true to its roots?

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This article was first published in the July 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

Authors

Michael Wood

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester

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