I find everyday, that someone asks me, or I notice in the press mention, that we Iranians have always been Shiite. That is wrong. Iran actually lost all its connection to Shiism, after Hulagu the Mongol conquerors literally wiped out Islam from the area.
So how come it came back? Well read this article. You will notice that there was a priest called Al Hilli, who converted what was a Christian Emperor of Iran, yes Christian as in Nestorian Christian, to become a Shiite. This is the root of the Shiites and in particular, the Seyyeds in Iran. People in Iran in those days really did not know about the ancient history of Iran. But we can say that after the Monguls, much of Iranian art and literature flourished, because the people were allowed to read other books than the Koran.
For two hundred years though that whole area seems to be in pieces, with many Kings and states. It is not clear what Iran looked like.
We had all these Kings:
Muzaffarid dynasty 1314–1393
Chupanid dyansty 1337–1357
Jalayerid dynasty 1339–1432
Timurid Empire 1370–1506
Qara Qoyunlu Turcomans 1407–1468
Aq Qoyunlu Turcomans 1378–1508
But eventually another King, Shah Ismail whose mother was Greek, yes Greek called Martha, converted to the ways of the Seyyeds. Why you say? Well he lost his father early on. I suspect that he was told by some Seyyed that he was descended from a Sufi called Zahed Gilani. He then felt he had a mission. So the Seyyeds helped Iranians like Shah Ismail, find a spiritual reason to oppose the Sunni Turks, and reunite Iran. At that time, the map of Iran then was pretty much the same as it is now, but for what is now called Iraq. The Seyyeds managed to capture Baghdad.
How this happened, was more to do with war tactics than what the Seyyeds did. We had a couple of English men, called the Shirley brothers come across from India and Afghanistan to help Shah Abbas to stop the Turks, with advanced war tactics. The Safavid lasted until 1700s It wasn't of course until three hundred years later, that the Turks were defeated in the WWI. But what is really important, was that the Brits forgot to give the eastern part of Iraq to Iran. They had created Iraq, which did not exist ever. So what about Babylon you ask? Well much of what became Babylon was inherited from Sumerian in Iran. Anyway, half of present day Iraq was Iran, and the western part was part of the Assyrian Empire. The Kurds were part of the Iranian Empire. But with the birth of Seyyeds suddenly we had a new area of the world purely because of Seyyed's "holy" shrines.
No one asks, what about the Holy Shrines that existed there for 6000 years for Iranians. If Cyrus the Great or Zoroaster were around, they would tell you what the map should look like. But the Brits did not bother to look at the history properly. As they and the Jews looked at the Old Testament and Torah and nothing else they just wanted to find the birth place of Abraham. And Uruk was were they found it. The name Iraq was created from the Uruk archaeological discoveries. But they are beginning to realise that much of what is Babylon comes from much older cultures to the east in Iran. I mentioned Sumerians, but recently there have been even older civilizations in:
Zayandeh Rud civilization 5th millenium
Jiroft civilization (Aratta?) 3000–5th cent.
Proto-Elamite civilization 3500–2800
Every day new discoveries are being made so look up the updates at wiki and chn.ir
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