A Culture, More Than a State, Reaches Out

On the medium of global television, Mohammad Khatami came before the American people Wednesday bearing 2,500 years of Iranian history. In an unprecedented act of diplomacy, the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran packaged his message in terms of culture, not politics. And it is only in terms of culture that America can understand what is happening in Iran and what it means to U.S. interests.

Iran possesses an old, complex culture composed of three competing yet interlocking identities. The first strand of that identity stretches back to the 4th century BC when Cyrus the Great built the mighty Persian empire. Into the soil of its heartland were planted the seeds of intellectual inquiry, artistic excellence, tolerance and assimilation. For almost a thousand years, this culture survived all challenges hurled at it.

In the 7th century AD, the Iranians acquired a second identity when they embraced Islam. Although Persia, the nation, had fallen to Arab conquest, Persian culture fed Islam's great intellectual achievements. By the 16th century, the Iranians had found in Shiism, Islam's dissenting sect, the vehicle that allowed them to preserve their unique Persian identity while remaining professing Muslims. Essentially Persianized Islam, Shiism wrapped an Islamic cloak around Persian culture. Under it, the legacies of ancient Persia and Shia Islam intertwined to create what we now know as the Iranian nation.

In the 19th century, the Iranians gathered in the political ideas of the West. As a result, representative government and the rule of law embedded themselves into Iranian culture to form yet a third strand of Iranian identity.

Over the centuries, Iran functioned best when the various parts of Iranian identity maintained balance. But over most of the 20th century, that vital balance has tipped in one direction and then the other. Before 1979, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi pushed the Iranians to the extreme of their Persian identity, and after 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini pushed them to the extreme of their Islamic identity. Neither leader achieved the internal peace and the external security the nation required. Just as the shah attempted to break the powerful Iranian cultural pattern composed of Persia, Islam and Western political liberalism, the imam enforced his own aberration of Iranian culture. It is Mohammad Khatami who now, in the interest of the nation, seeks to instill the delicate balance between the Iranians' three identities. This is why the United States must take seriously what he says.