Saviour to Satan: Biography of Iran–US hostility

The story began with America as Iran's saviour but ended with America as its Satan. The rivalry written over decades in oil and blood is catastrophically being settled with fire that can singe the world.

This is not a simple story of good and evil. It is a story of oil and empire, of nationalism crushed and rage uncontained, of a superpower that saw Iran as a pawn and a theocrat who turned humiliation into revolution. It is the story of how the United States went from Iran's saviour to its “Great Satan.”

The name Iran is directly derived from the word ‘Aryana’ (or Eran), meaning “Land of the Aryans.”

Like India, which also had a region called Aryavrat, Iran is among the oldest civilisations on earth. At its peak, the Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus the Great stretched from the Aegean to the Indus, a dominion so vast it dwarfed anything the ancient world had previously known. That empire fell to Alexander the Great, followed by the Parthians, the Sassanids, and finally the Arab conquest of 651 CE, which brought Islam and permanently reshaped Iranian identity.

From fire worshippers, Iranians became followers of Islam. But they carried their Persian soul into their new faith, blending it with their own Shia interpretation.

In 1921, Reza Shah Pahlavi, a military officer, seized power in a coup. His pro-German leanings during World War II, however, alarmed the Allies. In 1941, Britain and the Soviet Union jointly invaded and occupied Iran, forcing Reza Shah to abdicate in favour of his 21-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, before dying in exile in South Africa in 1944.

The young Shah sat uneasily on the Peacock Throne, haunted by a truth he could never quite escape: his throne had been given to him by foreign powers. And beneath that throne lay the thing every foreign power craved: oil.