III.

Population

About half (51 per cent) of the people of Iran are Persian-speaking Farsi, the descendants of the original Indo-European peoples who entered the country from Central Asia in the 2nd millennium bc. The remainder of the population consists of various ethnic and linguistic groups, including: Azeri Turks (about 20 per cent), Kurds (about 8 per cent), Gilakis, Lurs, Mazandaranis, Turkmans, Baluch, Arabs, Qashqai’is, and Bakhtiaris. During the 20th century there has been a sharp decline in Iran’s nomadic population, which now numbers about 1 million. Refugees, mainly from Afghanistan, account for over 20 per cent of the population.

A.

Population Characteristics

Iran has a population of 66,429,284 (2009 estimate). The average density is about 41 people per sq km (105 people per sq mi), but concentrations are much higher in the northern and western parts of the country. The population is about 68 per cent urban; the proportion of city dwellers having increased dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s. The birth rate declined much less steeply than the death rate between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s; in 2009 Iran had a population increase of about 1 per cent, following a government campaign to encourage smaller families. The infant mortality rate was 36 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2009.

B.

Principal Cities

Tehran has a population (2006) of 6,758,845. The country’s most important urban centres after Tehran are: Mashhad (2007 estimate, 2,926,000), a shrine city and a grain-marketing and important commercial and transport centre; Eşfahān (2007 estimate, 1,001,000), an industrial and commercial centre noted for its fine architecture; and Tabrīz (2007 estimate, 1,700,000), an industrial centre. Qom (2007 estimate, 777,700) is a shrine city and the chief centre of religious learning.

C.

Religion

The official religion of Iran is Ithna-Ashari (Arabic, “Twelver”) Shiism, a major sectarian division of Islam, which is followed by more than 90 per cent of the population. Some of the most sacred Shiite places are in Iran; the city of Qom, south of Tehran, is a noted place of pilgrimage. Sunni Muslims form about 9 per cent of Iran’s population, and the country also has dwindling communities of Christians and Jews (0.5 per cent together), as well as followers of Zoroastrianism and Bahai. Except for the followers of the Bahai faith, these religious minorities have inferior, but protected, status in law. As a Muslim reformist sect, those admitting to Bahai sympathies are subject to the death penalty.

D.

Ethnic Minorities

The periphery of Iran is inhabited by ethnic minorities, who at times have been perceived to hold greater allegiance to their individual ethnic groups than to the national government. The Turkomans in the north-east, and the Kurds in the west are Sunni Muslims, as are about half of the Balochis in the south-east. Shiite Arabs inhabit the south-west. The Azeris, although they are Shiites, came into conflict with the politically active Iranian Shiite clergy in the late 1970s and the 1980s, but at other times have found common cause with Iran.

E.

Language

The official language of Iran is Persian, or Western Farsi, one of the Indo-Iranian languages, a mother tongue for around a third of the population. Farsi emerged from the Middle Persian phase of the Persian language. The written form uses the Perso-Arabic alphabet, with many Arabic loan words. Around 67 other languages are spoken by certain groups in Iran, mostly from the Indo-Iranian family, but some Semitic and Altaic languages are spoken. South Azerbaijani is a mother tongue for 23.5 million Turki people in Iran—it has more first-language speakers than Farsi. Luri, Kurdi, Mazanderani, and Gilaki (all Indo-Iranian), Qashqa’i and Turkmen (Altaic), and Mesopotamian Spoken Arabic (Semitic) are all mother tongues for large minority groups.

F.

Education

Following the change in government in 1979, Iran’s educational system and its cultural life were altered to conform with precepts of revolutionary Shiite Islam. Certain approaches borrowed from the West were not allowed to continue, although most of the education system continues in its old form. However, staff and students are obliged to take additional courses in Islamic studies.

Education is compulsory for children between the ages of 6 and 14; enforcement has been lax, however, because of a shortage of teachers and schools and problems caused by the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. About 85 per cent of the adult population was literate in 2007. In 2007, about 7.15 million pupils attended 69,149 primary schools; some 8.32 million students were enrolled in secondary schools in 2007. In addition, around 1,000 teacher-training and vocational schools together had about 375,000 students annually. Higher education is provided by more than 100 universities, colleges, and other institutions, which had an aggregate yearly enrolment of some 2,828,528 students in 2007. The system, modelled on that of France, obliges students who fail one subject to repeat a whole year. Many students therefore graduate after the official age of 18; this partly explains the maturity of many university students.

Major institutions included the University of Tehran (established 1934), University of Eşfahān (1950), and the English-language medium University of Shīrāz (1945). Some universities were closed or renamed in the early 1980s during the cultural revolution. A quota of university places is reserved for those wounded in the Iran-Iraq war and the families of the war dead. Otherwise, admission is by nationwide exams followed by an ideological screening interview. In 2005, 4.7 per cent of the country’s gross national product (GNP) was spent on education.

G.

Culture

The culture of Iran is heavily influenced by Shiism, as is evident in the art, literature, and social structure of the country. There are great traditions of Persian literature, particularly of poetry, and Iranian art and architecture. After the change of government in 1979, the Shiite clergy led a drive for renewed Islamization. Women were encouraged to return to more traditional roles, and initially cinemas were closed and radio stations were prohibited from broadcasting music. These restrictions were subsequently somewhat relaxed. The segregation of men and women at certain social functions was reinstituted. Many women protested against the wholesale acceptance of Western values in the late 1970s by again wearing the traditional chador, a long black cloth draped over the head and body. “Islamic dress” was made compulsory by the government of the Islamic republic. In recent years there has been a renewed interest in many aspects of Iranian culture, even those of the pre-Islamic period.

Iran has a number of notable museums. These include the Iran Bastan Museum, with displays on archaeology, and the Negarestan Museum, with exhibits of Iranian art, both in Tehran; the Qom Museum; and the Pars Museum, in Shīrāz. The National Library is in Tehran; other important book collections are housed in university libraries. See also Iranian Cinema.