Ethnic groups
Persian 51%
Azeri 24%
Gilaki 8%
Kurd 7%
Arabs 3%
Lur 3%
Baloch 2%
Turkmen 2%
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Demographics%20of%20Iran Languages
Persian and Persian Dialect 58%
Turkic and Turkish dialect 26%
Kurdish 9%
Arabic 1%
http://www.iran-press-service.com/z_htdocs_z/dcforum/DCForumID6/38.htmlIran in History
by Bernard Lewis
In attempting to attain some perspective on Iran in history, I begin, as I think one must, with the Arab-Islamic conquests in the seventh century-that series of epoch-making events following the advent of Islam, the mission of the Prophet Muhammad and the carrying of his message to vast areas east and west from Arabia, and the incorporation of many lands, from the Atlantic and the Pyrenees to the borders of India and China and beyond, into the new Arab-Islamic empire. These events have been variously seen in Iran: by some as a blessing, the advent of the true faith, the end of the age of ignorance and heathenism; by others as a humiliating national defeat, the conquest and subjugation of the country by foreign invaders. Both perceptions are of course valid, depending on one's angle of vision.
What I would like first to bring to your attention is a significant and indeed remarkable difference between what happened in Iran and what happened in all the other countries of the Middle East and North Africa that were conquered by the Arabs and incorporated in the Islamic caliphate in the seventh and eighth centuries.
These other countries of ancient civilization, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, were Islamized and Arabized in a remarkably short time. Their old religions were either abandoned entirely or dwindled into small minorities; their old languages almost disappeared. Some survived in scriptures and liturgies, some were still spoken in a few remote villages, but in most places, among most people, the previous languages were forgotten, the identities expressed in those languages were replaced, and the ancient civilizations of Iraq, Syria, and Egypt gave way to what we nowadays call the Arab world.
Iran was indeed Islamized, but it was not Arabized. Persians remained Persians. And after an interval of silence, Iran reemerged as a separate, different and distinctive element within Islam, eventually adding a new element even to Islam itself. Culturally, politically, and most remarkable of all even religiously, the Iranian contribution to this new Islamic civilization is of immense importance. The work of Iranians can be seen in every field of cultural endeavor, including Arabic poetry, to which poets of Iranian origin composing their poems in Arabic made a very significant contribution.
In a sense, Iranian Islam is a second advent of Islam itself, a new Islam sometimes referred to as Islam-i Ajam. It was this Persian Islam, rather than the original Arab Islam, that was brought to new areas and new peoples: to the Turks, first in Central Asia and then in the Middle East in the country which came to be called Turkey, and of course to India. The Ottoman Turks brought a form of Iranian civilization to the walls of Vienna. A seventeenth-century Turkish visitor who went to Vienna as part of an Ottoman embassy, notes with curiosity that the language which they speak in Vienna is a corrupt form of Persian. He had of course observed the basic Indo-European kinship between Persian and German, and the fact that the Germans say ist and the Persians say ast, almost the same thing, for the verb "to be," present indicative third-person singular.
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