A Jewish Journalist’s Exclusive Look Inside Iran
Pasagardae, Iran — In the heart of Fars Province on Iran’s high desert plateau in the South, a stark and bare large limestone tomb juts out of the landscape. It’s in the middle of nowhere. But the understated burial place of Cyrus the Great still draws Iranians on pilgrimage.
Mohammad Parvi, a retired sugarcane factory worker, told me he was there with his family on this pitilessly hot and shadeless July afternoon because he wished to pay homage to “our ancestor, the grandfather of all Iranians.”
Cyrus, way back in the sixth century BCE, he averred, “exported human rights to the other nations. He denounced slavery. He made people respect each other.”
Historians reject each of these claims. But many Iranians believe them, thanks in part to a relentless propaganda campaign conducted by the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to legitimate his own rule as Cyrus’s heir in the early 1970s. And for the shah’s theocratic successors, that can sometimes be a concern.
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