Abbas Amanat

They changed that to the sublime state of Iran during the constitutional revolution.

Because they wanted to give a greater sense of centrality of this state.

And sublime was the term.

Yes, there's a romantic side.

Romantic side, that's right.

Yeah, I agree with you.

In Iran, of course, you know, there's a time of the constitutional revolution, it's a time of great poetry.

This kind of patriotic sentiments that comes through poetry plays a very important part.

Of course, these days, poetry has kind of declined.

and instead you see the visual image that is at the center.

That's why cinema is so important.

Kids these days with their TikTok.

Yeah, let me finish this about the period of Ahmad Reza Shah.

He built up, because he received a greater income,

from the oil revenue and it built up a very strong state with a strong security force, a strong security apparatus, which is the SAVAG, which is an acronym for the security force in security organization.

And he, of course, unfortunately in the 1960s and 70s, particularly in 1970s,

basically suppressed the voices or possibility of any kind of mass participation in the political process.

It became very much an authoritarian regime with its own technocrats

very much a modernist vision of Iran's future and almost kind of messianic that he was hoping that Iran in a decade would become the fifth most powerful state in the world and reaches, as he would have said, the gates of the great civilization, very much in the mind had this image of ancient Iran of the Achaemenid Empire.

And we want to go back to that greatness of the Achaemenid Empire.