Iran is a land where history vies for attention with even the most spectacular events of the present. It was in Iran, once ancient Persia, that roses first bloomed and nightingales sang. There, astronomy grew as a science and mathematics as an art, chess was invented—and the Garden of Paradise was lost. Long before the Romans dared venture out of Rome, the Persians ruled an empire that stretched from the Indus to the Nile, so that Darius the Great could justly describe himself as "King of Kings, King of the lands of many races, King of this earth." But nothing in its past prepared Iran for what is happening there today. The country is being shaken by a two-pronged revolution—social and industrial—that is bringing to the mass of its people the first real taste of prosperity in 6,000 years.
Across the huge land, almost equal in size to France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined, great factories are springing up everywhere—in Hamadan, once the capital of the Aryan Medes; in Tabriz, where Marco Polo was entertained by the mongol Khans; in Isfahan, whose fragrant splendors led the Arabs to call it "One Half of the World." The night sky flares bright in the oilfields of Abadan, where the Zoroastrians built fire temples over ducts of natural gas. A railroad is stretching out across the treacherous Dasht-i-Kavir Desert, once traversed only by spice caravans from the Orient. A giant dam now irrigates the rolling grainlands below Shush, the ancient capital of the Elamites, where Daniel had his second vision.
Below the Parthian battleground where Marc Anthony met defeat, Japanese mini-tractors now wade into paddies thick with rice. Along the Caspian seashore, the highways are clogged with slat-sided Mercedes trucks hauling a record cotton crop to market. The beaches bounce with bikinis, and teen-agers in Teheran have joined the Transistor Generation. The ancient, withered men of Yezd are being taught to read. In Qum and Bam, in Dizful and Gowater and 50,000 villages throughout Iran, 15 million peasants have been transformed, almost overnight in history's terms, from feudal serfs into freeholders whose land is now their own.
Iran's economy is growing at the rate of 12% a year, and the per-capita income of its 26 million people has nearly doubled—from $130 to $250—in the past ten years. The country, which once depended on U.S. aid ($1.7 billion since World War II) for its very survival, now stands proudly on its own feet, a good example of what an underdeveloped land can do with determination and some good sense. Gone are the swarms of U.S. advisers, administrators and technical experts who once inhabited every government ministry and hovered over every government project. Their places have been taken by Iranians. Gone as well, to everyone's satisfaction, are the aid dollars from Washington. With industry booming and the earnings from its huge fields of oil ever higher ($800 million this year), Iran has now reached the stage where it can underwrite its own development. Next March it will launch an ambitious new five-year plan that will cost $10.4 billion.