^Princess Fawzia, Reza Shah, Queen Nazli, Crown Prince Shahpur^
The topic of our last week’s gathering in Shiraz University was about what we think the most important discovery of our country is in the last century and this is what I think about it :
As we know in the ancient Iran there were an enormous number of scientists and hence a lot of big groundbreaking discoveries. But we are so far from that time and we somehow are far away from having those discoveries too. It is really shameful and sad that it is so, and the fact of what we were back in history makes it a lot worse. Today’s Iran is more of a consumer of new discoveries of the world rather than being a source to make them richer. I read some facts about Iran’s technology and science and we have a lot of university students and scientists and researcher maybe even proportionally more than other countries and despite of this fact we don’t make great discoveries. I’m an Iranian, so shame on me too.
So instead of writing about the most influential discovery of Iran over the last century I’m just going to write about the most influential milestone in the history that change everything for us and was like a big bang of universe for Iran in my opinion.
Over hundreds of years ago people of Iran had the backward lifestyle we see in historical movies, there was big palaces for kings and their relatives and elite people and there was huge cities around them. I’m talking about just a hundred years before this vary day. There came a man, who changed everything for Iranians, a patriot who had only heard of the stories of the world and wanted his own country to be like that too. He was the head of the military of the kingdom of those days and by means of a coup, he overthrew the king and made a new kingdom ruling over Iran. He getting really rich and wealthy with being an excessively harsh leader was a downside to this happening but wait to hear the changes that came with him.
Over his 16 years of ruling, he started a lot of road constructions, we got 16 times more roads in a few years after him being the king, we got 21 times more plants, A strict government which employed over 60000 Iranians, A cause started called “Women Awakening” which tried to bring women into public too and help them be more socially active and have the same rights as men, Construction of railways and bringing trains as a new way of transportation into Iran (although it happened under the influence of Britain with military purposes), changing the international name of the country which was called Persia to its historic and ancient name Iran(unifying the people of the country), stopping the rebellions started to separate the country after the coup (stopping the country from being separated), decreasing the influence of foreign countries like Britain and Russia (although he got a lot of help from them in sake of getting help in return to rule and also modernize Iran), modernization of the country, starting trades with foreign countries like Britain, Russia and Germany and . . .
And this is not the end of these changes, you can read more about these with references given in the Wikipedia page.
To conclude, in my opinion the most important thing that happened to Iran and had a viable influence on the country and changed everything was actually a person “Reza Shah”.
P.S. : Information is power, everything that happened in the world (and to Iran as a part of it) which has made information transmission faster and more feasible had a great awesome crazy influence on countries, their modernization, and of course the way people lived (and surely live!)
Arash-Interests 