The People

The population of Iran in 1991 was 55,837,163. About one-tenth of the people are nomads.

The majority of the people are Iranians, or Persians. They are the descendants of the Indo-European people who settled in the area about 1000 B.C. and of various invaders from the Altaic regions. About one-fourth of the population consists of Azerbaijanis, a Turkic-speaking people who live in the northwest and northeast. Arabs are in the southwest. Kurds live in the northwest, Lurs in the west. There are small groups of Assyrians, Armenians, and Jews.

The official and prevailing language of Iran is Farsi, or Persian. Farsi, an Indo-European language, is written in Arabic script. More than 90 per cent of the people are Shiite Muslims, and the Shiite branch of Islam is the official religion. Its religious leaders, called ayatollahs, are highly influential in Iran. Five per cent, mostly Kurds and Turks, are Sunnite, or orthodox, Muslims. There are also Christians, Jews, Gabars (Zoroastrians), and Bahá'ís. Because the government considers the Bahá'í faith a heretical sect of Islam, it banned the Bahá'í church in 1983.

Five years of primary school are followed by three additional years of elementary school called guidance school and four years of secondary school (general or academic). Major institutions of higher learning include the University of Tehran (founded 1934) and Shahid Beheshti University (1959), also at Tehran. The literacy rate is about 75 per cent.