Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
peripheries drifting away from Tehran's orbit. Iran has often been less a state than an
amorphous, multinational empire. Its true size would always be greater and smaller than
any officially designated cartography. While the northwest of today's Iran is Kurdish and
Azeri Turk, parts of western Afghanistan and Tajikistan are culturally and linguistically
compatible with an Iranian state. It is this amorphousness, so very Parthian, that Iran could
return to as the wave of Islamic extremism and the perceived legitimacy of the mullahs'
regime erodes.
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