The Iranian Diaspora

The U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey consistently ranks Iranian Americans among the most highly educated ancestry groups in the country. According to the Migration Policy Institute and the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA), more than two-thirds of Iranian-American adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher — a rate roughly double the U.S. average. Median household income outpaces the national figure by about 30 percent.

The largest Iranian community outside Iran is concentrated along Westwood Boulevard in the Westwood neighbourhood of Los Angeles, a corridor of bookstores, bakeries, kebab houses, music shops and satellite TV studios that locals call Tehrangeles. The City of Los Angeles formally recognised the stretch between Wilkins and Pico as Persian Square in 2010, and the district hosts the annual Mehregan autumn-equinox street fair.

Los Angeles is also the world capital of Persian-language satellite television: stations such as Manoto, Iran International, BBC Persian (London-based) and dozens of émigré music channels broadcast directly into Iranian living rooms, where they routinely outrate the state broadcaster. The city's record industry — Caltex Records, Avang, Taraneh Enterprises — produced the soundtrack of Iranian exile from the 1980s onward.

The deepest Iranian diaspora is also the oldest. When the Sasanian state collapsed under the Arab conquest in 651 CE, a community of Zoroastrians refused conversion and, over the following century, sailed from the Iranian coast around to Gujarat in north-western India. According to the Qissa-i Sanjan — a 16th-century chronicle of the migration — they landed at Sanjan in the 8th century and were granted refuge by the local Hindu king Jadi Rana on five conditions, including adopting the local language (Gujarati) and dress.

Their descendants, the Parsis, became one of the most influential business and intellectual communities of British India: the Tata industrial group, the Godrej conglomerate, the Wadia shipbuilders, and figures such as Dadabhai Naoroji (Britain's first Asian MP), conductor Zubin Mehta, and Queen guitarist Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara) trace their ancestry to this 1,300-year-old exile. Today around 60,000 Parsis live in India and another 5,000 in Pakistan, alongside a smaller community of more recent Iranian-born Zoroastrians known as Iranis.

Wherever Iranians have settled, certain institutions tend to appear within a generation: a Persian bookshop, a kebab house, a saffron-and-sumac grocer, a Nowruz committee, and — increasingly — a carpet showroom catering to local tastes. The Amsterdam Persian Carpet Shop photographed below is a typical example: family-run, three-generations deep, serving a clientele that is now largely Dutch.

For all the variety of routes and reasons that bring Iranians abroad, certain commonalities recur. Almost every diaspora household keeps a copy of Hafez and the Shahnameh; almost every family lays a Haft-Sin at Nowruz; almost every wedding finishes with a recitation of Saadi's "Bani Adam" — the same couplet that hangs, in Persian carpet form, in the entrance hall of the United Nations in New York.