Tehran police will no longer arrest women for failing to observe Islamic dress code
For nearly 40 years, women in Iran have been forced to cover their hair and wear long, loose garments.
Iran
This archive collects solutions-journalism stories and milestones tied to Iran — covering health, science, civil society, and other areas where progress is documented and real. Stories here focus on what is working or improving, not just what is wrong.
Iran provides free education to thousands of illegal migrant kids
Based on figures provided by the Eduction Ministry, last school year, Iran offered free education to about 560,000 foreign students, the majority of them Afghans.
Iranian government makes medical services free for all COVID-19 patients
The Iranian Health Minister said that uninsured and underprivileged patients should not pay for the healthcare services and the costs will be compensated by the national health insurance system.
Women’s rights group eliminates female genital mutilation in Kurdistan’s Garmiyan region
On International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), a women’s rights group active in the Kurdistan Region announced that zero cases of GM were reported in the Garmiyan Administration in 2019.
Iran’s Green Movement rises in historic post-election protests
Iran’s Green Movement brought millions into the streets in the summer of 2009, after a disputed presidential election handed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a landslide victory that opposition supporters rejected as fraudulent. On June 15, a crowd estimated in the hundreds of thousands to three million gathered around Tehran’s Azadi Tower — the largest demonstration in the Islamic Republic’s history to that point.
Iranian women win the right to vote after 56 years of struggle
Iranian women won the right to vote in January 1963, after roughly 56 years of organizing that reached back to the Constitutional Revolution. Within two years, the first women were elected to the Majles. Generations of activists never cast a ballot themselves, but the networks they built outlasted them and reshaped the law.
Safavid dynasty unifies Iran under Shi’a Islam and Persian statecraft
The Safavid dynasty rose from a Sufi order in Ardabil in 1501 C.E., becoming the first native rulers to reconstitute Iran as a unified state since the Sasanian Empire fell nearly nine centuries earlier. Shah Ismail I declared Twelver Shi’a Islam the official religion, a decision whose religious and cultural imprint still shapes the region today.
Tughril and Chaghri Beg establish the Seljuk Empire across Central Asia
Seljuk Empire founders Tughril and Chaghri Beg, two brothers from a nomadic Turkic clan near the Aral Sea, captured Merv and Nishapur in 1037 C.E. and built a state that eventually stretched from the Aegean to the Hindu Kush. Rather than dismantle Persian civilization, they governed through it — a pattern of cultural fusion that echoed across later Islamic empires.
Ibn Sina completes the Canon of Medicine, reshaping global healthcare
The Canon of Medicine was completed in 1025 C.E. by Ibn Sina, a physician working across Central Asia and Persia who pulled together Greek, Persian, Indian, and Chinese medical knowledge into one five-volume synthesis. Translated into Latin in 12th-century Toledo, it became a standard textbook in European universities for roughly seven centuries.
Persia’s panemone windmill brings wind power to the ancient world
Persian windmills first appeared in the Sistan region — today’s Iran and Afghanistan — where 9th-century geographers documented vertical-shaft machines with fabric sails turning inside slotted walls. They ground grain and lifted water in a place where summer winds blow for 120 days straight. It’s the earliest confirmed chapter in humanity’s long practice of putting wind to work.