First of all, you must understand that you are asking a difficult question of a people in a difficult position. Not only because we are very biased on the subject, generally speaking, one way or the other, but also because whatever we write here might turn out to be used against us in some court or another sometime in the future.
I will first look at how a typical, post-revolution child is brought up in Iran. As children, we skim over the 5000 year history of pre-Islamic Iran in less than a semester in our primary school (an experience that is sadly repeated, but never added to, throughout the middle school years) from books that often have as little to say about the Achaemenid dynasty as about prehistoric times: mainly nothing of import. We then progress over later dynasties and are largely fed a negative view of any monarch of any sort. Our history books never let us judge our predecessors in a grey spectrum and rather tell us that most of our rulers have been stupid and incompetent people who messed up their jobs so badly that they had to eventually be taken down by the next fool in line. Our very own last pre-Islamic king is often depicted as a blind fool who was going to ruin the futures of all Iranians who later turned to the light of Islam by rejecting an invitation by an unknown man in a fell, notorious country to step down, rather than the monarch of a wealthy, successful country who had but recently conquered a historic nemesis by the name of the Roman empire. We are generally taught to not take pride in our background.
The late Shah's attempts at bringing back the glories of past days are shown as preposterous, and wasteful -- a sentiment of which I am not entirely far myself -- and, generally speaking, we do not know much about our history.
Year after year, we are told about the glorious revolution taking down the tyrant Shah and its unlawful, abhorrent regime, and as children, are asked to prepare wallpapers and posters celebrating the memory of the occasion.
I have known people who have regretted trying to take down the king, but I have also known many who do not regret the act; rather they regret what came of it. If we look back at the climate of Iran during the 1970s and the early 1980s we will see that the people most instrumental to the fall of the Shah were, other than the Imam himself, largely non-Islamist and left-wing extremists who did have an organized body of people and had access to Soviet-backed military equipment as well as communication devices, as the Soviet Union could see an opportunity for increasing its influence in the area by hijacking the revolution. What actually happened was that people saw the central figure of Imam and held him in awe and failed to notice that the Islamic Republic they were being asked to vote for was nominally non-achievable: a theocratic democracy by name. Enlightened intellectuals who were aware of the issue were quickly silenced by the opportunists who took advantage of the Imam's announcement that he planned to retire and leave the country to the people who had won it for themselves. The Iraqi attack on Iranian borders and the 8 year imposed war on Iran only helped solidify the positions of said opportunists: it is harder for people to convince a government that they should not be pressured into accepting a religion when their country's independence and entire existence was at stake. It was accepted generally that it would be okay to hold the country with an iron hand.
To get back to the topic at hand, the Shah was very incompetent. Not only because he did not know how to deal with the uprising that ultimately resulted in his downfall, but mostly because his reign led to people becoming increasingly aware of two issues: one, that the gap between the poor and the wealthy was becoming so large, that it had become a dream for a person of small means to achieve the meanest of things, such as go to university in another city, or be able to support a family; and two, that people had begun to seek again after freedom of speech and were stifled by the iron fist of the regime. The secret police, Savak, instituted by the Shah was feared and hated by all and it predominated the minds of the general populace. What the Shah tried to achieve in respect to education and social freedom was in contrast to our culture at the time, much like what his father tried to do, and much like the current establishment is after. He tried to export brilliant minds rather than import knowledge, and tried to overstep himself by bringing cultural changes that the people were not ready for.
People could see that the amount of money spent on personal interests by the royal family dominated the national budget that was set aside for the betterment of the general populace, and the youth who were benefiting from the education brought to the country through newly opened up universities were outraged. This is an era of Iranian history marked with incompetence followed by incompetence.
If you look back a hundred years, when we fought for constitutional freedom and achieved a parliament that would oversee the monarchy's activities during the Qajar dynasty, you can see the beginnings of intellectual awareness in the general population, a population that had been starved and kept in the dark for more than three centuries. Not by Islam or muslim kings and queens, rather by internal strife, selfish rulers, and apathy enforced through poverty. However, educated youngsters reading the history of western revolutions (mostly the French revolution) realized that a similar act could be achieved and did just that. After the first world war and the renewed and reinvigorated strike of famine and poverty and the anarchy resulting from the fall of the Qajar dynasty (who had held the country for near two centuries) the rise of Pahlavis saw a slow period of recuperation. The second world war and forcible removal of Reza Shah, followed by the fight for nationalization of petroleum, and the coup d'eta directed by the US all served to heat up the civil unrest and general dissatisfaction with the Pahlavi regime, which was not mitigated by the Shah's actions.
In this period, we saw a general decline of favor for monarchy. This served to associate the previous monarch with all before him; we saw only Shahs that were after their own personal interests and forgot the culture that strived under them: the poets, the scientists, the philosophers, the travelers, and the rest. The newly stated Islamic Republic only worsened the situation by trying to herd the capital into an acceptance of strict Islamic rule and framing the religion as they saw it.
During the Iraq-Iran war, civil unrest was dealt with harshly and after the death of the Imam and the rise of the new supreme leader, matters only worsened. The next president, Rafsanjani, a major player in the shaping of the country and in the war, set to create his own personal empire, seeing the new leader as weak and unsupported. He failed to observe the climatic changes that this brought. A series of murders -- for which the secret police and the intelligence agencies of the government later took responsibility -- saw the demise and silence of opposing intellectuals. The country was despairing.
Then came Khatami, whose message was the Dialog of Civilizations, and with him came a more lenient, tolerant view of Islam and a semi-freedom of speech. The youth began to prosper. Information availability became a given, rather than a commodity. Social freedom was granted to the people and science and scientific research became a priority again. The people started to hope again. We began, for the first time in years, to see publication of books by authors active before the revolution. We had TV shows on traditional music, and even documentaries that forayed into the depths of Iranian history and culture.
When Khatami's term came to an end, his party failed to pose a serious enough candidate for the people. It became a race between Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani. People were frightened of Rafsanjani, and so Ahmadinejad, a rather obscure and not well known candidate, won the election. What happened next, was a series of reverting all that Khatami had done and regressing back twenty odd years. People were unhappy. The freedoms they had been granted during the previous president told them that they should do something about it. Khatami's law-oriented and peaceful government encouraged action through the establishment, rather than against it, and as such people sought to end their misery through the 2009 election. It was a miserable failure, a complete fiasco, and people began to learn their freedom was not real, the hard way.
Depression and apathy claimed the country, a cloud that has not been lifted, even though president Rouhani has shown promise. It is not, therefore, hard to imagine that the people are not much concerned when Turkey claims Rumi as theirs, even though he has not a single line of poetry in any language other than Persian, and a few lines of decorative Arabic. Azerbaijan has registered our repertoire of traditional music as theirs with UNESCO, and Arabs have registered their typography as the original, and Persian as a derivative, rather than the other way around. Nobody cares.
You will see extremely successful Iranian's abroad, and if you look back, most of them have either been nobodies here, or have been straight-A students whose all-time concern had been getting out of here.
As an Iranian, I can now feel comfortable explaining my position to you. I was a talent student studying in one of the best high schools in Iran. I finished my education in Software Engineering in Sharif University, the best and most-sought university in Iran. I ranked in the top 99.9 percentile when entering university. I loved my country and it was far from my mind that I would ever want to live elsewhere, even though at the time I had a great chance to enter Cambridge University. I had background in poetry, music, and literature; but my biggest failing was that I studied history and politics too much.
Here, it is difficult to live, to say the least, if you know about things. You cannot watch TV and listen to the nonsense they say, or watch a TV series about Iran's history which only has gotten the name of the series right, and not feel deeply enraged. You cannot look at youngsters fleeing their tradition and culture, because they have been told that the culture has only produced monsters, idiots, and know-nots throughout history. And yet, here I am, doing just all that. You cannot live and remain healthy, though. I have suffered much and that is why in less than two months time I am leaving Iran, probably for good, simply to be able to be more of an Iranian than I am allowed to be right now. I am a muslim. I care about doing the right thing according to my religion and I read my religion's holy book. But it deeply upsets me to see it abused and to see the things done in its name, to see how young people are being misguided about it. It upsets me that somebody else feels they have the right to tell me how a muslim should be a muslim, and actually be able to back that with legal authority.
Do I look back at my history and reminisce? I do. But I also think that as a people, we live in either of the two states: we either look back and see how much we have lost, or we decide it is too much to bear and just live in the present. I personally think that Iran would have prospered more if we did not have a grand history. Perhaps then our young people would have had the vision to try and make something of its future, instead.
