Islam in Iran in the context of "Pahlavi dynasty"

The Islamization of Iran began with the Muslim conquest of Iran, when the Rashidun Caliphate annexed the Sasanian Empire. It was a long process by which Islam, though initially rejected, eventually spread among the Persians and the other Iranian peoples. Although Arabization was a common element of the early Muslim conquests, it did not have as significant of an impact in Iran as it did elsewhere, as the Iranian populace persisted in maintaining many of their pre-Islamic traditions, such as their language and culture, albeit with adaptations to conform to the nascent religion. A distinctly Iranian Muslim identity emerged in this context and later sidelined the Arabs in what is known as the Iranian Intermezzo.

Iranian society was deeply transformed by the spread of Islam, which greatly influenced the nation's cultural, scientific, and political structure; the blossoming of Persian literature, philosophy, medicine, and art became major elements of Islam in Iran. Integrating a heritage of thousands of years of civilization and being at the "crossroads of the major cultural highways" in the Near East contributed to the Iranians emerging at the forefront of the Islamic Golden Age under the Abbasid Caliphate.

Henry Corbin (14 April 1903 – 7 October 1978) was a French philosopher, theologian, and Iranologist, professor of Islamic studies at the École pratique des hautes études. He was influential in extending the modern study of traditional Islamic philosophy from early falsafa to later and "mystical" figures such as Suhrawardi, Ibn Arabi, and Mulla Sadra Shirazi. With works such as Histoire de la philosophie islamique (1964), he challenged the common European view that philosophy in the Islamic world declined after Averroes and Avicenna.

Born into a Catholic family, he converted to Protestantism between 1927 and 1930. He received a Catholic education, obtaining a certificate in Scholastic philosophy from the Catholic Institute of Paris at age 19. Three years later he took his "license de philosophie" under the Thomist thinker Étienne Gilson. He studied modern philosophy, including hermeneutics and phenomenology, becoming the first French translator of Martin Heidegger. On 13 October 1929, Louis Massignon (director of Islamic studies at the Sorbonne) introduced him to Suhrawardi, the 12th-century Persian Muslim thinker. In a late interview, Corbin said: "through my meeting with Suhrawardi, my spiritual destiny ... was sealed. Platonism, expressed in terms of the Zoroastrian angelology of ancient Persia, illuminated the path that I was seeking." He thus dedicated himself to understanding Iranian Islam, which he believed esoterically expressed older perennial insights related to Zoroastrianism and Platonism.