In my recently-published study surveying selected 21^st c. history textbooks, Iran and Iranians (Persia/Persians) are virtually OMITTED… 

However…this wasn’t always the case in Western education or among Western notables…

One of America’s Founders Thomas Jefferson secretly translated Count Volney’s “Ruins of Empires” (1793) from French to English… Volney even visited Jefferson at Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia… 

Volney was a historian specializing in the East… In “Ruins of Empires,” Volney discussed the numerous religions and made some interesting remarks:

Muslims believe there is a God without knowing what he is and believe the words of a man without understanding his language and go into the desert to pray to God when he is supposed to be everywhere and give alms of their own goods but plunder those of others…

Christianity is the allegorical worship of the sun…

Moses tried to keep foreign ideas away from the Hebrews but the Hebrews adopted ideas from the Chaldeans and the Persians…

Zoroastrians constantly renew their debate of good vs evil and keep dividing into sects because of it…

Indians find their gods in various animals etc. and have divided into hostile bands…

The Chinese and the Japanese worship the same god that other Eastern nations worship--Persian Bodd or Boudd… the grand lama is the Persian corruption of the same Prester-John…

Persians introduced “an invisible and imaginary world…into the real and visible one; this is the origin of those regions of pleasure and pain” – that is, heaven and hell – and “Of these materials, Jews and Christians, disciples of the Persians, have you formed your Jerusalem” and other beliefs, and “ye Mussulmans! your bottomless pit” and other beliefs…

Volney claimed in order to stop all these wars generated by varying religious views, there needs to be “a uniformity of opinion” by tracing “a line of distinction between those [concepts] that are capable of verification, and those that are not…[so] all civil effect must be taken away from theological and religious opinions”…

Volney concluded “that all the social virtues are only the habitude of actions useful to society and to the individual who practices them; That they refer to the physical object of man's preservation; That nature having implanted in us the want of that preservation, has made a law to us of all its consequences, and a crime of everything that deviates from it; That we carry in us the seed of every virtue, and of every perfection; That it only requires to be developed; That we are only happy inasmuch as we observe the rules established by nature for the end of our preservation; And that all wisdom, all perfection, all law, all virtue, all philosophy, consist in the practice of these axioms founded on our own organization:

Preserve thyself; Instruct thyself; Moderate thyself; Live for thy fellow citizens, that they may live for thee.”

[pic Wikipedia: Tomb of Volney, Père Lachaise Cemetery (division 41), Paris…for educational purposes only]