AH Challenge: Islama Esperanta Respubliko Irano

Your challenge, should you accept it, is to make Iran the world's first majority Esperanto-speaking state with a POD no earlier than 1979.
 
During the 1960s the Pahlavis decide to take Westernizing to a much higher level. The Shah, unconvinced that his country was making strong progress towards Westernization and integration with the US and W. Europe, decided to make Esperanto the language of business, government, and academia in Iran. Initially he considered English, but realized that his educated subjects would not be comfortable working with an organic foreign language. No other country in the world had Esperanto as their official language. The Shah reasoned that a unique and artificial language would quell the doubts of those who did not want to take another nation's natural language.

Over the period of one year the Shah ordered all street and roadway signs converted into Esperanto. At first, TV newscasts were in Farsi with Esperanto subtitles, but after a few years the newscasts and even soap operas were in Esperanto. Government convened in the Esperanto language, though whispers of Farsi could be heard in the courtyards and in odd places around the Royal quarters. Slowly, the streets of Tehran burbled with 'kaj', as even the poorest tried to get their minds around the oddly Slavic sounding language. Even the Shah's secret police spoke Farsi and wrote their spy briefs in Esperanto. The underground Communist League of Tehran spoke Esperanto in a short-lived attempt to deceive the secret police. "Somehow" the police forced Iran's most competent Esperantist to spy on the Communists and quickly break up the cell.

In 1974 a series of bombings in Tehran by the "Farsi Language Liberation Front" confirmed what even the Shah knew: the experiment in artificial language rendered a strange mixture of Farsi and Esperanto -- Faranto, as the BBC reporters mused -- and this jumble satisfied nobody. On 1 May rioters took to the streets, singing and shouting in Farsi while taunting the Shah with "Death to Esperanto!" The Shah appeared on national television and officially permitted professional and academic services in Farsi. The days of Esperanto were over.

Or were they? The centuries old Farsi script, derived from the Arabic, did not survive the Esperanto experiment. Literacy soared after Iranians took to writing Persian with the Esperanto diacritics. Even after the reintroduction of Farsi fewer and fewer teachers declined to teach the Farsi script. The switch to the Roman alphabet made contact with the West even easier. Ironically, Esperanto did not work but the script held.
 
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