How do the people in Iran differ from other southwest Asian peoples?

Answer 1

Iranians are primarily of the Persian ethnic group as opposed to the majority of Southwest Asians, who are Arabs. (This means that they speak Farsi, not Arabic, and have a very different cultural tradition and value towards education and economic development.) Also Iran is a majority-Shiite Muslim country as opposed to most of the rest of the Middle East, which is majority Sunni Muslim. Iranians, also, as a result of secularism in the 1950s-70s and hatred of the current fundamentalist religious regime, are very secular-minded people and there is a large underground Atheist movement in Iran. This runs contrary to most Middle Eastern countries where the average person is very religious.