Tabriz

Overview

Tabriz is a city in northwestern Iran and a major center of Azerbaijani cultural and political life. Its history extends from its prominence as a capital of the Ilkhan dynasty through the upheavals of the Iranian Revolution and later disputes over ethnic equality, language rights and religious freedom. Tabriz has also been a center of industry, higher education and parliamentary politics. Its universities, factories, religious institutions and sports grounds have each figured in public arguments about the city’s place within Iran.

Several communities have shaped Tabriz. Iranian Jews lived there during the Middle Ages and remained through periods of persecution before the city’s Jewish community disappeared by 1828. Assyrian people maintained a Christian congregation in the city into the twenty-first century. The Azerbaijani majority has repeatedly pressed for respect for its language and identity. Under the Islamic Republic, those demands have brought demonstrations, arrests and armed repression. Tabriz has consequently been both an important Iranian city and a prominent site of dissent against the regime.

Geography

Tabriz lies in northwestern Iran, in East Azerbaijan Province. Its position gives it a close cultural relationship with other Azerbaijani-speaking communities in Iran and with the neighboring Republic of Azerbaijan. That relationship has influenced local reactions to Tehran’s policies toward Azerbaijan, Armenia and Turkey. It also helps explain why disputes over language policy and ethnic discrimination have been especially visible in the city.

Tabriz serves a wider area as a center for education, industry and medical care. Tabriz University has been a focal point of Azerbaijani language activism and student demonstrations. Tabriz University of Medical Sciences has trained physicians and employed senior public figures, including Masoud Pezeshkian. The city’s industrial importance is reflected in the Tabriz Tractor Factory and its association with the Tractor Sazi soccer club. After an earthquake struck nearby communities in 2012, people needing hospital treatment were transported to Tabriz, while local parliamentarian Pezeshkian criticized delays and failures in the relief effort.

Jewish history

Tabriz had a Jewish community in the Middle Ages. A twelfth-century account by Samauʾal b. Yahya al-Maghribī named Tabriz among the places where followers of David Alroy, a Jewish pseudo-messiah, remained active. The community became part of an important political center when Tabriz rose to be the capital of the Ilkhan dynasty’s realm under Hulagu Khan. Jewish residents participated in the city’s intellectual and administrative life during this period, although their fortunes depended heavily on rulers and court politics.

The Jewish physician Saʿd al-Dawla became vizier to the Ilkhan ruler Arghūn in Tabriz and exercised considerable power until his assassination in 1291. Rashid al-Din, a vizier, historian and physician, served three Ilkhan rulers before his death in 1318. These careers place Jewish figures close to the government of one of the medieval Middle East’s major imperial capitals. They also illustrate the vulnerability of prominent officials when political protection ended.

Hebrew manuscripts produced by scholars in Tabriz and its vicinity attest to a community containing both Karaites and Rabbanites. Among its members was the Karaite physician Nafis b. Daud at-Tabrizi, who left Tabriz for Cairo in 1354 and converted to Islam there. The manuscripts and the careers of physicians and scholars show a Jewish presence that extended beyond court service. They also connect Tabriz to Jewish intellectual and communal networks elsewhere in the region.

Conditions worsened in later centuries. Zechariah al-Ḍāhiri, a Yemenite Jewish traveler who visited Tabriz in the sixteenth century, recorded deteriorating conditions for its Jews. Persecution under the Safavid rulers ʿAbbas I and ʿAbbas II severely affected the community. It nevertheless survived: Judah b. Amram Diwan, an emissary from Hebron, visited Tabriz between 1711 and 1713 during his travels among Jewish communities in Iran.

Between 1790 and 1797, Jews in Tabriz were accused in a blood libel and massacred. By the time David d’Beth Hillel visited Iran in 1828, the city’s Jewish community had ceased to exist. Its history thus spans medieval scholarship and high office, Safavid persecution, survival into the eighteenth century and eventual disappearance. The blood libel massacre forms a central episode in that history; it was an attack on Jews driven by a false accusation, not evidence of wrongdoing by the community.

Modern history

Tabriz rose against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1978, during the revolutionary period that preceded the Iranian Revolution. The uprising became a lasting reference point in the city’s political history. After the revolution brought the Islamic Republic to power, conflict between the new regime and Azerbaijani activists persisted. In 1981, the regime used heavy weapons to suppress an uprising in Tabriz and summarily executed hundreds of Azeris. The violence established an early pattern of severe state repression in response to challenges from the city.

Questions of Azerbaijani language and identity remained prominent in subsequent decades. Students sought the right to use and study Azerbaijani at Tabriz University, petitioning Iranian officials over language policy. Demands for recognition were connected to complaints about ethnic discrimination and economic conditions. The city’s cultural role therefore had a political dimension: Azerbaijani speakers sought space for their language in public education and objected to treatment they regarded as unequal.

These grievances erupted in mass protests in 2006. Demonstrations began at universities in Tabriz and Tehran and spread from May 22 to about a dozen cities with large Azerbaijani populations. An insulting cartoon in a state newspaper helped trigger the unrest, but the protests also expressed broader complaints about discrimination, language rights and social and economic conditions. Iran’s deputy interior minister for security affairs acknowledged that the demonstrations in Tabriz amounted to more than a reaction to a newspaper insult.

The largest demonstrations of the 2006 protest wave took place in Tabriz, where government buildings were damaged. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps anti-riot units and Basij forces attacked Azeri protesters as unrest spread through the city and other parts of northwestern Iran. Across the protest wave, regime forces killed at least seven people and arrested hundreds more. Authorities also arrested several members of the Azerbaijani organization Gamoh in Tabriz after the Second World Azerbaijanis Congress. The crackdown did not end public criticism: Tabriz parliamentarian Akbar Alami protested the regime’s treatment of the Azerbaijani minority in the Majles.

Students continued to press for language rights. About 2,000 students joined May 9 demonstrations at Tabriz University against racism and a divisive state broadcaster survey. The protests joined demands for cultural recognition to objections about how Azerbaijanis were depicted in state institutions. In 2016, the University of Tabriz began offering bachelor’s degrees in Azerbaijani language and literature. That academic program marked a change in university provision, while earlier petitions and demonstrations remained part of the city’s political record.

Soccer has provided another setting for expressions of Azerbaijani identity. Some Tractor Sazi fans displayed Turkish and Azerbaijani flags at a 2011 match. At a later match in Tabriz, fans displayed a banner reading “South Azerbaijan isn’t Iran.” Such displays made the club’s matches occasions for public statements about identity and, in some cases, separatism. The Basij had controlled the Tabriz Tractor Factory from April 2009, placing a major institution associated with the city’s industrial and sporting life under a regime security organization.

Tabriz’s links with the Republic of Azerbaijan have also shaped debate over foreign policy. Following the 2020 Armenia–Azerbaijan war, Tabriz Majles member Ahmed Alireza Beygi criticized Tehran for failing to support Azerbaijan as Turkey had. A different position appeared at a May 8 march outside Azerbaijan’s consulate in Tabriz, where demonstrators demanded that Azerbaijan cut ties with Israel. These episodes show that public activity in the city has included competing views about Azerbaijan’s regional relationships, alongside the more enduring dispute over Azerbaijani rights within Iran.

Security

The Islamic Republic’s security apparatus has had a substantial presence in Tabriz. Its role has included the 1981 suppression of an uprising, attacks on Azerbaijani protesters in 2006 and arrests of activists in later years. In 2013, the Tabriz Revolutionary Court sentenced Majid Sefidani to six months in prison and Naser Kazempour and Bahram Akhouninejad to 100 days each on charges of “propagating against the system.” Plainclothes officials had arrested the three Azeri activists earlier that year and taken them to an unknown location.

Tabriz Prison was also the site of a reported assault and torture of student activist Arash Mohammadi. Arrested in June 2013 after a celebration following Hassan Rouhani’s presidential election victory, Mohammadi began a hunger strike to protest his treatment in custody. His lawyer reported that his health deteriorated during interrogation. An East Azerbaijan appeals court later upheld his six-month sentence. In another 2013 case, the Special Clerical Court in Tabriz sentenced Sunni cleric Abdolsalam Golnavaz to six years in prison and permanently barred him from wearing clerical clothing. The cases illustrate the range of activists and religious figures subjected to the regime’s courts in the city.

During the Iran–Israel war, Tabriz’s military and security facilities became targets. Israeli strikes were reported in the city in June 2025, including near its refinery; reports of a separate explosion at the refinery followed on June 29 after a ceasefire. That later explosion was reported amid others in western Tehran on June 28 and Shahr-e Ray on July 1. Reports of explosions alone do not identify their cause.

On March 10, 2026, strikes hit Iranian regime intelligence, police and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sites in Tabriz. The Israel Defense Forces identified the regime’s Special Units command and a large Basij complex in the city among the targets of simultaneous strikes on security headquarters in Tabriz and Tehran. The targets reflected the presence in Tabriz of institutions used by the Islamic Republic for domestic security and military purposes.

Present day

Tabriz remains a major Azerbaijani cultural center, with universities, industry and elected representation that connect local concerns to national politics. Masoud Pezeshkian taught surgery at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences after earning his surgical specialization in 1990. He became the university’s chief administrator in 1994 and won a parliamentary seat representing Tabriz in 2008. His career illustrates the city’s role in medical education and the national political system.

Religious minority communities have faced direct restrictions in Tabriz. Iranian authorities routinely prevented deceased Baháʼís from the city from being buried at Vadi-i-Rahmat Cemetery. Officials instead sent remains to Miandoab, where families could not wash the bodies or perform Baháʼí burial rites. The distance also conflicted with a Baháʼí religious requirement concerning burial near the place of death. Cemetery authorities and local and provincial offices described themselves as carrying out orders barring Baháʼí burial in Tabriz.

The city’s Assyrian Christian community lost access to its century-old Presbyterian church when Iranian intelligence agents closed it on May 9, 2019. Agents changed the locks, removed the cross from its tower and barred congregants from holding services. The building had previously been confiscated by a Revolutionary Court, although worship had continued there for years afterward. Its closure affected an established Assyrian congregation and a building recognized as a national heritage site.

Tabriz’s history brings together several strands of Iran’s past and present: Ilkhan rule, the long history of Jewish life and persecution, Azerbaijani cultural expression, revolution, and confrontation with the Islamic Republic’s security institutions. Its experience since 1979 has been marked both by participation in national institutions and by demands for rights that the regime has repeatedly met with force. The fate of its Jewish community, restrictions on Baháʼí burial and closure of an Assyrian church also place the treatment of religious minorities within the city’s wider history.