Islamic Azad University
private university system in Iran
The Islamic Azad University (IAU; Persian: دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی, Dāneshgāh-e Āzād-e Eslāmi) is a private university system headquartered in Tehran, Iran. It is one of the largest comprehensive systems of universities in the world.
History
Headquartered in Tehran, Iran, the Islamic Azad University is the world's fifth-largest university. It was approved and ratified by the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution in 1982, having been founded and established by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The first large-scale private university in the Islamic Republic, Islamic Azad expanded rapidly in the 1990s, overtaking regular state universities in terms of total enrollment by the early 2000s. IAU has an enrollment of over 1.5 million students. IAU has promoted 'higher education for all' as its key objective, growing physically and academically to become one of the largest higher education institutions globally. IAU has two independent and 31 state university branches across Iran, and four branches in other countries: the U.A.E., the United Kingdom, Lebanon and Afghanistan. The university has accumulated assets estimated to be worth $20–25 billion.
The Islamic Azad University's activities quickly expanded throughout the country, so that As of 2016, thousands of new students were enrolled annually.
The public source identifies “Islamic Azad University” as private university system in Iran. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Islamic, Azad and University.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2661844. VIAF identifies the subject as 152002506. The Library of Congress control number is nr92011613. Authority coordinates are 35.778, 51.318. 6 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Islamic Azad University” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.