As I write this, Iran is an open wound. Iranians are living through one of the darkest moments of their country’s contemporary history. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands have been massacred in the streets; wounded protesters are being removed from hospitals by security forces, and executions are taking place on an industrial scale in prisons. Families perform surreal rituals of mourning, dancing in agony as they bury their children whose lives have never had the chance to unfold. Scenes from morgues circulate endlessly; parents are calling out the names of their dead children, desperately hoping for a response that will not come. The images strike like a wrecking ball: blunt, relentless, and bleak.
Meanwhile a U.S. military formation is taking shape around Iran’s nearly six-thousand-kilometer border. Speculation accelerates: whether Trump will pull the trigger, when, and who will fall first. What is striking, yet entirely understandable, is that after this bloodbath, the only imaginable path towards decisive change appears to run through American military machinery. Rescue is outsourced. Agency is displaced. This condition is not accidental but the result of a long historical feedback loop.
In his recent essay published by The New Centre in tripleampersand, Reza Negarestani describes a Sassanid–Safavid dialectic: a political reality in which Iranian society oscillates between structures of sacralized authority, whether in the form of God, nation, revolution, or destiny. Sovereignty is repeatedly anchored beyond contestation. Law is elevated beyond human revision. Dissent is treated not as disagreement but as sacrilege. Negarestani proposes, with a little help from Mohammad Salemy, a “third term”: a historical and organizational project that treats this continuum not as fate but as political technology, something that can be analyzed, dismantled, and redesigned. The task is to reconfigure sovereignty, law, education, and public reason so that authority is no longer sacralized and dissent is no longer criminalized as heresy.
To understand why this project remains inaccessible today, one must name one of the central material structures sustaining the current order: the one that most decisively blocks any structural exit.
What has shaped political life in Iran for more than two centuries is not Islam as a belief, but Islam as an infrastructure. Since the late eighteenth century, the Usuli school of Shi’ism has dominated Iranian society, not only through doctrine but through organization. It produced hierarchy in the form of marja’iyya, clerical authority through the mujtahid, and obedience through interpretation and taqlid. Unlike the Akhbari school – which rejected interpretation beyond the teachings of the Twelve Imams – Usuli Shi’ism constructed a nationwide system of mosques, seminaries, foundations, charitable trusts, and juridical authorities. These were not symbolic sites but material nodes of coordination, finance, legitimacy, and continuity.
Public movements in Iran did not succeed simply because they were widespread or spontaneous but because they had form. From the Tobacco Protest of 1891 to the Constitutional Revolution of 1905, and decisively in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, mosques functioned as meeting halls, communication hubs, and distribution points. Messages moved without media, funds circulated beyond state oversight, rituals synchronized action, and religion became logistics. That infrastructure enabled revolution.
What followed after 1979 was an inversion; the same system was absorbed by the theocratic state and turned inward. Mosques ceased to shelter dissent and began to surveil it; clerical authority stopped mediating and started enforcing; independent religious finance became regime-aligned extraction. What had once functioned alongside the state was fused into it while retaining its own internal autonomy.
This is why one cannot meaningfully speak of a single state in Iran. The Islamic Republic governs through a structurally dual formation. Alongside formal ministries, laws, and administrative institutions, a dense Islamic infrastructure operates with its own financial streams, taxation mechanisms (such as khoms and zakat), welfare systems, property holdings through religious endowments and foundations, parallel judicial authority, and embedded coercive arms operating through the Basij and clerical networks aligned with the IRGC. These institutions function beyond public accountability and outside civic oversight. They do not supplement the state but instead compete with it, discipline it, and ultimately override it. That is to say, Islamic infrastructure operates as a material pole of sovereignty parallel to the state itself.
This duality is not incidental but the primary reason that civil institutions in Iran historically have failed to consolidate power. Secular unions, independent associations, autonomous education, and civic organizations have been systematically undercut, not only through repression but through a deep infrastructural asymmetry centuries in the making.
The political exhaustion and desperation visible today is therefore infrastructural. Iranian society is confronting an apparatus that has had generations to entrench itself spatially, financially, and symbolically while systematically depriving civil alternatives of time, protection, and the material depth required to mature.
It is under these conditions that restorationist imaginaries gain traction, especially the Pahlavi era, pre-revolutionary Iran, and pre-Islamic grandeur. The nostalgia, undeniably present in these imaginaries, is neither irrational nor politically hollow. It is a response to national suffocation and asymmetry, to the experience of facing a totalitarian machine with no equivalent counter-structure. But Iranians remain trapped within the same continuum. The object of reverence shifts, yet the sacralization itself remains intact.
This is precisely where the central deadlock lies. The exit strategy proposed by the “third term” – the slow and difficult work of redesigning institutions and public reason – presupposes organizational capacity, historical patience, and cognitive surplus. These are not cultural virtues that can be summoned at will; they are infrastructural conditions. Under a regime of dual sovereignty, where Islamic infrastructure continues to operate as a parallel state, such conditions cannot emerge.
In the current configuration, institutional demystification is not simply delayed or difficult; it is structurally blocked. As long as Islamic infrastructure functions as a parallel sovereignty, no durable civil alternative can be stabilized, and no redesign of law, education, or public reason can take hold.
That is to say, any transition that seeks to pave the way for a third exit must be initiated by a project of abolition, demolition, and castration of political infrastructure of Shia Islam.
State-enforced secularism, even when rooted in nationalist nostalgia, can still perform a crucial structural function. It liberates belief by intervening at the level of infrastructure. It dismantles the Islamic hidden-state by severing clerical finance from public life, abolishing religious taxation and parallel welfare systems, dissolving religious endowments and property regimes, removing mosques from political, military, and surveillance functions, and eliminating extrajudicial authority. Its task is to demolish the material bases through which political Islam reproduces itself as a sovereign force.
Secularity here is not to be understood as an ethical horizon but rather as an instrument. It clears the field and removes the mechanism that continuously regenerates sacral authority. Once this infrastructure is dismantled, a vacuum will emerge, waiting to be filled. Civil infrastructure must then be deliberately constructed where Islamic infrastructure once stood. Education, law, public space, and social organization must be rebuilt as secular, procedural, and contestable domains. Only under these conditions can the historical and organizational project proposed by Negarestani and Salemy be undertaken.
The soil of a secular order is more fertile, yet it is not innocent. Such a transition would almost certainly require a hard hand, and authority would reappear in a concentrated, disciplinary form. The specter of divine monarchy would return, stripped of God but not of command. This is the risk, and there seems to be no way around it.
What remains decisive is not whether a will for change exists, but whether Iranian society’s collective memory can function as a reliable political currency for transition—a memory accumulated through repeated cycles of sacralized authority, repression, betrayal, and collapse; a memory paid for in blood, exile, imprisonment, and exhaustion. It is precisely this memory that may enable a different outcome; not by rejecting authority altogether, but by preventing its sanctification. A secular and constitutional order, anchored in parliamentary sovereignty and legal procedure, could draw on this collective memory as an invaluable currency for covering the political costs of abolishing the Islamic parallel state. Only this memory, rather than optimism or abstract ideals, may be capable of underwriting such a transition to a single durable state as a precondition for the “third term” to take root.