By Asal Mansouri and Borna Dehghani, writing from Tehran
How can survival turn into something shameful? How does breathing itself become a burden – one that a person no longer dares to carry, a weight that grows heavier by the moment, with no path of escape left open?
What took place across Iran in January 2026 -in no fewer than 400 locations throughout the country- and what continues still, created the conditions for such an experience. The repression carried out by the brutal ruling regime was so exposed, so savage, and so overwhelming that many of those who survived were driven into silence. This silence did not arise from fear or calculation; it came from the sheer weight of continuing to exist. From the exhausting, unbearable question of why they survived at all – why they were left to carry this staggering magnitude of devastation, loss, and catastrophe in their own bodies.
Survival, in this context, was not a sign of salvation – not the kind of salvation promised by theology, nor an opening meant to cast death as a gift on the horizon, to reduce suffering to a temporary trial, or to render annihilation bearable through the promise of a transcendent end. What was lived did not align with that logic. What remained was a painful suspension: a condition that held the human being in the middle of time, without allowing them to move forward or setting them free.
Images arrived in drops -fragmented and torn- emerging from prolonged and deliberate internet shutdowns, themselves another form of killing, and through accidental cracks in connections that could go dark again at any moment. The images were disjointed and incomplete. Each one was a separate wound: streets where the echo of gunfire deafened the ears; defenseless bodies left on the asphalt; the wounded consigned to darkness before help could reach them; and hospitals whose very function as places of refuge was worn down under the relentless assault of the killers.
What was unfolding was unmistakably a slaughter – violence advancing forward, piling corpse upon corpse. Then came the stage of erasure: the hurried removal of bodies, the silencing of voices, assaults on the funerals of the dead, and most painfully of all, the agonizing process of identity theft.2 The sequence of these scenes scraped and cut through the mind, layer by layer. Violence had devoured its own boundaries; death had become the everyday language of power, and everything was moving forward in the name of a future that grew emptier the longer one stared into it.3
In the Islamic Republic, the future never became a destination to be reached; it was transformed into a permanent command. A continuous pressure that holds the present in a state of suspension and demands obedience from it. The sole function of this future is the consumption of the present: the wearing down of the now and the emptying out of life.
This temporal logic took shape on a ground where Shi‘ism organizes meaning around Entezar (waiting or expectation)4; a waiting that indefinitely defers the end and displaces salvation onto a blood-soaked horizon. The promised savior, within this configuration, arrives through violence, demands discipline through elimination and reduction, and cleanses the world through blood. As a result, suffering and death cease to be exceptions and instead become consumable components of time.
Iran’s 1979 Revolution transferred this logic from the realm of religious imagination into the machinery of the state. The future shifted from a promise into a demand, and the present became a field for measuring loyalty, endurance, and readiness for sacrifice. Within such an order, savagery – whether one wills it or not – finds room to emerge; for suspension must, at all costs, be preserved, violence must be converted into a tool for stabilizing expectation, and death must become a normalized marker in the management of time.
In truth, the future of the formless system that emerged from the condemned revolution of 1979 in Iran never arrives – because it has no concrete existence and remains perpetually absent. This future is bound to a logic that exiles it to the apocalyptic horizon of the appearance of the promised Mahdi. The future is severed from life and reduced to a promise that leaves no trace in history – a promise that cannot be seen, imagined, or spoken, except through the abandonment of reason and experience.
And yet, this impossible future continues to function as an object of faith: a faith built upon absence itself, and for that very reason, one that is reactivated with every act of erasure and secured anew through each massacre.
Here, the issue is no longer one of belief or disbelief. This order continues to function even when faith erodes, narratives collapse, and promises lose their credibility. Expectation is detached from the level of individual belief and becomes habit – an administrative, security-driven, and everyday procedure.
In this condition, violence no longer requires theological justification or moral persuasion. It is enough for suspension to be preserved for erasure, repression, and death to become ordinary actions – actions that do only one thing: keep time suspended and prevent it from reaching an end. When suspension persists even in the absence of belief, what remains can no longer be called an order or an ideology; it is something that kills in order to endure.
From the very beginning, the Islamic Republic was a monster. This monster did not take shape over time, nor was it the result of a deviation; it was present from the outset, born from the fusion of political Shi‘ism -whose central myths include the event of Karbala5– with the imagination of revolutionary leftism.6 A fusion that turned politics into a field of sacrifice and bound the value of life to its capacity to be given up.
Within this apparatus, the body was reduced to the level of a consumable resource, and death acquired meaning only as an instrument. From this point on, violence became a decision: the decision of which bodies would remain and which would be erased, which deaths would be seen and which would be allowed to disappear. Nothing was accidental. Every blow carried a message, and every death drew a new boundary.
The Islamic Republic does not devour everything all at once. It calculates, marks, and strikes precisely where the blow will have the greatest disciplinary effect. Power here is not measured by the volume of blood spilled, but by the precision of selection. This logic of selection -crucially- has its own language and ritual. Politicized Shi‘ism provides a framework that renders suffering bearable and elimination justifiable. The narrative of martyrdom turns death into a form of symbolic capital and makes its distribution possible. Returns -to 1979 and to foundational narratives- serve a function: they supply ready-made documentation for every decision. The past is never closed; it is transformed into a reservoir of legitimacy, ensuring that each new act of erasure can draw on a prepared reference.
Within this order, violence is ritual. It positions bodies and regulates time through elimination. The myth of sacrifice empties death of finality and installs it as a measure of loyalty. Life, in itself, holds no inherent value, and bodies are tolerated only insofar as their continued presence does not disrupt this mechanism. What proves decisive is the provisional condition of not yet being eliminated. Bodies that have not yet been set aside remain – and this temporary suspension produces a dark form of knowledge: survival is the result of another’s selection. Shame is born precisely from this awareness.
Within this order, seeing has been absorbed into the mechanism. The image of a body on asphalt circulates and is filed alongside previous images that looked almost identical. The archive grows heavier without growing closer to consequence. It extends laterally, and what it accumulates only confirms the rhythm it documents.
The regime’s most refined operation is the conversion of witness into material. Speech is permitted, documentation is tolerated, outcry is absorbed, because none of these interrupt the rhythm. They enter the same circuit that schedules elimination and manages its aftermath. Protest feeds the archive that keeps the mechanism legible to itself.
What collapses here is causality. The line between registering violence and producing an effect against it has been severed by a structure that treats response as input. The witness speaks, and the speech is processed. The witness records, and the record is catalogued. The apparatus has learned to digest testimony, and what it absorbs sustains it.
The silence that follows is the silence of someone who has understood, bodily, that every act of exposure is converted into proof of the mechanism’s continuity. Having seen, in this context, means carrying a weight that the mechanism itself assigned.
The persistence of savagery in the Islamic Republic arises from the coexistence of layered structures, each operating with its own temporality, stacked upon one another. Ritual Shi‘ism advances time through the repetition of mourning: a calendar that returns each year, renews loss, and turns death into an organized act of remembrance.7
Layered onto this ritual time is administrative time. Death is recorded, classified, filed, and circulated within a network of references. Bodies are not simply eliminated; they are entered into tables, quotas, and narratives. Bureaucracy renders loss manageable and strips savagery of its emotional charge. Killing is removed from the realm of eruption and transformed into a calm, continuous process – a process that moves forward and cannot tolerate interruption.
A third temporality rises from the ground itself. Oil regulates the tempo of this order and inserts death into a logic of calculation.8 The extraction economy compresses time and renders bodies replaceable: each one a unit whose removal carries a measurable cost, and whose continuation is tolerated only so long as the flow is maintained. Stoppage carries a cost that exceeds any single death. Elimination sustains the flow, and grief, which slows it down, must be managed accordingly.
Oil binds the regime to a global rhythm that demands continuity above all else. Death moves through institutions the way crude moves through pipelines, at regulated pressure, with minimal interruption. Ritual provides meaning for this movement, bureaucracy sets its tempo, and the extraction economy provides its deepest justification. The ground beneath the country is the material basis of a temporality in which life and death are governed by the same logic of uninterrupted flow.
This convergence of ritual, administration, and extraction produces something durable. Savagery persists because it operates at the intersection of three systems that reinforce one another and lend their distinct rhythms to the machinery of erasure. What emerges has no single origin and no single logic. It is a skill, refined across decades and calibrated with every new crisis.
At this point, what can be discerned is a mechanism – a mechanism whose rhythm can be learned, whose components can be taken apart, and whose circuits of circulation can be traced. Within this mechanism, erasure approaches the status of an everyday action, and death is embedded within the ordinary texture of time. This description is not a judgment on destiny; it is a registration of a form that is actively at work.
This mechanism is also calibrated through shocks. Each wave opens the possibility of reconfiguration, and each crisis provides new data for finer adjustment. Reactions are absorbed into the flow itself. Language enters circulation and is worn down before it can make contact. Records accumulate, and the archive grows heavier. What ultimately appears is the extension of a stretched present that refers neither backward nor forward.9
Within this framework, the monster resembles a pattern more than a creature10 – a pattern for organizing erasure, distributing death, and eroding life. This pattern has no face, nor does it have a clearly defined boundary, yet it is recognizable. One can see how bodies are displaced, how remaining is always provisional, and how departure is perpetually possible. Each death locks the situation in place, and each survival is tied to an external selection. This is the actual form of living.
Notes
1 This text is published under pseudonyms. Due to living and working inside Iran, and the existing security restrictions, the authors are unable to use their real names. Rather than choosing abstract or unrelated names, they have selected the names of two individuals who were killed during this uprising as their signatures. This choice is not intended to appropriate their voices, to speak on their behalf, or to attribute the views expressed in this text to their lives or beliefs. It makes no claim of representation or equivalence of experience.
At the same time, the use of these names is an act of respect and commemoration for a path that was walked with courage and resolve. The authors of this text consider themselves indebted to that courage – a courage that, even under costly and perilous conditions, made writing, speaking, and standing possible.
These signatures point to an absence that casts its shadow over the text: bodies that were erased, and with them the possibility of writing, bearing witness, or offering explanation. The names appear here with precisely this meaning and intent.
Asal Mansouri: A 30-year-old young woman, a child psychologist and children’s rights activist. She was killed on Dey 19 (January 9) in the Shamsabad area of Tehran after being shot in the heart with live ammunition by agents of the Islamic Republic.
Borna Dehghani: A resident of the city of Roudehen. He was only 17 years old and in his final year of high school. On Dey 19 (January 9), he was also killed by live gunfire from the ruthless agents of Ali Khamenei in the Tehranpars district of Tehran. Borna died in the hospital, in his father’s arms.
2 By “identity theft,” we refer to a practice in which security forces conditioned the return of victims’ bodies to their families on the signing of written declarations falsely attributing the deceased’s identity to forces affiliated with the ruling power (including the Basij). In some cases, families were forced to choose between accepting this falsification of identity or paying substantial sums of money in order to receive the body of their child.
3 In recent months and years, the leader of the Islamic Republic has repeatedly spoken of “the future,” of “ascent,” of “reaching the peaks,” and of the “nearness of victory.” These claims are reiterated even as the overwhelming majority of society, drawing on their lived experience, finds no tangible sign of this promised future.
4 In Shi‘i jurisprudence, Entezar is formulated as a condition that organizes time during the era of occultation. The absence of the infallible Imam keeps history in an unfinished state, in which justice, complete order, and the end of suffering are deferred to a future that has not yet been realized. Within this framework, the “present” is always understood as incomplete and provisional. Shi‘i jurisprudence -particularly in its political readings, of which the Islamic Republic is a concrete example- binds this suspension to concepts such as patience, obedience, and the endurance of suffering. In narrative traditions, the appearance of the savior is described through combat, bloodshed, and the purification of the world from injustice – an image in which violence is understood as the moment of final opening.
Messianism in Shi‘ism is grounded in the belief in the occultation of the Twelfth Imam, the promised Mahdi; a belief in which the absent Imam is nonetheless regarded as the ultimate bearer of religious authority and legitimacy. The Islamic Republic’s theory of velayat-e faqih emerges from this very logic, presenting itself as a mechanism for governing society during the period of occultation. Within this framework, the jurist acts as the general deputy of the absent Imam, and the legitimacy of political power is derived not from popular will, but from an asserted relation to the absent Imam.
5 Within the political Shi‘i formulation, Karbala is structured around the myth of the Third Shi‘i Imam – a myth that turns suffering into virtue and death into a source of meaning. In this narrative, Huseyn ibn Ali becomes a mythic model through which political action is defined along the path of self-sacrifice. Death, within this framework, functions as a form of capital: something capable of producing legitimacy and regulating time. In its politicized readings, this logic is transformed into an operational mechanism.
6 This claim is traceable. Both discourses rested on a shared set of assumptions: the sanctification of suffering and martyrdom; an ethics of sacrifice; absolute enemy-making (truth/falsehood, oppressed/oppressor, people/anti-people); the primacy of the collective over the individual; the devaluation of ordinary life in favor of meaningful death; and an understanding of politics as an existential battlefield.
The revolutionary rereading of the Karbala event in the 1960s and 1970s -particularly in the writings and lectures of Ali Shariati– stands as a paradigmatic example of this intellectual fusion. In this reading, martyrdom acquires both a religious meaning and a political function, and Imam Huseyn is transformed into a model for revolutionary action. Karbala is thus displaced from a historical-religious event and recast as a permanent template for mobilization, confrontation, and political violence.
Concrete manifestations of this synthesis can also be observed in the practices of revolutionary actors of the period. For instance, Khosrow Golsorkhi, who identified himself as a Marxist-Leninist, simultaneously invoked Imam Ali and Imam Huseyn as models of struggle. This coexistence of professed materialism with sacred authority signals an intellectual climate in which theoretical contradictions were not regarded as problematic and required no resolution.
Radical hostility toward modern civilization, the West, and especially the United States constituted another point of convergence between these two discourses. In these narratives, the West was portrayed as a unified, corrupt, and threatening force – a depiction reproduced both in anti-imperialist leftist literature and in anti-Western religious discourse. The result was a simplification of the world, reducing it to rigid binaries that curtailed the possibility of internal critique, gradual reform, and rational engagement.
Critical reflections on this condition can also be found in the responses of certain intellectuals of the time. Abbas Nalbandian -a prominent Iranian intellectual and playwright, known for his absurdist works and his outspoken criticism of Islam- issued a stark warning when he declared: “One must recite the funeral prayer for a country in which Islamic Marxism has come into existence.” Nalbandian – who was effectively marginalized after the 1979 Revolution – recorded his own voice before ending his life, in which he described the 1979 Revolution as a “historical disgrace.”
Taken together, this intellectual fusion resulted in the formation of a set of incompatible beliefs: improvised ideologies that held opposites together without tension. The Islamic Republic did not leave this legacy at the level of discourse alone; it institutionalized it within structures of power, logics of decision-making, and modes of exercising violence – an order that, emerging from these unstable syntheses, proved capable of operating in a sustained and terrifyingly effective manner.
7 The ritual calendar of Shi‘ism is structured around the regular return of mourning. The lunar months of Muharram and Safar – also counted within Islamic tradition as sacred months – are devoted to mourning Huseyn ibn Ali; a mourning that is repeated each year with no horizon of cessation. Within this calendar, the event of Karbala is not treated as a closed occurrence belonging to the past; it is a wound that must remain perpetually open and return to the present every year.
Within Shi‘i tradition and literature, there are narratives and prescriptions that regard laughter and joy after Karbala as improper or reprehensible. Living joyfully is seen as incompatible with fidelity to the foundational event, and sorrow becomes the preferred condition of the believer. Mourning is not merely an emotional response to a historical loss; it is a mode of being in the world that continues until the end of life. The Shi‘a, in this formulation, is one who has forfeited the right to carefree joy and must continually carry sorrow with them.
8 In Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, Reza Negarestani conceptualizes the Middle East as a telluric substrate – a ground that accumulates history, ritual, and violence, and reactivates them at specific moments. In this reading, politics exceeds the level of everyday decisions and becomes a flow of forces already sedimented within the layers of the earth itself. This ground possesses memory: an operational memory that retains and retransmits erasure, war, and collapse.
Oil plays a decisive role within this framework. Extraction compresses time, accelerates circulation, and inserts bodies into a logic of replaceability. Violence is removed from the status of an event and transformed into a continuous flow – a flow that cannot tolerate interruption and treats every pause as loss. From this perspective, the convergence of sacrificial ritual, administrative bureaucracy, and extractive economy does not appear accidental.
9 We name this condition “the nihilistic apocalypse,” because its temporal horizon is saturated with violence yet leads to no revelation, no salvation, and no end; and also because movement and regulation continue within it without pointing toward any destination or final meaning.
10 This formulation of violence and erasure enters into an implicit dialogue with the work of Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, particularly where his writings examine death, devastation, and the erosion of meaning as enduring conditions of lived experience. In his work, violence is understood less as a singular event or a moment of crisis than as a set of patterns, spaces, and temporalities that entangle life, language, and perception.
The relation of this text to Mohaghegh’s thought operates at this analytical level: an attention to violence as a mode of organizing experience, without reducing it to historical, moral, or redemptive explanations.