I begin with what looks like a detour, an old television memory that used to put a smile on our faces. It is also a compressed model of a political reflex that keeps repeating in Iran.
When I was younger there was a series called Roozi Roozegari (Once Upon a Time). It became a phenomenon, genuinely excellent, carrying that rare mix of humor and tenderness that popular art sometimes achieves without lying about provincial violence. For someone from Shiraz, the south, even the thick local accent did not feel like forced beautification of the non-Tehrani people, but a register of life from the heart of Iran, finally suspending the image of the accentless urbanite from the capital, and how political instinct is formed far from official language. It was an epic not centered in Tehran, a revolution that emerged from people with heavy rural accents, absent from historical books, who can be called petit bourgeois.
Years later the same director made Tofang-e Sarpor (The Muzzleloader). Many expected something similarly playful, maybe lightly comic or semi-postmodern. Instead, it was bleak, almost pitiless in its very bone. What stayed with me was not its plot but structure. A village wants autonomy. People speak the language of independence and resistance. Several figures compete to embody leadership, the cleric, the village headman, the educated man, and others. At first, it has the energy of a collective beginning and everything is supposed to go according to the revolutionary plan. Then an insidious pattern emerges. The leaders speak more than they organize. The villagers cannot do much beyond listening and waiting. Then the external force finally arrives, the imperial army, the occupier, and it crushes everything with a cruelty designed to break the very habit of expecting justice. Torture becomes spectacle as leaders of resistance are walked to high ground to be thrown down. Those who survive must make such a walk of tribulation over and over, and if by any chance they still survive, there are always the horses of foreign invaders to trample their bodies. In a nutshell, punishment becomes a nation-wide instruction. You keep expecting a reversal, a final uprising, a catharsis, a moment when the village becomes the author of its fate. But the series refuses the consolation and the final cathartic delivery of justice. There is no rescue by awakening. There is only the lesson that rescue will come from elsewhere, or not at all.
When I was younger, I took these stories as an unfolding prophecy that increasingly looks more like historical diagnosis. It represents a learned dependency that grows inside a long cozy exposure to domination. It is like the child in school who is bullied, for whom there are only two familiar exits. One is to bring parents to punish the bigger child. The other is to befriend a bigger bully elsewhere and invite him to beat your enemy for you. Either way, agency is outsourced. You are saved but not grown. You survive but do not learn how to save yourself without intervention from outside. This is the story of contemporary Iran.
Yet waiting for an external force to come to one’s rescue is not essentially Iranian but a form of political conditioning reproduced by cycles of repression, coup, foreign manipulation, failed reform, and repeated punishment of collective self-organization. Over time, the horizon of agency collapses into two fantasies: the regime’s club or someone else’s club, internal domination or external salvation, a domestic strongman or a foreign rescuer. Either way, the structure stays the same. Someone else must do the saving, or you will perish in that long walk from ground to the top of the ruin, pushed to your death, and if by some miracle you survive, bones broken, there are always the invader’s horses to crush you.
The Sassanid-Safavid bipolarity is not two discrete blocks but a continuum. In different moments, power borrows more from one register or the other. Sometimes the rhetoric leans toward a pre-Islamic imperial image, the glorious Iran which ultimately turned into a religious torture chamber for ordinary people. Sometimes it leans toward Safavid-style Twelver Shiaism and its clerical architecture.[1] Yet the continuum can still function like a pathological syndrome while projecting the appearance of a functioning civilization. The two poles look opposed and get marketed as mutually exclusive identities, but they share diseased roots which is a template of sacralized authority, an elevated state form, a punitive theology of order, and a deep habit of turning sovereignty into religious hyper-drama. The opposition is not an exit; it is sadly a long-distance historical relay.
This is why the most serious attempts to confront this entrenched pathology in modern Iran did not merely criticize one pole. They tried to break the relay itself, and both ran into the same machinery of repression and capture.
One figure is Ahmad Kasravi. His project is often remembered as a fierce attack on Safavid Shiaism and what he treated as plain superstition, clerical power, and the fixation that prevents Iran from modernizing in its own historical terms. There is courage in Kasravi’s refusal, and also an internal limit. He rejects the pole but remains trapped inside the polarity, approaching Shia Islam primarily as an enemy to be defeated rather than a historical formation to be analyzed and reworked from within. That position made him vulnerable to the clerical apparatus that could brand him an outsider and a traitor-apostate, and left him unprotected by a state too cowardly to defend him. He was assassinated, but just as telling is that the so-called secular order of the time did not protect him, did not honor him, and did not even want to be seen standing near him. The state feared clerical power, feared social backlash, and the very clarity Kasravi forced into public view. His death is a case study in how the royal palace and the religious pulpit converge when their shared interest is to keep the relay intact as opposed to tearing it down.
The second figure is Ali Shariati who did something different, by not renouncing the Islamic register and instead splitting it from within. The contrast between Red Shiaism and Black Shiaism is not a mere catchword for him, but a revolutionary edict grounded in a sociological analysis of the contemporary Iran and heavily influenced by his once teacher, Georges Gurvitch. Red Shiaism refers to an insurgent, egalitarian, and historical reading of the tradition. Black Shiaism titles the Safavid clerical state form, which turns faith into obedience, mourning into political anesthesia, and theology into an administrative tool. Shariati’s wager is that one does not exit the relay by denying the Islamic inheritance but by reinterpreting it as a revolutionary grammar and wresting it from the clerical monopoly whatever the cost.
Yet the fate of this wager and the ideological over-investment in the so-called inherent emancipatory ethos of Islam is instructive. Shariati warned about clerical Islamism and the capture of revolution by the clergy. Even so, the clerical state that emerged after 1979 could still co-opt him, and they did bitterly.[2] It absorbed the energy and discarded the warning. It borrowed his revolutionary vocabulary while building the very tyrannical machinery he feared. If Kasravi shows how rejection can be crushed, Shariati demonstrates how reinterpretation can be utterly captured.
The problem is not simply that Iran is pulled between two identities. The deeper problem is that both can be made to serve the same sovereign form, and that form survives by offering only two exits: a pre-Islamic or post-Islamic restorationist fantasy or a clerical theocratic destiny of the Dune-pilled messiah yet to come. The relay remains, and society is told it must politely choose which costume it prefers.
A friend put it exactly right. What is needed is a third term.[3] It has to stand between Kasravi’s renunciation and Shariati’s revolutionary reinterpretation. It cannot simply declare war on tradition, whether that tradition is framed as pre-Islamic or Islamic, because that becomes another purity posture and gives the clerical order an easy enemy to mobilize against. It also cannot simply reinterpret the tradition and hope for the best, because reinterpretation without institutional redesign can be absorbed and neutralized. A third term would be a historical and organizational project. It would treat the Sassanid-Safavid continuum as a political technology, then ask how to redesign sovereignty, law, education, and public reason so that authority is no longer sacralized and dissent no longer treated as sacrilege.
That third term is not a slogan for a desperate people. It is a long labor. Yet it is also the only way to stop outsourcing rescue, because the outsourcing reflex is not just a psychological habit but is reinforced by institutions that keep presenting salvation as something delivered from above, whether that above is the Imperium, the governing cleric, or the strongman.
This framing clarifies what is at stake in the present moment. Iran is yet again in upheaval. The state answers protest with lethal force, mass arrest, intimidation, and deliberate severing of communication. Even the attempt to count the dead becomes a struggle over legitimacy. Some numbers will be exaggerated, some minimized, some unknowable for a long time. That uncertainty is not a reason for silence but one of the regime’s instruments to shame the dead. Uncertainty is how impunity is laundered in the dark.
I am not here to rehearse the brutality of the Islamic Republic. That brutality is neither new nor surprising, except to those who never paid attention to what this regime has always been. I am also not here to deny foreign meddling, covert influence, opportunistic propaganda, or the strategic desires of states that treat Iran as a site of leverage. None of that is imaginary. All is part of a place I still call home.
What is newly revealing is the silence, hesitation, and moral evasion among segments of the Western left, especially those who present themselves as principled anti-imperialists, Marxists, and heirs to a long revolutionary tradition. I understand the fear that feeds this silence. The Iranian opposition field is polluted. Pre-Islam nostalgia is real, and so is the apparent alignment of those who wave the banner of Israel or the United States, flirting with fantasies of liberation delivered by sanctions or covert escalation. Let us not even talk about the legacy of Islamo-Marxism, which Bijan Jazani, the Iranian Antonio Gramsci, warned about in his prison letters. These currents exist and are unhelpful. They are also politically convenient for anyone looking for an excuse to look away.
The Western left often says the situation is complicated: There are monarchists, exiles, reactionary expats. There is foreign agitation. Then there is Israel and there is the United States. Therefore, better not to touch this mess. Iranian revolutions are not kosher so to speak. This posture is presented as educated sophistication, as learned caution, and as ethical refusal to be instrumentalized. But when I hear the word complicated or complexity in these contexts, I also hear cowardice. It is the politics of immaculate gloves, a desire to keep one’s hands clean by refusing to touch the nitty-gritty of history. It is a way of preserving moral hygiene by abstaining from political judgment, a form of profound pusillanimity that believes it has become another name for wisdom and historical maturity.
Hegel had a name for this consciousness. He called it the beautiful soul. The beautiful soul wants purity more than transformation, innocence more than responsibility. It avoids action because action risks complicity. It condemns the world from a safe distance that protects its self-image. It turns non-involvement into virtue and mistakes refusal for critique. Clean hands are easy when you never have to touch the world. In our moment, the beautiful soul takes a specific geopolitical form. It says I oppose American imperialism and I oppose Israel’s destruction in Gaza, and for that reason, anything that could be framed as helpful to Washington or Tel Aviv must be rejected, or at least bracketed into silence. It processes every event through a single anxious filter: ‘who benefits?’ It treats the only real actors on earth as states and intelligence agencies. It forgets that people act, and that they bleed when they act. Here, the contemporary left, not in its entirety but as a voice, resembles a right-wing conspiracy theorist but without all the juicy excitement of a conspiracy theory. Just a drab drag of conspiracy theory and nothing more, who rushes to learn Arabic out of guilt after the carnage in Gaza.[4]
The psychological mechanism is understandable. After Gaza, many are traumatized, raw, furious, and rightly so. But trauma is not a historical compass. Trauma can collapse distinctions and muddle judgment. It can make politics into a blunt kneejerk reflex. Anything that looks messy becomes forbidden, because it might be used, misread, exploited. This is how a left becomes politically colorblind. It loses the ability to distinguish solidarity with people from alignment with states, to oppose the Imperium without granting dictatorships a free pass, to condemn one crime without laundering another.
You can watch how the propaganda ecosystem feeds this paralysis. Rumors circulate that foreign actors have armed protesters. Officials inside Iran amplify the insinuation to externalize responsibility and frame the uprising as a proxy operation. Foreign media aligned with foreign interests use the same insinuation to pose as the hidden hand. Interventionists use it to sell escalation. And a portion of the Western left uses it to justify silence. They say, ‘look, it is all foreign agitation, so no loud empathy for these protesters.’ Hamid Dabashi crystallizes this insular beautiful soul anti-imperialism into propaganda for al-Jazeera, a media outlet based in Qatar, home to one of the largest United States military bases in West Asia. This is Dabashi’s endgame: Turn every uprising into a Mossad plot, and you never have to smell the blood in the streets.
This is where historical seriousness should begin, not end in muddled ‘But what if…’ pseudo-intellectual pedantry. Foreign agitation is not a revelation but the default background noise of contemporary geopolitics. The question is whether people still have agency inside that noise, and whether a revolt can be both real and infiltrated, both indigenous and internationally entangled, both emancipatory in impulse and vulnerable to capture. If foreign interference disqualifies revolt, then almost no revolt ever qualifies.
The Western left knows this when it wants to. Revolutions happen inside international systems. No serious historian reduces a revolution to a single foreign black hand. Yet when Iran appears, the standard changes. The presence of opportunists becomes an excuse to disappear. Contamination becomes disqualification, and Iran yet again becomes a site of counter-revolutionary privilege for the contemporary left. This is also why 1979 remains strangely absent in many leftist canons. The Iranian Revolution was a massive historical planetary rupture. It reorganized the region, reconfigured global politics, and gathered heterogeneous forces—communists, nationalists, Islamists, workers, students, minorities, and many others. It then produced a theocratic state that devoured rivals and rewrote public life through repression and cannibalizing its own children. That outcome terrifies the beautiful soul, because it forces a thought it does not want to metabolize. Revolutions can be real and still be hijacked. They can be emancipatory in impulse and catastrophic in institutional outcome. A revolutionary tradition that cannot hold that thought is not a revolutionary tradition but a Hollywood genre preference, a desire for clean protagonists and tidy endings. It is revolution as icon, not revolution as history. If the contemporary left is truly interested in clean revolutions, they should watch and talk about The Matrix Revolutions instead.
A revolt is not a purity ritual but a struggle over who gets to set the constraints of collective life. If you refuse every uprising that risks contamination, you are not radical but simply selecting for the regimes most skilled at manufacturing contamination and subterfuge. The presence of parasites does not annul the reality of the host. The world is not asking anyone to be pure. It is asking whether you can still distinguish an uprising from its capture, a people from the flags waved over their heads. Silence is an intervention by default. A left that can only speak when history is in order is not a left but a natural museum of correct sentiments.
Alongside the left’s hesitation, a different discourse has been gaining confidence, openly counterrevolutionary even when it pretends to speak the language of liberation. It is the discourse of partition, fragmentation, and shrinkage. The argument goes like this: maybe it is not a bad idea if Iran loses its current boundaries; maybe it is better if Iran is broken into manageable pieces. Azerbaijan and Azeri Iranians separate in the northwest. Baloch areas separate in the southeast. Kurdish regions regain autonomy. The remainder becomes a shrunken entity that poses no geopolitical threat. The logic is no longer hidden. A unified Iran is a geostrategic impediment to multiple powers: Israel, the United States, but also Russia and China, even when those states function as Iran’s partners and patrons. A large coherent Iran is an actor. A fractured Iran is a mere terrain.
Sometimes this fantasy is stated with almost comic cynicism. It treats geopolitics like chess and suggests that the best move is not to play by the rules but to remove a piece from the board altogether. That piece, in question, is Iran. The aim is not to help Iranians build democracy but to make Iran strategically disappear. The rhetorical justification is familiar: Iran never existed, it is only a loose bundle of ethnicities and nations in permanent conflict, held together by force, and unity is a fiction. Therefore, dismemberment is simply reality finally asserting itself in the last instance.
This is just pure opportunism. Every modern nation-state is, in some sense, an imaginary fabrication. Every national identity is a mixture of myth, administration, coercion, and lived reality. If you can dissolve Iran by declaring it fictional, you can do the same to almost any country. Yet nobody rushes to publish essays about the fictionality of borders when those borders protect their own preferred imaginary. The timing and the target tell you what is actually going on. First, you dissolve the object conceptually. Then you break it politically. Then you call the breakage, freedom from tyranny. Even the most nefarious political actors of the our past history haven’t resorted to such a leap in cynical reasoning.
Another rhetoric shadows the partition fantasy, aiming to make Iran unworthy of even the simplest sympathy. It whispers that Iran is essentially Nazi, a country full of Nazis. It says the name Iran is linked to Aryan, that it is therefore a country of Aryan brotherhood, therefore fascist by nature. This is historical illiteracy dressed as moral clarity. It is also strategically useful, because it turns a population into a contaminant and makes compassion feel deeply suspect. Yes, Iran had explicitly Nazi-aligned groups in the twentieth century.
One obvious example is SUMKA, which styled itself as a National Socialist Party of the Workers of Iran and borrowed the visual motifs of Fārre Kiyâni and European fascism, along with the latter’s ideological posture and street intimidation with machetes. It performed a grotesque imitation of the Nazi template, including iconography designed to echo both Iranian antiquity and the aesthetics of the swastika. Its existence is not a secret, but neither is it a national essence. It was a fringe formation, a piece of imported ideological rubble, and it never represented the complexity of Iranian society any more than any marginal fascist clique represents the people it tries to parasitize.
There were also ultranationalist currents that were not merely Nazi clones but could still slide into exclusionary mythmaking, especially under pressure and humiliation. The Pan-Iranist movement and its party offshoots are part of that twentieth-century landscape. In some hands, the language of territorial integrity and Iranian unity can become paranoid and primed for authoritarian temptation. In other hands, it can appear as a defensive reaction to foreign interference, partition threats, and the lived experience of a dominated country. The Retribution Committee (Komiteh Mojazat) is worth remembering here.[5] This is precisely why it is dishonest to treat any one of these currents as proof that Iran itself is fascist. The historical situation produces contradictory political forms, and the same vocabulary can be tugged toward resistance or toward reaction.
Yes, modern Iranian history contains reactionary ultranationalist elements, like almost every modern history. None of this makes Iran a Nazi country. None of it licenses the idea that Iran should be fragmented or removed from the board. If anything, this lazy labeling performs a familiar trick, for it replaces analysis with a half-wit moral stamp, then uses the stamp to justify what was already desired.
We can now see the full circuit. Inside Iran, a regime systematically kills and terrorizes while producing uncertainty and blackout as calculated tools of liquidation. Outside Iran, some restorationist fantasies in the style of the Sassanids and Safavids invite the biggest bully in the room and call it liberation. Outside Iran, geopolitical strategists speak of partition and shrinkage and call it realism. And then again, outside Iran, a portion of the Western left withdraws into silence, calling it anti-imperial caution, while refusing to distinguish solidarity with people from alignment with states.
These positions look different yet reinforce one another. The regime uses foreign plot narratives to justify the worst exercises in repression. Restorationist ambitions confirm the regime’s story. Partition fantasies treat Iranians as raw material to be rearranged. The left’s silence creates room for all of it. Silence is an intervention by default. It leaves the field to the worst bidders.
This is where the Western left has a task, if it wants to do more than gesticulation. It must stop acting as if the only moral causes are those that present themselves with perfect optics. If your politics cannot survive impurity, it cannot survive reality. Iran is not a case that tests whether your soul is clean. It tests whether you can think historically while people are being slaughtered and communication is being cut.
What would a non-beautiful soul stance look like? It would begin with a double refusal. It would refuse the Islamic Republic’s executioner-mentality violence. It would refuse imperial solutions—attritional sanctions that impoverish civilians, and partition fantasies packaged as humanitarianism. It would refuse the Sassanid-adjacent restorationist projects that outsource agency to external force. It would refuse the demand for purity that makes silence look like virtue. This double refusal is not fence-sitting. It is not both sides. It is the distinction between solidarity with people and alignment with shady states.
From that distinction follow practical responsibilities. One must speak clearly about repression even when the numbers are contested, because contestation is part of the silent violence and complicity. One must also reject war as solidarity, because massive ordnance penetrators rarely produce freedom and dismemberment is not democracy. One ought to listen downward to labor networks, women’s organizations, minority activists, dissident organizers, and everyday people, who most probably cannot afford a sketchy internet connection. Let us consider capture a real risk, without using it as a veto on revolt. This is the time to defend the difference between a people’s uprising and a geopolitical demolition project, without handing the regime a monopoly on the language of sovereignty, victimhood, and the innocence-feigning it is adept at using: ‘We are the children of Imam Hossein in Karbala.’
The contemporary Western left wants to buy time with silence until the dust settles, so afraid of being used by the global conglomeration of empire that it lets a dictatorship do the using instead.
[1] Safavid Shiaism was not born as a single orthodox Twelver package. When Shah Ismail made Shiaism the official confession, the Safavid military backbone was the Qizilbash, and many Qizilbash circles carried a heterodox, ecstatic, and strongly sacralized form of devotion in which the boundaries between imamology, Sufi charisma, and political loyalty blurred. This was the world of the ghulāt—the exaggerators—groups whose idiom could elevate Ali beyond veneration and into divinization, and could treat the sovereign himself as a quasi-sacred figure. The early Safavid formation also interacted with older Iranian dissident and syncretic currents that had resisted Arab conquest and attempted to rework Islam through mixtures with Mazdakite, Zoroastrian, and Manichaean residues, often associated in the historical imagination with Khurramite revolt and figures like Babak Khorramdin. Precisely because Qizilbash heterodoxy was politically combustible, the Safavid state later moved to standardize doctrine by importing and empowering more juristic Twelver clerical elites from Arab Shiite centers and networks, including Iraq and the Levant, and by disciplining the earlier charismatic formations. One result is that Safavid Shiaism denotes, not a timeless orthodoxy, but a long process of state building through doctrinal regulation. This is also why, inside modern critiques, Safavidism can refer both to a national project of Iranianization and to the later clerical apparatus that Shariati targets as ‘black Shiaism,’ even though the earliest Safavid religious ecology was not yet that apparatus.
[2] See, for example, the trajectory of Morteza Motahhari, who initially engaged Shariati’s project as a serious interlocutor and later became one of its most vocal clerical opponents. In polemical exchanges, he is reported to have branded Shariati a mal’oun, meaning accursed, a judgment tied to Shariati’s sharp anti-clericalism and his attempt to wrest revolutionary authority away from the seminary establishment. Motahhari was later assassinated by Akbar Goodarzi’s Forqan group, and whatever else was at stake in that episode, the conflict over Shariati’s legacy and its clerical reception formed part of the charged political background in which Motahhari was targeted.
[3] I am thankful to Mohammad Salemy, who brought this point to my attention.
[4] See, for instance, B. Noorizadeh, Exit from English: Iran in the political economy of translation, Online, Available at https://www.madamasr.com/en/2025/08/14/opinion/u/exit-from-english-iran-in-the-political-economy-of-translation/
[5] Komiteh Mojazat, often rendered in English as the Committee of Punishment or the Retribution Committee, was a clandestine cell formed in Tehran in the late Qajar period, in the shadow of the Constitutional Revolution and the wartime crisis. It defined its mission as eliminating those it labeled traitors and foreign agents, and it carried out a series of high-profile assassinations in 1916 and 1917, including the killing of a grain administration figure accused of profiteering and supplying foreign forces while shortages and famine conditions gripped the capital. The organization was ultimately uncovered and dismantled. One of its founders was Ebrahim Monshizadeh, whose son Davud Monshizadeh later founded SUMKA, a self-styled Iranian National Socialist party. The genealogical irony is edifying, because a punitive nationalism that can present itself as resistance in one historical conjuncture can be tilted, under different pressures and different ideological economies, toward fascistic mythmaking and street politics.