1.
Middle Eastern Islamisms and Islamists are reorganizing in a post-jihadi/takfiri Muslim/Arab world within their national boundaries. First of all, the Taliban’s path back to Afghanistan was facilitated by the USA. Afghan Islamists were swift in adopting a more Afghanistan-focused vision and dismantling any public state capacity, especially in social and women’s affairs, built under the US-backed Republic, a process which so far has led to the prohibition of women’s singing under the Law of “Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong,” the prohibition of women studying in medical and midwifery fields, and very recently, the reinstitution of slavery, a practice never banned in the “Golden Age” of Islam. A year after the Taliban’s return, the Iranians felt the moment, took to the streets against the Islamic regime’s sexual apartheid, political and religious oppression, and systemic economic corruption, an uprising which the regime cracked down on by killing hundreds of citizens, arresting thousands, and executing tens of people, and increasing the general cases of death penalty as a method to shock and take revenge on the society, mainly its impoverished layers. And a year ago, the Syrian HayʾAt Taḥrīr al-Shām, a former al-Qāʿida branch, arrived in Damascus, took power with the backing of Turkey, claimed an end to its strategy and vision of global jihād, monopolized power, and convinced the USA to divest its support from the Kurds in Syria, which was already anticipated in Project 2025, a paleo-conservative masterplan for the coming Trump administration.
Refocusing our gaze on Iran, the Islamic regime, now heavily under pressure following the consequences of the October 7 operation, was once again hit by the largest ever popular uprising in December 2025 to January 2026, this time with millions of Iranians in the streets, inspired by a secular nationalist vision, calling for the overthrow of the regime by any means, hoping to cut Iran’s ties with Islamic Jihadi projects in the region, and transition to a democratic developmentalist state, and normalize Iran’s relations with the West, USA, and Israel. The regime’s response has been brutal, massacring tens of thousands. In a small village that was the location of one of Abbas Kiarostami’s movies, seven people were killed. The injured were chased into the hospitals and killed. There are photos of assassinated citizens with urinary catheters or handcuffed. While it was assumed that the regime’s repressive apparatuses were paralyzed during the 12-day Iran-Israel war, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) veterans, who came back a year ago from Syria, together with hundreds of Iraqi militias were employed to unleash the ultimate violence on the Iranian people.
The Jihādi killing machines have come back home.
2.
“And kill them wherever you come upon them … [as] civil strife (fitna) is more grievous than murder” (The Qurʾān, 2:191).
Modern Islamism is, if not the failure, then an involution of Islam as an imperial project. Eurocentric imaginations, whether the geopolitics of the Right or the guilt-ridden governmentality of the Left, tend to begin the political history of West Asia with the European incursions. But the political and ideological domination in the region has a longer and more complex history. Centuries of Islamic empires and kingdoms, the knowledge they produced, accumulated, or repressed; the traces and footprints they left on communities, bodies, mentalities, and ways of speaking and seeing; and the conceptual apparatuses they developed to comprehend and manage the political field and its crises, did not just vanish in the face of so-called European modernity.
From the eighth century onward, Islamic polities, born out of an earlier apocalyptic monotheist movement, developed political projects formed within dense networks of institutional and semiotic or semantic practice. Drawing on the Qurʾānic vocabulary, imperial projects included an intercommunal geopolitical dimension, framed as jihād, oriented toward territorial expansion, looting, and securing of socio-economic bases for tribute collection, and an intracommunal policing dimension, expressed in the doctrine of al-amr bi-l-maʿrūf wa-l-nahy ʿan al-munkar (commanding right and forbidding wrong), aimed at regulating subjects within imperial borders.
As long as expansion remained feasible, jihād functioned as the central motor of Islamic polity. But a longue durée crisis of Imperial Islam, marked by the rise of semi-autonomous polities in Iran and North Africa in the ninth century, the Abbasid caliphate’s effective subordination to the Iranian and Turkic dynasts, the emergence of the Ismāʿīlī Shiʿite Fatimid Caliphate in the tenth-twelfth centuries, the collapse of Abbasid power under the Mongols in the thirteenth century, and Ottoman impasses in sixteenth-to-seventeenth-century central Europe, all gradually closed the avenues of geopolitical expansion on both eastern and western frontiers of the Islamic polities.
In response, intracommunal policing was accorded greater status in Muslim elites’ political discourse. As early as the 10th century, a security mentality had been developing, partly in reaction to the militant esoteric Ismāʿīlī movements that operated from castle-states stretching from Iran to Syria, with a concern for controlling the “inner” (bāṭin) and policing “innovation, heterodoxy, or heteropraxis” (bidʿa). This signaled a reconfiguration of crisis vocabulary: crisis was no longer only the ancient-late antique idea of an outbreak of private concerns of property and family into the public sphere of political loyalty (termed as stasis in Greek and fitna in the Qurʾān), but increasingly an apprehension of interiority, orthodoxy, and the hidden currents of belief and practice. Once again, it is in modern times that the crisis term fitna is revived; once in mid-19th century Iran to refer to the post-Islamic Bābi movement, then by Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader, to refer to the 2009 Green Movement, and finally very recently, by the ‘secular’ monarchists to retrospectively refer to the 1979 revolution.
Within Iranian Shiʿite Islam, from roughly the seventeenth century, this involution reconceptualized jihād as domestic policing. A Shiʿite interpretive tradition distinguishes the lesser jihād or military struggle from the greater jihād or a spiritual struggle against the self. Muḥammad Bāqir Majlisī, a seventeenth-century Shiʿite jurist based in Isfahan, went further and redefined sinners as enemies, making the practices of commanding right and forbidding wrong the first stage of jihād, that is, a holy war against an internal enemy both within the society but also within the self.
If an Islamic polity lacked the means for territorial expansion, it could intensify its control over subjects and rebrand that intensification as jihād.
Even into the late twentieth century, Khomeini, the first supreme leader of Iran’s Islamic Republic, theorized the ‘lesser Jihad’ in a series of lectures. The recent emergence of movements such as ISIS represented an explosive confluence of these tendencies: a violently expansive polity that combined territorial seizure for resource extraction with an extreme program of social regulation and extermination.
3.
The collapse of the Pahlavi monarchy, more precisely, the fall of its final government under the nationalist social democratic Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar, a veteran of French anti-Nazi resistance and Spanish civil war on the Republicans’ side, must be understood within a global restructuring in which other regimes, such as Allende’s Socialist government in Chile and Isabel Perón’s Corporatist government in Argentina, fell likewise. This process involved the systematic dismantling of state public capacities in favor of private profit and was expected to ensure access for depression-stricken Western economies to low-priced natural resources.
This global restructuring, however, was far from a Western plot. If the Western powers were apathetic toward the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty, domestic forces and regional interests, particularly Arab nationalists in Syria, Libya, and Lebanon, were actively supportive. The Pahlavi regime was the last of its kind, a peripheral developmentalist regime with a program centered on state-led heavy industrialization, and despite its prospects of a highly ambitious social security plan, the Pahlavi development produced an uneven allocation of public finance toward large-scale industry at the expense of small producers and traditional merchants. There was even considerable unevenness between the livelihoods of industrial workers and small producers favouring the former.
The result was a growing though sharply bifurcating socio-political economy with Mohammad Reza Shah lacking the political infrastructure to mediate this bifurcation. The Shah’s centralized system was an excessively personalist intervention in governance and development, disempowering state institutions of independent initiative, let alone the democratic potentials of constitutional frameworks. The final attempt to manage these contradictions, the creation of a one-party system through the Resurrection (Rastākhīz) Party in 1975, collapsed within the first months of mobilization when a hegemonic coalition seized power via an Islamic revolution coordinated by the Shiʿite clerics. Ironically, Shiism up until that point promoted a very apocalyptic scepticism towards state power in its history, both against Sunni Khalifa but also the secular kings in Iran. Backed by traditional private merchants, whose distrust of state intervention could be traced back even to the 1905-11 Constitutional Revolution, when they had also aligned with the Shiʿite clerics against the executive power. The new regime did not waste a minute of its time in power by instantly attempting to use Khomeini’s cult of personality to organize the urban middle and lower middle class in a variety of security and paramilitary organizations such as Islamic Revolutionary Committees and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for the sole purpose of dismantling the secular opposition and act as the moral police across the country.
4.
The ideological strike that foreshadowed the coming dissolution of state power under the emerging Islamic regime is evident in Khomeini’s framing of Iranians as beings bereft of a true human status, in his speech on the first of February 1979, delivered upon his return from Paris:
“In addition to wanting your material life to be prosperous, we also want your spiritual life to be prosperous. You need spirituality. They [the Pahlavi regime] took our spirituality away. Do not be content with this much, that we will only build housing, make water and electricity free, and make buses free. Do not be content with this much. We will enhance your spirituality and inner disposition. We will raise you to the level of humanity from which they [the Pahlavi regime] degraded you.”
The idiom of citizenship, as rights-bearing subjectivity, was strongly underrepresented in Khomeini’s Islamic revolutionary discourse. Dominant concepts such as “the downtrodden” (mostazʿafin) and “the toilers” (zahmatkeshān) described the political subject as a suffering and sufferable collectivity in need of tutelage, and simultaneously as a reservoir of extraordinary mobilizable power. In Khomeinist ideology, ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’ had a theological function: they are the formal and quantitative manifestation of God’s sovereign will. The content and quality of the people’s actions are assessed and mediated by the Jurist Sovereign (vali-ye faqīh) as the representative of the hidden twelfth Imam and the interpreter of Shiʿite jurisprudence. Thus, a total and indivisible image of the people, mirroring the totality of divine unity, coincides with an image of the people as morally precarious, liable to “sin” and “the forbidden,” the two key negative limits of Islamic law. In the Twelver imagination, even the postponement of the hidden Imam’s return, the postponement of the Shiʿites’ final victory, is attributed to people’s sinfulness. In other words, the people are not human. They either represent a more-than-human, i.e., divine, capacity or a subhuman with disruptive and corruptive potential.
5.
“I appoint the government; I will smash this government in the mouth; I appoint the government; with the backing of this nation, I appoint the government” – Khomeini shouted a couple of sentences after the remarks quoted above. What were the characteristics of the so-called “government” he appointed?
Starting from the early weeks of his return to Tehran, Khomeini and his supporters pursued a dual strategy regarding the state: emphasizing the preservation of conventional state institutions, especially the army and police, while simultaneously assembling a set of operational organizations under the label of “revolutionary institutions.” A large number of these entities were created whose spheres of activity overlapped not only with those of state institutions but also with one another, often in competition.
Among them were the Foundation of the Downtrodden, which confiscated the assets of the Pahlavi Foundation, turned into a vast economic conglomerate, and assumed a range of profit-making economic functions alongside the provision of social services for the poor; the members of Islamic Revolutionary Committees and Revolutionary Guards, which functioned as two extra law and order forces parallel to the Urban Police (Shahrābāni) and the Gendarmerie, tasked with pursuing opponents of the Islamic Republic and enforcing Islamic regulations such as compulsory veiling and the ban on alcoholic beverages; the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which served as a military force parallel to the army, simultaneously suppressing opponents of the Islamic Republic inside Iran while establishing its own military-security-trade networks abroad and gradually infiltrating into the army ranks; the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee, responsible for providing social services to the poor, orphans, and widows; the Housing Foundation, tasked with building housing for villagers and the poor; the Reconstruction Jihad, responsible for agricultural development services in rural areas and for building fortifications during the war with Iraq; the Islamic Propaganda Organization, aimed at disseminating Islamic ideology in society; and several others. They were to become financial cartels, privileged by the Jurist Sovereign, in their access to public enterprises and oil revenue.
Another blow that the Khomeinists dealt to Iran’s state institutions was the attack on and seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran in November 1979, which in effect removed, up to this day, the final decision-making over Iran’s foreign and regional policy from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and transferred it to the Jurist Sovereign and his associated security and military advisors.
In the first decade of the Islamic Republic, the political project behind this organizational proliferation was to craft a totalitarian parastatal executive space, independent from the ‘formal’ state apparatuses and led by the command of the Jurist Sovereign or his close financial, security, and military associates. This space should have provided enough liberty for the Sovereign Jurist, his jihadist circles in the IRGC and IRGC-Quds forces, and his financial conglomerates such as the Foundation of the Downtrodden to act exigently, without any potential interference from the state bureaucracy, in every social and political matter from economic planning and welfare provision to oil sale and foreign policy.
6.
The privatization of public enterprises and the deregulation of the labor market since the late 1980s have created a new opportunity to dissolve the state’s public capacities. If the Foundation of the Downtrodden had been the dominant economic force of the 1980s, the privatizations since the 1990s have turned the IRGC into the country’s principal economic power.
Deregulation of the labor market and the precarious nature of the labor force in today’s Iran has effectively relieved the state of responsibility for providing services to people, while the aforementioned revolutionary institutions offered no support to the employed population and were gradually narrowing their scope of services. Although on the surface, these changes appeared to free the state from the financial costs of social services, they undermined any potential for state-citizen projects. However, far from being victims of the Jurist Sovereign’s political initiatives or global neoliberalism, the state institutions under the Islamic Republic actively contributed to their own demise by advancing privatizations.
Another political initiative has been crafting a series of Supreme Councils, the first of which was the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution, set up in 1984 to oversee the Islamification of Iranian universities. These supra-legislative and supra-executive bodies proliferated with the IRGC’s growing economic empire since the 1990s and now number approximately 20. They comprise governmental, parastatal, and sovereignly appointed officials, with the aim of ensuring the proper integration of state institutions under the influence of the Jurist Sovereign, the IRGC, and their appointees. Today, the most powerful of them, which has been the de facto ruler of Iran since the 12-day war with Israel, is the Supreme Council of National Security, the head of which is, of course, appointed by Ali Khamenei.
7.
“Killing is a bad thing; it is undesirable. But fitna is worse than killing. Well, if fitna is worse than murder, then the forces responsible for maintaining security must also adopt the necessary posture and discipline to confront fitna; they must preserve their preparedness for dealing with fitna as well. This is what the institutions must pay attention to” (Ali Khamenei, 10 Oct 2019).
In November 2019, the IRGC massacred, according to Reuters’ figures, 1,500 Iranians during demonstrations sparked by an overnight, shock-like 200 percent increase in gasoline prices. However, the number of deaths recorded in the state registry for November 2019 is approximately 4,000 higher than in the two preceding and two subsequent months. On 8 January 2020, a couple of hours after attacking a US base in Iraq, and in order to discourage the US from retaliation, the IRGC shot down Ukrainian passenger flight 752, killing all 176 occupants on board. Following the COVID-19 crisis, Ali Khamenei forbade the importation of American and British vaccines in a public speech and commissioned seven “revolutionary institutions” to research and produce “native” vaccines. This corrupt and vicious prioritization of private interests of sovereign-aligned cartels led to the extra death of more than 270,000 Iranians.
These are not the first instances of violence against people, of course, but it was since 2019 that the regime played a violent all-in, moving all its forces to trenches against the overwhelming majority of Iranians wanting change. The usual game of slightly balancing a section of society against others, paying some alms to the impoverished to attack the middle class, or being morally less strict in order to attack the poor and working class is over.
Three days before the mass uprising in Iran on January 8 and 9, a regime-aligned soldier posted an Instagram story that read like a declaration of intent: “The beginning of the purge” – pāksāzī, “purification.” Days later, he posted again, this time brandishing a rifle, openly advertising his role in the violent crushing of the protests. During the protests, Hesam al-Din Haeri, a Quran teacher addressing IRGC officers, urged them to identify those opposed to the Jurist’s Sovereignty and the regime as “people of impure breed,” hence, he claimed, fit only for death. In 2019, another Quran teacher, Abulfazl Bahrampour, had already declared that arrested protesters should be treated as “infidels” and, citing the Qurʾān, demanded that they be “slain brutally in public.” In its latest phase of consolidation as a ruling conglomerate, at the very height of its project of state dismantling, the Islamic regime has elevated its dehumanization of Iranians who oppose political Islam. Hence the ultimate goal of state dismantling and collapse in Iran would be to eliminate the very bodies that demand a state responsible for the livelihood of its people, reminding us again that Islamic state dismantling always has a genocidal agenda as part of its colonial designs.
8.
State dismantling is the most daunting, the most violent reality in Iran today. Does naming this reality absolve existing state institutions of responsibility? Absolutely not. Presidents, ministers, and members of the Islamic Assembly, regardless of their political faction and the state fiction that allows them to LARP as part of a functional state, have all been complicit in and beneficiaries of the dismantling of the institutions for which they work and the murder of people they represent. These figures have all participated, directly or indirectly, in various episodes of democide during the life of the Islamic Republic. Nor is there any credible sign that the current regime contains within itself the capacity for state reconstruction. The Islamic regime, its Jurist Sovereign and his associates, the IRGC and its vast network of affiliated bodies, the labyrinth of Supreme Councils, the government, the Islamic Assembly, and the many ideological apparatuses bloated with oil money: none has the intention nor possesses either the vision or the interest required for rebuilding a functioning state.
Today, all eyes are on the United States. Trump’s promise that the U.S. would strike the Islamic regime if it killed its own people never materialized. The regime massacred tens of thousands of protesters anyway, partly to demonstrate to Washington its ruthless determination to survive, its readiness to unleash violence, and even its willingness to re-export that violence across the region. Meanwhile, some 400 kilograms of enriched uranium remain somewhere in Iran, and the IRGC retain missile and nuclear expertise that is far harder to destroy than physical infrastructure and far easier to transmit beyond Iran’s borders. For now, the U.S. appears to be stepping back toward negotiations. Whether this leads to another deal remains to be seen. There is a high chance of hitting some targets in Iran, but it is doubted whether the armada is enough, or intended at all, for a regime change project.
But even if a deal is reached, would a de-nuclearized Islamic Republic be able to operate within an increasingly Islamicized regional order, find renewed opportunities for economic cooperation with Turkey, Qatar, or even Saudi Arabia, allowing it to endure, if not indefinitely, then longer than many of us expect?
My answer is no, or at least not for long. The regime has not only hollowed out the public capacities required for long-term state reconstruction; it has also produced a vast constellation of mourning families and traumatized communities. With the IRGC and its Quds Force firmly in control, any agreement with the United States, and possible economic relief that may follow, will be temporary. A state that governs through massacres and mass incarceration cannot generate political initiatives, let alone legitimacy for national reconciliation.
So, where does this leave those who are neither a U.S. president nor have a media empire? On what terrain can they act?
The Iranian opposition must be forced, indeed, should have begun long ago, to think, plan, organize, and communicate as a national state in the making. There is little evidence that such a mentality exists today, and this absence produces two fundamental problems. First, in the event of a prolonged popular struggle, mobilization based solely on hatred of the regime, nostalgia for the past, or abstract promises of future freedom and prosperity will fail. Key sectors of society, oil workers, state employees, bankers, transportation workers, and segments of the armed forces, must either actively join the struggle or, at a minimum, refuse to suppress it. Meaningful political change in this context cannot be achieved through the rhetoric of vengeance or longing for a lost order. It requires material support, credible guarantees, and an inclusive transitional program that assigns concrete roles to diverse social and political forces inside Iran and across the diaspora.
The second problem concerns the day after the supposed fall of the regime. The crises imposed on Iran by the Islamic regime’s combination of jihadism and predatory privatization are so numerous and so structurally entrenched that transitioning out of the Islamic Republic will, in its initial phase, require a delicate balance between laying the grounds and scaffoldings for a central national state and devising local and national participatory mechanisms. The first years of a post-Islamic Republic will demand a hawkish domestic posture against institutions that have embedded Iran within a pan-Islamic terrorist network: the systematic dismantling of the IRGC’s economic empire, the dissolution of the parastatal cartels and Supreme Councils described above, the de-Islamification of the judiciary and educational system, and the decisive elimination of political Islam’s institutional infrastructure. The IRGC alone controls construction, telecommunications, oil, and banking networks so deeply embedded in the economy that dislodging them will provoke organized, possibly armed, resistance from those who profit from the arrangement. Without a centralized authority capable of acting swiftly and bearing the political cost of these confrontations, any transition will be captured by the very forces it seeks to replace.
Yet the same period must also lay the groundwork for a rapid and credible transition to constitutional democracy, because not only a central power without participatory mechanisms will reproduce the very pathology of personalist rule that brought Iran to this crisis in the first place, but also the very security measures mentioned will fall into grave danger if the central national authority cannot create broad power base in pluralistic, multivocal Iranian society. And this power base does not take shape only with words. The delicate balance, then, is institutional rather than personal. The transitional authority must be strong enough to break the IRGC, purge the parastatal apparatus, and restore the state’s public capacities, but constrained enough that it does not calcify into a new authoritarianism. A parallel civilian council, pluralistic in composition and representing Iran’s ethnic, linguistic, and political diversity, Kurds, Baluchis, Azeris, Arabs, as well as secular liberals, social democrats, and federalists, must share governing authority and serve as both a check on executive overreach and a credible signal to these constituencies that the new order is not simply a restoration of pre-1979 centralism. Concrete guarantees of urban governance, language rights, and proportional representation in transitional institutions are not concessions to separatism; they are the minimum conditions for holding the country together.
The risk of losing constituencies is real and cuts both ways. A leader who moves too aggressively against political Islam risks alienating religiously conservative but regime-critical segments of society, the very people whose passivity or cooperation is needed to prevent a civil war. A leader who moves too slowly risks losing the secular and urban constituencies, whose mobilization made the revolution possible in the first place. The only way to navigate this is transparency about the transitional timeline, visible institutional constraints on executive power, and early, tangible delivery on material promises, wages, housing, healthcare, labor rights, that distinguish a state-building project from a mere change of flags. People do not sustain revolutions on symbolism; they sustain them when they see the water running, the schools opening, and the paychecks arriving. A national congress of the opposition, convened before the fall of the regime, not improvised after it, is the organizational mechanism through which these competing demands can be negotiated and a transitional compact agreed upon. This would prepare the way for a new social contract, a new vision of citizenship, and new organs of citizens’ power, as conditions for an end to the dismantling of public power, predation of public resources, and the degrading and hence violating of human life.