De-Khomeinisation

The now-iconic image of a young woman setting fire to the portrait of Ayatollah Khamenei to light her cigarette says it all, symbolically speaking: the Iranian theocracy is dead and buried. It is only a matter of time.

Admittedly, the Iranian authorities can still repress, arrest, torture, rape, execute, and massacre with impunity, as they have done repeatedly since the Green Movement of 2008. Yet the wall of fear has definitively collapsed this time, as evidenced by the regime’s loss of control over several cities, an unprecedented development since the Islamic Revolution itself.

The clerical regime is drawing its last breath. The narrative that sustained it since 1979 has been drained of all substance, and the power derived from it had long survived only through coercion, fear, and the mechanical invocation of a mythologized past in which almost no one still believed, save perhaps a handful of Qassem Soleimani’s devotees in Lebanon and Iraq. What the world is witnessing today is nothing less than the exhaustion of a political model that has ceased to generate meaning for decades.

The contradiction is now frontal. On one side, a power structure irreversibly entrenched in an increasingly dictatorial logic, frozen in a political theology reduced to a purely instrumental function, serving as a cover for a system of corruption coupled with rigorist hypocrisy. Perversion elevated to a governing creed. On the other, a society in motion, driven by a youth that no longer sees itself as the heir to a revolution, but as the captive of a regime. Vitality on the march.

The more the world became modern, connected, and porous, the more the Islamic Republic retreated into an authoritarian and archaic understanding of politics. This youth, eviscerated decade after decade, uprising after uprising, endlessly sacrificed on the altar of the revolution and its exportation, now aspires to something else. And nothing can obstruct its hunger for progress.

The gap had become irreducible. All appeals to the sacrosanct “unity to preserve the revolutionary achievement,” long the regime’s survival mantra, could no longer suffice. That so-called unity no longer functioned as a higher principle capable of justifying sacrifices imposed in the name of nation or Islam. When severed from freedom, unity ceases to be a binding force and becomes an empty injunction, even a form of symbolic violence. Iranian society is no longer willing to indefinitely suspend its aspirations in the name of an order that guarantees neither justice, dignity, nor a future.

Yet the regime continues to operate as though the revolution remained an unquestionable absolute. It persists in denying social reality in the name of revolutionary primacy, as if the founding act of 1979 were sufficient to legitimize power forever. In truth, long ago, by refusing to confront reality, that revolution had transformed into a dogma, then into an apparatus of domination. The rupture is now complete, even if a monolithic regime like the one in Tehran will never be able to grasp it.

What initially gave Khomeinism its strength was not so much the promise of an Islamic order as the denunciation of a power perceived as illegitimate because subordinated to the West. The Shah’s alliance with Western powers provided the revolutionary movement with a clearly identifiable adversary, allowing heterogeneous ideological and social currents to rally around a common rejection. The revolution thus presented itself as a reclaiming of national sovereignty. Before Khomeini decided to turn it into a gulag.

That lever is now inoperative. The West is no longer the symbolic anchor of the conflict, as it had been designated in 1979 to mobilize opposition to the Shah’s repressive regime. It is neither a model to emulate nor a structuring enemy. The Iranian regime is defective without it. It is defective in and of itself. By relentlessly accusing the West of orchestrating the current protests, the authorities commit a double error: they deny the political autonomy of their own society, and they paradoxically reveal the extent of their internal bankruptcy. In doing so, they accelerate their own downfall by displaying a total disconnection from reality, exactly the mistake Assad made in 2011 at the outset of the Syrian revolution.

Today, the Iranian regime is confronting Iran’s new reality. Its name is freedom and modernity, though not necessarily in a Western mold, despite the regime’s crude attempt to portray it as such in order to fabricate a pseudo-unity against the protesters.

Khamenei and his acolytes seem to ignore that Iran’s history long predates 1979, and that Persia is far too proud to adopt ready-made models. It will forge its own path to modernity, far removed from the perverse and criminal obsequiousness of the clerics and their absurd anathemas.

Moreover, the accusation of “collusion with the West” does not bolster the regime’s legitimacy. It further erodes it. It amounts to admitting that the authorities are incapable of generating endogenous consent and survive only by inventing imaginary enemies to mask their radical disconnection from real society. Demonizing the youth, portraying it as manipulated or alienated, is an implicit acknowledgment that the bond between rulers and ruled has been severed.

This rupture is also moral. The Iranian authorities long ago abandoned the principles that grounded legitimate sovereignty in both Persian tradition and classical political thought: dâd o dahéch, justice and generosity. In abandoning them, they necessarily undermined âbâdâni, prosperity, and lost khérad, wisdom. A power deprived of justice, generosity, and wisdom is, sooner or later, doomed to be overthrown. It has succumbed to the inflation of its own ego to the point of madness. It must fall.

Indeed, excess has become the norm. Repression is now a mode of governance; security obsession has replaced any political vision. Violence, exercised without restraint, reflects not strength but profound fear: that of a regime that knows its authority no longer rests on consent, but on inertia and coercion. The vilayat e-faqih retains no legitimacy outside the corrupt or ideological circles it governs, or a few bands of indoctrinated Arab Shiite populations at the heart of the ruined satrapies of the Middle East.

In this context, freedom, âzâdi, ceases to be an abstraction. It becomes a vital necessity. When justice is no longer guaranteed, revolt ceases to be disorder and becomes salutary. The level of injustice reached in Iran is now too high for the demand for order, long privileged at the expense of freedom, to continue functioning as a stabilizing principle. Order without justice is no longer perceived as protective, but as oppressive, unstable, deficient.

The ongoing de-Khomeinisation does not necessarily imply the disappearance of all religious references from Iran’s public space. It signifies the end of a model in which religion, instrumentalized by power, claims to govern against society. What is collapsing today is the revolutionary utopia itself.

Under the weight of economic regression, costly imperial adventures, systemic corruption, and ideological totalitarianism, political Islam, transformed into a project of hegemony over the individual, the community, and society, has lost its ability to respond to the expectations of a complex, educated, and connected population. It no longer produces cohesion, only resentment. It no longer inspires dreams or exaltation. It has been reduced to its simplest form: a hideous vampire feeding on the blood of a community in the name of a personal power project.

That insatiable Nosferatu is the vali e-faqih. And it is high time it ended up in the dustbin of history.

Or better yet, that it disintegrates into smoke under the gaze of its worst nightmare: the rebellious, free smile of unveiled Iranian women.