Continued ☝🏼 ... Part Two: The Error of Templates—Why the Western Analyst Does Not Understand Iran

This search has always sought to imagine a political order capable of establishing a durable union between virtue and power: an order that can contain both the people and truth, freedom and merit, light and an awareness of darkness.

In my view, analysis of politics in Iran is impossible unless it begins with this fundamental question: what kind of government is legitimate for Iranians? Legitimacy in this land, unlike in many Western societies, is not merely a political contract. It is an ethical-symbolic order. When that ethical-symbolic order is wounded or distorted, even if institutions appear outwardly to function, society collapses from within.

The central problem of the Iranian government in recent years has increasingly been the collapse of this ethical legitimacy. If we look at its efforts in the realm of narrative, vocabulary and meaning, we can see that even instinctively it understands that the key to the continuity of power in Iran lies in controlling this sphere. Government in Iran does not rule only through police and prisons; it rules through language: by defining good and evil, appropriating words, producing counter-narratives and capturing signs and symbols. Yet its internal crisis and the growing challenge it has faced in recent years arise from precisely the fact that this control has weakened in the minds and psyches of a large part of society. Distancing itself from Iranian identity, followed by insincere attempts to return to it, has failed to reconstruct the idea of legitimacy in the minds of the majority.

On the other side, people too have sensed this battle over meaning, both consciously and unconsciously, and have built a narrative and historical infrastructure for their movements. They have understood that if they are to prevail, they must produce something beyond anger. They must create a “we”; they must construct a durable historical narrative; they must be able to return to the foundations of the idea of legitimacy in Iranian government. After paying heavy costs in leaderless movements, they have come to understand that narrative, structure and leadership are all necessary for the victory of a movement—and today, in my view, they possess all three.

What the Islamic Republic failed to understand during the historical time granted to it—and perhaps was fundamentally incapable of understanding and accepting—was that, in the Iranian mind, Iran is a concept larger than governments, including a religious government. Iran has witnessed the arrival and departure of countless political regimes and yet has not lost its “self”; or, more precisely, it has retained something of itself in memory and has continually searched for ways to remember more of it. The Islamic Republic was not an answer to this effort of remembrance. Nor is remembrance always political. Sometimes it lives in poetry, sometimes in ritual, sometimes in a symbol, a word, a musical mode, a name, or in the recurrence of Iranian festivals such as Nowruz, Mehregan and Yalda.

The Islamic Republic became, not only politically but throughout the sphere of culture, an obstacle rather than a facilitator of historical remembrance. This did not remain hidden from the sharp perception of society. The conflict in Iran today is therefore less a purely institutional dispute than a struggle over the centre of gravity of legitimacy: does that centre lie in Iranian identity, or in an ideology that claims authority beyond it? The consequence of the government’s loss in this high-stakes gamble to relocate the centre of political legitimacy is that society will continue to remember itself, while the government will leave the course of Iranian history. The hope of the Iranian people for the future is also a hope in the continuation of this remembering.