🪻 On the threshold of the new year, my wish for my homeland and compatriots is that we see a tomorrow in which all the cruelties and brutalities of these years have been consigned to museums of history: a day when capital punishment, violations of human dignity, systemic violence, the trampling of civil rights, institutionalised social inequality, poverty, and the erosion of our land’s human and natural resources are only bitter memories and instructive lessons from the past.

A nation whose history is filled with poetry, mysticism, philosophy, and tolerance has for many years been the victim of irrationality, hostility toward human beings, and violence alien to its historical spirit and cultural soul.

Yet I have faith that Iran’s tomorrow is bright. As clearly as the midday sun, I see a future and await it with my whole being: a future in which a large part of the 1.4 trillion dollars of Iranian capital around the world returns to the homeland; twenty thousand elite Iranian scientists and hundreds of thousands of Iranian doctors, engineers, and specialists return with global experience; and billions of dollars of foreign investment transform the country’s industry, production, and infrastructure.

A day when Iran’s tourism income rises from around one billion dollars a year to the level of countries such as Italy and Turkey, reaching tens of billions of dollars annually, and this land regains the place it deserves in the world’s economy and culture.

This is not a dream; it is a possible and attainable reality. In that reality, the living standard of every Iranian rises severalfold within a not-too-distant period, reverse migration from the Iranian diaspora begins, and Iran’s history witnesses a dazzling leap of a kind the source imagines as without historical parallel.

A future in which, looking back, we understand all the suffering of these years as part of history’s astonishing design for creating an unprecedented transformation in Iran—one that could not have happened without passing through this dark corridor; a fire from whose ashes the phoenix of Iran will rise.

A future in which Iran stands among the world’s major emerging industrial and economic powers.

In Iran’s bright tomorrow, Iranian culture and art will flourish with such force that Iran’s cultural influence extends beyond its geographical borders, and a greater cultural Iran rises from its ashes once again as an inspiring force in the world.

A future in which this bitter half-century remains for future generations only as an instructive footnote in Iran’s thousands-year history: half a century remembered not as the destiny of a nation, but as an intensive lesson for a great transformation in history books.

I know and believe with my whole being that we will pass through this darkness, and that the painful moment when everyone expects the caterpillar to die will be the beginning of the birth of a butterfly whose dazzling beauty will leave the world transfixed.

May our Nowruz be victorious, compatriot.
Long live Iran.